Poll 51: "Do animals have souls? Choose (1) for 'yes', (2) for 'no, only humans have souls', or (3) for 'there's no such thing as a soul'. Poll ended November 1 2009. 59.1% picked choice number 1, 8.7% went for choice number 2, and the remaining 32.2% said "there's no such thing as a soul".
Interesting results! This means that fully two thirds of the visitors to this blog at least accept the notion of there being something we can call a "soul", although if they have been regular readers of this blog then they will know that my definition of "soul" is not nearly as specific as some people's, which might have affected the results here. This poll question harkens back to a blog entry from June of the same name, Do Animals Have Souls?. Here's the video version of that blog entry:
A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM5VFnirTmg
We continued on to related ideas in the next few blogs that followed: Computers and Consciousness, Connecting It All Together, Suffering in the Multiverse, and The Biocentric Universe Part 2, all looked at the relationship between consciousness and the quantum wave function, free will and how our universe is created, and the role "life" (or "soul" if you're willing to apply that term) plays in those processes. Beer and Miracles, one of my personal favorite blogs from the last few months, wrapped this all up with a discussion of how unlikely events, Everett's Many Worlds, and life all are part of the same dance that creates the universe each of us are witnessing right now. To the extent that it matters, I believe that to be just as true whether you're an ancient yeast cell, a fruit fly, a human being, or a seventeen-year-old mostly-Bichon named Buddy.
Enjoy the journey!
Rob Bryanton
PS - On the subject of the unique universe each of us is witness to, here's a thought-provoking blog from Sentient Developments that offers the suggestion that as each event that could have ended life on our planet passes us by without incident, we may start to notice things around us becoming increasingly strange!
http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2009/11/lets-get-metaphysical-how-our-ongoing.html
You might also enjoy Unlikely Events and Timelessness and Randomness and Missing 96% for further discussion of the weird world in which we live.
Next Poll 52 - Entanglement and the Fifth Dimension
A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjR69ddBK78
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Polls Archive 51 - Do Animals Have Souls?
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7 comments:
Hey Rob, nice poll. One complaint though. You should have included an option for "Mu". :)
Zen humor. Gotta love it...
Mu, as in "yes and no are both right and wrong". Ha! Nice one.
Good to hear from you, Ian!
Rob
I think the Soul-Question can be boiled down to : Are you more than the sum of your particles (that is Molecules, Atoms, Quarks etc.)
While most people probably answered yes, i would choose 'No' or at least 'probably not'.
Because if you answered 'Yes', you would have to explain what component exactly it is that is outside your body and constitutes the 'Soul' and how exactly is it interacting with you Brain and the physical world.
See the similarity to the 'God' question Rob ?
On one hand we have a physical body and a universe that's following exact laws, on the other hand we have neboulous concepts that are called 'Soul' or 'God' and somehow they cannot quite made to fit with the rest of the physical world.
Hope you see what i mean.
Just my thoughts.
Yeah! :)
It's a classic Zen koan, wherein Joshu, a Zen master, is asked whether or not a dog has buddha nature (hence it's applicability to the survey). His reply is "Mu", which is sort of a way of negating the question. The obvious answer is "yes", cause everything has buddha nature. So then the question becomes, why did Joshu say "Mu" instead? Anyway, that's the way I understand it at this point.
Happy Thanksgiving Rob, hope your having a good one. Now, off to make some sweet potatoes...
The (Concordant Version) of the scriptures talk about soul and spirit. They also draw a distincion between the two. Their meanings today have been blurred together as though there is no difference. A thorough study of these words and their occurances reveal their difference. A soul is any being with sensation, usually reliant on blood and oxygen, "and every soul in the sea died". So yes, animals have souls too. In every occurance, the soul is temporary and dies. The spirit does not and is said to "return to God who gave it".
As far as being more than the sum of our parts, I'd have to agree with that. We lose limbs, and our limbs aren't us. We can freeze living things and thaw them and they're the same conscious being they were before they were frozen. Some can narrow it down and say that "we" are in some part of our brain, or cyrebrial cortex. Maybe. But if "we" can be suspended indefinately and brought back to life it makes me wonder where the "we" are in the meantime. There's certainly no electrical activty happening in the brain and for all practical purposes we're dead having no consciousness or physical activity. Probably the same place we were before we were born and/or after. The word spirit means "blast" or "wind" or "active force". Anything with requiring breath to live has it. But I think it's the union of soul and spirit that makes consciousness possible. (i.e. the need for ressurection)
Animals having souls? Definately. They often share all the sensations we do, i.e. have a soul. In the book "Diet For a New America" the author John Robins says "When a human does something, we call it intelligence. But when an animal does the same thing for the same reason we call it instinct."
Like you, I'm glad we're moving away from that conciousness.
But do animals have Spirits? (which I believe what is meant by the title of this thread) They might as well. I think any species that doesn't require lawyers deserves spirit. By and large animals demonstrate a lot more love for their own species than we do for ours.
Happy Thanksgiving anyway!
Hi Dan, thanks for the comment. I respect that you're not comfortable with words like "soul" and "God" being used in serious discussions of the nature of reality, and your position that there we are not any more than the sum of our parts. However, cosmologists are faced with an entire universe that is much much more than the sum of its parts - dark matter and dark energy throw a huge monkey wrench into the works, and I think that any attempts to reconcile these mysteries without acknowledging the existence of extra dimensions and the multiverse are doomed to failure.
Here's a couple of previous blog entries:
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2009/09/statistical-universe.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2009/11/o-is-for-omniverse-c-and-d.html
In these entries I quote theoretical physicist Raphael Bousso:
"This may seem laughable, but without the multiverse our finest theories predict that empty space should contain about 10^123 times more energy than it actually does. This is known as the 'cosmological constant' or 'dark energy' problem. It has been called the “worst prediction in the history of science” and the 'mother of all physics problems.'”
I believe that embracing these ideas provides us plenty of scope for seeing that the "I" that I call "me" can be connected to patterns that go beyond our 4D spacetime, and that what words we assign to those patterns doesn't change the fact that they exist. For a serious (and atheistic) discussion of these ideas, I would highly recommend Douglas Hofstadter's "I am a Strange Loop".
Thanks for writing!
Rob
Hi Fred, you're absolutely right about the definitions of soul and spirit, but I also agree that in modern usage these concepts have been blurred together. A poll question or blog entry called "Do Animals Have Spirits" certainly sounds like it would be the more correct question to be asking, but for people not familiar with the proper definitions might have led them to wonder if we were asking whether animals see ghosts. Ha ha, isn't that funny? I'm just putting up a new youtube video later today that discusses the possibility that animals see "ghosts". Here's the text version of that entry:
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2009/08/norways-reverse-deja-vu.html
I thank you for helping to clarify these concepts, and I'm glad to see that you agree with me on the question of whether animals and humans are really that different from each other.
Thanks for writing!
Rob
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