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But what positive meaning has the Soul, when scrutinized,but the ground of possibility of the thought?William James
When pondering the question ‘What kind of thing am I?’ most of us find ourselves pulled in different directions. In many respects we seem to be perfectly ordinary material things. We can see ourselves in mirrors; we have a certain shape, size and weight, and our bodies are composed of the same kind of elementary ingredients as tables and chairs. But in other respects it seems that we are not ordinary material things—or that we do not think of ourselves as such. We have minds, and most material things (or so most of us believe) do not. No less importantly, most of us have little or no difficulty in imagining ourselves surviving transformations and displacements that no ordinary material object could possibly survive. I may not believe it likely to happen, but I have no difficulty in making sense of the possibility that I could be given the form of a dolphin, or changed into a sentient tree (or even a sentient lump of silicon) and so discover what it is like to be physically very different from how I actually am. It is equally easy to imagine myself enjoying an afterlife in a non‐physical realm, or waking up to find that I already exist in a non‐physical realm and have been merely dreaming that I am a human being. How could such fates be conceivable possibilities for me if I am an ordinary material being?
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