What is a person’s soul?

What is a person’s mind?

What is a person’s mind? People are composed of soul and body. Less than one in 10,000 people are born with supernatural powers. If you understand If you understand the nature of the mind, you will also understand how to use the mind to control life functions. What does it take to share one’s soul below? What is a person's mind 1

Our body is composed of cells, and cells are composed of molecules and atoms. However, we not only have a body, but also a mind, which can think and have emotions and desires. But what is the mind? Is it matter? Is it also composed of atoms?

Mind and soul are often regarded as synonyms. When a person is alive, the two words soul and soul can be used interchangeably, but if the person dies but the soul is still there, then the soul is usually called soul. In this article we do not strictly distinguish between these two concepts.

Countless wise people throughout the ages have thought about the secrets of the soul. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato believed that the mind existed before we were born, and it existed in the world of ideas, which is a world different from the real world. When we are born, our souls enter our bodies, just like reincarnation. The soul of ordinary people is incomplete, only half, either male or female, and they are perfect when combined.

But Plato himself is different. His soul is complete and he does not need to fall in love or fall in love with himself. This is the so-called Platonic spiritual love method, which was later extended to the so-called pure love that only involves the spirit and has nothing to do with the body.

During the Warring States Period, Zhuangzi and Huizi once came to the bridge and watched the fish swimming in the river. Zhuangzi said: How happy these fish are. Keiko asked, you are not a fish, how do you know that fish are happy? Zhuangzi asked, "You are not me. How do you know that I don't know that fish are happy?" Here they are discussing spiritual issues. If you are not a fish, can you know the mental state of a fish? If you are not me, can you know my mental state.

Let alone the state of mind, it seems difficult to determine whether others have minds. Imagine that someone fights, smashes someone else's head, and finds that it is full of circuits. Do you think that person has a mind?

In the above example, Plato’s view can only be said to be poetic imagination, not a serious theory, while Zhuangzi and Huizi only raised questions. Let's take a look at various explorations by philosophers into the nature of the mind.

1. Mind-body dualism

This view holds that the mind and the body are essentially completely different things. The body belongs to matter, but the mind does not. The most famous supporter of mind-body dualism is Descartes, a French mathematician and philosopher who proposed the philosophical thesis "I think, therefore I am."

Why are the mind and body fundamentally different? Descartes advanced several arguments, one of which was this. The body can be cut into different parts, but the mind cannot be divided, so the two are completely different. This argument is controversial. Is the mind really indivisible? More on this later.

The mind is different from the body. Does the mind occupy a position in space? Where is it? Ancient Chinese people believed that the soul resides in the heart. This is also reflected in our words. The heart of the soul originally refers to the heart. For example, the word "thought" has the word "heart" under it. Descartes speculated that the mind is located in the brain because we generally think of ourselves behind the eyes, and behind the eyes is the brain.

How does the mind control the behavior of the body? For example, if I want to watch a movie now, I can control my hand to turn on the computer and watch it online. Descartes believed that there is a part of the brain called the pineal gland, and that the mind affects our behavior through the pineal gland. The pineal gland is like the receiving device of a radio, receiving signals from the soul and transmitting them to other parts of the body, and the body also transmits signals to the soul through the pineal gland.

This theory of Descartes conflicts with modern science. Because according to scientific concepts, the physical and chemical changes of neurons should be able to explain the activities of the brain, but now the mind wants to get involved in the activities of the brain, which is simply disrupting the order!

Leibniz believed that the mind and brain are independent and do not influence each other. But how to explain a certain synchronicity between them? For example, if the body is short of water and the mind feels thirsty, it will open its legs when it wants to walk. Leibniz said that this is because God synchronized the mind with the body when he created the universe, and there is no interaction between them. Just like two alarm clocks initially aligned with time, they have been synchronized since then, although there is no interaction between the two. This idea is called the theory of predetermined harmony.

There are still many questions to be answered about mind-body dualism. Do vegetative people have minds? If consciousness never returns, has the mind disappeared, or has the mind left the body? If there is no soul, is it necessary to maintain vegetative life? One can further ask, do animals have minds?

Although it cannot be said that mind-body dualism is absolutely wrong, after all, we still don’t know what the correct theory of mind is.

But it does conflict with the concept of modern science, because modern science also regards everything in the world as material, and mind-body dualism regards the mind as something different from matter. In addition, regardless of its pineal gland theory of the soul , it is better to establish the theory of harmony first, which is even more inconsistent with science.

In some legends, some evidence can be found to support mind-body dualism, and the mind can exist without the body. An example of this is near-death experiences. I often see reports that when a patient is seriously ill and undergoing resuscitation, his soul suddenly leaves the body, and he can no longer feel the pain. The important things he has experienced in his life are quickly played. After passing through a dark tunnel, there is light at the end. Hearing Beautiful music, loved ones who have passed away are there waiting for them.

When some people were on the verge of death, their souls were suspended in the sky out of their bodies and saw themselves lying on the hospital bed while doctors were rescuing them. In either case, eventually the soul will suddenly return to the body and return to reality. Is it possible that sometimes the soul wanders away and never comes back? Don't know, because if that were the case, the man never came back to life to tell us what happened to him.

Is out-of-body experience real or fake, or is it an hallucination caused by brain dysfunction? Someone thought of some ways to test them. For example, hang some special paintings on the wall. You can't see them while lying on the bed, but if your soul floats, you will definitely notice them. Some people put special props on the operating table for the same reason as before. But those who had out-of-body experiences never reported seeing those props after waking up. This shows that out-of-body experiences are most likely hallucinations.

In addition to near-death experiences, another related one is the legend of reincarnation, in which children recall their "past lives." The University of Virginia School of Medicine has conducted specialized research in this area and published a book in 2005, Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives, which contains a large number of cases. For example, there is this: There was a New York policeman who was killed during a robbery in 1992, and his heart and lungs were broken by bullets.

Five years later, his daughter gave birth to a son. The son was born with a defective pulmonary artery and heart problems. Later, the child kept saying that he was once a policeman, talking about the past, and remembering the small animals her mother used to raise, and many of his living habits were the same as that of the policeman. For more information about this book, please read Tongren Yuye’s article, “An Epidemiological Study on Reincarnation.” He also imagined an experiment to test the theory of reincarnation, "How to Use Statistical Experiments to Test the Hypothesis of Soul Reincarnation".

Are these things really the reincarnation of souls? Or is it just a coincidence, or is it the party's memory error, or is someone fabricating the facts? It is unknown, at least it seems unreliable and makes people think it is superstitious. Whether this is really the case requires further research.

If the soul can leave the body, there are many puzzling questions. We need eyes to see and a mouth to speak. If the soul leaves the body, how will it see? It has no mouth, so how can it communicate with other souls? Communicate telepathically? I can directly sense what other souls are thinking. Is there any privacy in this? Is this what heaven is like? It is even more difficult for the soul to create supernatural events like in the movies. How can it create it without arms and legs?

Except for unreliable rumors, there is no credible evidence that the soul can exist without the body. What is a person’s soul 2

Mystic: The soul is a ghost

If you have watched ghost movies or horror movies, you can understand intuitively what a ghost is.

The ghosts in Japanese ghost movies will have extremely thick foundation on their faces, and they may even crawl out of the TV screen. Most of the ghosts in Hong Kong ghost movies are very beautiful, but their bodies are translucent, they can penetrate walls, and they have various superpowers. Many of the ghosts in American ghost movies are not humanoid. They have terrifying faces, long nails, and sharp teeth, just like monsters.

For a mystic, the human mind is the soul, and the soul is this kind of ghost. Such ghosts may be reincarnated into humans or other animals. Such ghosts may also go to heaven or hell and receive rewards or punishments.

In short, mystics believe that the body may die, rot, or turn into a pile of loess or dust, but the soul will not die. The soul will continue to exist in some form after the death of the body and enter some other world. Most people who have religious beliefs, whether they believe in Buddhism, Christianity, Allah, or the Jade Emperor, are some form of mystic.

The biggest benefit of mysticism is that it can give people psychological comfort. Everyone is afraid of death. If a person believes that he will not really die and that his soul will continue to exist after his body dies, then this person may not be so afraid of death.

Mysticism can also lead people to do good. If a person believes that he has done bad things, he will go to hell and be tortured after death; if he does good things, he will go to heaven to enjoy happiness after death. Then this person may do as many good things as possible and do as few bad things as possible.

The biggest disadvantage of mysticism is that it is incompatible with the most popular scientific worldview. People who hold a mystical stance are either ignorant low-educated people, brave anti-intellectuals, cowardly high-educated people, or literati who pretend to be sophisticated. In the eyes of scientists, these people can be generally called fools.

Once a person is labeled as "stupid", this person is excluded from the circle of rational communication. His thoughts no longer have any serious meaning except to make people laugh. This may be excommunication in a scientific society.

I think this is why people would rather give up those psychological comforts than be called stupid.

Dualist: There is both a mind and a brain

The most famous dualist is Descartes. Descartes was a brilliant mathematician and philosopher, and to a lesser extent a physicist and physiologist. He believes that all animals are complex machines, and the human body is also a complex machine. But people are different from stones, reeds, clocks, and tigers. In addition to having a body, people also have souls. Nothing else has a soul.

Dualists believe that the soul and body can be distinguished. The body belongs to the category of matter, but the soul does not belong to matter. Matter is what physicists promise exists, like fermions and bosons and the larger things they make up. These things roughly have a volume, occupy a certain position in physical space-time, and can be described by four-dimensional coordinates. In short, there is no disagreement between dualists and physicalists about things like matter.

What is unique about dualists is that they believe that there is another kind of thing called soul in this world. Such things are not made of matter. They have no volume and do not occupy a spatial position. The unique thing about the soul is that it can think and have mental activities. Materials cannot think and have no mental activity.

Descartes believed that the pineal gland deep in the human brain is the seat of the soul. The human soul controls the human brain through the pineal gland, and the brain can control the limbs.

Unfortunately, modern scientific research has discovered that this small pineal gland is not as important as Descartes thought. It is only used to secrete melatonin and regulate circadian rhythm. Moreover, Descartes did not explain clearly how the soul, which is completely different from the body, controls the body through the pineal gland.

This is also the biggest trouble faced by dualists, who cannot explain how soul and matter, two completely different things, interact. Why does the physical event of "stubbing my toe" lead to the psychological event of "feeling pain"? Why does the mental event of "wanting to drink water" lead to the physical event of "reaching for a cup"?

The difference between dualists and mystics is that dualists have scientific common sense and believe that the world is described by physical laws. Dualists believe that people have souls, but they do not necessarily say that souls are immortal and can go to heaven or hell or even be reincarnated. Dualists simply want to save the human soul and carve out a reservation for it from the scientific worldview.

At present, this work is unsuccessful.

Behaviorists: There is no mind, only behavior.

Friends who study psychology must be familiar with the term behaviorism. Behaviorism in psychology, represented by Watson and Skinner in the United States, believes that psychological research should focus on behaviors that can be objectively measured, rather than studying unobservable thoughts, desires, motivations, consciousness, etc. . This is called methodological behaviorism.

Methodological behaviorism was later replaced by the cognitivist paradigm based on analogies between the human brain and computers, but its influence on philosophy continues to this day. Behaviorism in philosophy is called logical behaviorism, represented by Ryle in the UK and Quine in the United States. Incidentally, Quine and Skinner were classmates at Harvard and have remained good friends.

Logical behaviorism is now regarded as the standard for testing whether something has a mind. If something looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. If all the external behaviors of a thing are exactly the same as those of a person with a soul, then we say that this person has a soul.

In other words, the mind is behavior or behavioral tendencies. To say that a person feels pain means that the person may say "ah" and then avoid the stimulus that causes pain. To say that a person is thirsty means that this person is more likely to go looking for water to drink, even if he is not looking for water to drink at the moment.

To paraphrase Quine’s famous saying on physicalism: “Without physical change, there is no change.” Regarding the human state of mind, we can say, "There is no change without changes in behavior or behavioral tendencies."

Ryle’s behaviorist thought started from his criticism of Descartes. He called the dualist view the ghost in the machine.

Since the human body is already considered to be a complex and precise machine, why do we need a supernatural soul orb to control this machine?

The Turing test also embodies the spirit of logical behaviorism. If a machine can perform verbal behavior perfectly like a human, then the machine can be regarded as having human level intelligence. Behaviorism does not care about the inner self or subjective feelings. It only cares about external manifestations and only behaviors that can be observed. What is a person’s soul 3

What exactly is “soul”?

The mind is a very mysterious thing.

It is not the brain,

Because the brain is the collective name for structures such as the cerebrum, cerebellum and brainstem;

It is not the heart, because the heart only functions as a pump.

Nor is it the soul or spirit.

In short, the mind is not our body,

But it is in our body,

It is very much like an organ, but it cannot be found.

Studies believe that,

It exists in every organ,

It exists in every inch of skin,