Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses….
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
How about a crazy hypothesis? Blake is technically correct.
Under this hypothesis our bodies would be composed of normal matter, which we sense using our sense organs, and our soul would be composed of “matter” of a quite different type, something like dark matter.
Dark matter is not sensitive to electromagnetic radiation; we infer the existence of dark matter by its other effects on normal matter, i.e., it is sensitive to gravity, and therefore, its gravitational effects on normal matter imply its existence. The soul’s “matter” could be dark in that it would be sensitive to very little in our normal space-time, but would nonetheless exist (perhaps something like a Higgs Field?). Moreover, since matter is fundamentally packets of waves, it might simply effect normal matter as a sound wave has an effect on a tuning fork. How would we know it existed? Our subjective experience of the natural world implies its existence.
We are absolutely certain that we subjectively experience reality. We are almost as certain that there is an objective reality. Historically we differentiate spiritual things from material ones, but now that we know materiality to be an erroneous concept we may have to learn that spirituality isn’t what we thought it was either; perhaps Mr. Blake was on to something.
Blog No. 69, Soul Matter
Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses….
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
How about a crazy hypothesis? Blake is technically correct.
Under this hypothesis our bodies would be composed of normal matter, which we sense using our sense organs, and our soul would be composed of “matter” of a quite different type, something like dark matter.
Dark matter is not sensitive to electromagnetic radiation; we infer the existence of dark matter by its other effects on normal matter, i.e., it is sensitive to gravity, and therefore, its gravitational effects on normal matter imply its existence. The soul’s “matter” could be dark in that it would be sensitive to very little in our normal space-time, but would nonetheless exist (perhaps something like a Higgs Field?). Moreover, since matter is fundamentally packets of waves, it might simply effect normal matter as a sound wave has an effect on a tuning fork. How would we know it existed? Our subjective experience of the natural world implies its existence.
We are absolutely certain that we subjectively experience reality. We are almost as certain that there is an objective reality. Historically we differentiate spiritual things from material ones, but now that we know materiality to be an erroneous concept we may have to learn that spirituality isn’t what we thought it was either; perhaps Mr. Blake was on to something.