Best I could come up with, for the substance equivocation in Descartes, was Aristotle’s physics was still method of the day, re: pre-Newton. Dunno if that’s a sustainable premise or not.

The big idea that has grabbed me of late is that ‘being is a verb’. It sounds obvious, a tautology even, but for the tendency to treat beings as things (something which Descartes inadvertently foisted on us with his ‘res cogitans’.) This is where Aquinas’ doctrine of being really stands out in my view (but that is far from the topic of this OP).

Human being, or being human.

So specifically, I am searching for arguments, preferrably complete, even more preferrably in syllogistic form, for the belief that the self persists. Otherwise, I will remain in doubt, and in absence of any evidence of permanence, I will default to the position that it does not stay at all, and that we are constantly as always dying, as the comic posted in the first page depicts. — Lionino

I recall reading Plato saying that our innate abstract ideas on the world and objects, and the mathematical knowledge are from our recollection of our previous lives. So based on that perspective, I tried to come up with a syllogistic proof of the permanence of the human soul.

From Descartes famous declaration "cogito ergo zum", one cannot mistake one's own identity who one is, the identity of the human soul is one of the essence or properties of the human soul, therefore it stays the same no matter what happens to the body of the soul residing, or no matter how long time has passed since the birth of the soul.

The other properties of a person are subject to the changes through time or events of course such as the body will grow old, thoughts and views might change depending on the experience and age of the person etc, but the identity of the person remains the same no matter what changes have gone through to the whole body or thoughts, and the base of the identity is one's own memory of the past.

1. I have no recollection of the past experience of my previous life (if there was one) in my daily conscious mind, no matter how hard I try to remember them (it is just blank). But I can imagine my soul's existence in the ancient times, medieval times and 18 centuries. I was imagining meeting up with Plato, and having a chat in the sunny corner of the Roman square talking about the world of ideas. I can imagine myself walking along the medieval town of London dressed in the medieval clothing and a pointed hat going for a beer in the pub.

I am not sure how I can do these imagining if my soul had NOT existed in those times and NOT actually gone through in the real past lives seeing and encountering the images in my mind experiencing them personally. The people I see in my imagination are the ones I have never seen or met before in my real life or seen on TV or films.

2. On some days I have dreams in my sleep. The images I see in my dreams are the ones I have never seen before in my daily real life. The people I see and meet in my dreams are totally strangers to me, as well as the places I see are new and unfamiliar. I have absolutely no control of the contents of my dreams, and they are totally random in nature.

I often wonder why I dreamt these images and saw the people whom I never met or know, but there is no logical or causal explanation for the reasons. The only logical analogy I can come up with is that my soul had existed sometime in the past prior to my birth, and it encountered the places and situations in the images and people in my dreams. The only logical conclusion I could come up with is that all these contents of my imagination and dreams are my recollection of my past lives. If they are not, where else could they be from?

3. According to Descartes, soul is a different existence from body which is distinct itself, independent and composed of different substance to bodies. So it implies, souls can depart the body and keep existing transcending to some other possible worlds or universe for a while until finding a new born body to settle the new life in the body. When bodies get old the memory gets weak, and when the body dies the memory gets killed off too with all the other mental functionalities. But the soul is intact with its identity and all the latent memories, which survives the death, keeps existing, and gets reborn in the new body, which explains all the dreaming and imaginations which are based on its previous lives.

Therefore if one's soul had existed in the past outside one's body of the present life, then there is no reason why it shouldn't exist in the future when one's body no longer exists. The soul must exist throughout past, present and future permanently as long as the universe keeps existing, keep coming back to the profane lives whenever there is a match between a newly being born body and the body-less soul made up by God or coincidence - one of the laws of the universe.

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I don't think Descartes makes such a mistake. — Lionino

It’s there in his own words. What do stones and his soul have in common? They’re both substances.

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Descartes is not confusing anything, he is using 'substance' in the metaphysical sense — Lionino

He has changed the metaphysical sense, though. Descartes introduced a new meaning to the notion of substance but that this has had deleterious consequences. Recall he says 'these two ideas (i.e. stones and the mind) seem to have this in common that they both represent substances'. But comparing stones (or other such objects) with minds (res cogitans) seems to me a egregious equivocation of the idea of substance.

Also it has to be remembered that Descartes' mind-body dualism is an abstraction like an economic model or explanatory analogy, but I don't think the abstraction holds up very well. Whereas the Aristotelian model of matter and form is, I think, still quite feasible, even in light of modern science. I suppose you could say that hylomorphism gives complementary roles to matter and form - one cannot exist without the other as matter must have form, and forms can only be instantiated in matter, whereas Descartes model has two fundamentally different kinds of substance that are supposed to interact, but Descartes himself was never able to say how, and it's never been clarified since.

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So, to you, if someone loses their memory, they simply die and become another person? — Lionino

Not necessarily. One may only lose one's identity. Of course, this doesn't mean that one's objective identity is lost too. One only loses one's subjective identity with the loss of one's memory. The objective identity is intact as a fact whether one can recall who one is or not.

If you lost all your memory, I am sure you wouldn't know who you are. But at the time of one's death, all the memories of that life time will be flushed out into blank.

Hence when having been reborn into the secular world, one cannot recall the previous life's memories clearly. One can only scrounge the previous life memories via imagination and one's own dreams.

Are you actually saying that or this is some figurate speech I am not picking up on? — Lionino

As Kant said, any claims made on the Soul, also the opposite is true.

But comparing stones (or other such objects) with minds (res cogitans) seems to me a egregious equivocation of the idea of substance.
— Wayfarer

How so? — Lionino

Category mistake?

Why not?

Is it not the inverse? Going by the first quote, it seems that space and time arise from objects, so space and time would need objects and not the other way. I feel like this could be a semantic nitpick on the way you phrased the statement; if it is, ignore it. — Lionino

I'm hoping an analogy might help. Here addressing space alone strictly via geometric points, which, as a reminder, are in themselves defined as volumeless: Conceptually addressed, were there to hypothetically strictly be one geometric point in all of existence, no space would manifest, for all that would here occur is one instantiation of volume-less-ness which, by its very attributes, is spaceless. However, once one allows for the occurrence of two or more geometric points, space (distance-between) will necessarily be coexistent with them. One can here say that space arises from (or is constituted by) a plurality of geometric points, yet here space would need a plurality of geometric points just as much as a plurality of geometric points would need space. Because they they can only be contemporaneous, it then doesn't make sense to ask whether space occurs first and the plurality of geometric points second or vice versa. The two necessitate each other at all times.

Also, as typically understood, objects are only one type of givens that are identity endowed. Thoughts, as well as emotions, can serve as another type of such givens. In so upholding, I then find that cognition is of itself spatiotemporal (although clearly not physical): As one example, because a paradigm (e.g., biological evolution) consists of multiple ideas (e.g., the ideas of species and mutation), a paradigm will then be "larger than" one individual idea contained therein from which it is constituted, such that this relation of "larger than" is here itself a spatial relation (albeit here, clearly not in a physical sense of space). I don't so much want to clarify this here (it would be very cumbersome) as to point out that when I previously mentioned identities I didn't mean to restrict them to objects (again, as objects are typically understood). A conscious being (to which thoughts, emotions, etc. pertain) being another identity that doesn't qualify as an object.

In parallel, if one as a conscious being experiences a new percept, one as the conscious being addressed will itself continue through time unchanged — javra

That is fair, but, ¿in this view of consciousness, when can we say it starts? And if we have a person as a five year old, is it the same consciousness as the same person 80 years later with advanced dementia (may it not happen)? — Lionino

You'll notice that the semantics are here subtly but importantly changed: this in the difference between "a conscious being" and "consciousness". I only know that I cannot know when consciousness started. In terms of a conscious being, however, this is always identified by type. For instance, in supposing that gametes are awareness-endowed and in this sense alone conscious beings, two gametic conscious beings can then unify to produce a different type of conscious being, that of the zygote's. The zygote will then develop and itself change in the nature of what conscious being is addressed till it becomes that type of conscious being which we identify as a human, at which point typically birth occurs. Then the conscious being further changes from a human infant, to a human child, to a human adolescent, etc.

Here, then, in the same sense that a human infant, or human child, and a human elder with advanced dementia (ditto to may it not happen) are different phases of the same exact human being, we can then safely affirm that the infant, or child, and the elder are two different phases of the same conscious being.

Having said this, the conscious being's consciousness will perpetually change throughout.

Here, then, each different type of conscious being will have a different type of quality and magnitude of overall consciousness: hence the sperm's awareness of direction, for example, is of a different magnitude than the awareness of the embryo in utero, is of a different magnitude than the awareness of the birthed human being as a whole.

But I fully acknowledge the many complexities involved. The aforementioned is nevertheless how I currently view the issue.

Now, do you think that, if the nature of time is continuous (and time here would be not relative but an independent substance/dimension within which bodies exist), it would favour a process philosophy view of consciousness, and if it is discrete it would favour quanta-of-identity, or that there is no correlation? — Lionino

Yes, this correlation is in keeping with my best current understanding, or at least my best current intuitions. Although I find that time can also be continuous and relative (this being the view I currently take - as in relative to a plurality of identities that are each endowed with the ability of causation).

That is fair, but, ¿in this view of consciousness, when can we say it starts? — Lionino

An addendum to my previous reply: To more directly address this first question, given the aforementioned post's contents, a human conscious being will then approximately commence with birth into the world and will end with corporeal death. As to the thread’s overall theme, were continuation of conscious being to occur subsequent to death—in this example, via reincarnations—it would then consist of ongoing periods of “a human conscious being’s life” thus understood: this in very rough analogy to how, during one’s life, one as a conscious being consists of ongoing periods of awakened states of being which are separated by periods of sleep (which individually commence with awakening from sleep and end with falling asleep at night). The principle difference, to my mind, being consciously accessible recollections or former periods addressed. Yet such periodic states of being, to my mind at least, do not necessitate that process philosophy cannot apply throughout.

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What definition of substance are you even using? — Lionino

I am trying to capture the meaning of ‘substance’ in philosophy as distinct from everyday use. I am mindful of the fact that ‘substance’, in philosophy, is derived from the Latin translation of Aristotle’s word, ‘ouisia’, which is a form of the verb ‘to be’. The meaning of the Greek verb ‘to be’ is very difficult to define (there’s an excellent academic paper that was introduced here some years ago about this, Charles Kahn, The Greek Verb ‘To Be’ and the Problem of Being’ which can be downloaded from here. Also see The Meaning of Ousia in Plato.) //A very simple way of putting it is that ‘ousia’ is much nearer in meaning to ‘being’ than ‘thing’.//

The Latin translators then used ‘substantia’, ‘that which stands under’, as the translation of ousia, and from there it became ‘substance’ in English. But as I’ve said, the term is nowadays nearly always thought to refer to some kind of stuff or thing (which is the meaning of ‘reification’, namely, to turn an abstraction into a thing. The root of that word is ‘res-‘, the Latin term for thing or object, and the basis of Descartes’ ‘res cogitans’, literally, ‘thinking thing’.)

Later, Husserl points to the same issue in his Crisis of the Western Sciences. Whilst he admires Descartes’ genius for recognising the ineliminable ground of being in the Cogito, and wrote whole books on Cartesian Meditations, he faults him for conceiving of res cogitans as an objective existent, on par with other existents - I seem to recall him saying Descartes made it ‘a little fag-end of the world’, which naturally makes it seem an epiphenomenon from the materialist perspective. Again it is a flaw of reification which was identified first by Kant, and later by phenomenology and existentialism, but to see that requires something like a gestalt shift, a change in perspective.

I acknowledge it’s a difficult issue but there’s quite a bit of commentary about it. The underlying problem of post-Cartesianism is the oxymoronic conception of mind as an object or thing, whereas in reality, we never really experience mind as an object. The mind is ‘that which experiences’, it is transcendental in Kant’s sense.

Category mistake? — Corvus

Quite so, although I expect that criticism would have made no sense in Descartes’ time.

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Origin of substance according to the Stanford Encylopedia:

The philosophical term ‘substance’ corresponds to the Greek ousia, which means ‘being’, transmitted via the Latin substantia, which means ‘something that stands under or grounds things’

Whilst Latin may not be a source of much of the daily English lexicon, philosophy was written in Latin up until the 18th century, hence the Latinised origin of the term in philosophy.

I take your point about the root of res cogitans.

More later.

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Stanford claims that English "substance" matches Ancient Greek usía in meaning, — Lionino

Via the Latin ‘substantia’, as SEP also says.

Etymology. From Middle English substance, from Old French substance, from Latin substantia (“substance, essence”), from substāns, present active participle of substō (“exist”, literally “stand under”), from sub + stō (“stand”).

Does Permanence/Impermanence of the soul necessarily refer to a fact about souls, or might it refer to the grammar of the word "soul"? (Theology as grammar)

For example, consider a presentist who considers the concept of change to only refer to objects but not to subjects (since he believes the present to be the only moment of time). Then he might assent to the sentence that "the soul is permanent", as a vulgar way of expressing his view that the word "impermanent" isn't applicable to subjects.

what reason do I have to believe in the maintenance of the self as opposed to its constant creation and subsequent destruction and replacement by another self? — Lionino

None! In fact I accept the latter entirely. I mean, I'm not like 100% confident in it or anything, but it seems intuitively reasonable to me.

Now there is something that is interesting. Though it may seem a mistake to objectify the mind, as it is the mind that scans for objects, is it not valid when we talk about self-reflection, or rather, self-analysis? Descartes in his meditations talks about investigating what is this "thinking thing", which is him. Can the memories we have of our mind and/or experiences not be an object which will then be studied by the mind itself? Surely it is not the same thing as a physical body, like a stone, but we could argue that it could be seen as a thing that exists, hence why Descartes calls it a substance. — Lionino

But you're using the word 'thing' and 'existence' very imprecisely here. Surely I can reflect on myself, I can engage in reflection and analysis, but that is always something done by a subject, and the subject itself is never truly an object, as such, except for in the metaphorical sense of 'the object of enquiry'. We relate to the natural world and to others as objects of perception (although understanding of course that others are also subjects), but the 'I' who thus relates is not an object, but that to which or whom objects appear.

I know the following is perhaps tangential to the OP, but recall that this particular digression was based on the quote I mentioned from Descartes which compares stones and minds as instances of substance. I found the reference I was thinking of regarding Husserl's critique of Descartes' tendency to 'objectify' the mind, in the Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology, edited by Dermot Moran. He says:

Of course, Descartes himself had failed to understand the true significance of the cogito and misconstrued it as thinking substance (res cogitans), thus falling back into the old metaphysical habits, construing the ego as a “little tag-end of the world”, naturalising consciousness as just another region of the world, as indeed contemporary programmes in the philosophy of mind deliberately seek to do. ...

(I believe that's a reference to the 20th century program of naturalised epistemology.)

A little further along he says:

Descartes correctly recognised that I exist for myself and am always given to myself in a radically original way. I am a structure of egocogito-cogitatum. According to Husserl, as we have seen, Descartes’s mistaken metaphysical move was to think of this ego as a part of the natural world—as res cogitans, a thinking substance. I am not a part of the world...

Why? because:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role.

Category mistake?
— Corvus

Not the case. Res cogitans and res extensa are two distinct things, yet they are both still substances. — Lionino

Can substance be further broken down into their constructive elements?
For example, bread is made of flour. Water is made of 2 hydrogen and 1 oxygen molecules.
What is res extensa made of? What is res cogitans made of?

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