Discussion Main / OurSoulsAreDifferent

It'd be nice if someone talked about katras from Star Trek 3, and possibly also thetans from Scientology and wathans from Riverworld by Philip Jose Farmer, all of which seem to be the same sci-fi concept of immortal souls.

I swear I cannot make sense of anything on this page.

The mind would be contained (also) somewhere else than the brain? What?

And then after 100 words of explaining it.. you point out the "soul" we are talking about would actually be best called spirit (no religious or mystic explanation provided)?

I could understand if you were just introducing Life Energy (found in many supernatural works indeed, and used to justify "magic-like abilities", not last life itself) but then you say "true soul" would be the thing encompassing the whole physical body and I'm lost.

This whole train of thought, possibly, may also be why I had such a hard time comparing Two Beings, One Body and Sharing a Body (aka Two Souls One Vessel, which is literally the same).

Not to mention Merger of Souls and Mental Fusion (yes, it is stated "the components" of the union differs in their final share/degree of importance, but then [some] same examples are provided)

(also very funny that instead Many Spirits Inside of One and Mind Hive uses "opposite" words in their title, but then their description claims they are simply different degrees of the same thing)

"The trope name is entirely self-explanatory. What? What are you laughing at?" Could somebody explain this one to me?

Pulled:

• In Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series, the soul is an artificial construct implanted by Applied Phlebotinum, recording one's life, memories, and existence to allow people to reincarnate on the eponymous Riverworld, eons later, and work their way to some kind of Redemption/Ascension/Crystal Dragon Nirvana. One striking scene shows a holding vat holding thousands of souls: this is metaphysics meeting brutally mass manufacture. Imagine: machinery handling souls like a billion ghostly coke bottles on a production line. In a supreme irony there is no proof for the final afterlife: the spirit engineers are profoundly religious.
  • This is backwards. The devices were not souls, they were the detailed recordings of physical humans, including all memories recorded by the brain. To rejoin the soul to a body, they needed the exact physical body it started with, because the soul had a blueprint of that body when it left the body once and for all. So they created the person's exact original body from the blueprint in the soul, which summoned the soul back into the unconscious body. They healed the body from all human ills, including whatever killed it and old age, so the soul would have a healthy young body to return to. Then they destroyed the bodies. However, when they were ready, they could recreate them at will, thus summoning the soul to a young healthy body and returning the person to life. The problem wasn't that they needed to create souls, but that the souls floated around unconscious after death, and they needed to create an afterlife.

because it's responding instead of repairing, except that I've never read this and don't know what's true so I can't fix it.

Is there any evidence for #5 in Short Circuit gaining a soul? As far as i can recall, he gains a functional AI. There's no mention of souls in the movie, at all.

"Now we know that what we call thinking goes on in our brains, which is something that dies and decomposes along with the rest of the body when it reaches the end of the life that was given to it, but this idea seems difficult to comprehend - not to mention unattractive - to us who are the ones in the pilot seat, so the loss of our mind is an event comparable to the end of the entire universe from a "

We know nothing of the kind. What we know is that there are electric impulses in the brain at roughly the same time as we happen to be thinking. No test could possibly find out if any outside source claimed to be immaterial caused said impulses because such tests by definition only test the material. The only thing we can possibly know is that we don't know. Which we already knew thousands of years ago.

I wonder how would a body act if it had no soul? Would it only act to fulfill biological needs? Would it even talk or show any form of emotion? Or would it just go into a coma? Or...something else?

"In Nerh�n, as stated in the preface, 'Soul' is treated like a form of energy like heat or light, that can be transferred and controlled, and that is the basis for the series' magic system. "

The accent mark in "Nerh?n" is irretrievably broken, and I can't find any likely candidates by searching with any unaccented vowel in its place and stuff like 'soul energy'. Anyone know what it is?

In Soul Eater... they are edible.

There's a problem with the title, but I don't know how to edit this...