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Monday, October 17, 2016

Soul and spirit

Here is my guess as to what our spirit or soul might be.

With introspection we can realize that our mind is not a thing but a process -- constantly going from place to place, bringing up memories, responding or at least noting sensory stimuli, and sometimes experiencing thoughts (both welcome and unwelcome) arising from what we commonly call our sub-conscious mind.

When we die or suffer serious brain injury, the surface evidence leads one to conclude the spirit dies too.
However, the "deep questions" of neurology and psychology, what is sentience and what is consciousness, seem immaterial (obviously influenced heavily by brain, but still doing things of an immaterial, "spiritual" sort.

A wave of light is also a process, and can be compared to our mind.  It propagates itself in vacuum without any aether to propagate in (technically, it is an electrical wave generating a magnetic wave generating an electrical wave, and so on as it moves along).

So it is not necessary to conclude mind needs brain any more than light needs a medium.  However, there does not seem to be any credible evidence, so I guess it is better to just speculate and avoid the trap of belief.

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