h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There is something sexual about all this. I don't whether it's the 'organ of reception' or the notion of 'devices' that makes me wonder what you're really on about.
More distressingly, my memory of previous encounters with you informs me that you will not take this posting seriously or be at best offended by what you perceive as my taking the mic with your good intentions.
Fact is my organ of reception is right where it ought to be; worn out and useless now after all these years but once it was my only connection to heaven.

~jwf~

I'll certainly take it seriously, ~jwf~ -- it's the most concrete response I've ever had to the question.


The point of the question is to induce believers in an immaterial soul, if they are willing, to articulate their understanding of how the relationship between the immaterial and the material actually works and to articulate some of the logical difficulties of the ghost in the machine idea.


As for your (worn) organ of reception, I would have thought that your organ was actually one of transmission rather than reception, unless there's something about you orientation about which I was unaware.

Ah, bless you sir, for your kindness in not taking advantage of my carelessness there. Indeed, I wonder if I could entirely delete all prior references to my having an organ of reception. God forbid anyone less understanding or not as familiar with my usual transmutations should come by and get the wrong impression.

~jwf~

AS for the ghost in the machine, I am a believer. I have a pagan (or primitive) relation to many material things and bestow them with character if not wisdom.
In most cases I am also aware that it is really a residual echo of my own sense of touch that animates so many of my material possessions into favoured spirits.
That is not to say that I do not recognize the anima in things belonging to others which I have not seen or touched before. This is especially true with automobiles which I credit with having a body language and I can even read what they are saying.

so, is the anima in the car something immaterial which could perhaps have an existence separate from the car? Is the anima something other than the physical car? If so, how does the physical car learn what the car-anima wants it to do? What is the means of communication? And, if the anima is not something other than the physical car, why give something a separate name when it doesn't have a separate existence?

Several very good questions which I shall have to ponder over the next week as Tuesday is Remembrance Day and the Library will not be open again until Thursday.

But if it helps, my first reaction is that the body language of a car is likely just the 'imprint' given to it by the driver's actions. It is probably just a residual echo of the driver's 'touch'.

The patina (to use that word in its most general sense) of used tools and clothes and gadgets is often just an imprint or impression of the user's touch, but to the owner it is also a measure of familiarity that often encompasses an emotional value that can easily delude itself into believing things have a personality.

Perhaps the good old days when things were:
(1) made of more maleable materials, like leather saddles and wooden tool handles and
(2) more valuable to the owner (especially a prideful owner)
have left us (me) with too romantic a view of the personification of stuff.

I will go fourth (4th) and ponder mightily for your question challenges some of my most basic assumptions about my relationship to the whirled and the things I call mine.

Dare I ask what has prompted your current fascination with this question? It is a worthwhile question(s) but as I've discovered in just these few moments of consideration it has a highly subjective context (and subtext) and is probably just an extension of personal senses and sense memories.


~jwf~

the 'current fascination' with this question is certainly not just 'current' and I'm not sure that I would call it 'fascination'. It's a result of ongoing frustration with wooly thinking on those religion threads that keep cropping up here.


Have a good weekend and Remembrance Day.

Well, I'd given it some thought.
And still I was not quite prepared to make any definitive statement until I had a chance to re-read your question, to be sure I understood it. And now that I have. I realise I hadn't really understood it in the first place.

But no, I doubt such a device could even be conceived.
Oh I'm sure there are 'concepts' or theories of how this might be accomplished but none I've ever heard of amount to more than wishful thinking or scifi fantasies. Most seem to assume there must be some neural-electric activity that could be measurable.

To many this would imply that the soul has and needs a source of electro-magnetic influence to be viable and communicative - and, if so, denies the immortality of the soul when cut off from the electro-generative body.

So I guess I have to say I really don't know. And my imagination cannot resolve the issue. So I will have to remain agnostic on the question. But let me suggest that the words metaphor and metaphysical are more closely linked than our 'Christian' culture is prepared to acknowledge or consider.

So in my mind the question is:
Is there a metaphysical soul or is it just a metaphor for unresolved ideas created in the neural kludge of our minds? It does seem to be an idea floated in many religions and cultures, but not all of them, and one has to wonder whether all these ideas sprang up separately or are merely remnants of an earlier proto-religious-belief system.

The so called spiritual whirled has often been (and continues to be) dismissed as merely a manifestation of our imagination's attempts to reconcile the unknown, but again one has to wonder if such beliefs would arise spontaneously in some impossibly isolated culture.

That said, I do firmly believe we should embrace the primitive foundations of all our institutions and belief systems and plumb them for what might be possible or viable - even if only to appreciate why our ancestors were wrong and not just to dismiss them.

There may be no truth at all, for example, to anything associated with the New Testament, but does that mean I should offend the spirit of any of my ancestors who may have had no chance to believe anything other than the established order of their time and place.


~jwf~

I think I agree with much of what you say about what to do with old religions and I particularly like you bit about honouring the spirit of you ancestors. This is one reason I get annoyed by some Christians who seem to claim exclusive dominion over the term 'Christian': there is much about the phenomenon called 'me' that is Christian and I don't really see any way that some guy behind a pulpit somewhere in Georgia can claim that only those who send him money are allowed to use the term.

More specifically concerning the question, it seems to me that the crux of what I'm getting at is if the soul has an independent existence from the body then it must have a means of transferring information from itself to the physical body. It is the nature of this means of transfer that I'm querying. If the physical body can receive the signal, could a machine be made which could receive the signal? If not, why not?


I don't pretend to have an answer apart from 'the soul is a fiction'.

>> ...then it must have a means of transferring information from itself to the physical body. <<

"must" you say...
Yeah that was the part of your original question that I hadn't really understood properly. I just didn't allow for the fact that you (feel, believe, are convinced - pick one) that the soul could, would or should (all three apply) somehow communicate with the body or the conscious mind. Such an assumption prejudges the nature of the soul just as most people fail to realize that a unicorn's horn isn't just a cute decorative add-on but is in fact a deadly offensive weapon. The soul may be nothing more than a receipt issued only upon completion of the transaction we call Liff.


~jwf~

I am thinking of the more usual (I think) idea of the soul as being something of an active pilot of the body. In that case, I still think there would have to be communication between the body and soul. If, however, the soul is as you say something with which we are issued at death, then communication between the soul and body would not be necessary.

I wonder, though: what is the 'we' to which the soul is issued after the body is dead?

>> ...idea of the soul as being something of an active pilot of the body <<

Perhaps my agnostic upbringing robbed me of the opportunity to consider or even hear of such an idea before. The 'soul' for me always seemed to be the residue of spirit upon death. Spirit is definitely a product of neural magic...
Crap my time is u[p

'Crap my time is u[p'

I hope that wasn't a cry for help or a death rattle.


What I infer from the phrase 'residue of spirit upon death' is that during life there is some sort of sufficiency of spirit somewhere. By 'neural magic' do you mean that this spirit is a product of the brain? and yet it somehow continues after the end of its physical underpinnings?

the only time I've come across a convincing scientific explanation of some sort of life of the personality after death has been in the work of Douglas Hofstadter, in which he follows in the footsteps of Gilgamesh and Beowulf by saying that our personalities achieve a sort of life after death in the brains of those who have memories of us. Those memories are our only immortality. I find there is a certain grandeur in this view of life . . .

Life goes on! But computer access is a finite limitation.


I am pleased to see that the classics have at least instilled in you the possibilities of 'immortality by reputation and memory'.



I promise to come here first tomorrow and give this the attention it and you deserve.

20 seconds..
~jwf~

I think I have the answer.

When it finally occurred to me, I began to wonder if perhaps this wasn't the whole point of your question to begin with. You sometimes employ a rather Socratic method. And I have to thank you for bearing with me all these weeks, guiding me to the discovery so that I come to it feeling I have had a personal epiphany.

The answer to the question, "Is there a device for communicating between the body and the soul?" is 'Yes, it's called Music'.

Here I would begin a discussion of the history of music to demonstrate how the first instrument was the human voice, as a wail, a moan or a humming contentment. Back then, in the Dreamtime, men sang the whirled into being. And when they went walkabout, it took on rhythm.

And rhythm led to drums. And these too could express a range of emotions, but they also led to the first chicken and egg question,
does music come from within to express a mood or can it be used to create emotional responses in the listeners. Remember all those 'war drums in the distance' scenes from old films? The drumming expressed the frightened heartbeat of the savages as an outlet for their fear before battle. But it instilled the same fear in their enemies.

Oh lord, I could go on (in chronological order) to the woodwinds, strings and brasses but the point has been made that what began as expression of internal emotion became an instrument (pun? what pun?) to communicate and instill feelings in others.

What is important is that in that evolution from an expression of the soul to a communication of emotion we learned that it could also touch the mind and the heart. So we now have intellectual music, love songs and songs of seduction, dance music and 'soul music'.

Here's what brought me to this epiphany:

"...and I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
and looking back down at me
smiled reassuredly.

I dreamed I was flying
and high up above my eyes could clearly see
the Statue of Liberty
sailing away to sea."

It's Paul Simon's 'An American Tune', which like a lot his work hadn't always struck me as 'unified' or 'complete', being as it were a collection of clever phrases and abstracted generalisations (See - hear: 'The Sounds of Silence')

It was the now familiar scene of the soul rising which brought me to the tune as evidence (if not proof) that there is an almost universally accepted 'truth' in the belief that the soul is separate and separable from the body.

But when I listened carefully to the lyrics that followed the image of the Statue of Liberty sailing away to sea I began to realise he was having a prophetic vision that can only now be recognised in the current state of affairs. He was using the 'soul rising' metaphor to validate his vision as a 'true' prophecy as can only be seen when in an elevated out of body state.

"...but it's alright, it's alright
you can't be forever blessed,
for tomorrow is another working day
and I'm trying to get some rest."



Got a bit off track there, going off into global politics et al, but all that aside I have now firmly come to conclusion (and I guess I always had known) that Music is the device you are seeking. But I'm also quite sure you knew that all along and were just trying to make others realise it.


~jwf~

actually, ~jwf~, my personal opinion is that the word soul, when describing something immaterial and capable of existence independent of the physical, is a descriptor of a fiction. That sort of soul is a figment of imagination. On the other hand, the soul you describe which is affected by music is not, in my opinion, immaterial, nor is it capable of independent existence. That sort of soul is, in fact, a function of something physical, namely, the human body/brain.

So, to clarify my own answer to my question: I don't think it is possible to build a machine which could detect the communication between the physical body and the immaterial soul for the same reason it is impossible to construct a camera which could follow Santa's journey down my chimney on Christmas Eve: either Santa or my chimney doesn't actually exist.

And, perhaps to clarify even more, the reason I don't expect that an immaterial soul exists is precisely because there can be no coherent answer to the question about the communication between the immaterial soul and the material body.

>> there can be no coherent answer to the question about the communication between the immaterial soul and the material body. <<


"Hey Jude, don't make it bad,
take a sad song and make it better..."



~jwf~