Thread 1: The Trouble with Souls All Soul’s Day approaching—let’s talk souls! Thread here will, like the others, proceed at the will and choosing of the lovely, talented, and sleep-deprived Broadcast Depth crew (pictured above, in its entirety). Said crew has also devised an ingenious means for indicating a continuing thread--namely, '...' at the end of the post (Yep--crew is that good.) On to souls and their troubles! *********** Post 1: The Trouble with Souls One of persistent troubles with purporting to have a soul is that one is never quite sure where to put it. It seems accurate, so far as such talk can be, to say that our soul is ‘in’ our body; but justifying our choice of preposition is not so easy, given the soul’s itinerant nature. The soul's casual relation to body and place has a historical pedigree, as peoples, ancient and modern, tend to stash their souls in very different places. Ancient Hebrews favored the kidneys. Western poets prefer the heart, which they subsequently tend to either lose to various (generally ‘raven-haired’) persons, leave in various locations (e.g. Paris, San Francisco), or both. Philosophers who take soul-talk seriously tend to make the head (i.e. mind, rationality) the seat of the soul, and deride all other locations as unworthy of so ethereal a guest. Others, however, tire of the search and profess themselves quite satisfied with the body, no soul required. The less humble of these go on to profess to be on the verge of discovering just which bodily parts and functions have colluded to generate such an elusive essence; they promise to produce a public account of the most inner person. Though at odds over details, all such persons are agreed that talk of souls, hearts, etc., is well and good, provided it is all seen for what it is: a bit of folk-psychological fable-ry. Yet such ‘reductionists’ tend to lapse into physicalist fables of their own, as Ambrose Bierce happily points out in his incomparable dictionary under his entry for 'heart'.

HEART: An automatic, muscular blood-pump. Figuratively, this useful organ is said to be the seat of emotions and sentiments—a very pretty fancy ...[for] it is now known that the sentiments and emotions reside in the stomach, being evolved from food by chemical action of the gastric fluid. The exact process by which a beefsteak becomes a feeling—tender or not, according to the age of the animal from which it was cut; the successive stages of elaboration through which a caviar sandwich is transmuted to a quaint fancy and reappears as a pungent epigram; the marvelous functional methods of converting a hard-boiled egg into religious contrition, or a cream-puff into a sigh of sensibility—these things have been patiently ascertained by M. Pasteur, and by him expounded with convincing lucidity. (See, also, my monograph, The Essential Identity of the Spiritual Affections and Certain Intestinal Gases Freed in Digestion—4to, 687 pp.) In a scientific work entitled, I believe, Delectatio Demonorum (John Camden Hotton, London, 1873) this view of the sentiments receives a striking illustration; and for further light consult Professor Dam's famous treatise on Love as a Product of Alimentary Maceration.

As usual, Bierce’s citations here are entirely fictional; and his account of the viewpoint he is skewering rather uncharitable. But the view he impugns does engage in a certain 'just-so-story'-style physicalist fiction; it must, for its discoveries of self, consciousness, and soul are all, as they say in publishing, 'forthcoming'. And, while some excellent work proceeds humbly, and piecemeal, Bierce's characterization of a certain form of physicalist-philosophical ambition is not so far off--is, in point of fact, a perfectly serious reductio of soul-to-body reductions. For the very idea of a clear physical/causal explanatory path from 'a hard boiled egg to...religious contrition'--the very notion that one might chart the conversion of 'a cream puff into a sigh of sensibility' is, to say the least, an extraordinary sort of assumption--yet it is an assumption which, in some form or other, those who seek a public and physical explanation of the soul, our selves, and our inner life, do make...