I used to regard soul as a non-supernatural metaphor for the unique totality of each individual person. Even if I was cloned, I still would be an one-of-a-kind because of the specific interaction I had with my environment which would differ from my clone’s.

This metaphor would encompass all the emergent properties which are derived from the human brain: emotions, consciousness, memories, desires, intellect, in addition to the actual physical body. The whole enchilada so to speak. However, since the soul is usually considered to be supernatural, I don’t use the word anymore. Sometimes I use essence or core or simply an individual.

Life is best viewed as a continuum as the basic ingredients for inanimate and animate matter can overlap.

Life is not a force which imbues matter. Life, instead, describes in general, animate matter like plants, insects, and humans which can reproduce either sexually or asexually, passing on their genome. Life involves a particular pattern/structure of substances. If that functional pattern is achieved, than life/animation concurs.

Refer here for the basic background of our understanding of how animate matter might have happened.

Posted: December 11th 2009

See all questions answered by logicel

I think of souls as imaginary objects that represent the “personhood” of an individual human. The soul signifies everything that makes a person what s/he is – except, of course, his/her body (whether that makes sense is another question). Sometimes they make effective metaphors, but that’s about the extent of their reality. “Personhood” is also a construct.

As to what differentiates us from other animals, well, we seem to be smarter. It’s not clear to me that this is true in every case (dolphins?), but it’s my best guess.

Regarding your last question, evolution is only an operative concept when you’re talking about changes in a population, a group of individuals, over time; it isn’t something that happens to an individual. A genetic mutation in one member of a population may cause the population to change; that’s evolution. A mutation in a single organism is not in itself evolution. (A loose analogy: a single metal ring is not a chain.)

Posted: December 11th 2009

See all questions answered by George Locke

I don’t see any reason to belief that Soul or Life exists, so it’s pretty hard to answer your question.

People are animals. Sentient animals, but still animals.

Posted: December 9th 2009

See all questions answered by Eric_PK

Life has little to do with the concept of a soul. Human functions which some people see as the work of the soul tend to be products of the brain. Even things without any brain at all can be alive.

You speak about life as if it were “breathed” into the fully formed human body, and developed separate to it. That’s not how it works at all. Think of a baby in the womb: the sperm and the ovum are biologically alive long before they form something recognisably human.

I suppose you could think about life in much the same way as sexual reproduction: it’s something we inherited from our ancestors. If you go back far enough, those ancestors cease to be human.

Go back all the way (about 3.5 billion years) and there is a single common ancestor to all living things, a simple prokaryotic one-celled creature in a pond, a swamp or even a crystal. We don’t know exactly how it formed or began to function in a way we think of as “living”, though there are several good theories. We do know that it was able to consume resources around it and replicate itself almost perfectly. It shared these characteristics with its offspring, and they shared them with theirs.

Eventually the replication process went far enough awry that a not-quite-duplicate was spawned, and suddenly two slightly different creatures were in competition. At that moment natural selection kicked in, and the rest is biology. (Sexual reproduction came millions of years later, by the way.)

The emergence of life by natural means (“abiogenesis”) is one mystery biologists are confident they’re getting closer to solving. They’ve recreated parts of the hypothetical process in labs, for example creating amino acids, and assembling self-replicating modules from RNA. Time will tell how close they get, and how soon.

Posted: December 8th 2009

See all questions answered by SmartLX