Post Edited (One Love) : 5/25/2012 1:43:15 PM (GMT-5)

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Philosophy in the Flesh
The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought

By GEORGE LAKOFF and MARK JOHNSON
Basic Books

Introduction:
Who Are We?

How Cognitive Science Reopens
Central Philosophical Questions

 The mind is inherently embodied.

 Thought is mostly unconscious.

 Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

 These are three major findings of cognitive science. More than two millennia of a priori philosophical speculation about these aspects of reason are over. Because of these discoveries, philosophy can never be the same again.

 When taken together and considered in detail, these three findings from the science of the mind are inconsistent with central parts of Western philosophy. They require a thorough rethinking of the most popular current approaches, namely, Anglo-American analytic philosophy and postmodernist philosophy.

 This book asks: What would happen if we started with these empirical discoveries about the nature of mind and constructed philosophy anew? The answer is that an empirically responsible philosophy would require our culture to abandon some of its deepest philosophical assumptions. This book is an extensive study of what many of those changes would be in detail.

 Our understanding of what the mind is matters deeply. Our most basic philosophical beliefs are tied inextricably to our view of reason. Reason has been taken for over two millennia as the defining characteristic of human beings. Reason includes not only our capacity for logical inference, but also our ability to conduct inquiry, to solve problems, to evaluate, to criticize, to deliberate about how we should act, and to reach an understanding of ourselves, other people, and the world. A radical change in our understanding of reason is therefore a radical change in our understanding of ourselves. It is surprising to discover, on the basis of empirical research, that human rationality is not at all what the Western philosophical tradition has held it to be. But it is shocking to discover that we are very different from what our philosophical tradition has told us we are.

 Let us start with the changes in our understanding of reason:

* Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason. Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanisms of neural binding. In summary, reason is not, in any way, a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.

* Reason is evolutionary, in that abstract reason builds on and makes use of forms of perceptual and motor inference present in "lower" animals. The result is a Darwinism of reason, a rational Darwinism: Reason, even in its most abstract form, makes use of, rather than transcends, our animal nature. The discovery that reason is evolutionary utterly changes our relation to other animals and changes our conception of human beings as uniquely rational. Reason is thus not an essence that separates us from other animals; rather, it places us on a continuum with them.

* Reason is not "universal" in the transcendent sense; that is, it is not part of the structure of the universe. It is universal, however, in that it is a capacity shared universally by all human beings. What allows it to be shared are the commonalities that exist in the way our minds are embodied.

* Reason is not completely conscious, but mostly unconscious.

* Reason is not purely literal, but largely metaphorical and imaginative.

* Reason is not dispassionate, but emotionally engaged.

 This shift in our understanding of reason is of vast proportions, and it entails a corresponding shift in our understanding of what we are as human beings. What we now know about the mind is radically at odds with the major classical philosophical views of what a person is.

 For example, there is no Cartesian dualistic person, with a mind separate from and independent of the body, sharing exactly the same disembodied transcendent reason with everyone else, and capable of knowing everything about his or her mind simply by self-reflection. Rather, the mind is inherently embodied, reason is shaped by the body, and since most thought is unconscious, the mind cannot be known simply by self-reflection. Empirical study is necessary.

 There exists no Kantian radically autonomous person, with absolute freedom and a transcendent reason that correctly dictates what is and isn't moral. Reason, arising from the body, doesn't transcend the body. What universal aspects of reason there are arise from the commonalities of our bodies and brains and the environments we inhabit. The existence of these universals does not imply that reason transcends the body. Moreover, since conceptual systems vary significantly, reason is not entirely universal.

 Since reason is shaped by the body, it is not radically free, because the possible human conceptual systems and the possible forms of reason are limited. In addition, once we have learned a conceptual system, it is neurally instantiated in our brains and we are not free to think just anything. Hence, we have no absolute freedom in Kant's sense, no full autonomy. There is no a priori, purely philosophical basis for a universal concept of morality and no transcendent, universal pure reason that could give rise to universal moral laws.

 The utilitarian person, for whom rationality is economic rationality--the maximization of utility--does not exist. Real human beings are not, for the most part, in conscious control of--or even consciously aware of--their reasoning. Most of their reason, besides, is based on various kinds of prototypes, framings, and metaphors. People seldom engage in a form of economic reason that could maximize utility.

 The phenomenological person, who through phenomenological introspection alone can discover everything there is to know about the mind and the nature of experience, is a fiction. Although we can have a theory of a vast, rapidly and automatically operating cognitive unconscious, we have no direct conscious access to its operation and therefore to most of our thought. Phenomenological reflection, though valuable in revealing the structure of experience, must be supplemented by empirical research into the cognitive unconscious.

 There is no poststructuralist person--no completely decentered subject for whom all meaning is arbitrary, totally relative, and purely historically contingent, unconstrained by body and brain. The mind is not merely embodied, but embodied in such a way that our conceptual systems draw largely upon the commonalities of our bodies and of the environments we live in. The result is that much of a person's conceptual system is either universal or widespread across languages and cultures. Our conceptual systems are not totally relative and not merely a matter of historical contingency, even though a degree of conceptual relativity does exist and even though historical contingency does matter a great deal. The grounding of our conceptual systems in shared embodiment and bodily experience creates a largely centered self, but not a monolithic self.

 There exists no Fregean person--as posed by analytic philosophy--for whom thought has been extruded from the body. That is, there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false. The correspondence theory holds that statements are true or false objectively, depending on how they map directly onto the world--independent of any human understanding of either the statement or the world. On the contrary, truth is mediated by embodied understanding and imagination. That does not mean that truth is purely subjective or that there is no stable truth. Rather, our common embodiment allows for common, stable truths.

 There is no such thing as a computational person, whose mind is like computer software, able to work on any suitable computer or neural hardware--whose mind somehow derives meaning from taking meaningless symbols as input, manipulating them by rule, and giving meaningless symbols as output. Real people have embodied minds whose conceptual systems arise from, are shaped by, and are given meaning through living human bodies. The neural structures of our brains produce conceptual systems and linguistic structures that cannot be adequately accounted for by formal systems that only manipulate symbols.

 Finally, there is no Chomskyan person, for whom language is pure syntax, pure form insulated from and independent of all meaning, context, perception, emotion, memory, attention, action, and the dynamic nature of communication. Moreover, human language is not a totally genetic innovation. Rather, central aspects of language arise evolutionarily from sensory, motor, and other neural systems that are present in "lower" animals.

 Classical philosophical conceptions of the person have stirred our imaginations and taught us a great deal. But once we understand the importance of the cognitive unconscious, the embodiment of mind, and metaphorical thought, we can never go back to a priori philosophizing about mind and language or to philosophical ideas of what a person is that are inconsistent with what we are learning about the mind.

 Given our new understanding of the mind, the question of what a human being is arises for us anew in the most urgent way.

Asking Philosophical Questions
Requires Using Human Reason

If we are going to ask philosophical questions, we have to remember that we are human. As human beings, we have no special access to any form of purely objective or transcendent reason. We must necessarily use common human cognitive and neural mechanisms. Because most of our thought is unconscious, a priori philosophizing provides no privileged direct access to knowledge of our own mind and how our experience is constituted.

 In asking philosophical questions, we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical. In itself, that is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact about the capacities of the human mind. But it has major consequences for every aspect of philosophy. Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take.

 Philosophical reflection, uninformed by cognitive science, did not discover, establish, and investigate the details of the fundamental aspects of mind we will be discussing. Some insightful philosophers did notice some of these phenomena, but lacked the empirical methodology to establish the validity of these results and to study them in fine detail. Without empirical confirmation, these facts about the mind did not find their way into the philosophical mainstream.

 Jointly, the cognitive unconscious, the embodiment of mind, and metaphorical thought require not only a new way of understanding reason and the nature of a person. They also require a new understanding of one of the most common and natural of human activities--asking philosophical questions.

What Goes into Asking and
Answering Philosophical Questions?

If you're going to reopen basic philosophical issues, here's the minimum you have to do. First, you need a method of investigation. Second, you have to use that method to understand basic philosophical concepts. Third, you have to apply that method to previous philosophies to understand what they are about and what makes them hang together. And fourth, you have to use that method to ask the big questions: What it is to be a person? What is morality? How do we understand the causal structure of the universe? And so on.

 This book takes a small first step in each of these areas, with the intent of giving an overview of the enterprise of rethinking what philosophy can become. The methods we use come from cognitive science and cognitive linguistics. We discuss these methods in Part I of the book.

 In Part II, we study the cognitive science of basic philosophical ideas. That is, we use these methods to analyze certain basic concepts that any approach to philosophy must address, such as time, events, causation, the mind, the self, and morality.

 In Part III, we begin the study of philosophy itself from the perspective of cognitive science. We apply these analytic methods to important moments in the history of philosophy: Greek metaphysics, including the pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle; Descartes's theory of mind and Enlightenment faculty psychology; Kant's moral theory; and analytic philosophy. These methods, we argue, lead to new and deep insights into these great intellectual edifices. They help us understand those philosophies and explain why, despite their fundamental differences, they have each seemed intuitive to many people over the centuries. We also take up issues in contemporary philosophy, linguistics, and the social sciences, in particular, Anglo-American analytic philosophy, Chomskyan linguistics, and the rational-actor model used in economics and foreign policy.

 Finally, in Part IV, we summarize what we have learned in the course of this inquiry about what human beings are and about the human condition.

 What emerges is a philosophy close to the bone. A philosophical perspective based on our empirical understanding of the embodiment of mind is a philosophy in the flesh, a philosophy that takes account of what we most basically are and can be.

(C) 1999 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-465-05673-3

http://www.philosophynow.org/issues/78/I_Am_A_Strange_Loop_by_Douglas_Hofstadter

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I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter

Scott O’Reilly loops the loop with Douglas Hofstadter.

“You would not find the boundaries of the soul no matter how many paths you traveled, so deep is its measure.”

Today, more than two thousand years after Heraclitus wrote those words, science has shrunk the boundaries of the soul considerably. A soul that can transcend space and time, survive death, and even possess others, is considered intellectually passé. In its place we have the brain – “a teetering bulb of dread and dream” as the poet Russell Edson described the grey matter which makes us who we are – which is the indispensible substrate of our personal identity and consciousness. As the brain goes, so goes the mind, they say.

Not so fast, protests Pulitzer Prize-winning cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter in I Am a Strange Loop – the thoughtful companion to Gödel, Escher, Bach, his seminal contribution to consciousness studies and the field of Artificial Intelligence. Strange Loop says that each of us is a point of view, and one’s perspective – indeed our most intimate subjectivity – can exist in other substrates, outside of the brain. No, Hofstadter hasn’t gone mystical, religious, or superstitious; but he has pushed the boundaries of science by thinking poetically. This leads him to some very fruitful ways of looking at consciousness.

Does the score of a Bach fugue contain a trace of the composer’s soul or essence? Certainly there is a world of difference between the Old Master himself and a folio of his sheet music lying waiting to be played. Nevertheless, that objective musical notation does represent a pattern of symbolic activity that once danced through Bach’s brain. And when we listen to a particularly sublime passage, Hofstadter speculates, are we not in some sense sharing in Bach’s subjectivity – that is, in his experience?

Poetically speaking, Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare, Plato, Socrates and our loved ones can live on through us insofar as we can see the world through their eyes. Immortality by proxy may not be what most of us have in mind when we think about life after death, but it seems to me Hofstadter is on to something very profound.

Stories of Mind

Hofstadter subscribes to the concept known as the narrative self: the notion that the idea of the self is ultimately a hypothetical construct – a story our brains spin which generates the illusion that there is a single, stable and unified locus of willing, thinking and choosing which constitutes our ‘I’. We are all like Scheherazade, the queen narrating the 1001 Arabian Nights, who postponed her execution by seducing the king with one fantastic tale after another. Similarly, our ‘I’ can only be sustained through an act of perpetual storytelling on ‘our’ brain’s part.

Yet who – or what – is doing this storytelling? According to Hofstadter, the threads that make up the tapestry of a self are patterns of active symbols (‘neurological patterns’) that mirror the outside (and also the inside) world. For instance, we experience an object – we see a flower, for example – which causes a pattern of neuronal firings that symbolize or represent the external object. Our concepts are built up this way: for example, the fast-moving furry critter in our visual field with whiskers and spots, triggers a complex pattern of neuronal activity that once stored as a memory symbolizes a leopard.

Our enormous craniums each contain a hundred million neurons, with each individual neuron making thousands of potential connections, making our brains the most complex information processors in the known universe. Moreover, the concepts we can create are infinitely extensible – meaning, we can pile concept upon concept to generate ever increasing levels of generalization and abstraction. The individual leopard belongs to the genus feline, part of the category mammal, which falls under the heading life-form, which is itself subsumed in the more encompassing class of being.

Concepts are also extensible in that we can map analogies between seemingly dissimilar concepts. For example, one might say that writing an original philosophical article is a lot like trying to cut a trail through the jungle: they are both arduous processes where the destination is uncertain, but the possible thrill of new vistas and discoveries provides motivation. No two concepts could seem more dissimilar on the surface as writing philosophy and trailing through the jungle. Yet thanks to the infinite extensibility of concepts we perpetually manage to make useful comparisons between seemingly disparate ideas.

I Am A Symbolic Knot

Perhaps Hofstadter’s most intriguing argument is that the complexity and extensibility of active symbols in the brain inevitably leads to the same kind of self-reference which Gödel proved was inherent in any complex logical or arithmetical system. In a nutshell, Gödel showed that mathematics and logic contain ‘strange loops’: propositions that not only refer to mathematical/logical truths, but also to the symbol systems expressing those truths. This recursiveness inevitably leads to the sort of paradoxes seen in statements such as ‘This statement is false’.

Hofstadter argues that the psychological self arises out of a similar kind of paradox. We are not born with an ‘I’ – the ego emerges only gradually as experience shapes our dense web of active symbols into a tapestry rich and complex enough to begin twisting back upon itself. According to this view the psychological ‘I’ is a narrative fiction – a point that Wittgenstein made when he argued that the ‘I’ is not an object in the world, but a precondition for there being a world in the first place. “It is the ‘I’, it is the ‘I’, that is deeply mysterious!” exclaimed Wittgenstein.

A perspective (a mind) is therefore a consequence of a unique pattern of symbolic activity in our nervous systems. But Hofstadter contends it’s the symbolic pattern that is paramount, not the nature of the physical substrate. That is, if their logical activity was organized in an equivalent way, silicon chips could support consciousness just as neurons do. Hofstadter also believes that the pattern of symbolic activity that makes me who I am, that constitutes my specific subjectivity, can be instantiated within the brains of others.

This notion may seem far out at first, but I believe Hofstadter is onto something. As he observes, each of us is a more than just a self; we are a collection of selves. In addition to a core self which we identify as our ‘I’, each of us contain neuronally-based symbolic models that mirror and reflect the other people in our lives. These patterns of symbolic activity have a certain degree of autonomy in so far as they really do simulate the perspective of our significant others. Hofstadter contends that if we have lived and loved someone long and deeply enough, our symbol models will come to mirror their perspective ever more closely. We will essentially be able to see the world through their eyes.

Hofstadter acknowledges that the simulated subjectivity of another in us will not be as robust as the subjectivity that arises in the cranium of its owner. However, Hofstadter’s intuition seems to me is a remarkably deep way of understanding the permeable fluidity and the profoundly poetic dimensions of selfhood. The Cartesian prison of isolated and monadic selves is demolished, in favor of selves that are deeply enriched and entwined by their relationships to other points of view.

The Boundaries of Reality

Hofstadter is a natural phenomenologist and a first rate scientist (a pretty good combination, by the way). Yet his forays into the philosophical implications of his ideas, though often provocative, are the most frustrating part of his book. For instance, he argues that concepts like free will make no sense in terms of scientific explanations of matter at the most fundamental level. Yet Hofstadter readily acknowledges that when we shift our attention to the macroscopic everyday world, invoking free will or the intention of an agent is frequently the most expeditious and justified way of arriving at an explanation of the behavior in question.

To understand this, Hofstadter asks us to consider two very different levels at which we might view the Mona Lisa:

1) At the micro level, observed reality will consist of subatomic particles combining together to create pigments which reflect light of a certain wavelength;

2) At the macro or everyday level, however, we experience an entirely different reality: a gal with an enigmatic smile.

Which is more real? Similarly, the utility of thinking in terms of free will depends on which level we’re discussing, Hofstadter says.

There are several problems here, however. If the self is a narrative fiction, then how does it pull the levers which initiate free action? How does a hypothetical construct exercise causal powers? Second, when push comes to shove, Hofstadter, dyed in the wool scientist that he is, opts for the lawful, deterministic, and in principle entirely predictable universe of matter and physical forces as the most appropriate candidate for Ultimate Reality. When you get down to it, as far as Hofstadter is concerned, the self is the Ultimate Illusion – or even a hallucination, as he puts it.

Full Circle

Hofstadter is certainly right in exorcising the ghosts of Cartesian dualism. The self is not, and cannot be, some indivisible, indissoluble and immaterial phantom that nonetheless inhabits the physical body. He is also correct in expanding the frontiers of the soul, I believe – in illustrating how the phenomenon of subjectivity is much more open-ended, permeable and relational than we imagined. When we share our perspective with a receptive other, we are implanting a part of our self in the other, and vice versa. We can live in others, just as others can live in us. The boundaries of our souls are indeed beyond all measure.

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/25/2012 3:05:00 PM (GMT-5)

Let’s conceive of creation as triune gift, as an intra-trinitarian event. Take the rationale out of the sphere of human perfection (whether fallen humanity or unfallen). And instead of finding a place for the incarnation within the larger act of creation, let's locate creation as a whole within incarnation. In other words, it’s all about incarnation as the gift of extravagant creative expression of the divine persons one to another prior to an irrespective of human beings. Creation really is about God celebrating Godself. And creation remains a third-part event so to speak until the Son unites it to his own person irrevocably. THAT is God's gift to Godself. So creation of the cosmos is just the means and space by which the Son is able to fashion a creative expression of himself for the Father. One might conclude that we humans are an afterthought, and in a sense this is true, But we are as much part of the Son’s gift to the Father.

It views the incarnation not as a necessary means to human fulfillment per se (though it could be described as that only very indirectly). That makes incarnation subservient to humanity and elevates humanity unduly, as if God creates the cosmos to have humans relate to him before all else and thus incarnates to achieve this human end. What if we turn this all on its head and say God creates to incarnate for Godself (viz., to relate to Godself in a new way, i.e., as personally incarnate) and pursues relations with humans only as a consequence of this plan. But this would remove any need to understand the incarnation as necessary for human perfection in the sense traditionally believed. It means human perfection becomes necessary to God’s larger intentions for incarnation. Human perfection and glorification become implicated in incarnation in precisely the opposite direction we usually think. Human perfection doesn’t require the incarnation as much as the incarnation (and all that God intends it to be) requires human perfection.

What I’m suggesting is that a motive for the incarnation be sought within the Trinitarian relations (i.e., in what God comes to mean to Godself via creation) and not in human perfection per se. Why should the Son desire to incarnate within the constraints of finitude? Because it is the nature of the divine persons to personalize gift-giving. That is the divine essence after all. One puts one’s self into a gift, one becomes the gift. That is why a finite cosmos that is not united personally to the Son (i.e., not taken up into the personal existence of the Son) is less than a personal offering of the Son to the Father. Hence creation is just the stage upon which the Son personalizes his love for the Father as creative expression.

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REEEEALY makes sense once you think about it!   Human beings have been designed they way they have to facilitate divine incarnation and the SOCIAL CONTEXT into which the incarnation would take place "in the fullness of time."  In this way, Christ truly IS the fulcrum of Creation's history!

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/25/2012 3:01:45 PM (GMT-5)

"Hofstadter is certainly right in exorcising the ghosts of Cartesian dualism. The self is not, and cannot be, some indivisible, indissoluble and immaterial phantom that nonetheless inhabits the physical body."

Dualism per se doesn't imply souls/spirits LITERALLY inhabit physical bodies. It just means physical bodies serve as necessary conditions of CERTAIN conscious experience and that souls, via their causal capacities, play a role in ANIMATING bodies. In other words, it's about how the causality is conditioned, not about locality of the causal agent. To say the human self cannot be immaterial implies God can't be immaterial. It proves too much. But modern scientists tend to think they know scientifically what they cannot know by reason and experience. They're doing metaphysical speculation and calling it science. And consequently, that same lack of clarity and consistency carries over into their definitions. Some of the otherwise "smartest" scientists (in certain respects, i.e.) can be utterly confused about the philosophy of science. Indeed, the most dogmatic, while being quite competent in certain regards, can be hostile to philosophical analysis.

One of the obvious areas where many otherwise competent scientists fail is in the area of epistemology. On the one hand, they say real knowledge is scientific knowledge. Then they will say scientific hypotheses must be falsifiable. But then they'll say solpsism isn't scientific because it's unfalsifiable. But then they claim to corroborate hypotheses about a real, external world. But this is impossible. You can't corroborate an hypothesis that logically implies an unfalsifiable view is false. Some of these people are virtually idiot-savants.

Post Edited (Similitude) : 5/26/2012 10:27:02 AM (GMT-5)

Lemme put it this way.  Say your body (Jeff) are completely atomized and your remains are scattered hither and yon by the wind.  Where is the personal identity content/construct that was housed within your brain named "Jeff" existing at that moment?

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/26/2012 10:59:32 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Similitude) : 5/26/2012 12:11:29 PM (GMT-5)

This becomes pertinent when we apply it to the substance/attribute relationality. Do what we call properties (basically, what causes us to experience a quale PLUS capacities per se) truly inhere in substances? If so, properties are attributes. If not, we need an a priori criteria to tell us WHEN properties inhere in substances. To say the conscious self/ego is not a substance is to say that not all or no psychological properties inhere in substances. Those who advocate that position need to tell us what a priori criteria they have possession of that tells them WHEN properties are attributes. Otherwise, that metaphysics will seem completely undefined in a very significant way to those who think properties DO inhere in substances.

When I read materialists' discussions of psychology, I feel like I'm reading very confused people. For they never define their terms in a way to where they're being clear. This is the very ANTITHESIS of the scientific/rational approach. But worse, it's completely unhelpful, philosophically speaking. We have a "Mars hill" culture where people can make careers out of making up new ideas, intelligible or not. And materialism has created all kinds of ways for pseudo-scientists to speculate in the name of science, mostly unintelligibly and incoherently, about psychological subjects.

And the biggie is this: Materialists are typically either QT type a-causalists/non-realists or determinists. If either of those is true, Christianity is sheer non-sense.

Post Edited (Similitude) : 5/27/2012 8:51:07 AM (GMT-5)

Said another way, instead of the "soul" being some created animating non-conscious, non-local, non-material "stuff" or "force", it is uncreated "grace-gift" for created, non-divine reality.

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/27/2012 9:25:47 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/27/2012 9:23:18 AM (GMT-5)

How can a "volitional being" be merely "capacities"?

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/27/2012 10:03:19 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Similitude) : 5/27/2012 10:24:34 AM (GMT-5)

This is what I have. A "soul" is a BEING that is a non-material, non-local locus of capacities (some of which is the capacity for consciousness, feeling, and choosing).  This means that a soul is not ESSENTIALLY conscious.

Is the "soul" just a created version of God as a being?

What gives this any REALITY?

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/27/2012 10:28:22 AM (GMT-5)

I think a major place we disagree on is the relationship of God to Creation.  I believe that Creation doesn't have any essential being IN AND OF ITSELF...but only has it's reality communicated to it PERSONALLY, WILLFULLY, CONTINUALLY by God.  You seem to say that Creation has actual autonomous being from God such that God exists ALONGSIDE Creation.

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/27/2012 10:39:38 AM (GMT-5)