the soul

First, I don't think that there are two parts of us: a body and a soul. I don't like to break things up that way: mind or matter, us or them, physical or spiritual. It's really all one blur.

That said, let's talk about all the soulful things that are within us. What makes us human? What gives us our person-ness? Music, love, passion, scheming, study, drawing, humor, anger, tears, mathematics, religion and more.

So let's take all of those things that make us different from every other living creature, and see that there's a drive within each of us to do some or all of these things. Let's call that spark of human-ness a "soul." Now, a soul isn't something apart from who we are, it's just the group of virtues and values that make me, me and you, you and makes each of us human. Robots don't have souls. Robots don't have any qualities other than the ones their programmer puts in.

Do ants have a soul? Does an oak tree? I'm pretty sure that ants do have a soul. They have an ant-ness, and they know it. If they didn't, how would they go about doing their ant business, building colonies? I don't believe they could carry on if they didn't have a sense of their ant-ness. Otherwise, they'd be robots, carrying out a program.

An oak? Here, I'm stumped. I've always loved trees, and they seem incapable of harm. A tree gives air and shade, and doesn't seem to ask too much in return. An oak tree has a distinct character that makes it this oak and no other, an oak and no other kind of tree, and tree and not another kind of creature. It has an oak-ness, but does it know that? Maybe. It doesn't seem to require knowing to carry out its oak life.