Discussion Main / GhostInTheMachine

Moving this discussion of the idea in religion here.

• But note that this is a comparatively recent religious interpretation. The bulk of Christian theology, at least up through Thomas Aquinas, makes it very clear that a you are a body and a soul, and a disembodied soul is inherently incomplete. In the very early church, going around claiming that "you are a soul; you have a body," would be considered dangerously close to gnostic heresy.
  • Actually it's backwards. The original interpretation going back to Judaism was that you are a soul, and that soul consisted of the mind, body, and spirit. To use the analogy above, the mind is the driver, the body the car, and the spirit the car battery; the soul was everything together.
  • And sometimes the distinction was so blurred, people thought that the soul was an actual organ within the physical body.
    • Said organ is commonly referred to these days as the brain.

Moving this section from the description because it does not help explain the trope: Some schools of philosophy dismiss this notion, such as phenomonology and positivism (see Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett for an alleged thorough experimental demolition of the "Cartesian Theatre"; alternatively, see The Conscious Mind by David Chalmers for a theoretical defence of a similar idea).

Can someone make a Laconic version of this trope page, please? I would enjoy (and modify) it (after all, no profanity aequals lesser words).