The illusionary soul

I think about the soul a lot. Or rather for half of my life I have thought about what it means not to have a soul, and why we have the word and concept to begin with.

Certainly on defining difference between a rock and a dog is sentience. Awareness of other things separates a sentient thing to a non-sentient one. Being born brings about sentience. And being unconscious, in a coma or dead certainly changes a thing from being sentient to one that is no more sentient. At no time does a rock become conscious or dies (unless your believe in panpsychism).

So for me a rock has no more or less a soul than a dog has a soul. I am not saying a human or dog has a soul. I am saying the opposite —that a human or dog having a soul is an illusion by reason of being an animated object.

Real, unreal and semi-real entities

There are real, unreal and semi-real entities. Physical objects or things are real entities. Concepts are unreal entities. And word forms are semi-real entities.

Only real entities are ontologically real or existent. Unreal and semi-real entities are ontologically unreal or non-existent.

Objects that do conceptualization and word-formation exist. But concepts and words do not strictly “exist” in the same way that objects exist.

Two kinds of objectivity

Consider these two definitions of the adjective, objective.

1. based on facts, or making a decision that is based on facts rather than on your feelings or beliefs OPP subjective 2. formal existing outside the mind as something real, not only as an idea

Firstly, Definition #2 does not have subjective as its opposite. To consider what is the opposite of Definition #2 we need to look at the opposites within the definition itself. So the question is what exists inside the mind. And that is given in the definition at the end — idea. The next question then are ideas “real” in any sense of the word. By one definition, real is not imaginary, something that [ … ] actually exists and is not just imagined.

So what does Definition #1 mean when it is defined as based on facts, or making a decision based on facts. We must remember that a fact is not the thing itself as Wittgenstein pointed out. Thus, even the definition is suggesting that fact is an idea. We have noted ideas are not real, again, not things.

The first definition is about perception and therefore about knowledge (of facts) or epistemology. the second definition is about what is existent or ontology. So when we talk about being objective and objectivity we must always qualify whether we are talking about epistemological objectivity or ontological objectivity.

God, being, heaven

To be is about now. God is about the past before now. Heaven is about after now. The only time we have is now. Everything else is speculation.

Baffled about dualism

I am curious, people say the physical is more than likely there. We play tennis in it. We navigate from one place to another in it. We seemingly have to function within.

We have no proof of knowledge of functioning before or after life in this physical world. We have no other access to knowledge of consciousness other than through this world. And yet we claim it is somehow separate from this world (mind and body duality) when we have zero evidence from either outside or inside this reality.

How can we claim any sort of duality other than the very body that does the mind?

Sampling and POS

The more data the better understanding we have of the world to which that data refers to. Data is thus a representation of the world and not the world. One must keep that in mind at all times.

Corpus linguistics represents the world in data. The simplest is type and token. The next layer is parts-of-speech or POS. Every token is given a POS in its context. This POS is a labeling of every item in language. POS therefore is a categorical representation of every word, itself a representation of the concepts and things in the world.

To account for the entirety of the representation of the world in words is what POS is. These are the categories of our mind, a summary of our conceptualizations.

Type and token

In corpus linguistics language is studied in its entirety as types and tokens. A type is a complete gathering of one form under frequency. A token is the form in its natural environment in the text. Type study does not tell you anything about the usage but only the frequency. Token study tells you nothing about the frequency but only a particular usage. In combination we can learn a lot about what a word means and what is important about these words.