BACK
NEXT
Forum
Post 158. September 3, 2026
Self vs Soul
C
Descartes’ famous dictum, cogito ergo sum, may have been a solution to the “life is but a dream” notion of Eastern philosophy. So he concluded that he had conscious (self) control over his thoughts, not some deluding demon. Yet, Buddha noted that the sense of Self was a process, not an eternal Soul. Apparently, they were focused on different aspects of the Self-
Jewish tradition had a soul concept (nephesh, ruach) similar to the 5 part Egyptian body/soul, but no heavenly afterife. In Egyptian theology, heaven was only for Pharaohs, who were incarnations of the sky-
Ancient thinkers wondered what happened to Life after death. And some imagined that the immaterial essence of a person could exist on a different plane after the body stopped functioning. However, the Egyptians were Materialists who thought the soul was somehow attached to the body. Hence, mummification of the desiccated body. Hindus were Spiritualists, and assumed that the Soul (Atman) was eternal, so after a temporary sojourn in the body, it rejoined the universal Brahman. Greek Philosophers, like Plato, gave the soul its first major formal definition as an immaterial, immortal substance separate from the physical body. Aristotle though viewed the soul as the vital, organizing principle of a living body rather than a separate trapped entity. In his HyloMorph theory, malleable Matter was shaped and animated by a transforming power that he called Form. And I call Causation3 or EnformAction.
Aristotle’s Organizing Principle was closer to my own Information-
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-
Post-
Post-
@Gnomon , is the self just a mental object, like a fairy, in a dream?
Yes. As I understand the Self/Soul question, both were traditionally imagined as substantial objects (ghost) before modern science discerned the interchangeability of Matter and Energy. Now it seems that they — mind, matter, self — are different forms of the same causal essence.
In recent years scientists are learning that Energy is a form of Generic Information (power to transform). So, my conclusion is that everything (mind & matter) is a specialized form of that general Potential : Active Information1. This a relatively new and marginal concept, so beyond this mention, I won’t get into the details. But in my philosophical thesis, I call it EnFormAction : Energy + Form + Process.
Therefore, everything in the world (objects & ideas) is a dynamic Process2. So even the Self-
1. Active Information : Towards the end of the 1980s David Bohm introduced the notion of Active Information into his Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory. . . .
At first sight ‘information’ plays no role in the world of physics. . . .
In giving information an active role in science, the face of physics will change. . . .
An activity of information is therefore responsible for the existence of quantum particles and quantum events.
https://paricenter.com/library-
2. Process philosophy, pioneered by mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, is a 20th-
1. Self/Soul :
The brain can create the image of a fictional person (the Self) to represent its own perspective in dealings with other things and persons.
This imaginary Me is a low-
https://blog-
Yes, the self is information. Does the self move from one body to another? Note also that the self is dependently originated -
I don’t know, but I doubt that the Sense of Self (soul) could transfer to a different body, with strange DNA. The physical body is the identifying information (the ID) which the brain interprets as a person : me. So a new body would have to set-
Note : [for real] I’ve been going in circles with my bank about out-
