Who or what has a soul?
In my last coffee break I thought, ...
... of course, the first thing is to define the word "soul". Suggestion: A soul must be something active, otherwise it would be dead. However, vice versa, anything active isn't necessarily a soul. So, what else except activity does a soul require in order to be a soul?
It must be something that supports the soul's activity. What supports activity? Activity needs at least time and space, or time and qualities. Time is essential. For if time were frozen, nothing would change. An activity is a change. A color change, a form change, a position change and so on.
If there is plenty of causality in the world, things, once kicked, keep rolling driven by causality (or whatever one interpretes as causality; causality might be just another illusion if Kant was right, but this problem doesn't affect my theory).
Is causality everything that activity needs? Probably not. Causality itself is just a condition. It keeps things rolling, but it doesn't start or stop the activity.
To get things rolling, a kick is required.
This kick itself can't be a causal event, in other words: it can't be a direct consequence of a preceeding event. Otherwise it would be just another event in the already running choice-less causal mechanism. Thus, the thing that I call kick has to be non-causal.
Such a kick may be, for example, the big bang (where was no time at that time), or a radioactive particle jumping out of an Uranium atom (at random time or random places by no exact cause but just some probability), like every event in the electronic chaotic noise inside a transistor, or inside a neuron.
Kicks are true decisions. A calculator that spits out "4" whenever "2+2" has been entered, is no decision maker; the calculator has always only one choice. If there are no multiple choices, there's no decision to make.
Without a decisive kick, an activity would never start. Thirdly, the decision must be self-reflective, self-aware in some way, in order not to destroy itself by its own kick.
I think, "soul" has something to do with all this.
To complete my definition of "soul". A soul must consist of activity, kicks and self-awareness.
Now who or what has a soul?
So, everything that remains active and is unpredictably kicking and doesn't destroy itself might have a soul. Even the entire universe as a whole might have a soul. Or that jumping electron may have a soul, during its ride, or during the change of its motion direction.
Another question: Is a soul's existence only a matter of "to be or not to be"? Or does it have a gradual intensity? Can souls grow? Or do they completely appear and disappear? I can't imagine that any prehistoric man suddenly got a soul over night. It must have been a slow process with an increasing intensity. With that in mind, many animals must have a soul as well, but perhaps not at the same intensity as homo sapiens. On the other hand, why not?
:-)
Good coffee. Back to work ...
