Rethinking the Concept of Souls

https://discord.com/invite/EGFRjwwS92

In this episode, hosts Simone and Malcolm embark on a profound exploration of the concept of the soul, delving into its implications in various cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions. They discuss the functional difference between the classical idea of a soul and modern understandings of consciousness and sentience. With references to Christian, Platonic, and other ancient understandings of the soul, and incorporating thoughts on AI consciousness and future human evolution, Malcolm and Simone provide a thought-provoking reexamination of what it means to have a soul. They relate these ideas to contemporary ethical debates, such as abortion, and consider the historical and potential future ways humans could reconcile these concepts. The episode presents a compelling case for updating our views on personhood and the sacred, leveraging scientific insights to enrich our understanding.

Speaker: [00:00:00] It craves purity. It devours purity. It sings to me. What

Speaker 2: the hell is this thing made out of? . All right, fine. I might have used a few unorthodox parts. Just tell me one. An orphan.

Speaker 4: Did you say an orphan?! Yeah, a little

Speaker 3: orphan boy.

Speaker 4: It's powered by a forsaken child?! Might be, kind of. I mean, I didn't use the whole thing.

Hello, Simone! I am excited to be here with you today. And today, we are going to be continuing a conversation we had on one of our strategy walks this morning. Every morning we try to take like an hour. Just to ourselves, we're going to discuss some new idea or something we've been thinking about.

And what I was thinking about was I had been editing the abortion video that we had done.

Speaker 43: To kill my mom. She's my mom. I can do whatever I want with her. [00:01:00] It's more important I live the way I want. She isn't an object you can own, she's a human being. . Ow! Heya! Ow, she's making you suffer! Maybe the world doesn't revolve around me.

Maybe the world doesn't revolve around me.

Speaker 44: Blegh, blegh, blegh, blegh.

And we had talked about when do we think insulment happens? Like, when does a human body get their soul?

And this is an interesting thing for us to be talking about, because we also don't believe in a literal soul. And it got interesting to me as I was thinking more about it because I was like, yes, but even though we don't believe in a literal soul, it still makes sense for us to be talking about insolvent because we're calling, when we're talking about like your consciousness, your sense against your emotion, everything like that, that is what many other people would call a soul.

So in general is that we shouldn't be talking about souls at all because we came [00:02:00] up As humanity with the concept of souls a very long time ago before we had a scientific understanding of the larger things that we can now describe as life or sentience or sapiens, which is, I think what people are really referring to.

And various cultural traditions are really referring to when they talk about their various types of souls and spirits. And we can, I want to go into this actually before we go further in this, an analogy that I think is good to help people understand what I mean when I say, well, there's 5. Functionally, no difference between what we're talking about in a soul.

So it makes sense to use the word soul, which is to say, we believe that these larger processes that we experienced, like the human experience that many people would think of as being part of this solistic process is an emergent property of the way our brains function. So what is an emergent property? An emergent property is something like, I, as a human, can understand that all of the individual water molecules, like what their [00:03:00] shape is, why they interact in the way they interact, why they form waves, why they, everything. But I will never be able to conceive of those individual H2O molecules as also being wetness liquidity.

The human brain is just not meant to understand these types of emergent properties because there was never an evolutionary advantage to being able to understand them. Now, if somebody came to me from a tribe and they were like, well, we are aware of water molecules and how they work and all that, but then there's this separate thing that we call wetness or liquidness, right?

And that for our tribe is a totally different thing than the water molecules. And they'd say, now you don't believe in wetness. And it's like, no, I believe in wetness. I can touch the water. I, I can feel the way I can see what happens when I splash in a pool. Like I believe in wetness. I just think it's the same thing as this other [00:04:00] thing that we have always talked about as being something else.

What do you think of wetness without thinking about the Zoolander Mermaid ad? Oh, what was the catchphrase? Like wetness is the essence of the boy. We have a moist. .

Moisture is the essence of of

beauty. Yeah, I, so I agree with you on that, but I'm, I also think that it's, it's damaging to, to give this magical property to something like a soul because it can create the kinds of toxic recursive.

arguments and reductions that you see with things like the abortion argument, where when you take an emergent property or you take any concept that can be explored better by science and by more concrete terms, now that we have the tool [00:05:00] set to do so, and then elevate it to this, this element of sacredness, now we can no longer talk about it.

And people can establish these boundaries. arbitrary boundaries like the Catholic Church has and move the goalposts and then say that this argument is beyond reproach that according to what this Pope said in the late 1800s, the soul starts now. And if you question that you are destroying souls when really we should be having a conversation, which we discuss in our Episode on abortion about the increasing level at which sentience and sapience and capability of feeling pain increases over time and how abortions become increasingly morally complex and risky and questionable.

With each passing second as these developments increase and that there are ways for us to measure things like neural development, like the ability to feel pain, like the ability to react to stimuli. And when you take away the sacredness of the soul and instead break it [00:06:00] down into more of its component parts, as is understood by Christians in the Catholic church to be the soul.

And I want to get into this. Then you can have a more realistic and practical conversation. I want to, I want to do a quick aside here that I think is really important to the point you're making. Which is that this leads to much more suffering in the long run, this interpretation of soul, because if you look at Europe, which is a much more socially liberal place in the United States, Their average abortion age in most countries, in terms of legalness, is around 15 weeks, and in the U.

S. it's like around, like, 23 weeks, okay? The, the, the point in a pregnancy at which there are restrictions, not the average Gestational age at which abortions take place. Whatever, the legal, you, you, the audience understands what I'm saying here. Anyway, so, the question is why is the U. S. so much more legally loose?

And I believe fundamentally it's because the conservatives in this [00:07:00] country have approached the argument with a Not something that's going to cross interface divides, which is to say, here, look, we can prove neural activity. I can show you pictures of a baby suffering, you know, a fetus suffering. I can show you this is def, here are the brain wave scans.

They appr