hutch (02/11/83)
Ok, Randal. I'll bite. The reason why one wants to ask the question about souls is because one wishes, partly, to know if one will come to an end. I agree that eternity starts now (I may even have said so to you at some point) but the question of "is there a soul" is still valid enough to be worth considering. The minimum we can be sure of is that as long as we are remembered and as long as our past and present actions endure, we will continue to have had meaning. But we may find it interesting to know whether or not the complex of awarenesses, beliefs, and personality traits that we tend to think of as "self" has any objective existance. After all, we have only the subjective awareness of our senses that we are even here at all. Actually, I think we can assume we exist, since I know that the world is continually more complex and surprising than I am personally able to envision all by myself. The details are too consistent, and I am too often wrong about some part of them, for me to think that it is all just an hallucination. So, by self-examination via physical senses, I can reasonably assume that I have a body, which exists in a universe, and that I am not the only body in that universe. I cannot assume a soul based on that information granted by my physical senses. The problem is, can I discover other senses or modes of self-perception which will allow me to discover whether the soul is more than an hypothesis? I can tell indirectly by the use pf some of these physical senses that the other bodies in the universe can be roughly classed into those that are "alive" and those that are not. The "alive" ones show a high degree of complexity, tending to behave in ways that are not simple to predict. The "unalive" ones tend to be fairly inert or do not act in anything other than simply mechanical fashion. I will explore this concept later, after I get flamed at for what I have said already. Steve Hutchison ...decvax!tektronix!tekmdp!dadla!hutch