Ensouled Down the River of Time

If Noam Chomsky is a genius linguist, it wouldn't be the first time a gifted intellectual also suffered from delusions -- for example, Isaac Newton and his alchemy fixation, or Gödel and his paranoia, or Tesla and his pigeon obsession.

But let's keep this party polite, and never let truth out of our sight. Truth is true even if it's said by an America-hating terror-supporting utensil.

Spitzer certainly keeps things polite, relying on Chomsky's linguistic theories without so much as a peep about his extracrackpotular political wacktivities. 

Do the soulless prove the existence of the soul?

I don't know if I'd put it that way, but privations in general are parasitic on some positive good.

Where there's smoke there's fire, and where there are shadows there is light. In this sense, where there are progressives there is truth lurking nearby. 

Is it enough to prove the soul's immaterial capacities to prove the existence of the soul? Whatever we call it -- for example, (¶) -- it does routinely do things that that matter could never do, for example, the self-reflection whereby it is both observer and observed. 

Again, we can teach sign language to primates, but there is no evidence that they can think conceptually or communicate abstract ideas, whereas this is what humans effortlessly do. Similarly, they might connect two words that are immediately adjacent to one another, but cannot relate more distant connections, as we are doing in this and every other post.  

The question is whether the gap between animal and human is truly unbridgeable, i.e., an ontological distinction, or one that can be explained by natural selection?

Eh, we've long since dismissed the latter possibility. As we've been arguing for a couple of decades, there is ontological discontinuity from the bottom up, but continuity from the top down. Chomsky & Co. "hypothesize that the gap between humans and nonhumans is fundamentally biological," but then they would, wouldn't they?

As the science currently stands, "this is a major problem, which is currently inexplicable through physical-biological processes." I say it cannot in principle be solved via science, because the soul is irreducible to anything less.

But if the soul didn't evolve via natural selection, how and when did it get here? In the book, I suggested that it was a sudden occurrence that happened -- if I recall correctly -- as recently as 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, whereas Spitzer puts it at 50,000 to 65,000 years ago. No doubt the date of the third Big Bang (into Mind) will be increasingly fine-tuned as more evidence comes to light.

Let me fast forward in the book, as Spitzer presents his evidence for the third bang in an appendix. Again, given the soul's existence, "when did we get it?," i.e., "when did the nonevolutionary, transphysical event of the soul's creation occur for the first time?"

Examining only the biological evidence, we can trace things back to a Miss Mitochondrial Eve and a Mr. Y Chromosome Adam. Although these two lived at roughly the same time and came from a similar neighborhood, there's no way of establishing if they knew each other (in the biblical sense, wink wink). In fact,

Though they may have had acquaintance with each other, it is by no means certain -- and seems quite unlikely (given the large region and time spans involved).

Now, looking at the trans-biological evidence, it hardly matters whether these two got together, since they lived some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, whereas evidence of the transphysical soul doesn't burst upon the stage until much later, again, 50 to 65 thousand years ago. 

Anthropologists call this "the great leap forward," even though natural selection is a gradual process that doesn't allow for such leaps, much less vertical ones. 

As I said in the book, Homo sapiens does nothing novel for a couple hundred thousand years, and then bang, more advanced technology, mathematical discovery, representational art, music, sewing, seafaring, awareness of the future, more sophisticated burial practices, and those lovely mancave paintings. Wha' happened?

In short, "Our first ensouled ancestor appeared on the earth." I suppose it's a bit like trying to remember back to when you and I became ensouled. It's something of a blur. I just woke up one day and there it was. 

Spitzer, bless his heart, also brings Gödel into the argument, since he proved that "human thinking is not based on a set of prescribed axioms, rules, or programs" and is indeed "beyond any program." 

Presumably this includes any genetic program -- I'll have to check with Robert Rosen -- but in any case "human intelligence is indefinitely beyond any axiomatic or program-induced intellect." It is

not only always beyond axioms, rules, and programs (to which artificial intelligence is limited) but also capable of genuinely originative creativity (that is, capable of thinking without deriving from or making recourse to any prior axioms, rules, or programs).

Much like the Creator who ensouled us and in whose image we are.

Say, those aren't pigeons, are they?