From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!CAD:tektronix!tekmdp!dadla!dadla-b!hutch
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Title: Souls part three
Article-I.D.: dadla-b.359
Posted: Fri Feb 25 13:43:17 1983
Received: Tue Mar  1 03:38:48 1983

Thanks to all of you out there who let me know that I do exist.
Or at least that I think I sometimes like to imagine that I am reading
mail that might have been sent by something that could be another
person, out in the far reaches of networkland, and it is sometimes
interesting to imagine that this means I exist . . . 

Anyway:

This is the middle of an ongoing essay.  If you missed the first two
parts, send me a note and I will try to mail you a copy.

Physical senses might provide some analogy to the "senses of self"
that I want to identify.  Physical senses are mediated by the nervous
system, in humans and the more complex animals.  Since I cannot make
meaningful dialogue with a plant, I cannot ask it what physical senses it
might have.  They don't seem to be mediated by nerves, but instead by
local growth-hormone and mechanically triggered systems, anyway.

There is no direct equivalent to a nervous system for the postulated
awareness of a human.  Some people will say that there are energy nodes,
also called chakras, but that all falls under the heading of mysticism
and can not be proven from the philosophical argument I am trying to develop.  
In order to identify this awareness, and to determine if it is mediated
physically, or if it is abstracted from the physical, we need to decide
what it includes at the very least.

I had attempted to show that some awareness is required to explain
certain aspects of the activities of living things.  What this basically
means to me is that there is some decision system which is at least
psuedorandom at the most basic level and which determines the actions
that an organism takes.  Some are mechanical, but some which seem to have
no direct origin in the environment of the organism, I have defined as
the probable result of an awareness of motivation.  (This is one
of the weak points of this essay.  Please feel free to disillusion me, if
you are able to point out any major flaws in the formation of this idea.)

Since we have isolated the awareness of motivation, we can classify the
motivations.  These are usually rather simple in the less complex creatures.
They seem to become more complex in more complex creatures.  The awareness
of beauty is clearly more complex than the drive to survival, although it may
incorporate some of the simpler motivations.

Hmm.  I may have come upon something here.  Awarenesses are used to determine
whether or not a motivation is being satisfied.  I know this is sounding
rather too Freudian, but please bear with me while I look for terminology.
It looks like awarenesses and motivations are tied rather closely to the
physical processes of the organism.  The process of determining which of the
motivations to satisfy, when that number is limited, is based on the value
that satisfying the motivation has to the organism.  The choices seem to be
based on a function which weighs these values and applies the pseudorandom
principle to force decisions.  When we get a creature as complex as a human
then many motivations and awarenesses, while they depend on the physical
senses, are still rather far removed from the primary motivations that
engender them.

So far there is nothing that REQUIRES the presence of a soul or spirit.
Neither is there anything which prevents such a presence.  It would tend
to facilitate certain parts of the decision process.
However, if you want to identify the system of processes which is used
to make the decision as being the spirit. . .

I will make an analogy here which you can shoot full of holes if you
want to.

There are several operating systems out there.  (OH NO NOT THAT ANALOGY)
These systems give life to the computers they run on.  We cannot and
know better than to say that it is any part of the hardware of the
machine.  However, it is there.  The behaviour of the machine changes
very remarkably if we change its operating system.  I assert that there
are strong similarities between the spirit of a living thing and the
operating system of a machine.

These ideas lead to some very disturbing conclusions, and I am going to
stop writing so I can consider some of them.


I now return to my gopher hole, now awaiting the descent of many great
mallets from the sky that will squash all this pretentious discussion.

Steve Hutchison
... decvax!tektronix!tekmdp!dadla!hutch