What is the Soul?

In Culture:The Ancient Greek word for "butterfly" is ψυχή (psȳchē), which primarily means "soul", "mind"

This is quite a challenge in a way.

Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked that "the map is not the territory", encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, that is, confuse models of reality with reality itself.Map–Territory Relation

What I was thinking here was symbols that represent the soul. Now I am not sure how well verse some people are in terms of the adventures they can take. So, lets say your a dreamer that remembers their dreams and you encounter "a book" and in that book you find a representation of who you are as a soul. What would this mean to you, since it symbolically now incorporates who you are as a soul and defines your territory?

By nature we like to map our progress and what this means, is what if one were to understand that each life is condensed, as if, into a symbol? That symbol may be like a time capsule awaiting to manifest into your reality now? It is part of your accomplishments. So at its basis each soul had this inclination and sought to simplify the totality of it's entire life so as to remember what was accomplished.

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing. It is an image-centered diagram that represents semantic or other connections between portions of information. By presenting these connections in a radial, non-linear graphical manner, it encourages a brainstorming approach to any given organizational task, eliminating the hurdle of initially establishing an intrinsically appropriate or relevant conceptual framework to work within. A mind map is similar to a semantic network or cognitive map but there are no formal restrictions on the kinds of links used. The elements are arranged intuitively according to the importance of the concepts and they are organized into groupings, branches, or areas. The uniform graphic formulation of the semantic structure of information on the method of gathering knowledge, may aid recall of existing memories.Mind map

You have no way of knowing what this symbol means and all you are given is this pictorial representation. How the heck are you to define such a symbol? That symbol, may be called a mandala.

The most important archetype of all is the self. The self is the ultimate unity of the personality and is symbolized by the circle, the cross, and the mandala figures that Jung was fond of painting. A mandala is a drawing that is used in meditation because it tends to draw your focus back to the center, and it can be as simple as a geometric figure or as complicated as a stained glass window. The personifications that best represent self are Christ and Buddha, two people who many believe achieved perfection. But Jung felt that perfection of the personality is only truly achieved in death Personality Theories

Here too, such abstractions help to pave the way for seeing the soul's ability to experience inner/outer and ways to describe inductive/deductive relations that we have with reality? While abstract, they give one the sense of interplay that goes on with an subjective/objective world.

This is a torus (like a doughnut) on which several circles are located. Unlike on a Euclidean plane, on this surface it is impossible to determine which circle is inside of which, since if you go from the black circle to the blue, to the red, and to the grey, you can continuously come back to the initial black, and likewise if you go from the black to the grey, to the red, and to the blue, you can also come back to the black.

Can you tell the difference? What does liminocentric mean?

If conceived as a series of ever-wider experiential contexts, nested one within the other like a set of Chinese boxes, consciousness can be thought of as wrapping back around on itself in such a way that the outermost 'context' is indistinguishable from the innermost 'content' - a structure for which we coined the term 'liminocentric'. A Conversation with Physicist Brian Greene

So lets examine out of context consciousness in relation too, the soul. For me continuity of thought is to form methods to our thinking and to construct models with which we adopt as part of our being in this life. So given the context of Mapping and territory this was interesting to me. This also spoke to the idea of mathematical models and how they are used in life to understand science processes, for example Riemann geometry that lies at the basis of relativity.

On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry. Bernhard Riemann Translated by William Kingdon Clifford

But before this, it was just plane Euclidean geometry with the understanding that you were in straight lines and such, as to be place before the the preponderance of the Parallel Postulate?

The value of non-Euclidean geometry lies in its ability to liberate us from preconceived ideas in preparation for the time when exploration of physical laws might demand some geometry other than the Euclidean. Bernhard Riemann

So by model development you become free from the constraints of your previous observations of the limitations Euclidean geometry forced upon you.

Almost all criticisms of Euclid up to the 19th century were centered on his fifth postulate, the so-called Parallel Postulate.The first half of the course dealt with various attempts by ancient, medieval, and (relatively) modern mathematicians to prove this postulate from Euclid's others.Seminar on the History of Hyperbolic Geometry, by Greg Schreiber

So that's the idea then is to recognize model development is more then the abstract connotation mathematical structure is given in face of what is real or not. This is important. You cannot ignore the reality in which you work, but for me ever the struggle to identify the substrate with which we not only embedded models into our thinking , but have their basis not only in this life, but are carried over.

Betrayal of Images" by Rene Magritte

The Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte illustrated the concept of "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves"[5] in a number of paintings including a famous work entitled The Treachery of Images, which consists of a drawing of a pipe with the caption, Ceci n'est pas une pipe ("This is not a pipe"). In The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan rehashed the argument— that all media are "extensions" of our human senses, bodies and minds. This concept occurs in the discussion of exoteric and esoteric religions. Exoteric concepts are concepts which can be fully conveyed using descriptors and language constructs, such as mathematics. Esoteric concepts are concepts which cannot be fully conveyed except by direct experience. For example, a person who has never tasted an apple will never fully understand through language what the taste of an apple is. Only through direct experience (eating an apple) can that experience be fully understood.Mapping and territory

Through my own explorations and understanding is the context of what manifests in "as an explosion into reality" of such model schematic formulations, is to understand the larger context of the beliefs we form, have their constitutions from such a forming apparatus embedded within us? You gleam this from life as the basis of how might have been raised by your parents to assume, the meme's with which you assume come from there. Yet you learn to see that as a individual, that as you grow, such beliefs come into question because of the difference in your experiences. So you begin to form your own thoughts.

Thomas Kuhn

However, the incommensurability thesis is not Kuhn's only positive philosophical thesis. Kuhn himself tells us that “The paradigm as shared example is the central element of what I now take to be the most novel and least understood aspect of [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]” (1970a, 187). Nonetheless, Kuhn failed to develop the paradigm concept in his later work beyond an early application of its semantic aspects to the explanation of incommensurability. The explanation of scientific development in terms of paradigms was not only novel but radical too, insofar as it gives a naturalistic explanation of belief-change. Naturalism was not in the early 1960s the familiar part of philosophical landscape that it has subsequently become. Kuhn's explanation contrasted with explanations in terms of rules of method (or confirmation, falsification etc.) that most philosophers of science took to be constitutive of rationality. Furthermore, the relevant disciplines (psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence) were either insufficiently progressed to support Kuhn's contentions concerning paradigms, or were antithetical to them (in the case of classical AI). Now that naturalism has become an accepted component of philosophy, there has recently been interest in reassessing Kuhn's work in the light of developments in the relevant sciences, many of which provide corroboration for Kuhn's claim that science is driven by relations of perceived similarity and analogy to existing problems and their solutions (Nickles 2003b, Nersessian 2003). It may yet be that a characteristically Kuhnian thesis will play a prominent part in our understanding of science.

As real is the understanding that objective reality exists, so does the subjective reality, in so far as we understand that "belief change can exist," our world view can change. That we can change our views of the world by "truly grokking and experiencing." Any accomplishment then is to recognize the platform from which you came, then is to advance one's growth? What use any model then, to not take into consideration the method by which you have made assumptions. These, had come from "models of perception" before?

Observations Pay Off

Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries Kuhn now moves past his initial topic of paradigm to scientific discovery saying that in order for there to be a discovery, an anomaly must be detected within the field of study. He discusses several different studies and points out the anomaly that invoked the scientific discovery. Later in the chapter he begins to discuss how the anomaly can be incorporated into the discovery to satisfy the scientific community.

There are three different characteristics of all discoveries from which new sorts of phenomena emerge. These three characteristics are proven through an experiment dealing with a deck of cards. The deck consisted of anomalous cards (e.g. the red six of spades shown on the previous page) mixed in with regular cards. These cards were held up in front of students who were asked to call out the card they saw, and in most cases the anomaly was not detected.(link now dead)

The example given is to understand the nuances in life are like nagging questions as to what is bothering one according to an assumption made or taken for granted. Reality for instance.

It is important to find such anomalies so as to record how belief change is possible. While we secure our beliefs in reality, such excursions to beyond the limitations of our belief, are essential to "grow more?"