Death: Soul

Hi all,

Last night I posted a new blog entry.

Would love to hear your thoughts:

 

Death: Soul

I’ve always believed that we all have souls, but what exactly is a “soul”? As far as I know, you can’t measure or quantify it. I once heard that it weighs 7 grams, but that sounds a little far-fetched to me. Why so little for something that represents so much?

Your soul is what makes you who you are. It drives the passion in you to do things. It acts as your conscience to contemplate good versus bad. It represents your mind and heart combined.

I also believe every living thing has a soul — not just humans. I see the soul as a kind of energy/life force. When we die, this energy transfers elsewhere. Maybe it gets reabsorbed into the Earth, or maybe it floats into space? No one knows for sure.

But for everyone reading this that’s currently living: remember to nourish your soul. Just like how you eat and drink to nourish your body, you need to feed your soul too. Take some time to self-care and focus solely on your breathing.

We’re constantly being bombarded with notifications and social media. So, try turning off your phone and electronics. Explore the world around you — whether it’s through parks and nature, or through buildings, shops and restaurants you’ve never been to before. Experience life as it’s meant to be experienced by fully utilizing all your five senses.

If you’re more of a social person, try chatting with someone you wouldn’t normally talk to. Reconnect with an old friend, or make friends with a complete stranger. Better yet, do something nice for them without expecting anything in return.

Lastly, I would say the best way to nourish your soul is to follow your true passion. Maybe you have a hobby or project you enjoy working on? Maybe there’s something you’ve always wanted to try but never have, for whatever reason? You don’t have to be an artist to be creative. Just follow your soul and do what feels right. Trust me, your mind and body will thank you for it.

I also believe every living thing has a soul — not just humans. I see the soul as a kind of energy/life force. When we die, this energy transfers elsewhere. Maybe it gets reabsorbed into the Earth, or maybe it floats into space? No one knows for sure.
Stop right there. There is no Soul or Life force, or Elan vital. All objects have inherent potentials, but these are energetic latencies and are unrealized, until expressed in reality.

Example; a mountain lake has the potential to generate electricity. A generator powered by a gravity fed stream from the lake can provide eletricity for many uses. But this energy can only exist after conversion and until then it is only a “possibility”, not a thing with physical properties.

Potential

Potential generally refers to a currently unrealized ability. The term is used in a wide variety of fields, from physics to the social sciences to indicate things that are in a state where they are able to change in ways ranging from the simple release of energy by objects to the realization of abilities in people. The philosopher Aristotle incorporated this concept into his theory of potentiality and actuality,[1] a pair of closely connected principles which he used to analyze motion, causality, ethics, and physiology in his a Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics and De Anima, which is about the human psyche.[2]
That which is potential can theoretically be made actual by taking the right action; for example, a boulder on the edge of a cliff has potential to fall that could be actualized by pushing it over the edge. Several languages have a potential mood, a grammatical construction that indicates that something is potential. These include Finnish,[3] Japanese,[4] and Sanskrit.[5]
In physics, a potential may refer to the scalar potential or to the vector potential. In either case, it is a field defined in space, from which many important physical properties may be derived. Leading examples are the gravitational potential and the electric potential, from which the motion of gravitating or electrically charged bodies may be obtained. Specific forces have associated potentials, including the Coulomb potential, the van der Waals potential, the Lennard-Jones potential and the Yukawa potential. In electrochemistry there are Galvani potential, Volta potential, electrode potential, and standard electrode potential. In the thermodynamics, the term potential often refers to thermodynamic potential.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential

If you want to call that the “soul” of a thing, you’re welcome, but don’t assign any physical properties until this soul has become expressed as energy.

When something dies, all its potential dies with it. When the mountain lake dries up, the potential for electric generation simply disappears, an unrealized potential.

Potential = That which may become reality.

What about work?

“Potential energy is closely linked with forces. If the work done by a force on a body that moves from A to B does not depend on the path between these points (if the work is done by a conservative force), then the work of this force measured from A assigns a scalar value to every other point in space and defines a scalar potential field. In this case, the force can be defined as the negative of the vector gradient of the potential field.” (Source: Potential energy - Wikipedia)

When something dies, all its potential dies with it.
What about when stars die and supernova? Their energy doesn't die; it explodes and transfers to anything around it.
What about when stars die and supernova? Their energy doesn’t die; it explodes and transfers to anything around it.
But that is a false equivalence. You are just citing the law of conservation of energy.  That has nothing to do with life force or soul.
It all depends on its inherent potential.

What if a star just burns out a becomes a brown dwarf, slowly getting cooler and cooler until it’s just a big rock in space.


A white dwarf such as IK Pegasi B (lower left) is much smaller than the Sun (also shown, for reference), but hundreds of thousands times denser than Earth. When a white dwarf cools enough that it no longer gives off visible light, it becomes a black dwarf. The Sun won’t become a black dwarf for trillions of years, and even the oldest white dwarfs have not had time to cool enough to become black dwarfs yet.
RJHall, Chrkl/Wikimedia Commons

Q: When will the Sun become a black dwarf?

But that is a false equivalence. You are just citing the law of conservation of energy. That has nothing to do with life force or soul.
On the contrary, the law of conservation states that energy doesn't just die, because it is neither created nor destroyed.

Let’s examine the law further, because I believe it supports my argument:

I started reading “Braiding Sweetgrass”, a book by a woman with a PhD in botany who also re-connected with her Native roots later in life and found the poetry of that tradition matched her knowledge of the science of life. Even her language, Potawatomi, uses words to describe things as having a life force that English just labels.

For example the word for the energy that pushes up a mushroom overnight. English doesn’t have one. Or a bay. You can look up that anywhere, but you won’t find the Potawatomi word that is actually a verb, “being a bay”. It’s not a prescribed area that we can sell and park our yachts, it’s a living thing, related to living things around it. Western culture doesn’t think like that, but it’s still in our bones, so we added on this “soul” thing, and we sell that too.

Humans see this life force as something apart from the functions of the universe itself. This because we speak from a stationary perspective and from that perspective everything seems to have inherent drive, a force which inevitably guides us to some destination.

Well yea, that driving force is the result of a dynamical universe.

The law of Causal Dynamical Triangulation (CDT) describes this force which permeates everything within the universe. It’s not a soul, it’s the the dynamics of the Universe itself.

Causal dynamical triangulation

(abbreviated as CDT) theorized by Renate Loll, Jan Ambjørn and Jerzy Jurkiewicz, is an approach to quantum gravity that like loop quantum gravity is background independent.
This means that it does not assume any pre-existing arena (dimensional space), but rather attempts to show how the spacetime fabric itself evolves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_dynamical_triangulation

 

IMO, this phenomenon was already described by David Bohm in the Pilot Wave model of the Universe, which incidentally also resolves the wave/particle duality cunundrum.

Pilot wave theory

In theoretical physics, the pilot wave theory, also known as Bohmian mechanics, was the first known example of a hidden-variable theory, presented by Louis de Broglie in 1927. Its more modern version, the de Broglie–Bohm theory, interprets quantum mechanics as a deterministic theory, avoiding troublesome notions such as wave–particle duality, instantaneous wave function collapse, and the paradox of Schrödinger's cat. To solve these problems, the theory is inherently nonlocal.

The de Broglie–Bohm pilot wave theory is one of several interpretations of (non-relativistic) quantum mechanics. An extension to the relativistic case has been developed since the 1990s.[3][4][5][6]


I see a parallel between Bohm’s Universal Pilot Wave and the common expression of “the river of life”, and the mystery of the Life Force has been solved.

Awesome!

From the Pilot wave theory link, I saw this:

Albert Einstein objected to the fundamentally probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, and famously declared "I am convinced God does not play dice".
I actually tested that quote experimentally years ago. I purchased a set of 7 dice with letters on them, used for a Boggle-type game. Every night, I'd toss the dice onto a photo of Jesus Christ and take a photo. I'd then post the outcome of the dice throw onto Twitter. I did that for about a month or so, but I never wrote my interpretation of what the letters spelled out.

All I did was arrange the dice into a Wheel of Fortune-type position. The objective was to say “If God were to speak to me through the complete randomness of probability, what would he say?” And you’d be shocked at how many times I could form coherent statements. Things like “I Luv ewe” and “U bad boy” etc. See attached (I just took this now).

But yeah, this is definitely supporting evidence for Einstein’s quote! ?

 

I deleted them from Twitter (because I didn’t want to look like a crazy person! ?), but luckily I still have the images in my Google Photos. This was taken Saturday, May 31, 2014:

I’m guessing it’s meant to say “Pa x true -> alpha, false ->omega” Or, perhaps:

Neil = “Father”. The “true” “Alpha” but “false” “Omega”. => not the AntiChrist.

A soul is a thought about our total life and that is all that it is. Unless you want to imagine and pretend and have a story that it’s something else but then it’s just a story make-believe story. How do I know? How does anyone know anything?

How do I know? How does anyone know anything?
Wow, that's deep. ?

What is knowledge and how did you personally acquire it? How do you know 100% for certain that souls are imaginary?

The soul is the real and true existence of man in the spiritual world. We are our souls and our bodies and minds manifest the soul so long as these faculties are healthy.

What does health have to do with it? Your soul only leaves you physically when you die, not when you’re sick…

Albert Einstein objected to the fundamentally probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, and famously declared “I am convinced God does not play dice”.
 
I actually tested that quote experimentally years ago. I purchased a set of 7 dice with letters on them, used for a Boggle-type game. Every night, I’d toss the dice onto a photo of Jesus Christ and take a photo. I’d then post the outcome of the dice throw onto Twitter. I did that for about a month or so, but I never wrote my interpretation of what the letters spelled out.
 
All I did was arrange the dice into a Wheel of Fortune-type position. The objective was to say “If God were to speak to me through the complete randomness of probability, what would he say?” And you’d be shocked at how many times I could form coherent statements. Things like “I Luv ewe” and “U bad boy” etc. See attached (I just took this now).

But yeah, this is definitely supporting evidence for Einstein’s quote! ?


I believe you may have this backward. IMO, Einstein used the term God as an analogy of the fundamental mathematical essence that brings order from chaos. (see Chaos Theory) . This ordering process is probabilistic, and we have named it “natural selection”, but that does not mean “god” is the selector.

Natural selection is a mathematically probabilistic function and is very much related to throwing the dice, which is also a probabilistic mathematical function.

Probability means that given enough time and resources something (everything) will eventually happen. Motivated intent is not required.

Natural selection is a mathematically probabilistic function and is very much related to throwing the dice, which is also probabilistic mathematical function.
I guess the main difference is that believers would say God threw the dice first, whereas scientists would say Mother Nature did! ?
I guess the main difference is that believers would say God threw the dice first, whereas scientists would say Mother Nature did!
Basically, yes. It makes no difference who rolls the dice.

As to Einsteins remark, IMO he was saying that “cause and effect” is not a probabilistic, but a deterministic function. 1 + 1 = 2 , 1 + 2 = 3 … (always)

Ah, I see. But even that is flawed. In Computer Science, 1+1=2, but if the 1’s are strings, 1+1=11. ?

In other words, context matters. ?

Ah, I see. But even that is flawed. In Computer Science, 1+1=2, but if the 1’s are strings, 1+1=11. ?
And what are the mathematical values of the strings?

Strings don’t have mathematical values. It’s like saying “a+a=aa”. There’s no mathematical value, they’re just characters. The plus sign concatenates the characters together.

I guess I’m the only Software Engineer here? ?