Three questions....for whomever happens upon this

[shadowkat]

Bored. Beyond bored at work. Then I came home to well a virtual waterfall outside my kitchen window - it was so bad, water leaked in my window and all the windows underneath it - apparently the water overflowed the gutters. What happened? The sky opened up and dumped buckets of water on us in the space of an hour - 4.5 inches to be exact. Never seen anything quite like it. Was drenched to the bone running, with an umbrella, under trees, the two blocks from my bodega to my house - a scant five minute walk. Yikes.

Ugh. Can't think of a dang thing to write about. You ever feel as if all your words have been pulled out of your skull? OR rather all the nice words, leaving only the angsty bitchy ones? What can I say, it's been one of those...weeks? days? The future feels grim. And I really wouldn't have minded all that much if the bus hurtling down the street in the drenching rain had hit me and knocked me out of me misery (and hopefully not to one of the 20 hells - according to a guy at work - the Chinese believe there are 20 different hells, hmmm maybe this is one of them? That would explain a lot come to think of it...or just one of the purgatories?) - but no such luck - best it did was throw a bunch of dirty water at me.

I'd do a meme but meme's rarely get responses they just breed new memes on others journals.
Not that this will get a response. People, I've discovered, respond to the oddest things. I can't predict it. I've given up. Okay not true. My analytical brain analyzes human behavior whether I want it to or not. It can't help itself. Even if it is wrong 80% of the time.

Anywho...I'll just ask questions....about stuff I've been pondering and would like to hear a voice outside of my own internal one contemplate for a while.

1. Nature or nuture? I love this debate - mostly because I think it's both not one or the other. You can make a valid argument both ways. ie. That human personality is based on DNA and biology. Or that human personality is developed by experience and environment.
This brings up another question, I've been pondering - why do people think it has to be one or the other? Why not both? Come to think of it, why do we, not all of us, but a lot of us, tend to well...drift to extremes? Or broad generalizations? Categorizing stuff constantly.
Is it a desire to understand? OR rather to make sense out of something?

2. Do you believe in souls? That humans have them? If so, why. If not, why. (Actually, I should ask how do you define souls - because not everyone defines it in the same way and that does make a huge difference. You can after all be an athesist and still believe in souls - you just may not define them in a religious context. Semantics give me headache sometimes.)

And more to the point - how do you handle literature, television shows, and films in which the writer clearly does believe in souls and it is a main ingredient of the story? Do you ignore it? Accept it as part of that universe? Question it? Or go find something else?

What if the writer's or artist's definition of a soul is different than yours?

This is a huge thing in fantasy stories that involve vampires and creatures who are separated from humans based on whether or not they have a soul. The book I'm currently reading (Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan novels) really uses souls as an ingredient. But it is not necessarily defined in a religious context. The soul is defined as the energy that holds the mind and body together, keeps the mind sane. Without it, the mind doesn't care and tries to convince the body to kill itself. In fact the mind doesn't care about much of anything - it just craves it's lost soul - and undead vampires who are soulless take a bit of someone else's aura/soul when they take blood in order to stay sane. To keep the intergrity of their mind. It's an illusion but it keeps them together. In this book, people give a portion of their soul to another person when they make love or share a part of themselve, whether in a kiss, a hug, an act of compassion, or exchange of blood. It's not a big deal. You get it back. It regrows. The only religious bit is that you can't find your way into the afterlife without your soul - the mind requires it to hold it together and show it the way. If your mind doesn't go with your soul, the soul dissolves and is gone.

In Whedon's fantasy series - soul was more or less another word for conscience. That voice inside that told people the difference between right and wrong - or more to the point made them care about the difference. It's a dicey question. People think a sociopathic personality is someone who doesn't know the difference between right and wrong. Not true.
They know the difference. They just don't care. The television series Dexter actually did a marvelous job of examining that. It's a story about a serial killer who kills serial killers to avoid killing nice people because he's been taught it was wrong. (Dexter really examines the degree in which nurture can effect human behavior. Can change it. In the series - it's indicated that Dexter's environment as a small child caused him to become a sociopathic personality (something happened to him), but his foster father was able to train him to harness those impulses and use them in another way.)

At any rate - in Buffy and Angel - a creature without a soul - knew the difference between right and wrong but did not care. It did not matter to them. Spike was an anamoly of sorts because he did show remorse for attempting to rape the heroine. Something a soulless creature shouldn't have felt. The reason he did - was well - the writers take on a psychological and philosophical debate - which the tv series Dexter is examining and the novel A ClockWork Orange examined - which is - can we teach a sociopathic personality who does not care about the difference between right and wrong to care? Can we change the sociopath? Is it possible? OR should we just kill them for the betterment of society because they are a lost cause? It is biologically impossible for them to change?

In A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess believed it is possible for someone to change, that while state behavioral conditioning was inherently wrong, the sociopathic tendencies of the street punk would change once he learned there was more to life - or that life itself had meaning. Stanely Kubrick disagreed and stated that the punk could not change and would revert back to form once the conditioning was removed.

Whedon takes the middle ground. Stating that the sociopathic personality can be taught to feel remorse, but, that will not mean that they won't do the act. Won't hurt someone.
But once they feel the emotional pain of doing the act - it may motivate them to seek change in themselves. Or not as the case may be. He explores two characters in this regard.
Spike and Angel. But does not really answer the question - leaving fans somewhat frustrated. But I'm not sure the question can be answered. I'm not sure we know. Psychologists have done studies, sure, but nothing that conclusive. People tend to be pretty complex and had to categorize.

But if you don't buy that souls exist - I wonder if the metaphor may have given you difficulty??

Which actually brings up a much broader issues or question, how do you handle a work of art in which you do not believe or support certain parts of the premise or world?

3. Memory loss - to what degree does memory loss or the loss of memory affect personality?
This fascinates me to no end and is a personal kink, I guess. I'm a sucker for a *good* amensia story. But it has to be one that shows how the character has changed and explores this question.

Does the person who lost their memory become someone else? Or are they just forgetful?
Does their entire life change?

If I for example forgot what happened between 2000 and 2007, how would that change me?

There's apparently a new drug out that can erase a victim's memories of an assualt or bad experiences - saw it talked about in the news and on Boston Legal of all places. So if a child is molested/sexually abused by a parent and takes this ruthie like drug - what does that mean - does it mean it never happened?

And can you erase just one memory without erasing all of them? There's an Alfred Bester novel called Demolished Man - where they erase certain aspects of criminals in order to rehabilitate them. Reminds me of lobotomies - which were quite the rage back when Bester wrote the novel. Along with shock therapy.

In the flick Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - bits of a guy's memories are removed - or rather just all traces of this girl he loved. After the flick, a friend and I had a lengthy discussion on whether this was possible. He stated it wasn't - you can't remove one memory without affecting all the others - it would be like pulling a thread out of a tapestry, the memories would unravel.

Emotions are based on memory. How we feel. How we love. How we relate. Our defenses. If I didn't remember people throwing spiders at me, would I still be afraid of spiders or would I be afraid and just not know why? Does the body retain memory as well as the mind? Can our body remember something, our nerves, that our mind forgets? Like walking. When I think about walking - I can't walk. It's the oddest thing. Like when I think about writing I can't write, have to focus on something else...And when I focus on a memory like the name of a song, a person, or a lyric - it often does not come.

What do you think?

Comments

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

I didn't really understand your post last night...it seemed to start in one place and moved to another, leaving me a mite confused....
But tonight's is very evocative:
I'm not sure I believe in the memory erasing drug, I think the memory might still be there and they have only erased the connectors accessing the memory, and eventually the brain may find the memories again.
When my Mother had a brain injury they had to cut into her skull to remove the blood clot, and they removed all kinds of 'connectors' (I don't know how this works) but for 6 weeks she remember a few things but had forgotten many more.... And then one morning she actually woke up to find all her memories flooding back. It was kind of amazing.
Of course I'm no brain surgeon and I don't know how these things work (but IMO the brain surgeons are working pretty much in the dark too).

3. I'm not sure if memory really defines who we are, when you see someone w/Alzheimer's they don't remember a lot, but they still seem to be the same person (maybe they aren't the same if you are the one forgotten...).

2. I think I believe that the soul is the eternal infinite aspect of your Self which transcends all the rest. The mind is more subtle than the body, but it (IMO) is still part of the relative material world....
But my definition didn't stop me from appreciating what Joss was saying (I agree w/you I think Joss did kind of equate the soul with the conscience).

Different writers use the soul as a devise in their stories, and they use it in different ways, but the reader (viewer) can pretty easily get the drift of where they are going with it.... It is like any metaphor, you get some percentage of what the writer means mixed in with your own beliefs and experiences.

1. Nature or Nurture? How about neither one? How about Fate? I know, people hate that answer, fate sounds like pre-destination (which is kinda what I mean). It seems to imply a lack of self-determination, but of course DNA implies a certanly lack of self-determination too... wait: so does nurture (it isn't like we have any control over how we were nurtured! LOL).

It is all moot. We have to do the best we can with the lives we lead, it doesn't matter if we believe in God or if we are existentialists or atheists or whatever.... We still have to take it one day at a time, there isn't anyway to skip ahead and check out the ending of the story.

But I'm not sure my thoughts are very organized or well thought out.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I didn't really understand your post last night...it seemed to start in one place and moved to another, leaving me a mite confused....

Yeah, I know. I had troubles clarifying my thoughts in that one.
So I finally just deleted it.

I'm not sure I believe in the memory erasing drug, I think the memory might still be there and they have only erased the connectors accessing the memory, and eventually the brain may find the memories again.

Interesting. That may be what it does - if so, it's not all that different from how the body protects the victim - often repressing or making a painful memory we can't handle inaccessible until someone helps us access it and deal with it.

There's two schools of thought on this - 1)That you should focus on the horrible thing that happened on you, analyze it, come up with a means of coping and understand it. 2) that you should let it go, forget it, and not focus too much on it. It happened. It is over. There's little that you can do regarding it.

I think it depends on the person. The mistake I think people sometimes make is they think one approach or one size fits all. When of course it doesn't. What might have worked for one person most likely won't work for another.

I'm not sure if memory really defines who we are, when you see someone w/Alzheimer's they don't remember a lot, but they still seem to be the same person (maybe they aren't the same if you are the one forgotten...).

Actually they are quite different. Have had two grandparents who have had troubles with memory - not due to Altzeimers but other causes. My grandfather lost most of his memory due to brain tumors - he could remember basic things - like who people were, his name, speaking, stuff like that, but he couldn't handle complex thoughts and no longer remembered certain events. He was confused and very different than the man we'd known. In some ways he was a bit like a child, a toddler. The same thing with my grandmother - her laspes in memory, mostly short term memory, have made her act a lot like a small child. Altzheimers does much the same thing - the person is no longer who you knew, they have bits of their personality - but they are lacking other bits. At least that's been my experience.

I more or less Agree with your take on souls. I believe in them and have ever since I saw my grandmother's dead body about ten years ago. I could tell just by looking at it that it was an empty husk, a shell, which meant she had a soul and her soul had passed on. I wonder if everyone can sense this? I'm guessing not? Or maybe they just think of it/explain it differently? Which is why I really wish people would explain why they don't believe in souls as opposed to just stating they don't as if it were an obvious. Give me a reason.

After I saw my grandmother's body, I did not understand why anyone could not believe in a soul, particularly those who had seen dead bodies. They seem to equate it with believing in God. And I don't think having a soul necessarily means there's a God (although I do believe in God in the general sense). Or an after-life in the terms most religions believe in an after-life. I see a soul as an aura or the energy that gives us life, that makes us who and what we are. When it is gone, we are little more than organic material, a shell. Empty. I can sense it - that's why I believe this - I felt it. It's not a philosophical belief so much as a gut one, if that makes sense. Don't know quite how to explain it without it all sounding nutty as hell.

I assumed everyone could sense it, now beginning to believe maybe not? People are odd - if they can't sense it, see it, feel it, touch it for themselves than it is not real or does not exist. Which may be no different in my certainity that it does based on my experience of it? Although to be honest, I'm not completely certain about anything at the moment. Part of me is waiting for the boring scientific explanation - although the one's I've heard to date I don't find that convincing and just science BS.

My sister-inlaw can see spirtual entities as well as sense them. I just sense it, but luckily can't see it. Thank god. Don't envy people who can see them.

So why do you believe in souls?

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

I went through a 'I don't believe in anything' existential/atheist stage when I was in High School, and then in my Freshman year of college I started Transcendental Meditation and I had some experiences of my infinite light that were powerful enough to completely alter my view of everything. Since then I've studied a lot of Eastern philosophy and I kind of subscribe to my own individualized mish-mash of that (a little Buddhism with touches of Hinduism and a lot of the ancient Yoga taught by Parashara).

I did have an experience like yours once: I had read as a child that Louisa May Alcott could see her sister Beth's soul leave her body, and when I was at the bedside of my college friend Bill (who died of AIDS in 1987) I experienced a very strong and tangible sense of Bill's soul expanding to fill the room with his release from the body and his joy.... I knew for certain the exact moment he died, but his Mother and Sister had evidently not noticed anything at all... I was stunned, how could they not have witness what I had? But instead I had to point out that I could no longer get a pulse, so we called in the doctor.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I did have an experience like yours once: I had read as a child that Louisa May Alcott could see her sister Beth's soul leave her body, and when I was at the bedside of my college friend Bill (who died of AIDS in 1987) I experienced a very strong and tangible sense of Bill's soul expanding to fill the room with his release from the body and his joy.... I knew for certain the exact moment he died, but his Mother and Sister had evidently not noticed anything at all... I was stunned, how could they not have witness what I had? But instead I had to point out that I could no longer get a pulse, so we called in the doctor.

I've come to the conclusion that not everyone can see it or experience it.
We're all wired differently - so makes sense. Some are more sensitive to their external enviroment than others or perhaps I should state sensitive to it in a different way?

Don't know.

I went through a 'I don't believe in anything' existential/atheist stage when I was in High School, and then in my Freshman year of college I started Transcendental Meditation and I had some experiences of my infinite light that were powerful enough to completely alter my view of everything.

Have had similar types of experiences - nothing concrete, but enough to make me uncertain. I believe in God, because I've seen evidence of the existence of some entity beyond my comprehension that cannot be explained by logic. And I believe a lot of things are just inexplainable.

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

"I've come to the conclusion that not everyone can see it or experience it.
We're all wired differently - so makes sense. Some are more sensitive to their external enviroment than others or perhaps I should state sensitive to it in a different way?"
I think that everyone sees life through a slightly different filter, sensing different things, experiencing the same things differently, and believing in their own experiences (as you said "wired differently". I think that this is why different religions come about, everyone is so sure that their experience is right and that others would benefit from sharing it.
The huge problems arise when trying to impose one belief system on another person, because one size does definitely NOT fit all!

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Agree.

everyone is so sure that their experience is right and that others would benefit from sharing it.
The huge problems arise when trying to impose one belief system on another person, because one size does definitely NOT fit all!

It's hard to avoid doing that, I think. It's like well...my grandmother used to state that my brother and I had arguments over whether the wall was white or off-white. He'd see white and I'd see off-white and we could not understand why the other didn't see what we did.

Sometimes I think it would be great if everyone experienced the world in the same way. Saw it the same way. But it would also make life incredibly boring and we would get nothing accomplished.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the first, original Star Trek series, was how they explored the different ways people saw things. Spock saw everything logically. Bones emotionally. Same with Buffy - each character brought their own interpretation to the proceedings based on their issues. Willow clearly believed in a god or goddess or sorts, while Buffy was agnostic. Their abilities to see different angles to the same situation made it possible for them to solve it.

I think sharing the information is important. The tough part is trying not to impose your opinion or view onto someone else. I was taught in law school to be persuasive to act like my opinion was gospel or the truth - as a litigator, I struggle not to do that. But it's not easy.

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree: that is how a really good ensemble should work, not just being diverse w/age or sex or race, but really diverse in POV.

"The tough part is trying not to impose your opinion or view onto someone else."
My biggest fault is in judging or dismissing other people's arguments or opinions as being their ignorance. It is easy to think 'oh they can't actually BELIEVE that!'.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

My biggest fault is in judging or dismissing other people's arguments or opinions as being their ignorance. It is easy to think 'oh they can't actually BELIEVE that!'.

Mine too. But I think, at least in my case, it is often an expression of frustration.

There's nothing worse than trying to have a discussion with a friend about something you care about and having them interrupt you half-way through with either:

I don't believe in ___.

I don't like ___.

As if everything you've said or felt is completely unimportant and irrelevelant because they just don't care about it enough to discuss.
They don't say why. It's not - oh I understand what you are saying, but I don't believe in that because...or I can't agree with that because...

People...sigh. Can't live with them, can't live without them. And sometimes I feel lonlier surrounded by them or with people than alone in a pine forest with just myself. Lately, very much so.