21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

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then perhaps that might need to be qualified by saying, ‘does not align with any particular neurological state’, ‘maybe partly sub-conscious’ and so on. By contrast, you probably get what I mean right away when I just say soul! On the border between the more religious idea of soul and something that is just considered a brain-state is what I describe as the Aristotelian soul.

It’s worth giving a description here of the Aristotelian soul: It’s a very different concept from what we normally think of as a soul. Aristotle said that if the eye were a creature then seeing would be its soul. So there is nothing, for him, over and above our embodied selves. But the Aristotelian soul considers instead our environment and our action in the world. Thus, Body + Mind + Environment = Soul. We might say further that whilst this does not imply any transcendent properties it nonetheless very much seems to imply ‘emergent’ properties. In other words, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts — the Aristotelian soul is more than just what our bodies are doing, what our minds are doing and what our surroundings are doing. In fact, the emergence is saying that the soul is even more than the combined effects of these three.

We can see similar emergence happening at more complex levels. For instance, we could think of the combination of all the plants, animals, people, birds, insects and bacteria making up an eco-system. We could think of all the human minds that go together to make up a culture. We could think of all the separate eco-systems that go together to make the bio-sphere of the Earth. Perhaps we could even

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