If there were a soul, would it be self aware?

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The way I always looked at it is, humans are beings of many parts, and only one of those parts possesses self-awareness, the one that reads, thinks, and wonders about itself. All the other parts of the being contribute to, surround, protect, and augment the self-aware part.

Each part has one ‘job’ and if another ‘job’ is identified, then another name should be given to another part of being to take on that job.

For example, the job of the subconscious is protection. The subconscious takes in input from a dizzying variety of places in order to keep track of a vast amount of context for the one goal of protecting the conscious mind’s conception of a continuous reality. If the subconscious ever stopped doing its job, death would soon come, as danger is ever-present in society and the conscious just can’t keep track of all the ways in which it’s dangerous. So the subconscious steps in and handles things so that the conscious is freed to think freely and build it’s own understanding of what life is and what self is.

The subconscious may have many functions but it only really has one goal.

We can examine the ego in the same way. The ego is a set of patterned responses to stimuli that regulate how the conscious perceives itself. The goal of the ego is to make sure the conscious doesn’t forget about the self. The goal of enlightenment is to transcend the ego. Ego doesn’t go away, it’s sitting there in the background contributing to the conscious as normal, but unless a spiritual process is undergone, ego becomes a block to ‘true’ perception. Transcension makes the blocks transparent so you can see through them.

The soul has a similar telos that we can examine. How the soul does what it does is unfathomable. But what it does is fairly easy to work out. The soul provides continuity of being as it morphs into different forms. Such as when you die and are reborn. If you don’t believe in reincarnation that’s fine, think about the countless little deaths we experience daily. When you forget something, that part of you has died. How many times do you as an adult human think about your childhood? I’m sure there are parts of it you never want to think about again, that you might rather have just never happened or just died. Any time you learn something, the sense you made of the world before you learned the thing dies, to make way for a new way to make sense of the world.

Something ensures continuity of self in the face of all this death. That thing is properly called the soul, even if you don’t want to believe in a metaphysical soul, we can still speak of an abstract soul that applies to way more than just human beings.

We can speak of the soul of different brands of car. What makes cars uniquely Ford, or uniquely Mazda. Certain design priorities, Mazda has a certain priority on exterior styling that Ford lacks. If you spent enough time looking at Mazdas vs. Fords, then I showed you some random concepts, you could probably tell which came from Mazda and which came from Ford. It’s an ineffable quality, perfect for ascribing the word ‘soul’ to.

One fun thing to do is to look at fonts. If you look deeply at fonts, you’ll see the immense design space that even just the 26 Latin glyphs along with 10 Arabic numerals offers. That we can group all the various fonts and make judgments and theories around means that there’s an ineffable design characteristic that ties fonts from the same family together. Sure you have serifs vs sans-serifs, but what about Grotesk vs Neo-Grotesque?

A lot of people conflate soul with spirit. I think these two aspects of being have different goals, so they’re properly different concepts. Spirit comes from the Latin word for breath, a things spirit is its animating force. They’re both ineffable concepts, but the soul is precisely descriptive while the spirit does things. The soul describes the spirit, and isn’t changed by anything that happens to it, while the spirit holds on to things that happen to it and so changes how it does the animation of the brute matter. When the body dies, the spirit lives on, but if the spirit dies, the soul will eventually imprint into another spirit. Spirits are temporal and changing, souls are eternal and unchanging.

At least, that’s how I think of it.