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satyesu
Joined: 23 May 2009
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Post: #1  Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 7:39 pm Post subject: what is the difference b/t the soul and mind? |
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wanabe
Joined: 24 Nov 2008
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| Post: #2 Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 7:59 pm Post subject: |
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Define mind, define soul.
Going off of my understanding:
Mind is your thoughts, your knowledge.
Soul is your will, your feelings.
Though where one begins and the other ends; there is no clear separation, and it is not the same for all.
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The Secret To Eternal Life: Live Life To The Fullest, And Help All Others To Do So. Fear is weakness leaving the mind. |
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satyesu
Joined: 23 May 2009
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| Post: #3 Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 5:16 pm Post subject: |
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| I know no one knows for sure, but any ideas about why the feelings, etc that make up the soul are eternal? |
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wanabe
Joined: 24 Nov 2008
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| Post: #4 Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 8:35 pm Post subject: |
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We can know for sure for ourselves, just not for other people, nor universally (absolutely).
The feelings that make up the soul are eternal because life; souls, have always had emotion, it remains unchanged. Memories and “knowledge” however are “temporal”; relative to ones pattern of events("time" they were alive).
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The Secret To Eternal Life: Live Life To The Fullest, And Help All Others To Do So. Fear is weakness leaving the mind. |
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kumarrsin
Joined: 05 Apr 2008
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| Post: #5 Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 2:11 am Post subject: mind and soul |
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| According to me,mind and soul are completely different.Mind is something like a tape recorder.All actions that are performed by a person are recorded in mind.It is an entity that is not permanent. It is subject to change and it's functions can be known from our experiences. The soul is beyond mind. It is something very subtle.We cannot comprehend it hence cannot experience it. I believe we can say it exists/not exists(beyond life and death) because there should be something greater than the mind. |
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lifegazer
Joined: 08 Jul 2009
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| Post: #6 Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 7:54 am Post subject: |
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| The mind is an attribute of the soul: 'I' have a mind. |
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nada
Joined: 19 Sep 2009
Posts: 91
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| Post: #7 Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 3:10 pm Post subject: |
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According to classic philosophy the word 'spirit' is the English form of the Greek word 'psyche' which means 'mind' and we see it in use with such words a [psychiatry, psychology, and psychic]. And so spirit means mind.
The word 'soul' was used to indicates the power which binds the psychological mind and body - into a cooperative harmony or unity. Not a 'thing' but a force or power. The best analogy I have heard for this is to think of a magnet with a sheet of paper on top of it and iron filings on the paper. We have all seen this in grammer school science.
The iron filings will from a patten on top of the paper. And 'soul' can be analogically compared to the magnetic and invisible force which unites the iron filings to the magnet.
Think to yourself right now "I will raise my hand in the air" and while thinking that - go ahead and raise your hand in the air. It is soul that allows (in some unknown way) your body to cooperate with your mind.
The word soul is much misused today. It is often misused as the essence of a person. Which it is not. |
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ape
Joined: 06 Apr 2009
Posts: 3324
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| Post: #8 Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2009 8:22 pm Post subject: Re: what is the difference b/t the soul and mind? |
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| satyesu wrote: |
| Is there one? |
Hi Satyesu, there is a subtle difference:
The mind is brain plus words.
The soul is the mind plus the word Love loving all words.
Example: To be soul-less is to be Loveless or to be loving less words. |
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Kool-aid
Joined: 12 Dec 2008
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| Post: #9 Posted: Sat Nov 14, 2009 10:59 am Post subject: |
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| lifegazer wrote: |
| The mind is an attribute of the soul: 'I' have a mind. |
The soul is an attribute of the mind: 'I' have a soul.
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PrivateVoid
Joined: 18 Nov 2009
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| Post: #10 Posted: Thu Nov 19, 2009 11:10 pm Post subject: |
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The soul is an idea created by our minds.
Our mind is an emergent phenomenon of our brain.
The mind/self is just what happens when a few billion neurons are connected together in a special way.
When the brain dies, the mind dies and with it the idea of the soul dies. |
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Santini
Joined: 20 Nov 2009
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| Post: #11 Posted: Sat Nov 21, 2009 1:56 am Post subject: |
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| satyesu, you'd have to define what is meant by "mind" and by "soul" before that's an answerable question. |
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Moriarty
Joined: 02 Nov 2009
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| Post: #12 Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 1:17 pm Post subject: |
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| The terminology is significant. The believer in the "soul" is likely to take a more agressively dualist or idealist position in the philosophy of mind. For example: a reductive physicalist is likely to admit that you have a mind but will insist that this mind is reducible either to brain chemistry or to brain function. He will not be willing to admit the existence of a soul, because the term "soul" implies something logically and ontologically distinct from brain chemistry or brain function. |
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Inductive
Joined: 01 Dec 2009
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| Post: #13 Posted: Wed Dec 02, 2009 9:23 am Post subject: Re: mind and soul |
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| kumarrsin wrote: |
| I believe we can say it exists/not exists(beyond life and death) because there should be something greater than the mind. |
I am not sure where this normative statement would come from. Where is it that we "should" have something greater than the mind? |
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James S Saint
Joined: 14 Oct 2009
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| Post: #14 Posted: Wed Dec 02, 2009 10:56 am Post subject: |
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| satyesu wrote: |
| I know no one knows for sure, but any ideas about why the feelings, etc that make up the soul are eternal? |
Regardless of so much that has been said for so very many centuries;
The words "soul" and "spirit" have been conflated throughout history by those who didn't really know the difference but liked to preach anyway.
Soul == your fundamental and essential identity, who/what you really are.
Spirit == your behavior, energies, efforts, goals..
Mind == your planning and calculating mechanism.
Your soul CAN be eternal merely by keeping it recorded or known (MUCH easier said than done). As a soul, there are no feelings, no good or bad, nothing. It is just a pattern that is the real you much like a computer program that is stored on a CD.
Your spirit is the actual efforts that your soul instigates, much like that same program that has been loaded into the computer to run. The word "sole" in reference to a shoe means the same concept in that the sole (soul) is the foundation upon which the rest of the shoe is built.
Your mind is how your spirit processes what it observes in its effort to deal with life. |
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nada
Joined: 19 Sep 2009
Posts: 91
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| Post: #15 Posted: Wed Dec 02, 2009 8:42 pm Post subject: Re: what is the difference b/t the soul and mind? |
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| satyesu wrote: |
| Is there one? |
This is late but I just ran across this ... Ancient Theories of Soul which traces the classical development and variations held by different groups.
Very interesting.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-soul/
A few interesting (to me anyways) points...
Interesting to me (because materialists do not believe in a soul) is the fact that Stoic's (which held a very materialistic view based upon four elements) considered that the soul was composed of fire and air (a very fine material composition). Such a materialist view reminds me of Newton who also believed soul to be composed of a very fine material and could argue how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. The Stoic's believed that the soul was destroyed when the body died (disperses "like breath or smoke").
Socrates apparently disagreed and maintain the soul was immortal and not composed of anything that could be destroyed .. as anything material can be destroyed. (“Haven't you realized that our soul is immortal and never destroyed?” Republic 608d) and so Socrates maintained that human nature did not arise as a product of the composition of the body but was rather imposed upon the body.
Along with Aristotle, the Stoic's held that there was three types of soul in every body. Three forces which animate the body. These three types operate with some degree of autonomy from one another and can therefore conflict. The basic soul which animates plant life, a higher soul which animals also have of impressions and instinctive reactions, and a highest soul which allows for reasoning with impression (a psychological mind). The human is animated by all three types. A basic organism nature, a further animal nature, and a reasoning nature.
Thales attributed soul (the power that animates the body) to magnets. Interesting to me because I had made the comparison of soul to a magnetic field animating iron filings.
Aristotle is probably to be considered the established Western classical concept of soul when he further develops Plato. According to Aristotle's theory, a soul is a particular kind of nature, a principle that accounts for change and rest (animation) in the particular case of living bodies, i.e. plants, nonhuman animals, and human beings.
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we can describe the theory as furnishing a unified explanatory framework within which all vital functions alike, from metabolism to reasoning, are treated as functions performed by natural organisms of suitable structure and complexity. The soul of an animate organism, in this framework, is nothing other than its system of active abilities to perform the vital functions that organisms of its kind naturally perform, so that when an organism engages in the relevant activities (e.g., nutrition, movement or thought) it does so in virtue of the system of abilities that is its soul.
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Aristotle does not, however, think that there is an organ for tought, and so he also does not think that the exercise of the ability to think [non-reactive thoughts] involves the use of a bodily part or organ that exists specifically for this use. DeCartes places thinking and soul in the pineal gland.
Aristotle would not agree with modern idea that the brain is the organ of thought. Hence Aristotle does not equate soul with a psychological mind (thinking). The soul is not the same as the conscious mind. Nevertheless, he does seem to take the view that the activity of the human intellect always involves some activity of the perceptual apparatus, and hence requires the presence, and proper arrangement, of suitable bodily parts and organs. So thinking requires the use of impressions (memory).
Epicurus is an atomist, and in accordance with his atomism he takes the soul, like everything else that there is except for the void, to be ultimately composed of atoms.
The further division of types of soul into a feminine soul male (anima) and a masculine soul (animus) as also animating the body seems to appear soon after Aristotle.
So the classic view is that the human body is animated by four types of soul (four types of natures).
1) An organic soul (metabolism and plant level activity).
2) An animal soul (able to receive senses perceptions)
3) A reasoning soul (able to think using images)
4) A feminine or masculine soul.
Those interested might find more substance in the link I provided. |
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