The Body
Physically, every human is merely a mammal. Beyond unusually large brains, there is nothing scientifically special about us. We have hair, females secrete milk for their young, and we birth our young instead of laying eggs. We must eat, rest, and tend to our offspring.
However, we’re the only beings who think about the future, but tend to make errors about pretty much everything:
- Our thoughts have trouble balancing between what is vague and what is certain.
- We often understand things with an over-simplified model, and tend to simplify things further if we’re ever overwhelmed or have things that violate our beliefs.
- When we try to do something, our bodies are very imprecise without tons of practice.
Moral decisions typically involve how we use our body, especially in our language.
Like any biological being, every drive of a body is based on two primary themes: fear of death and sex. Or, in more vague terms, every action we make is either a reaction driven by fight/flight/freeze or pleasure.
One of the most prominent components of our bodies is our capacity for error. We make mistakes constantly in performing actions, even when they’re complete routine. Against anything sensible, our errors sometimes become the creative basis for permutations of those habits that actually improve our performance.
Absolutely anything noble or good must come from something beyond the body. The body completely in charge of all decision-making can even turn moderation itself into excess.
While the base configuration of reality is semi-ordered chaos, the human being is semi-chaotic order.
The Soul
If people are merely a cosmological improbability, we have no reason to presume the “soul” exists. As it stands, science hasn’t found the soul, so there’s no empirical evidence for it. The only evidence we have is that the cessation of biological function is literally impossible to restart, in all instances, after only a few minutes without oxygen or a functioning organ.
If a soul exists distinctly from the body, it only naturally stands that it’d last beyond the body’s death. There are many competing ideas about what happens then, each expanding the story of our existence into something we can’t know right now, often with many myths interspersed that add meaning to this present life.
If the soul exists, the essence of a person is that soul, and their body is simply the thing the person operates.
Soul Components
We can’t know precisely what a soul is (including whether it’s simply a component of the body), but we can still group certain things as being “soul-like” that express onto reality.
The soul contains the will, which finds some form of purpose through adhering to values that always advance some sort of meaning. The stronger that will, the more determination toward that purpose. A will can partly be trained, but a large portion of the will comes from birth and personal decisions.
Souls also each contain a type of personality, which is a product of pure preference. Both preference and decisions from preference can allow multiple people to grow up in the same environment, but all respond differently to it.
The soul constructs an identity from its environment, especially from how it observes its creations and results. Most of a person’s growth comes through finding the right way to get desirable responses.
The things we’re naturally good at and like doing can be defined as natural talent, which comes from the soul’s interaction with the body. While it expresses as we create and build, it has its potential long before we become influential with that talent, often when we’re children before we can even speak.
We have thoughts in our mind, which are fleeting glimpses of patterns that represent as values. When thoughts group together enough to generate certainty, they form feelings that can last longer than mere thoughts. Over a longer stretch of time, feelings can create an intuition and sensations, which profoundly affect our understanding and personality.
Our subconscious mind is designed to protect us by automatically performing routine actions, but is ridiculously hypersensitive to input. These inputs can either be thoughts or environmental experience. Anything we can potentially do automatically and regard as unimportant, including our feelings, can become part of that subconscious.
We have many depicted expressions of self-concept, which are all built on the purposes within our environment. There are many ways to group those faces, but they broadly classify as short-term selfish (the “id”), long-term selfish (the “ego”), and love beyond oneself for others (the “superego”).
It’s very possible we are nothing but those faces, though it’s difficult to precisely tell. Either way, we are essentially what we decide more than what we do. But, everyone else only sees what we do, and their judgments are typically on that aspect alone.
Habits aren’t part of the soul, but the soul is definitely responsible for the choices that made those habits in the first place. The chattering stream of noise in our minds are mostly those habits, which means they’re only past-tense iterations of what our soul has done, with our present-tense decisions dictating what will happen in the future.
From a moral perspective, the soul has plenty of evil. Whether you believe it’s in-born or inherited, by the time people can reason, they will do things with the intent to harm others, and with far more capacity than any other animal is capable of performing. It’s typically driven by self-interest, but a soul is often not aware of its own moral state, especially when young. It can be retrained, but requires the trainers to believe the moral issue exists in the first place.
No two souls are precisely alike, but many overlaps are frequently universal to all humanity.
Nobody is particularly unique, and not particularly mysterious compared to anyone else, but we all like to think we’re more unique or mysterious in some special way. We live to gain that uniqueness (i.e., being important) and find tremendous meaning and identity when others see us as special. Any uniqueness we do perceive comes through bias driven by love.
Individually, any particular human is typically accessible and pleasant-enough to coexist with. However, they become very dangerous and unreasonable when provoked. In large groups, any capacity for evil is dramatically magnified, and that capacity is why most political systems devolve into dysfunction.
Human Worth
We have an odd tendency to find interest in others’ mundane lifestyles. The life of a farmer, welder, cleaner, and dance instructor are all fascinating to us if we haven’t worked in those specific capacities.
The only measure of human value, besides what we can exploit from them, comes from whatever is in the soul. All the properties of a body are entirely reproducible by anyone else (or even technology someday), so love of a soul is the only way to give that person inherent value.
People don’t usually pay attention to others’ legitimate human worth because they focus more on status, social class, or accomplishments. Our outward status, however, is only loosely correlated with a soul’s values, to the degree that the person has power when they make their decisions. The relationship between attempts and results has an inescapable component of luck.
As we age and transition through life stages, we become known (and know ourselves) for the habits we build (and their consequences) far more than any motivations for those habits.
Transhumanism
All religion gives us directives to live in a morally superior way. While those morals are not the same according to each religion, they all give promises of humanity becoming better than it is right now. Most of them indicate that this superior existence comes after death.
Beyond religion, a relatively new type of trend has arisen in light of technology, called “transhumanism”. Instead of the promises coming through moral action that leads to post-mortem payout, the promises come through technology, with the promise being a superior quality of life. At its farthest, the promises extend to ending death itself.
Many works of fiction magnify this story, to tremendous levels. It’s not unusual in this mindset to visualize humanity:
- Traveling the stars with advanced technology
- Living a non-physical life within a computer
- Transcending this physical life to become an energy-based being
- Creating life of their own, similar to God
Unfortunately, there are far too many logistical failures that almost guarantee death:
- Organic life eventually decays.
- We have never had control over anything in our essence beyond our bodies.
- We barely grasp what a “soul” is that creates life, or its relationship with whatever God is.
Application
The soul is the only vehicle that we keep after this life, in whatever form that expresses.
To not value a soul, while valuing anything else of a person, is to not give them true value.
Instead of the conventional wisdom that leaders are trained, the existence of a soul and will implies they’re born, then fostered.
There’s always more to a person than you can see. If you believe that when speaking with someone, they’ll respond well to it because they’ve become important.
We can’t directly observe a soul, and the easiest way to discover the value of a soul is through changing the situation that person is in. Make a rich man penniless, or give a low-ranking person ultimate authority. Their value is in the virtues and goodness they keep or change as the situation shifts.
We are often entitled because we believe we deserve something. In truth, we only deserve things the same as anyone else (meaning we must consider the needs of everyone around us) or by our merit (which is based on results just as much as intention).
Humanity doesn’t really change as a baseline. People will change individually, but everyone is born with approximately the same base programming, then adapts to their environment (which includes other humans’ interactions). If the environmental stimuli stops, the new people being born will be the same as we’ve seen for all written history.
The transhumanism movement is doomed to never achieve immortality, mostly because their proponents haven’t sufficiently grasped how the human soul works.
- Since many of them are naturalists, they consider the soul, brain, mind, and psyche to be synonyms.
- Without knowing the raw mechanisms of how we’re built with absolute certainty (including our connection with God), they miss a major component of how to fix humanity.
- It will persist, however, because it’s a secular religion, filled with myths and hopes which are difficult to easily define but easy to believe in.