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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 w
Published on 1 year ago