Theme: Agency

DO WE HAVE A SOUL? IF SO, HOW?

I should ‘science’ the concept of the soul in a video.

Like many intuitions of the ancients, they simply had no means of describing an experience other than in supernatural terms. Yet, there is a biological process and resulting intuition and behavior that is analogous to the soul. 1) A low level persistence of your behavior in time. 2) Others memories of you over time, that do somewhat play out. 3) And there is some merit to the soul/karma concept in demonstrable outcomes because of them.

These three concepts can be expressed as derivations of the laws of the universe. But, just as you need legs to run, and running is a potential only until you do run, and running comes into existence only as you are running. Likewise, a soul needs a nervous system, and it needs biological processes, and mental processes to come into existence.

Humans, whose primary competitive value comes from specializing in adaptation itself, and the utility of returns on cooperation over time, are very good at subconsciously ‘computing’ debts owed and credits issued, with status as the means of increasing opportunities, and decreasing costs of debts owed and credits issued.

One of the universe’s unpleasant truths is that the brain is an acquisition engine, and cooperation can vastly improve cooperation, and status vastly improves the number and quality of opportunities to cooperation with increasingly successful returns. We humans try to paint a nice picture of ourselves, but we are just an extension of the physical universe. We dissipate energy (entropy) and we counter it by capturing energy (negative entropy). And as Adam smith demonstrated, many hands make for far lighter work than you’d expect by orders of magnitude.

But we’re still just doing what every animal, plant, molecule, element, particle, proto particle are doing: trying to maintain enough energy to persist (exist) before we dissipate back into the quantum background.

Your soul is your internal chart of accounts of harms(debts) and contributions (credits) and your status is something you face every day in the mirror. It’s very hard to lie to ourselves. And other people often keep very good accounting of us too. With the record of both often written in the expressions on our faces.

DO WE HAVE A SOUL? IF SO, HOW?

I should ‘science’ the concept of the soul in a video.

Like many intuitions of the ancients, they simply had no means of describing an experience other than in supernatural terms. Yet, there is a biological process and resulting intuition and behavior that is analogous to the soul. 1) A low level persistence of your behavior in time. 2) Others memories of you over time, that do somewhat play out. 3) And there is some merit to the soul/karma concept in demonstrable outcomes because of them.

These three concepts can be expressed as derivations of the laws of the universe. But, just as you need legs to run, and running is a potential only until you do run, and running comes into existence only as you are running. Likewise, a soul needs a nervous system, and it needs biological processes, and mental processes to come into existence.

Humans, whose primary competitive value comes from specializing in adaptation itself, and the utility of returns on cooperation over time, are very good at subconsciously ‘computing’ debts owed and credits issued, with status as the means of increasing opportunities, and decreasing costs of debts owed and credits issued.

One of the universe’s unpleasant truths is that the brain is an acquisition engine, and cooperation can vastly improve cooperation, and status vastly improves the number and quality of opportunities to cooperation with increasingly successful returns. We humans try to paint a nice picture of ourselves, but we are just an extension of the physical universe. We dissipate energy (entropy) and we counter it by capturing energy (negative entropy). And as Adam smith demonstrated, many hands make for far lighter work than you’d expect by orders of magnitude.

But we’re still just doing what every animal, plant, molecule, element, particle, proto particle are doing: trying to maintain enough energy to persist (exist) before we dissipate back into the quantum background.

Your soul is your internal chart of accounts of harms(debts) and contributions (credits) and your status is something you face every day in the mirror. It’s very hard to lie to ourselves. And other people often keep very good accounting of us too. With the record of both often written in the expressions on our faces.