Nice piece. I think we can make some distinction between "soul" in the broad sense of "what makes you the type of being you are" vs. the more narrow sense of a kind of causal explanation for what makes you speak and act, with the latter being an idea that developed in cultures with a tradition of philosophical inquiry into the ultimate principles of the world, particularly ancient Greece and India. In that case, there is the question of whether something like the mother-soul, a shared realm of ideas and tradition, is having an immediate causal effect on me distinct from bodily structure or any personal soul I might have (something like a collective consciousness or unconscious), or whether it's important because of the way it shaped my body/mind in the past, the "fingerprints" it left on them. Imagine my body/mind in its current form transported to a parallel universe with the same laws of nature but with no other humans, cut off from all further causal influences from my home universe (including any sort of psychic influence from a human group consciousness)--would I still retain my personality, reason, creativity etc. because of those fingerprints of human society left on my present form (at least until I went crazy from the isolation), or would I instantly become a different sort of being without the ongoing influence of the rest of humanity?
BTW, it's my understanding that there is a key difference between the way Aristotle thought the mind was the form of the body and the ideas of modern scientific thinkers who see the mind as a pattern of information in the body. In terms of the distinction between "strong emergence" and "weak emergence" that philosopher David Chalmers discusses in his piece at https://consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf , the modern thinkers would usually be arguing for weak emergence where my purposeful behavior can in principle be accounted for based just on the laws of physics acting on the arrangement of particles/fields in my body and its immediate environment (Chalmers seems inclined to accept this is true about behavior, though he thinks subjective consciousness is a different matter). Aristotle seems to have argued for something more akin to strong emergence where forms like the soul can exert a top-down influence on the matter of the body which can't be accounted for in terms of the lower-level physical properties of the individual parts and the way they interact. See the discussion starting on p. 326 of https://ancphil.lsa.umich.edu/-/downloads/faculty/caston/epiphenomenalisms-ancient-modern.pdf which talks about his reasons for rejecting the ancient "harmonia" theory of the soul discussed earlier in the paper, the idea that the soul is akin to the musical properties of a lyre which are assumed to depend only on the lower level properties of its parts, like the noises made by individual tuned strings (Plato also criticized this idea in his dialogue Phaedo).
Thanks for reading! Love your response-- I'll try to respond to as much as I can.
My intention with this piece was to talk more about the (as you put it) broader sense of "soul", by comparing how different cultures understood what type of being humans are, as reflected in the different "catalogs" of human soul-parts . If I were to speak more about the narrow sense of soul, I would have mentioned tradition's causal effects on human development (something like what's described in Cecelia Heyes' book Cognitive Gadgets: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/hail-cecilia-heyes), and likely argued that many of the cognitive mechanisms we take for granted may in fact be tools handed down to us (related to the passage of Pirsig's I included). In the months since I wrote this, I've definitely thought of a lot I could add!
To respond more directly to your ideas: maybe it's possible to think of the madness which comes with being estranged from human contact as resulting from a sort of "fraying" of the mother-soul, which to me seems like something which needs to be continuously refreshed by staying in social (and/or traditional) contact; I noticed, for example, that when I left the intellectual community I was part of at university and lived at home for a while (which is errr...not an intellectual community), there was definitely a notable shift to my thinking. Reading the ~complicated~ books I liked helped stave off this "fraying" to some extent, but not completely. I can only imagine that being stranded on a far away planet would simply be a more extreme case than me being (intellectually) isolated at home. (Unfortunately I have less concrete things to say about group consciousnesses, at the moment.)
As for Aristotle and contemporary philosophy of mind--it's my perception (possibly wrong!) that Chalmers' ideas are not representative of those of many cognitive scientists, who are more likely to be functionalists about the mind, mostly because p-zombies seem neither metaphysical possible or conceivable to them (though the opposite seems to be true for those outside the field). I think when I started out reading philosophy of mind in undergrad Chalmers seemed indisputably correct (p-zombies are conceivable AND metaphysically possible!) but my views have since shifted.
At the moment I find myself leaning towards the normie view among specialists -- a computationalist variety of functionalism -- partially because Chalmers seems less convincing to me now, and largely because I think mental patterns can be "implemented" or "realized" on different substrates, and that mental patterns can have causal effects on the substrate they are implemented on; both of these ideas seem pretty in line with Aristotle (would recommend this great article on functionalist interpretations of hylomorphism: https://academic.oup.com/book/32491/chapter/269649440).
Thanks--yeah, I figured you were talking more about the broad notion, but the part about that modern informational view of the soul sort of touches on the narrow causal notion so just wanted to add that it's a useful distinction to keep in mind when thinking about the whole topic of what various people have said about the soul. I mentioned that Chalmers believes in strong emergence when it comes to first person experience/qualia but is inclined to accept weak emergence when it comes to physical behaviors like speech--I was thinking about the latter rather than the former when I talked about the ideas of "modern scientific thinkers" and how they differ from Aristotle, who seemed to think souls directed actions of physical parts of the body in a top-down way that couldn't be explained just in terms of physical properties of individual parts.
And I agree that social isolation can start to drastically change a person (I think extended solitary confinement should be seen as a cruel and unusual punishment for this reason), but in terms of the causal issue there's a question of whether that's a matter of being cut off from some kind of group mind or whether it's more like being cut off from regular sensory inputs from other people which your system has come to expect (why I talked about whether in the thought-experiment I would 'instantly' become different or initially retain my capacities even if in time 'I went crazy from the isolation'). The latter is compatible with a causal picture where all my behavior is due to laws of physics acting on the current structure of my body and matter/energy impinging on it from its immediate local environment, without other human minds having a direct non-local influence on me that isn't a matter of signals received by known sense organs.
Nice piece. I think we can make some distinction between "soul" in the broad sense of "what makes you the type of being you are" vs. the more narrow sense of a kind of causal explanation for what makes you speak and act, with the latter being an idea that developed in cultures with a tradition of philosophical inquiry into the ultimate principles of the world, particularly ancient Greece and India. In that case, there is the question of whether something like the mother-soul, a shared realm of ideas and tradition, is having an immediate causal effect on me distinct from bodily structure or any personal soul I might have (something like a collective consciousness or unconscious), or whether it's important because of the way it shaped my body/mind in the past, the "fingerprints" it left on them. Imagine my body/mind in its current form transported to a parallel universe with the same laws of nature but with no other humans, cut off from all further causal influences from my home universe (including any sort of psychic influence from a human group consciousness)--would I still retain my personality, reason, creativity etc. because of those fingerprints of human society left on my present form (at least until I went crazy from the isolation), or would I instantly become a different sort of being without the ongoing influence of the rest of humanity?
BTW, it's my understanding that there is a key difference between the way Aristotle thought the mind was the form of the body and the ideas of modern scientific thinkers who see the mind as a pattern of information in the body. In terms of the distinction between "strong emergence" and "weak emergence" that philosopher David Chalmers discusses in his piece at https://consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf , the modern thinkers would usually be arguing for weak emergence where my purposeful behavior can in principle be accounted for based just on the laws of physics acting on the arrangement of particles/fields in my body and its immediate environment (Chalmers seems inclined to accept this is true about behavior, though he thinks subjective consciousness is a different matter). Aristotle seems to have argued for something more akin to strong emergence where forms like the soul can exert a top-down influence on the matter of the body which can't be accounted for in terms of the lower-level physical properties of the individual parts and the way they interact. See the discussion starting on p. 326 of https://ancphil.lsa.umich.edu/-/downloads/faculty/caston/epiphenomenalisms-ancient-modern.pdf which talks about his reasons for rejecting the ancient "harmonia" theory of the soul discussed earlier in the paper, the idea that the soul is akin to the musical properties of a lyre which are assumed to depend only on the lower level properties of its parts, like the noises made by individual tuned strings (Plato also criticized this idea in his dialogue Phaedo).
Thanks for reading! Love your response-- I'll try to respond to as much as I can.
My intention with this piece was to talk more about the (as you put it) broader sense of "soul", by comparing how different cultures understood what type of being humans are, as reflected in the different "catalogs" of human soul-parts . If I were to speak more about the narrow sense of soul, I would have mentioned tradition's causal effects on human development (something like what's described in Cecelia Heyes' book Cognitive Gadgets: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/hail-cecilia-heyes), and likely argued that many of the cognitive mechanisms we take for granted may in fact be tools handed down to us (related to the passage of Pirsig's I included). In the months since I wrote this, I've definitely thought of a lot I could add!
To respond more directly to your ideas: maybe it's possible to think of the madness which comes with being estranged from human contact as resulting from a sort of "fraying" of the mother-soul, which to me seems like something which needs to be continuously refreshed by staying in social (and/or traditional) contact; I noticed, for example, that when I left the intellectual community I was part of at university and lived at home for a while (which is errr...not an intellectual community), there was definitely a notable shift to my thinking. Reading the ~complicated~ books I liked helped stave off this "fraying" to some extent, but not completely. I can only imagine that being stranded on a far away planet would simply be a more extreme case than me being (intellectually) isolated at home. (Unfortunately I have less concrete things to say about group consciousnesses, at the moment.)
As for Aristotle and contemporary philosophy of mind--it's my perception (possibly wrong!) that Chalmers' ideas are not representative of those of many cognitive scientists, who are more likely to be functionalists about the mind, mostly because p-zombies seem neither metaphysical possible or conceivable to them (though the opposite seems to be true for those outside the field). I think when I started out reading philosophy of mind in undergrad Chalmers seemed indisputably correct (p-zombies are conceivable AND metaphysically possible!) but my views have since shifted.
At the moment I find myself leaning towards the normie view among specialists -- a computationalist variety of functionalism -- partially because Chalmers seems less convincing to me now, and largely because I think mental patterns can be "implemented" or "realized" on different substrates, and that mental patterns can have causal effects on the substrate they are implemented on; both of these ideas seem pretty in line with Aristotle (would recommend this great article on functionalist interpretations of hylomorphism: https://academic.oup.com/book/32491/chapter/269649440).
Thanks--yeah, I figured you were talking more about the broad notion, but the part about that modern informational view of the soul sort of touches on the narrow causal notion so just wanted to add that it's a useful distinction to keep in mind when thinking about the whole topic of what various people have said about the soul. I mentioned that Chalmers believes in strong emergence when it comes to first person experience/qualia but is inclined to accept weak emergence when it comes to physical behaviors like speech--I was thinking about the latter rather than the former when I talked about the ideas of "modern scientific thinkers" and how they differ from Aristotle, who seemed to think souls directed actions of physical parts of the body in a top-down way that couldn't be explained just in terms of physical properties of individual parts.
And I agree that social isolation can start to drastically change a person (I think extended solitary confinement should be seen as a cruel and unusual punishment for this reason), but in terms of the causal issue there's a question of whether that's a matter of being cut off from some kind of group mind or whether it's more like being cut off from regular sensory inputs from other people which your system has come to expect (why I talked about whether in the thought-experiment I would 'instantly' become different or initially retain my capacities even if in time 'I went crazy from the isolation'). The latter is compatible with a causal picture where all my behavior is due to laws of physics acting on the current structure of my body and matter/energy impinging on it from its immediate local environment, without other human minds having a direct non-local influence on me that isn't a matter of signals received by known sense organs.
Great. Will be a part of my memory for a long time