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Comment by reg_dunlop

7 hours ago

The idea of "ownership of a body" made me think about a quote I heard a long time ago, while talking amongst musicians while waiting to get up and perform. It felt like some secret knowledge that I gained privilege to, while somewhat inebriated and it hasn't left me since.

> I _have_ a body, I _am_ a soul.

Maybe what they're identifying is the first half of that statement, how we interpret the former, through the presence of the latter.

9 comments

reg_dunlop

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Tarq0n  5 hours ago

Dualism is almost always unhelpful as a model. Your soul is a process your body runs, they are indistinguishable.

  • hackinthebochs  1 hour ago

    It doesn't have to be a reference to dualism. We can draw a distinction between specific patterns of brain activity and the body that realizes it. "I" exist only when the characteristic property of neural activity that realizes the self is present. I am the realization of this second-order property. Here the "soul" is this specific pattern of dynamics realized by my body's neurons.

roenxi  6 hours ago

You can do that with mental phenomenon too - eg, having memories, feelings, consciousness, thoughts. All aspects of "I" that might be present or not - so they can't really be said to be you as much as possessed by you for a moment. Insofar as a soul exists for you to be ... it is quite small.

  • zozbot234  2 hours ago

    > You can do that with mental phenomenon too - eg, having memories, feelings, consciousness, thoughts.

    But once you carry that reasoning to its full conclusion, the original argument for a "soul" or "self" that can even be meaningfully called "I" vanishes entirely. There still is some sort of underlying "true" subjective awareness that's felt to be ontologically basic in some sense (just like the "soul") but now it's entirely impersonal (the traditional term is "spirit", or "the absolute") since anything that's still personal is no longer comprised in it: an ongoing phenomenon and perhaps an inherent feature of existence itself, not a "thing".

ajuc  27 minutes ago

I think of it this way:

    Person me = new Person {
      body: { ... },
      personality/soul: { ... },
      emotionalState: { ... },
      memories: { ... }
    }

The "me" is very small - it's just the structure that holds the pointers to everything else.