Souls

2. Humans have souls that exist after the death of the physical body.

However, the precise definition of a 'soul' may be rather hard to come by. Here I use the word only to mean a non-physical spirit or sense of self. The general idea of a 'conscience' may actually be part of this soul, but then again, maybe not.

>>>This soul is the only common denominator between all humans of all times and all places.

I'm not yet sure if I think that the souls exist before their joining with the human body.


I do like some aspects of the Platonic view of two worlds with a mediating soul:

~There are two worlds, the real world and the shadow world. The real world is eternal and unchanging, and the Forms exist in this world. The Forms are absolute and eternal. Souls not joined with bodies are in this world also. The world in which humans exist is the shadow world. Here we can grasp the basic concepts of the Forms, but we cannot know them fully. The knowledge of the Forms come from our souls. Before joining with our bodies, they knew everything about the forms but forgot this knowledge when joined with a human body. Therefore everything we come to realize about the Forms is simply the memory of our souls returning to us. After the death of the body, the soul will either return to the real world (as it desires very much to do) or it may need to endure another round of human life, if it for some reason has not attained the privilege of returning the perfect eternal real world.

There are some rammifications on the issue of suicide with respect to Plato's view of the worlds and the soul, but I will discuss that in another post.