Gary Denton wrote: > One is the smallest divisible unit of a soul? > Can souls become entangled? > Is the soul a part of the brain or some energy that surrounds the body? > Does a soul enter the body at the first breath? > Does it come into being upon implantation or before? > Does each sperm carry a partial soul? > How many can dance on the head of a pin? > Are souls useful, scientific, or testable concepts? > How much is a soul worth? > Do animals have souls? > Do uplifted animals have souls?
Hey now, I was just talking about Artificial Intelligences and Singularities - don't know a thing about souls. One tentative, unprovable hypothesis at a time. ;-) But if one takes the existence of the soul as an initial condition... > One is the smallest divisible unit of a soul? Probably not, since so many people seem to lose little pieces of their soul when engaged in boring or useless labour. (IE: Tech support workers.) I wonder what happens to all those soul pieces. Do they collect in the gutters and wash into the ocean? Is the bottom of the sea filled with the strata of ancient soul fragments? Or do soul parasites (IE: pointy haired bosses) consume them all? This would explain why upper management types seem to proliferate in direct proportion to the pointlessness of a job - they're clustering like vultures around a water hole. > Can souls become entangled? Definitely. It happens all the time, and alcohol seems to facilitate the process. > Is the soul a part of the brain or some energy that surrounds the body? I don’t know, but why limit ourselves to only two possibilities? Maybe the soul is some sort of solid object in a higher dimension. (Like those rolled up dimensions in String Theory. Perhaps they're not quite as tidy and out of the way as we think.) Souls could be six-dimensional boiled eggs or the poop generated by nine-dimensional seagulls. And our boiled eggs and seagull splats are the souls of two-dimensional flatlanders, who we wipe out of existence forevermore with each breakfast and trip through the car wash. We're monsters, I tell you! > Does a soul enter the body at the first breath? > Does it come into being upon implantation or before? > Does each sperm carry a partial soul? It's really hard to answer those questions without knowing at least something about the soul itself. But if every sperm carries a partial soul, then most guys must be mass murderers by now... Those numbers add up quickly. > How many can dance on the head of a pin? First we need to know what kind of shoes they're wearing. Pin heads are probably pretty slippery, since they're made of hard metal. So the souls will need good traction or they'll fall off. > Are souls useful, scientific, or testable concepts? Nope. > How much is a soul worth? That probably depends upon who's buying. At least one golden fiddle per soul, I should think. > Do animals have souls? > Do uplifted animals have souls? I'd like to believe that all life has value, and when we treat other creatures with the dignity due any feeling mind we enhance our own souls. So there may be no way to tell if animals have souls, but maybe we should act like they do anyway. Kevin Street -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.7.10/25 - Release Date: 6/21/2005 _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
