I over heard a conversation I thought was interesting, The subject was where does the life of a person, animal or plant go that we call death.
When a person’s body(Or animal and plant) dies we say he, she or it’s life is gone. The crux of the conversation was: Is the soul different than life.
In latin class I learned that the word for soul translated to mean life. If a soul is different, what happens to the life.What is life? Is it an energy that keeps the body going?
I would also ask,Why is the body responsible for the soul, if the soul is unable to be responsible for itself.
I know that many people believe the soul goes to either a place of bliss or to a place of torture. Depending on how they lived there life or repented at the last second.
The body of an individual person is nothing more nor less that the “Dust of the Earth.”
The life therof is that which distinguishes a living person from the Dust. The Bible says that the “life is in the blood,” when the blood is gone so is the life or animating portion of the person. Cardiac or pulmonary arrest essentially results in death within a short time as the body does not receive oxygen via the blood stream which appeart to be equivalet to removal of the blood. [This equivilates life and oxygen, does it not?]
The debate devolves into what is the spirit and/or soul and the theologians can and will argue over that for a long time to come.
Science has yet to prove the existence of any soul or “vital energy” or “animating force” in living things, nor anything about them that cannot be explained in terms of known physical and chemical processes. (The [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirlian_photography appears to be nothing more than an electric field and can be emitted by nonliving matter.) That does not prove such does not exist, of course, merely that Occam’s Razor would require rejecting the idea until more evidence is presented.
The soul has been described on a continuum from the most subtle to the most cartoonish as the abstract qualities and principles that make one specifically themselves and as a semitranslucent gauzy thing that has no physical substance and which is breathed in and out along with the air and departs the body at death.
Life is the physiological process. It is effectively studied by natural sciences, from which we now know that the death of the organism is followed in fairly short order by death on the cellular level, which is what causes the corruption of tissues and the susceptibility of it to opportunistic microorganisms feeding upon it. (The microorganism are themselves alive but were not an intrinsic part of the original organism).
Cite?
To essay a serious answer to this question, “life” is a defined set of biological functions. A dormant spore, a Horta, or whatever can be identified as “alive” or not based on whether it matches that defined set of functions.
Contrariwise, the whole issue of whether a “soul” exists, much less what happens to it when the body dies, is one that is (obviously) hotly contested between religionists and those who disagree with them. I’d offer the following definition: A “soul” is a useful term for the self-identity experienced by a human being (or, presumably, other sentient creature) which corresponds to the body in general and the brain in particular in much the same way as software programs correspond to the hardware on which it runs.
This being the case, it’s plausible to see it “hanging” after the hardware suffers an unrebootable fatal error, unless it has been “saved” to other media. And yes, the pun is fully intended, and I believe corresponds to something real.
Life is what a mindless instinct driven animal has. The Soul is what makes humans (most of us) care as much for others as we do for ourselves. The Soul lets you cry for strangers, become moved looking at a painting, or feel bad when you do something you know is wrong, and allows you to ask questions like this one.
Or it’s all just a complex chemical reaction in your brain that when done in the right proportions makes you think have a soul… one or the other.
Catholic dogma states that the body and soul are created at the same moment and neither one passes away; the body and soul are inextricable combined forever. The soul does not exist before the body (waiting to be placed) and it is reunited with the body at the Resurrection:
“BODY AND SOUL BUT TRULY ONE”
362 The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. The biblical account expresses this reality in symbolic language when it affirms that “then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” Man, whole and entire, is therefore willed by God.
363 In Sacred Scripture the term “soul” often refers to human life or the entire human person. But “soul” also refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God’s image: “soul” signifies the spiritual principle in man.
364 The human body shares in the dignity of “the image of God”: it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit: Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity. Through his very bodily condition he sums up in himself the elements of the material world. Through him they are thus brought to their highest perfection and can raise their voice in praise freely given to the Creator. For this reason man may not despise his bodily life. Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honor since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day.
365 The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.
366 The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not “produced” by the parents - and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.
367 Sometimes the soul is distinguished from the spirit: St. Paul for instance prays that God may sanctify his people “wholly”, with “spirit and soul and body” kept sound and blameless at the Lord’s coming. The Church teaches that this distinction does not introduce a duality into the soul. “Spirit” signifies that from creation man is ordered to a supernatural end and that his soul can gratuitously be raised beyond all it deserves to communion with God.
368 The spiritual tradition of the Church also emphasizes the heart, in the biblical sense of the depths of one’s being, where the person decides for or against God.
That’s a great analogy. “Life” is not a thing, but a process (or a set of processes). When the process stops, life stops. As for a soul, well that’s a religioius question not open to scientific inquiry.
I was going to use the computer analogy also. First, by “hardware” I assume you mean platform, since you can’t tell which instance of a computer a program is running on, unless you get its hostid.
I’d say life is more like a process, which is basically a running program. The program itself is more like one’s DNA and neuronic interconnections. When a computer stops running, the process is gone. Some of it you’re not going to be able to save, and if you’re dealing with truly random numbers, for instance, restarting the program doesn’t give you the same process.
I now ask this - say we could “save” the state of the brain - all the neurons, their weights, the hormones from the body that affect the brain, etc. Say we could either build a new brain and body with all this stuff, or simulate it on a computer, and “restart” the brain - like we can restart a process which we checkpointed. The new and old processes won’t be identical in either case. Has the “soul”, as you see it, migrated to the new brain and life, does the new brain have a new soul, or does the new brain have no soul at all, despite being able to reproduce the behavior of the old person exactly?
Although we can make analogies about brains and hardware and between thinking and memory as a running computer program I don’t think it follows that our observations about how a computer/program entity acts can be applied to the brain and its thinking and memories.
That is I don’t think we can validly argue that since a computer and its program act like this therefore the analogous brain and its processes act the same way.
Analogies are great for explaining things at a first level of understanding but they all fail if pushed too far.
Whether there is a fundamental difference between computation in the brain and in a computer would be an interesting discussion. There is no question that the design and architecture of these two things are very different.
However, there is benefit in using the example of a computer to delineate the difference between a program (which is static) and a proces, which is dynamic. We don’t think of our brain’s programming, which changes to some extent with learning (as do programs - so static is a relative term) - nor do most people who aren’t architects or operating systems designers or sophisticated programmers think of processes in computers all that much. Where a “soul” goes when you die is like asking where a process goes when you turn off a computer - it is an absurd question.
