Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Electromagnetic Souls



"Democritus roundly identifies soul and mind, for he identifies what appears with what is true -- that is why he commends Homer for the phrase 'Hector lay with thought distraught.'" -- Aristotle, philosopher, On The Soul, 350 B.C. (A really funny joke that gives justice to Democritus's title "Laugher.")

"Democritus has expressed himself more ingeniously than the rest on the grounds for ascribing each of these two characters to soul; soul and mind are, he says, one and the same thing, and this thing must be one of the primary and indivisible bodies, and its power of originating movement must be due to its fineness of grain and the shape of its atoms...." -- Aristotle, philosopher, On The Soul, 350 B.C.

"Thales, too, to judge from what is recorded about him, seems to have held soul to be a motive force, since he said that the magnet has a soul in it because it moves the iron." -- Aristotle, philosopher, On The Soul, 350 B.C.

"And Pythagoras learned from Egyptians his teachings about the gods, his geometrical propositions and theory of numbers, as well as the transmigration of the soul into every living thing." -- Diodoros, historian, 1st century B.C.

"In the very midst of feasting, upon any small occasion, it is ordinary for them [Egyptians] in a heat to rise, and without any regard of their lives, to fall to it with their swords. For the opinion prevails so much amongst them, that men's souls are immortal, and that there is a transmigration of them into other bodies, and after a certain time they live again...." -- Diodoros, historian, 1st century B.C.

"Upon quitting the marbles to pass on to the other more remarkable stones, who can for a moment doubt that the magnet will be the first to suggest itself? For what, in fact, is there endowed with more marvellous properties than this?" -- Pliny the Elder, historian, 77

"Aristotle and Hippias say that he [Thales] attributed souls also to lifeless things, forming his conjecture from the nature of the magnet...." -- Diogenes Laertius, historian, 3rd century

"Favorinus says, when Plato read his treatise on the Soul, Aristotle was the only person who sat it out, and that all the rest rose up and went away." -- Diogenes Laertius, historian, 3rd century

"They say, too, that he [Pythagoras] was the first [Greek] person who asserted that the soul went a necessary circle, being changed about and confined at different times in different bodies." -- Diogenes Laertius, historian, 3rd century

"... a treatise on the Magnet. These are his [Democritus's] miscellaneous works." -- Diogenes Laertius, historian, 3rd century

"He [Pythagoras] showed to his disciples that the soul is immortal, and to those who were rightly purified he brought back the memory of the acts of their former lives." -- Porphyry, philosopher, 3rd century

"He [Pythagoras] taught that the soul was immortal and that after death it transmigrated into other animated bodies. After certain specified periods, the same events occur again; that nothing was entirely new, that all animated beings were kin, and should be considered as belonging to one great family. Pythagoras was the first to introduce these teachings to Greece." -- Porphyry, philosopher, 3rd century

"And now we might add something concerning a certain most subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which spirit the particles of bodies attract one another at near distances, and cohere, if contiguous; and electric bodies operate to greater distances, as well repelling as attracting the neighboring corpuscles; and light is emitted, reflected, refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and all sensation is excited, and the members of animal bodies move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this spirit, mutually propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain into the muscles. But these are things that cannot be explained in few words, nor are we furnished with that sufficiency of experiments which is required to an accurate determination and demonstration of the laws by which this electric and elastic spirit operates." -- Isaac Newton, mathematician, 1686

"The base of life is the North and South pole magnets. The magnets are indestructible. Every period of material life goes through two periods, construction and destruction period, but the life itself is indestructible, life has no beginning and no end. The sun is living in a destruction period and the earth in a construction period. In the sun only mineral life exist but on earth mineral, vegetable and animal life exist. When one form of life goes through the destruction period the life leaves the matter and goes somewhere else." -- Edward Leedskalnin, stone mason, 1945

"Now you can see when the zinc went dead those North and South pole magnets that held the zinc together they did not die but escaped and went some where else." -- Edward Leedskalnin, stone mason, 1945

"Those surplus magnets, they are real life." -- Edward Leedskalnin, stone mason, 1945

11 comments:

KV said...

OIM,

When you (and all your dead old farts) think of soul in material terms (including EM), you reduce soul or your spirit to the crap level, and lose the basic premise of separation of soul and matter. The matter is called dead, if it is soulless...

L I L L Y time, really.

Quantum_Flux said...

To observe an immaterial entity requires an immaterial instrument....I don't have any of those OIM, good work!

OilIsMastery said...

QF,

"To observe an immaterial entity requires an immaterial instrument"

Isn't it possible to observe immaterial entities (mind/soul) with material instruments (eyes/brain)?

Jeffery Keown said...

The mind is a product of the brain. It is a physical object. There is no evidence of the soul.

Except maybe to magpies and delusional humans.

OilIsMastery said...

The mind is not a physical material object since it's intangible and cannot be held.

Nor are your imaginations, fantasies, dreams, and fairy tales, physical material objects.

Brain is observed. Mind is experienced.

Jeffery Keown said...

It is experienced, therefore it is a manifestation of physical reality.

OilIsMastery said...

Jeffery,

Not everything we experience is material.

For example, imaginations and dreams are not material.

Jeffery Keown said...

Imagination and dreams are chemical processes of the brain. They do not occur without the action of neurotransmitters.

OilIsMastery said...

Meinong's Jungle is not real or material.

Jeffery Keown said...

That isn't relative to anything but your need to dodge another thing you are ignorant of... this time neurochemistry.

What else don't you know? I suspect quite a lot.

Geology
Evolution
Gravity
Neurochemistry
Religion
Reason
Logic
The Scientific Method

I could go on, but I'm sure there's a Star Wars article I should be reading instead.

Fungus the Photo! said...

The yogis tell us that there is only one mind.
We each have access to it. The brain is not the only part of the receiver /transmitter. There are many traces of serotonin in other parts of the body. Heart transplant patients appear to inherit some of the habits of the donor.
Quantum computing promises many orders of magnitude of computational power, based upon eletrons.