Human Consciousness: self and soul (Humans)

by David Turell , Tuesday, October 18, 2016, 02:08 (2741 days ago) @ David Turell

A very interesting philosophical/theoretical discussion of self and soul:

http://www.livescience.com/56505-do-you-have-a-soul.html?utm_source=ls-newsletter&u...

I present only this paragraph from Physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne:

"In fact, it's quite difficult to understand what's the carrier of continuity for a person in this life. Here am I, an aging, balding academic — what makes me the same person as the little boy with the shock of black hair in the school photograph of years ago? It's not atomic material continuity — the atoms in my body are totally different from the atoms in that schoolboy. It's not the atoms themselves, but the pattern in which those atoms are organized in some extraordinary, elaborate and complex sense. And I think that's what the human 'soul' is. It is the information-bearing pattern that is the real me.'"

Comment: What is continuous is our consciousness in which our 'self' develops. Each self is individual and different from all others. What might be a soul is discussed in the article but the key point is every cell in a body is not the same as it was at birth. As pointed out the atoms are all different, but we have a continuous self which maintains itself from birth to death. This is what consciousness does for us, a mighty tool managed by the brain.