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Speak

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Well, I certainly have missed out on quite a number of interesting posts in the last couple of weeks. That's what happens when your internet access is taken away as a result of moving... and when you go from the luxury of Ethernet to 56k... blah. Thankfully, i'm getting a 128K DSL or something like that, next week.

There was so much said about Souls, Intellegence, and Language, and I can hardly remember it all... so i'll try to throw in as much as i can recall, and people can get back to me on what seems to be missing or incomplete.

First off... this idea of "Self-Awareness"-- we'll i hate to break it to you james, but we (humans) are not the only ones in which are believed to be "aware"...

So are Dolphins... and evidence would indicate that yes, even infants... really young infants, have the beginnings of self-awareness--- not surprising considering that they do develop self-awareness when they reach an older age.

I have always defended that dolphins were smart animals, far smarter than some give them credit for, and smarter than even supporters would believe... and here is why:

[--1--]
Dolphins have been seen to be "aware" of themselves when confronted with a mirror. The exact details of the mirror experiments escape me, but the basic bottomline is that show a dolphin an image of itself in a mirror, and it can differentiate between itself and another dolphin. Furthermore, it will spend different amounts of time looking at itself versus looking at an image of another dolphin.

It would seem that vanity is an offshot of "self-awareness".

Now, this is not an argument that dolphins are as "aware" as we are. However, it does go a ways toward attacking the belief that humans are the only creatures capable of the feat of "self-awareness". With that said... self-awareness is indeed a feat. There is no arguing that... at least not at the present time.

[--2--]

Dolphins, like humans, and a very small select amount of species, mostly, if not entirely chimps or primates of other kinds, engage in both recreational sex and homosexual acts. I cannot explain why this is important at the moment, but it actually does stand out as important... i will more than likely formulate the reasoning for why its important later.

Now, much as i explained how we have come to believe that dolphins have some sort of self-awareness, be it rudimentary or not, that is how we have come to believe that young, young infants have self-awareness. The mirror. Believe it or not, the mirror is perhaps one of the most powerful tools for the testing of self-awareness. (I would argue that the mirror as an invention, was perhaps just as important for human beings as fire would have been, or the wheel.)

(Now, before i continue, i will say that i am neither supporting or denying evolution or creationism... i'm just stating it as how i understand things... without putting my personal beliefs into it... i may do that later...)

If you want to take the dogma of evolution... then consider this...

[--1--]
During the early phases of conception and fetal development, the fetus goes through the process of growing and maturation. Biologists and doctors have long noted that (by looking at it through the evolutionist's eyes), the fetus matures along phylogonical (i think that's the right word) lines. By this i mean that one can see the path of evolution of humanity by watching the stages of human fetal development. Phylogeny recapitulates ontology (or something like that... i forget the actual phrase, but it's something really close to that.)

Wouldn't the same go for mental growth...

many researchers would say yes, and it would appear so...

The structure of the human mind, as many more advanced mind structures of other animals, shows this similarity. There are two parts of the brain... the old reptilian brain, and the more advanced mammalian brain... the mammalian brain being an extension, an upgrade, of the older brain... yet we still carry the old... and as we mature, it is the mammalian brain that grows...

[--2--]
why is this important...

well... now consider what i mentioned earlier... about an infants early "awareness"... think of the young infant as a symbol of the way we were thousands of years ago as adults... even millions of years ago...

imagine that neanderthal, as it approached a pool of water... a pool of crystal clear water, and it saw itself... and for a moment, it stared at itself... almost... just almost touching upon itself mentally... coming to a clear realization... but for just a moment, before turning away...

that is the infant mind...

and it evolves... only the evolution from the infant awareness to adult awareness takes place during the beginning of modern human lifetimes.

There was more i wanted to say about all that... but it is late, and my thought processes are severly lacking at the moment...

but the point of that spiel? simple... if you believe, as someone mentioned earlier... that a soul is linked to self-awareness, that would almost mean that a soul could be obtained through evolution...

do i believe that... well that is not important, as i'm only giving this information to clear up somethings for the moment.

i will say though, that i believe that if you are going to say that an infant does not have a soul due to a lack of self-awareness... then you are wrong, or at least to me it would seem like your taking a fallacious stance.

i would argue that if souls are linked to self-awareness... it is still possible for the infant to have a soul...

first for the fact that infants do have a rudimentary type of self-awareness... think of it this way... for them, it must be like first waking up from a long nap, especially one with a particularly vivid dream... the infant is experiencing, and using, its ability for understanding awareness for the first time... its new, as is life to it... of course it will have some trouble processing this new notion of "i exist outside of others... outside of the environment... i am one onto myself..."

two... and here is where it gets more muddled... is where language comes into play...

it is still possible for infants to have a soul and they are simply unable to express that to us. Language allows us to understand what another is contemplating...

without the ability to "speak" with infants, we are unable to ask if they understand themselves separate from others...
{DAMNIT...i totally lost where i was going with my line of thought...}

okay... i can't recover my thoughts... that's what i get for waking up early today... okay...

hmm, so i will end this post prematurely... there is definitely more that i will say later today after sleep... and probably some i will correct...

so if it seems like my arguments are missing key points... that's understandable...

but i will say at the moment, that--James, i would seriously consider dropping the argument of self-awareness equalling having a soul if you wish to say that animals have no souls... because i feel that there are some holes with that argument...

kinda like when people believed that they had souls and intellegence and such because we where the only ones to use tools...

until a woman named Goodall went and made us all feel a little less "special".

To be continued...