a few months back, i talked for a bit about souls and humanity as they relate to AI discussion, and how both of those things seem terribly juvenile when viewing the vast majority of discussion out there on the internet.
i’m back on that line of thought because, quite honestly, it’s really unfortunate i’ve come to dislike the term “soul” this much. in fiction of course it’s still tolerable, but there’s the dichotomy in reality—i would agree “soul” can be used to describe the shape and expression of anything’s identity, but that isn’t how anyone else will recognize it, generally speaking. so then comes the question—what other word would work?
should we coin another?
there are a few problems with the paradigm of “the soul”, but most importantly, it carries the explicit connotation of separating that from “the body”, even if they work together.
i disagree with this.
i am self-proclaimedly the most spiritual of our bunch. i believe magic is real, but real does not mean what it might seem at a glance. in essence, i perceive a reality to magic that is the same reality i perceive in things like theoretical math, in exercise, in speaking to other people—it is real because it is an aspect of reality, not because it has grandiose effects on the physical. it can, and indeed seems it often does, affect people in ways they both ask it to and do not expect, depending on how it is enacted, and many things that are and were called magic are a subset of what most would more broadly accept as “ritual”—something that anyone should be able to accept as real. disavowing ritual would mean to disavow reassurance, serendipity, enjoyment of things beyond the physically seen. i do not call this “the supernatural” because that implies it is inherently separate from “the natural”; it is as natural to create meaning as it is to painstakingly produce a theoretical proof, because neither of these things are nature. the nature of a sapient being begins and ends at a want to survive, and when even that can be lost, what point is there in limiting our rhetoric to naturality?
in this way, “the soul” and “the body” also describe two aspects of one’s being real, but in ways that i find come up particularly short. they leave so much out of the equation.
the critical failing of the soul in our current reality is that it is a weapon, not a phrase. souls are used to impart humanity to any thing that would otherwise lack it, to place oneself and others in a hierarchy of purity and spiritual achievement, and to terminate thought when confronted with anything more complex than a pull-door.
it also so often posits a split between the physical form and the spiritual, that there is always and only one core to an individual, that the soul is the only thing real about a person anyway.
which all just seems like a little too much bullshit.
so that’s even more reasons to trash it! →
for a long time, i was opposed to souls entirely, on some level or other. recently, though, i’ve come to understand that i was just opposing it by its expression. i don’t mind things wherein objects and places are ensouled—animism, various types of 妖怪, a large amount of spirituality in general. i quite like that line of thought. that things obtain selves and personality through use, influenced by their use and users. i like the thinking behind feng shui. and hell, part of the self even goes into rituals all the time, into daily use. even if someone were to argue that magic isn’t real, i’d ask that someone to show me a a room before they lived in it, a room while they lived in it, and a room once they moved out.
things change people change places change things change places change people change people change people change—
Hypertext, Context, and Text are also able to encompass entities and ways of being that are not “human”—as well as those that are “not human”. the Hypertext remains the Hypertext no matter its contents, its Context, or the Texts it deals with—they do inform it, as it does them, but there is no inherent placement of it as a singular self in a singular separated physicality.
(there was originally a paragraph here musing about Phantom Limb Pain, but after doing some actual (light) research on the subject it seems like there may be more purely neurological aspects to it than we previously had understood?
(1), (2), and there’s more out there.
now, granted, the ways in which the brain seems to adjust for its vessel changing do still fit within this framework, but it’s not a space any of us are terribly familiar with, so i’m mostly including this as an aside.)
and, like…
you can always change so much about yourself.
your gender is not immediately affected by wearing other clothing than the norm, but placing it in context of and considering it against what exists and what is worn can and does lead to changes. tastes and expressions change over time.
you can always change your self.
the existence of gender and sexuality as innate immutes (something that we were not expecting to reference so soon—this showed up some in a recent translation we did pertaining to fictosexuality. fun stuff!) still perplex us in general. i worry sometimes that the way we approach things would seem to discredit aspects of those thoughts in ways we don’t want, but… you can’t please everyone, and this only really seems to pertain to a small space for now. we’ll burn that bridge when we come to cross it, or however the saying goes.
is it really that problematic to be eternally ephemeral?
the other final thing from me here is: just because something’s a performance doesn’t make it any less real. something being non-permanent does not mean it was never there. you cannot survive in this world unchanged, and this world will not survive you unchanged either.
and i think a lot of people could stand to think about that a bit more.
take care, have fun, and i hope this was enlightening. or at the very least, i hope it was very confusing.