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Glossary

There are so many meanings of so many words it is hard to hold a conversation. I will always adopt the meaning of a word that I believe is in most general use in the philosophy community. My intention is to write in a way that is compatible with the bulk of the literature out there. But that is unfortunately not always possible when there are multiple meanings of a word.

To clarify my writing, I offer this glossary of definitions to clarify which of various meanings I am intending when I use a words. I hope to be consistent with these meanings when I write, however I am fallible and sometimes stray. My apologies in advance.

soul​

By "soul" I mean your essential consciousness, the part of you that is aware that you exist.

An immaterial soul/spirit would be able to persist after death of the material body, because it is not dependent upon in. Soul is used in Christian literature to mean the part of you that continues on after death, and might then go to heaven or hell.

Such a situation was proposed by Rene Descartes where he assumes that the material world exists in one realm (res extensa), and consciousness/thinking/spirit exists in a separate realm (res cogitans). Thus your soul/spirit experiences the world without being part of the world. He felt that the spirit connected to the material world in the pineal gland of the brain, but he never found an explanation for how this happened.

Someone who believes in a soul separate from the body is a "dualist" because there are two aspects to the human experience. Also called a Cartesian Dualist because of the connection with Descartes.

I am however a non-dualist, and I believe that every aspect of consciousness can be explained by workings of the material world. I do not believe in an immaterial soul. Instead I think consciousness is a real process in the world.

spirit​

When speaking about spirit as an object, I mean exactly the same thing as soul. Spirit and soul are interchangeable in my writing. See Soul.

objective​

Something is objective when it exists independent of or external to the mind. There is one objective world in common to all of us. If we are careful about how we do measurements, all measurements of objective things if done carefully will always be the same without regard to who does the measuring. A tree is a particular height, and no matter who measures it will get the same measurement. A mountain has a particular mass. A planet has a particular size. The objective world is something that all people can agree on (if measured carefully) because those measurements are not dependent on who does the measuring. See more at Definitions

subjective​

Something is subjective when it depends upon the mind that is encountering it. Such an experience can and will be different for different people. Personal preferences are subjective, for example a favorite flavor of ice cream. There is no reason to think that everyone will have the same favorite flavor, and we can't even say that different minds experience things the same way. Some minds might find a particular piece of music or art pleasant, while others find it unpleasant. Subjective things are dependent on the mind and might be different for every mind that encounters it. See more at Definitions

morality​

goodness​

magic​

I will use the term magic to refer to supernatural acts performed by an agent. I am not talking about magic tricks that human magicians play, which are in fact clever tricks played against our normal patterns of perception. Nor do I believe there are people capable of real magic spells. Instead, if an actor performs an action that is supernatural, something that is not possible according to out understanding of the universe. In general I will use the term magic when referring to mythical acts of God which would violate the known laws of nature. For example, instantly turning water into wine would be magic because such a transformation could not occur naturally.

emergence​

When a large number of individual primitive units are put together to interact, new properties can emerge to describe the overall system. Those properties on the system as a whole can not be reduced to properties on the constituent parts. That is the properties can not be found on the individual parts of the system.

Examples of emergence:

  • atoms are emergent structures from subatomic particles which have chemical properties not found on the subatomic particles.
  • molecules are emergent structure built from atoms having chemical properties not found on atoms.
  • a solid is an emergent system built out of molecules which has "hardness" and "temperature" not found in the individual molecules
  • a gas is an emergent system built out of molecules which has properties of "temperature" and "pressure" which is not found on the individual molecules.
  • simple life, such as single celled organism have properties that are maintained over long periods of time as long as the organism stays alive
  • complex multicellular life has novel properties not found in single cell life.
  • neural systems display properties like "learning", "perception", and "memory" which are not found on the individual nerve cells themselves.

Weak emergence is the idea that these novel properties could be derived or calculated from the properties of the lower level. Strong emergence is the idea that these novel properties are something can not in any way be derived from or predicted from the properties at the lower level. I view strong emergence as a kind of magic and I don't know of any reason to believe it exists. On this site all emergence discussed will be assumed to be weak emergence.