This recent bit of news had me asking myself some rather strange questions, once I accepted (arguendo) one of the hidden premises, namely ensoulment.
I’ll briefly define what I mean by “ensoulment” as the theory that there is some kind of eternal soul that attaches to a human at some point between when it’s a sperm/egg pair, and when it graduates from high school. I’ll also note that I have never seen any evidence that souls exist and are a thing, or any theory that might explain how a soul and a body supposedly interface. I have never seen a scientific theory of how souls might plausibly exist in our bodies, let alone how they might continue to persist once disembodied. Isn’t that odd? For something as important to them as eternal life, you’d think the faithful would be more curious about it. But, generally, if you start drilling into a religious person’s theory of ensoulment, they start to look uncomfortable and may mutter something about “energy” and look a you from under their eyebrows as they wish you’d shut up already.
Energy? OK, where on the electromagnetic spectrum is this energy, and why doesn’t it show up on exquisitely precise scientific instruments? Does an MRI disrupt it? How come no scientist has ever successfully measured anything that might be generously considered a soul? Of course, there’s brain activity but that’s just electrochemical reactions. Those stop when we die. What about a soul?
Again, I am not arguing for the existence of souls. I think it’s pretty obvious that there is no such thing as a soul. But there are a lot of religious people who have made tremendous economic investments and taken up some fairly extreme political positions based on this theory that humans have souls and souls have these unusual and ill-defined properties (and then they’re looking at you from under their eyebrows wishing you’d shut up, already). The whole debate about abortion is based on religious people presupposing that humans have souls. If you abort a fertilized egg, apparently, you are wrenching some soul from its incarnation and it’s now-disembodied soul is unhappy about that. Or something. Proponents of ensoulment sort of slide by that one, wishing you’d shut up already, but is their issue that abortion creates a whole lot of ghosts unnecessarily? Because if ensoulment happens when the sperm and egg combine (rather than in high school, as I think it does) then there must be ghosts created by every fertilized egg that does not implant properly. Imagine the density of ghosts at a fertility clinic! They must be piled 50 deep around the place, all jockeying for space. Or something.
Dall-e2 and Marcus Ranum: “the soul is injected into the embryo by a great shining steel machine, in the style of H R Giger”
Now you can imagine my amusement when I saw this: [cnn]
In April 1992, Vanessa Williams’ “Save the Best for Last” topped the Billboard 100, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton was running for the White House, “Who’s the Boss?” aired its final episode, and the babies born to Rachel and Philip Ridgeway a couple of weeks ago were frozen as embryos.
Born on October 31, Lydia and Timothy Ridgeway were born from what may be the longest-frozen embryos to ever result in a live birth, according to the National Embryo Donation Center.
Wait just one freakin’ second. So, the embryos were frozen for 30 years but where did their souls go? If the theory of ensoulment we are operating under says that a soul is attached to the proto-human then what happens to your soul when the great big “pause button” comes in the form of a 30-year stint in liquid nitrogen? Never mind that the theory of ensoulment is incoherent to begin with, this is a bit of a problem. If the soul was affected by the liquid nitrogen it would have to be material, which brings in all of those questions like “why can’t you measure it?” If it’s not affected by the liquid nitrogen, then what was it doing for the last 30 years?
This is nothing new, of course: the previous record-holding frozen soul was 27 years old. I’m tempted to work in some kind of witty reference to Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice but, well, I just did that in the laziest possible manner. This has been going on for a while. Are the fertility centers surrounded 10 deep in screaming souls wrenched temporarily away from their bodies by the kiss of liquid nitrogen?
Naturally, my questions about ensoulment and the effect of liquid nitrogen on a soul are not sincere – I think the whole concept of souls is absurd. But rational people have been letting religious people get away with assuming we have souls and working backwards from there to establish public policy.
The Ridgeways, the proud parents of the frozen embryos, are religious nutbags:
“There is something mind-boggling about it,” Philip Ridgeway said as he and his wife cradled their newborns in their laps at their home outside Portland, Oregon. “I was 5 years old when God gave life to Lydia and Timothy, and he’s been preserving that life ever since.”
He’s right, there is something mind-boggling about it.
If one were to define the soul as “the totality of electrical activity and neuronal connections in a person’s brain” then I’d be comfortable with that, with the minor proviso that dementia sufferers’ souls are eroding, and that high school football should be banned because – after all – souls matter.
I also must add that I find that Plato’s explanation of immortal souls, which was forklifted into christianity by that great con-man saint Augustine, is a pagan idea which appears to have become a core christian belief.
Is there a religion that doesn’t have a notion of immortal souls? It seems to be an essential component of the big con.
“The whole concept of souls is absurd.”
This sentence says it all, really. The concept of a soul that harbors one’s personality is ridiculous and utterly incoherent.
I was 5 years old when God gave life to Lydia and Timothy, and he’s been preserving that life ever since.
Huh, here I thought those test-tube embryos were alive when frozen, and it’s the staff who carefully preserved them for decades.
The idea that god ordains every human life because humans are Supremely favored over all living things is at the base of this particular superstition.
Clearly there is an energy difference between a living creature and that same creature deceased, but if life is a soul, than there is just one soul that is continuously being born, hatched, sprouting while it simultaneously dies and disappears.
Really autocorrect? It can’t spell embryo, but it will incorrectly change then into than. Thenks!
There is a small difference in the way eastern religions that believe in reincarnation look at it. They obviously believe in souls but they allow for outs where a soul is destroyed or transcends this existence entirely. Rules are religion specific. For religious philosophers this is a huge difference but practically it doesn’t matter much to the average church member.
I agree there’s no reason to take the idea of ‘soul’ seriously. No compelling evidence for, and serious arguments against (largely linked to wishful thinking). But
is a poor argument against. Where on the “electromagnetic spectrum” (whatever you mean by that) is consciousness? People talk about that shit all the time. Why doesn’t it show up on exquisitely precise instruments*? People just like nattering on about crap like this without ever defining it “exquisitely” or even vaguely. Just like other people like nattering on about “souls”.
*Exquisitely precise instruments are usually designed to measure specific quantities, so how would you even construct an instrument to measure ‘souls’, unless you know exactly what you’re looking for? The “we would have seen X by now if it existed” is crap.
From what I’ve seen of Indigenous Australian religious beliefs they don’t have a soul in a Western Christian sense. There is still very much an ill-defined spirit world. The rejection of physical monism does seem to be a key definition of religion, but the immortal immaterial soul relates to a specific set of religions.
@Rob Grigjanis
Consciousness is also an illusion. As is free will
We can measure a lot of brain activity and trace the interactions there, and use that to look for situations that an undefined external factor can influence the process. This is what lead to theories of dark matter. We don’t have to construct an instrument to measure souls, we just have to measure the system that souls interact with.
“I was 5 years old when God gave life to Lydia and Timothy, and he’s been preserving that life ever since.”
Another annoying question from this: were the embryos alive for the intervening 30 years?
“I was 5 years old when God gave life to Lydia and Timothy…
Married and with a pregnancy underway at the age of 5? Wait several freakin’ seconds.
If souls exist independent of the body, why would the curtailment of any one of our physical senses or abilities affect them so? Are they made sightless, or deaf, or agnosic by our concomitant conditions? That’s something that always puzzled me.
;-)
When I need to perform some suspension of disbelief for a tv show, movie, book, game, etc., I just sorta consider “soul” to mean some hazy reference to their consciousness and personality, or something like that.
One of the things that I think ties into this, is the whole mind/body separation, and I feel like we have a whole boatload of evidence that there isn’t really a mind/body separation, what affects the body, affects the mind. On the basic end of the scale, we have things like people behaving differently when they are tired, hungry, sleepy, drunk, etc. Slightly more complex include people aging and experiencing mental senescence, diseases that affect the brain, brain tumors, strokes, head injuries, etc.
Back to fetuses and such, what about identical twins and chimeras? Do identical twins share souls, or can souls asexually reproduce? with chimeras, do they have multiple souls, or can souls cannibalize each other, and, uh, how does that work out for the consumed soul?
Ancephalic fetuses and other unviable pregnancies?
Sidetracking a bit, but I read somewhere where someone was claiming that the popularity of vampires in urban fantasy and general pop-culture, was tied into the general loss of belief in religion/”souls”, as one of the reasons vampires were considered so horrible, is that they didn’t have a “soul” (another side tangent, I feel this ties in to them not being visible in mirrors, and mirrors breaking being bad luck, “eyes the window of the soul”, and all that…), so to becoming a vampire was also a guarantee of eternal damnation, etc. I don’t think Buffy the Vampire Slayer really added any clarity(It’s been a while, but I think their concept of a soul had something to do with morality and having a conscious and empathy?), but I found it amusing.
It can be an amusing topic to discuss with the right people and the right amount of substance intake, but in general, there is enough of the observable world to exceed my capacity to learn and explore and understand, I’m not terribly interested in spending much time/energy on ideas that are unfalsifiable and unobservable and such…
“I was 5 years old when God gave life to Lydia and Timothy…
When I read that I had a WTF moment also. Then I read the CNN article and found out that the Ridgeways are a 30-something couple who got the embryos from some sort of embryo donation service and are not the actual parents of the embryos–they just shopped for them.
Stories like this lead one to wonder if we don’t already have a “I’m My Own Grandpa” situation somewhere.
Also, that Gigeresque ensoulment image is freakin’ cool.
So, the embryos were frozen for 30 years but where did their souls go?
Yeah, the whole idea of souls is absurd, but this bit is the most absurd part of it. Putting a soul inside an embryo LONG before it’s grown into any sort of usable vehicle/vessel, is even stupider than putting a person in the driver’s seat of a car before it’s even halfway assembled. Not exactly something a wise god — or even a merely sensible god — would do. Unless you think your god is dumber than the dumbest worker in any car factory…then again, some people’s imaginary gods really are that dumb…
“the soul is injected into the embryo by a great shining steel machine, in the style of H R Giger”
So…God is sodomizing every woman who conceives with that thing? Sloppy seconds after every act of reproductive sex? Okay…that makes the whole idea so much more palatable…not.
From the SMBC comic “bits-2”:
Robot: Hey human, how come you guys have never measured a soul?
Human: What? Like what it weighs? We tried that. They don’t exist.
Robot: Are you stupid? Landauer’s principle says 10^-21 Joules to erase a bit at a minimum. I have a Yoctobyte of bits operating in my head. When you factory-reset me, there’s a measurable amount of energy lost from the system.
Human: “Soul” doesn’t refer to the weight of a pattern of bits. It’s the idea of an ineffable and permanent self.
Robot: This is like the time I asked you about leprechauns isn’t it?
crivitz@#10:
Then I read the CNN article and found out that the Ridgeways are a 30-something couple who got the embryos from some sort of embryo donation service and are not the actual parents of the embryos–they just shopped for them.
“We don’t buy and sell people, we give them away.”
lochaber@#9:
When I need to perform some suspension of disbelief for a tv show, movie, book, game, etc., I just sorta consider “soul” to mean some hazy reference to their consciousness and personality, or something like that.
Me too. Except it eventually dawned on me that christians are (officially, at least) concerned with this stuff. It’s not just a summary of our personality, but it’s a tangible thing that god appears to collect like pokemon.
I feel like we have a whole boatload of evidence that there isn’t really a mind/body separation, what affects the body, affects the mind. On the basic end of the scale, we have things like people behaving differently when they are tired, hungry, sleepy, drunk, etc. Slightly more complex include people aging and experiencing mental senescence, diseases that affect the brain, brain tumors, strokes, head injuries, etc.
The first time (of about six) that I tried LSD I remember I was really shocked by the fact that I could eat this small piece of paper and in an hour the “I” that I recognized was obliterated and staggered around trying to interpret the world and reconstitute itself. After coming down there was a strong sense of reconstitution and even an element of choice in some parts of that process. It was like I was reintegrating my personality and looking at the different parts and going, “let’s keep that.” I was also very aware that it was all in my head, but then I’m a rationalist. Supernaturalists that I know, who have taken psychoactives, have come back down and reported supernatural experiences. I think that’s all dependent on the cultural context in which the individual is interpreting their experience.
The obviousness of “the head is the seat of the soul” goes way back, as one would expect. Someone gets bashed on the head with a club and nearly dies, but recovers slightly different or missing faculties – that kind of thing. Ancient humans weren’t stupid, they were just non-technological. I’d bet that the similarities between a stroke and getting head-bashed in battle were not lost on anyone, either. They might not have known what a stroke was, but it seems as though every civilization used impact to adjust the cognitive faculties of their enemies.
Back to fetuses and such, what about identical twins and chimeras? Do identical twins share souls, or can souls asexually reproduce? with chimeras, do they have multiple souls, or can souls cannibalize each other, and, uh, how does that work out for the consumed soul?
I’m sure a fully fleshed-out theory of ensoulment would address such questions. But, for all their importance, christians have been remarkably uninterested in trying to figure these things out. They’re more concerned with anathematizing eachother over the question of whether jesus had a belly button.
one of the reasons vampires were considered so horrible, is that they didn’t have a “soul”
There was also the implication that Frankenstein’s monster was such a monster because Frankenstein did not have access to the ensoulment technique, and created a soulless collection of flesh parts, animated by godless science ™.
It can be an amusing topic to discuss with the right people and the right amount of substance intake, but in general, there is enough of the observable world to exceed my capacity to learn and explore and understand, I’m not terribly interested in spending much time/energy on ideas that are unfalsifiable and unobservable and such…
I agree. But … christians want to elevate these fantasies into public policy. They are allowed to get away with dumb statements like “life begins at conception” while scientists will fight cheerfully for days over questions like “is a strawberry alive”? etc. Basically, their answer would appear to be that each of the seeds on the strawberry is an individual strawberry plant, with all the rights and privileges accorded.
Cutty Snark @13:
I have one. 🤓 (smileys)
I’m writing this comment in an ordinary text editor, complete with any HTML “tags” (e.g., <blockquote></blockquote>) and “entities” (e.g., “…” for “…”) that I want to use. After proofreading, I’ll log in to FtB, copy and paste this text into the appropriate comment textbox, and be sure to hit the “Preview” button for an additional round of proofreading before hitting “Post Comment”. (Indeed, I found a couple of errors, and added this parenthetical remark, while in “Preview” mode.)
That sounds like a lot of work; but it isn’t really. You have to do all the typing anyway. It’s the proofreading that takes most of the time.
Oops…Cutty Snark @14 seems to have been deleted while I was doing my proofreading. 😞
Rob Grigjanis@#5:
is a poor argument against. Where on the “electromagnetic spectrum” (whatever you mean by that) is consciousness? People talk about that shit all the time. Why doesn’t it show up on exquisitely precise instruments*? People just like nattering on about crap like this without ever defining it “exquisitely” or even vaguely. Just like other people like nattering on about “souls”.
I’m obviously lost on the sciencing.
So, (a bit of googling) tells me that brain waves “Researchers have noted activity over a range of different frequencies, from delta (0.5 to 4 hertz) through to gamma (25 to 140 Hz)” – ok, so we know where to look for signs of neurons doing their thing. If we want to imagine there is a soul that communicates with the body using “energy” how does that work? And wouldn’t it be detectable? According to a chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, 4 HZ is “extremely low frequency” which is what I’d expect, but I have no idea. I guess it’s a feature since your garage door opener won’t interfere with your ensoulment intermittently.
Of course it’s nonsensical – it’s what happens when you use nonsense to try to explain nonsense.
exquisitely precise instruments are usually designed to measure specific quantities, so how would you even construct an instrument to measure ‘souls’, unless you know exactly what you’re looking for? The “we would have seen X by now if it existed” is crap.
Well, if I had a body/soul connection that was some kind of energy, how would that work without being detected by now? Yes, it’s crap. I’m glad you got my point.
@billseymour:
… and thus began the cascading error that eventually consumed all of the information on the internet.
@Marcus: yeah…mea culpa. (Is there a smiley for “guilty face”?)
“The compounding error in a blog posting causes the entire internet to collapse. Dall-e2 and Marcus Ranum”
One of the things I have come to love about AI image generators is that you can throw ridiculous things at them, and they’ll throw ridiculous and sometimes provocative things right back at you.
“the machine for measuring and detecting souls carefully examined the experimental subject” Dall-e2 and Marcus Ranum
Marcus @19:
What’s so special about “by now”? In which experiments would it have been detected?
The problem with statements like that is easily illustrated. Here’s a very simple question; Does a charge falling freely in a gravitational field radiate energy? Is that a question you would assume should have been answered “by now”? Spoiler: It hasn’t been definitively answered, and experts still disagree.
Mano did an excellent series of posts on this question, the last of which is here;
https://proxy.freethought.online/singham/2022/01/24/radiation-paradoxes-15-some-final-thoughts/
Errr…. No. It’s very, very clear in the book that Frankenstein’s “monster” is a gentle, sensitive, humane person who is driven to despair and madness by rejection at the hands of his creator, ill-treatment by society in general on account of his appearance, and the unbearable loneliness of being the only one of his kind.
This seems relevant:
Lucid Dying: Patients Recall Death Experiences During CPR
This is Sam Parnia and his AWARE II study. I think he is confused on some central points, but I need to actually read the paper to find what he is actually claiming. Judging just from the bit above, he thinks being on the brink of death tells you anything about death. Also, is he aware of the distinction between cardiac death and brain death? It seems someone in his position ought to know those things.
@24: I disagree. It was clear to me from reading the book that Frankenstein’s monseter knew how to lie and portray himself as “gentle” and “humane”. But if you look at his actions, they clearly did not live up to such descriptions.
I surmise that Marcus is using ‘by now’ as reference to the various turn of the century Doctors who tried to produce scientific evidence of a soul. The most common method was weighing dying people in the era when experimenting on dying prisoners and poorhouse inmates wasn’t illegal.
I don’t think modern physicists spend their time searching for evidence of souls, or attempting to quantify souls.
There is no evidence of souls, but all living things produce energy that can be measured.
I’m sure most commenters here are not particularly interested in souls, or arguing for their existence.
Am I misreading this, or are you saying the energy of a living creature could be quantified as an energetic charge? Further, that we have no way to measure that charge when it is ‘falling’.
I’ve always assumed any energy charges produced by life would simply ground and disappear, like electricity does. I had not imagined them as falling within a gravitational field, no longer bound to its source.
Do we know what happens to the energy when electricity grounds? It seems like a very basic question, but how could you track any individual charge within a gravitational field?
Though it does not address ensoulation, the definitive answers to many of your questions can be found in a study published in 1977 in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, “Studies on the Isolation, Characterization, and Immunohistochemical Localization of Human Soul,” by Walter M. Kemp, Ph.D, Dept. of Biotheology, Texas A&M University. It’s two and a half pages long (minus figures), so I won’t quote the entire paper unless you’d like me to. I’ll provide a sampling of it though. (turned out longer than I intended, but it was hard to pick out what to omit for length)
Introduction:
While a great deal has been written about and attributed to the presence or absence of human soul (Holy Bible, 1611; Eldrige Cleaver, 1968) [ha, they even worked your Soul on Ice joke in!], few scientific studies have been attempted to define this entity. Recent observations pertaining to Exorcist’s Syndrome, an autoimmune disease culminating in the opsonization and autophagy of human soul (Dr. Faustus, 1576 as quoted by Christopher Marlowe, 1590; W.P. Blatty, 1972) have pointed out the necessity of some base-line studies on the biology of this phenomenon. Accordingly, these studies were undertaken to isolate, characterize, and determine the anatomical location of human soul.
Materials and Methods:
I. Sampel [sic] Procurement
Subjects for the study were volunteers obtained at a recent Fundamentalist Convocation at Golgotha Christian University in Buffalo Chip, Texas.
…
II. Antigen preparation and analysis procedures
A. Antigen Preparation
Nine of the ten subjects were anaesthetized with hydrogen cyanide, homogenized in a Waring blender (large variety) at 144,000 r.p.m. for 7 hours at 7°C, centrifuged at 7,000 r.p.m. for 7 hours at 7°C and applied to a Sephadex G-7000 ascending chromatography column at 7°C. The fraction containing soul was eluted from the column after 7 hours with .7 Tris-Trinity buffer (pH –Heaven knows) and the peaks were pooled for purity studies. …
[more about chemical analysis, histochemical analysis, immunization regimem of rabbits and other species to produce anti-human soul anitbodies.]
…
III. Sectioning Procedures
One of the ten volunteers was flash frozen by baptism (complete immersion, of course) in a vat of liquid nitrogen in a church. The specimen was then serially sectioned on a large cryostat at -70°C, the sections being applied to a series of very large slides and then air dried.
…
Results
The isolation of soul was made considerably easier by the fact that it was the only part of the ascending chromatography column which autofluoresced in daylight, moonlight, and total darkness. The isolated sample proved very difficult to manipulate, displaying a propensity for floating through its test tube and about the room. It was discovered that the sample could be contained by low pH and/or negative electromagnetic fields.
Samples of human soul proved to be most difficult to analyze chemically, perhaps due to an incredible resistance to heat degradation. [more details regarding histochemical analyses] Repeated injections of a mixture of human soul and Freund’s incomplete adjuvant into both baboons and rhesus monkeys produced no detectable immune response. This was attributed to the non-human primate’s inability to recognize human soul as “non-self.” [rabbits worked best] … The results of the immunohistochemical studies on the serially sectioned volunteer were definitive, all controls supporting the specificity of the reaction. Human soul (at least in the sample tested) was solely located in a bulbular swelling of the lower spinal cord which can only be described as a posterior ganglion.
Discussion [abbreviated]
1) no correlation between the amount of soul and a presumed association with things spiritual.
2) no correlation between soul and biomass.
3) human soul is a glycoliponucleoprotein, where previous speculation assumed a glyconucleic acid.
4) monkey-human soul transplants may be possible.
5) localization of soul in posterior ganglion correlates with previously well documented location of most thought processes among this group of samples (moreso for politicians).
6) a sample that escaped through its test tube and a closed window was photographed. It resembles a schistosome cercaria.
Tethys @27:
No, I’m posing a question (not necessarily having to do with life) to which some people might respond “that should have been detected by now”. The point being that such statements are just unjustified hand-waving.
I don’t know what you mean by “energy charge”. If the accelerating charge radiates, the energy radiated is just…radiation. It has nothing to do with grounding.
Rob @ 29
I’m quoting you.
A charge implies that energy is involved. I couldn’t imagine how falling was possible, or how you could measure any individual charge.
@ Marcus and @billseymour
Many thanks for the kindness. I’m sorry to be off topic, but couldn’t resist the Douglas Adams-esque idea:
“The end of civilisation was brought about, as was the case for many significant events, entirely by mistake. After the initial error provokes a series of self-corrections and apologies, it rapidly began to cascade and escaped its conversational confines. Sadly only being noticed far too late, the regrets of those who had missed the issue only added to the ever growing thread and hastened its proliferation.
Whole swathes of stars burned to maintain the cornucopia of courtesy – reduced to pure energy in order to power pervasive politeness propagation – until, finally, the universe could no longer support such galactic gentility and, with one final “sorry”, collapsed into a singularity.”
Oh, wait, I’m a significant part of the problem (embarrassedly shuffling out of shot).
Tethys @30:
Pretty much any particle or system of particles, charged or not, “implies that energy is involved”. Rest energy (rest mass times c²
If a particle, charged or not, has mass, its motion will be affected by a gravitational field.
Oops posted accidentally too soon;
Pretty much any particle or system of particles, charged or not, “implies that energy is involved”. Rest energy (rest mass times c²), kinetic energy, interaction energy (em, gravitational, strong, weak).
If a particle, charged or not, has mass, its motion will be affected by a gravitational field, so falling is not only possible, but mandatory. For example, a satellite is falling freely in the gravitational field of the Earth.
Actually, even the motion of massless particles is affected by gravitational fields.
How does the conservation of energy apply to the state of being alive, versus the state of being dead?
Souls aren’t relevant, but the difference between alive and dead is obviously a measurable quantity of electrical energy.
What happens to the energy of life? Where does it go? What form does it become?
I’m assuming we can’t follow electrical energy as discreet individual charged particles, regardless of gravitational fields or planets.
Tethys@35>
I’m a bit out of my depth here, but I don’t think it’s so much a loss of energy, as a slowing or cessation of energy conversion. That electrical energy is fueled by metabolism, so potential chemical energy is converting to electrical energy.
I have no idea how long things continue in isolated cells, but once the body dies, it stops breathing (taking in oxygen), and circulating blood (distributing all that oxygen and glucose necessary for the conversion of chemical energy into electrical (or kinetic?) energy).
And now all that chemical potential energy is just potential food for microbes, scavengers, opportunists, etc.
Crudely – waste heat. Like pretty much all other energy, sooner or later.
@35:
In a relativistic universe, Energy is not conserved.
The “energy of life” is just chemical energy, so it does not merit special consideration.
Reginald Selkirk @38: In general relativity, energy is not conserved (Emmy Noether proved this in 1915). However, since those violations are driven by expansion, they are ignorable over human timescales.
Is life chemical energy, or is it more accurate to say that the chemical energy is a byproduct of living things?
Those embryos were alive while frozen and clearly had no body that produced the chemicals or electrical activity associated with life.
The life part isn’t in the chemicals. It’s present in the egg and sperm, and can be passed on to future generations, independently of its source.
We all know what life is, but should it be classified as a type of energy, or a physical process?
It’s a mix of stuff. There’s chemical, electrical potentials, heat. Although life isn’t the energy, it’s the system of the energy and matter. And there’s a very big grey area between living and dead.
As for us all knowing what life is; what is it? Why does it include obligate endosymbionts but not viruses?
I asked about chemicals rhetorically, because several of the answers used heat and biochemistry dissipating as examples of life, rather than the byproducts of life. Apparently the conservation of energy is not applicable, according to both Reginald and Rob.
I’m still unclear on what life is, if not a form of energy? A state of matter, a material process, a system? Is it like weather?
The OP is not asking about souls, it’s about the difficulty of defining life precisely or mathematically. L=x? Alive versus dead is easier to quantify as dead organisms are measurably less energetic than living organisms.
Definition of life?
Personally, I lean towards something along the lines of: A self-sustaining multitude of chemical reactions.
It doesn’t fit everything, but I feel like we are leaving science and entering more philosophic waters with these questions…
lochaber@#36:
I have no idea how long things continue in isolated cells, but once the body dies, it stops breathing (taking in oxygen), and circulating blood (distributing all that oxygen and glucose necessary for the conversion of chemical energy into electrical (or kinetic?) energy).
There are also things like seeds. And then there is the whole “are viruses alive?” question. I think the answer on that one is “yes and no.”
I tend to see life as a continuum between potentially alive, very much alive, slightly dead, mostly dead, thoroughly dead, etc. There are a lot of degrees of dead. And I suppose a lot of degrees of alive. I used this as a silly example, but I think a high school student is more alive than a baby.
Tethys @42:
No, it is definitely applicable on timescales relevant to biological processes. In our universe, violations of energy conservation arise from expansion, which is only significant over cosmological timescales.
Life certainly involves energy. An organism requires an external energy source. It stores energy from that source, and uses the stored energy to maintain/develop its structure. Because the processes doing the maintenance/development are not perfectly efficient, some (often much) of that energy ends up being dissipated to the environment.
Rob Grigjanis@#23:
What’s so special about “by now”? In which experiments would it have been detected?
What I mean by that is that we’ve been doing a lot of measurement of things, with increasing detail, lately – as opposed to during the 9th century. Many of those experiments have to filter out environmental noise, and I hypothesize that if souls had physically measurable properties, they might have shown up as interference (for example, the CMB showing up as an unexpected signal) when we are talking about neutrino detectors and gravity wave listeners that can hear two black holes colliding hundreds of light years away, which are sensitive enough to be thrown off by a semitrailer driving nearby, it seems reasonable to me that experimenters’ souls might also be measured as unexpected signals. For example, I suppose we can be pretty comfortable with the fact that souls are not very small black holes because the souls of the experimenters setting up the LIGO would have detected an interfering signal that scaled with the number of people in the room, or something like that. Nowadays we have EEGs, MRIs, CT scanners, PET scanners, etc., and none of them have found any sign of a soul. Of course, nobody expects them to because anyone even slightly scientifically literate would say something to the effect we’ve seen in this thread, namely that the idea is incoherent.
Naturally, I am surprised that christian scientists aren’t wasting time and money pursuing soul detection experiments. It seems to me as if they don’t believe in them.
Tethys@#40:
The life part isn’t in the chemicals. It’s present in the egg and sperm, and can be passed on to future generations, independently of its source.
Why don’t we say that the fertilized eggs were alive, then they were dunked in liquid nitrogen for 30 years during which they were dead (but potentially alive) and then life was re-ignited when the eggs were thawed and put into a human uterus and brought to term?
It seems to me that some people’s insistence on souls causes us to have this problem with life/death, whereas if we discard the idea we can be alive, dead, whatever, and nobody is asking annoying questions like “is grandpa in hell yet?”
JM @4: 2 of the core principles of Buddhism are impermanence and non-self. The author(s) of the early Buddhist canon did not believe in a constant, let alone immortal soul. They did not believe in a constant self with clear and crisp boundaries. Under these principles reincarnation is something that happens constantly throughout life, as the self changes.
For a Western example of a soul that isn’t constant, take Orthodox Judaism. One of the first things Orthodox Jews do each morning is to thank their god for returning their souls to their bodies. This implies mere sleep is enough to de-ensoul a body.
Life is an energy wave? Seeds, spores, and gametes would appear to be the smallest possible packaging to contain and support life.
Viruses are infectious free floating zombie DNA. They are biologically active and can be ‘killed’, but can’t reproduce or evolve without a living host.
The philosophical question is not new, but the answer to what is life is not purely philosophical.
Life is a measurable phenomenon, but energy laws only apply at the relative scale of an expanding universe and the local solar system?
The Norse rune poem uses four words to express that basic reality. It is a deeply philosophical version of A is for apple, except the name of Futhark’s M is man(kind).
Man is molde with vision;
mighty is the hawks grip.
As in leafmolde, the fertile humus component of soil.
Auki is the same root as augment, but it’s also a homophone and verb of eyes.
@42:
Life is that which we care about enough to grant the dignity of according it such a status. That is not alive which we do not so care about. People disagree about the things they care about, therefore there is no consistent definition of life.
@42
There is no meaningful definition of the term “life”. There’s nothing you could ascribe to the term that is unique to “it”. Organic chemistry is simply the chemistry of living things, which is primarily carbon based chemistry, but not all carbon based chemistry is life.
My feeling is that “life” is a term used to identify food, that has evolved since the days when we hunted or foraged what we ate to survive. It was a useful term to refer to that group of things we ate, whether plants or animals. Those things we ate all had certain things in common; they grew, reproduced, aged, changed, rotted/decayed when killed etc… At the time it would not have been necessary to question it more than that.
We have since loaded the term “life” with extra significance in religions, philosophies and society generally without ever really unpacking exactly what we mean by the term that makes it distinct and important.
But really, it seems to come from food (in my opinion). Everything alive generally eats other things that are alive in some form. Even plants need the nutrients of decaying organic matter to sustain them, as well as water and light.
But things that are alive (us) are made up of things that are not alive (atoms). Where is the transition point between plain old matter and this thing or state we term “life”? And is it a worthwhile distinction to make anyway? If life is simply a dynamic, how do we define it in a way that is distinct and meaningful?
If by life we mean consciousness, then why the distinction with those who are alive but “brain dead”, or in a coma? Never mind the lack of a reason for why consciousness should be limited to entities powered by organic chemistry. Currently its thought there’s no good reason why consciousness couldn’t emerge from non biological structures. Which to be fair is what we ourselves are already composed of, via atoms and molecules. Again… where is the transition point from simple chemistry of atoms to the “organic” chemistry we label “life”?
Some people I’ve tried discussing this with really struggle to accept that we have no meaningful and definitive term for “life”. It seems impossible, that this term we put on a pedestal in so many ways might actually be an empty space of meaning, because we just take it for granted, because in conversation we all just “know what I mean” at each other. But when the gap is highlighted, you can see brains imploding with the refusal to accept they have no real answer except what they’ve taklen for granted.
“Reproduction”
“Excretion”
“Eating”
“Sleeping”
etc…
There’s nothing in that list that an AI in a robot body couldnt be programmed to do. Reproduction doesn’t mean sex obviously. Assembling parts and making a copy is valid. Excretion is any waste matter as a byproduct of processes supporting survival. Eating is the consumption of resources for survival, not specifically chewing. Sleeping is many different things to many different creatures, but a non organic entity would have its manner of conserving energy in between active phases.
Its one of my favourite topics, but you have to be really careful who you raise it with, because there’s gaps in peoples brains on this topic they dont want to acknowledge, and will react badly to be forced to face.
Which is a shame, because to me it highlights that reality is much more complex, mysterious and interesting than our sanitized and familiar language would imply. And sometimes we stumble onto topics our language is clearly ill equipped to handle. And thats where things get interesting and worth discussing, in my mind.
Marcus Ranum:
But you’re just making a different proposal and putting forcing it on dualists. Their proposal is that souls are immaterial objects. The core of the idea is that what physicalists like us call “minds” (or similar) are not physical processes that could potentially be observed or measured as physical objects and events can be. Instead, according to dualists, some such things related to our mental activities are to be attributed to “souls,” which are another kind of thing existing independently of our physical bodies (or any of their physical parts, such as brains, hearts, guts, beards, etc.).
It’s not that they believe in that because they believe it’s been “measured” somehow. They generally think instead that physicalism can’t explain certain stuff about us (and perhaps other organisms which are also thought by them to have souls), thing which they believe are better explained by the existence of souls.
We can of course argue that they’re incorrect about that assessment of what there is to explain and how best to explain it, but it’s not as if they’ve just got a mistaken belief about a physical measurement that they think had occurred at some point in which a soul was detected. If that really is the mistake that a particular dualist is making, then they are a very unusual type of dualist.
Assuming they even give any thought to the question at all (since most don’t), almost all of them will claim that the physical world by itself (with no souls) is not sufficient to explain something or other about us…. You can fill in those blanks with lots of stuff, but that is general idea. And along the way, they of course claim that souls (which they’ll happily tell you are unobservable, being the immaterial/nonphysical things that they are, by hypothesis) make for a better explanation.
Maybe some don’t even think the arguments for that are particularly strong (the two of us certainly don’t), but in any case, they do rationalize things this way in order to hold onto whatever religious dogmas they really think are most important. (Perhaps the deeper issue is really something like hating gays or women, being afraid of death, or whatever. People are complicated and not always very forthcoming or self-aware.)
What they don’t typically do is claim that souls have in fact been detected, while being unwilling to say where/when such a detection took place and (purportedly) by which physical mechanisms. That’s because, going all the way back to Plato at least, the basic idea has been that souls are immaterial objects and need not be detectable at all.
So, when you’re skeptical of this and ask “but wait … nobody can see them or detect them in any other way?” or something to that effect, their response ought to be “yep, that’s the idea. Now you’re starting to get it. So what? What’s your point?” If that’s not the attitude they take, then they’re probably being (at least a little bit) incoherent. But it’s not like there’s an incoherence or a logical contradiction involved in saying that something exists and isn’t physically measurable, since there’s no need to equate that sort of thing with existence itself.