The Spirit And The Body

[Rivers]

There is an object lesson I've seen used in the church several times. It is designed to teach the relationship between the spirit and the body. The teacher would hold up a glove and say that represents the body. The teacher would then hold up his/her hand and say that it is the spirit. He/she would then explain that the the glove/body can't do anything by itself but with the hand/spirit inside, it could then move.

Its a simple analogy and it made sense to me for a long time until I I started learning about human biology. After everything I've learned about the human body, there seems to be an explanation for how most things work, even at the cellular level. All the physiology is governed by natural laws. This got me wondering where the spirit fits into all this. Does the body really need the spirit like the glove analogy tells us? Is there any room for a spirit to be necessary in living things?

Edited October 27, 2011 by Rivers

[jo1952]

There is an object lesson I've seen used in the church several times. It is designed to teach the relationship between the spirit and the body. The teacher would hold up a glove and say that represents the body. The teacher would then hold up his/her hand and say that it is the spirit. He/she would then explain that the the glove/body can't do anything by itself but with the hand/spirit inside, it could then move.

Its a simple analogy and it made sense to me for a long time until I I started learning about human biology. After everything I've learned about the human body, there seems to be an explanation for how most things work, even at the cellular level. All the physiology is governed by natural laws. This got me wondering where the spirit fits into all this. Does the body really need the spirit like the glove analogy tells us? Is there any room for a spirit to be necessary in living things?

What does human biology have to say about what the first cause is which makes a body a living thing, which is then absent when a body is no longer living? IOW, this is beyond the obvious wherein, for instance, there is still blood pumping through the body which brought it to life. What started the heart pumping in the first place, etc.? Then, where did that cause go when the body died? Just curious since I don't know what they teach or what their theory is.

Regards,

jo

Edited October 27, 2011 by jo1952

[CV75]

Is there any room for a spirit to be necessary in living things?

Yes, this is how things have spiritual life.

[CV75]

P.S.

Spiritual life is found in fulfilling the measure of creation (the expression of the Lord’s will). Some do this better than others as a function of how they use their agency within the constraints that God has allowed. It is His will that some things act and some things are acted upon.

Ideally, physical life and spiritual life go hand in hand. The separation of physical and spiritual life occurs at death and is resumed in the resurrection. Otherwise, God ensures the life of the spirit in the spirit worlds, and a spiritless body (or tissues or cells) may be kept alive through artificial support and without the original spirit’s involvement.

A spirit is the sole force for keeping a physical body alive only when it is granted the power to do so. Otherwise the physical body is subject to additional laws of our temporal, probationary world in order to remain “alive” or become “dead” (and depending on how one defines and uses these terms).

[Maidservant]

This is a good question, and although I had many explorations on this a few years ago, I think I'm about ready for a revamp on my understanding of this information.

I don't know about you, but I am completely aware that my experience as a Being did not start when I was born on this planet, nor will it end when I am finished here. Part of that awareness comes from a deep sense of ludicrousness in what happens here on this planet (both true ludicrousness [i.e. like how exactly do post-it notes fit into God's plan/the grand order of the universe], and the more sad, tragic, what-more-can-we-humans-possibly-do-to-brutalize-each-other ludicrousness).

But what was my substance before I gained a body, and what relationship it has with my body, I do not have a complete understanding on that. I'm not positive that it is as clear cut and dualistic that it has tended to be taught, but I suppose that is still a good place to start. I do think that things like emotions, thoughts, chi energies (etc) are properties of the body, not of the spirit. Also I am heavily influenced by things like the movie The Matrix or my experience entering virtual worlds for fun as I ponder on this a bit.

However, I do know that there is a lot in the scriptures that is very interesting and also very plain, if we'll just look at it. Maybe I'll post a few things on that in a second post here.

[cinepro]

Its a simple analogy and it made sense to me for a long time until I I started learning about human biology. After everything I've learned about the human body, there seems to be an explanation for how most things work, even at the cellular level. All the physiology is governed by natural laws. This got me wondering where the spirit fits into all this. Does the body really need the spirit like the glove analogy tells us? Is there any room for a spirit to be necessary in living things?

All the stuff that we don't understand how it works is the spirit part.

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

This is a fascinating subject, but as the replies here have shown, the only answers to be found are pretty speculative.

Some important things to keep in mind:

1. In Mormonism, God is not ontologically unique. He is one of an infinite number of uncreated Intelligences. There are many, many implications which can be extracted from this view.

2. Because God cannot create or destroy any other Intelligence, they are not contingent on Him for existence, since they've always existed in one form or another. Much of traditional Christianity is predicated on accepting Aristotle's (unscriptural) argument in favor of a First Cause, an ultimate Unmoved Mover, which is the final ground of being. It is an archaic Greek notion that we should only worship this Ultimate Cause, rather than the living person who is our Father - a man who has body, parts, and passions.

3. Mormonism is also quite amenable to materialism (as an epistemic philosophy of being, not the support of rampant consumerism which - because of the similar name - it is often mistaken for). This is because, as D&C 131 states, "there is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; we cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter."

(In the early 1800's, according to Bowler & Morus, only a few decades before Joseph Smith received this revelation, John Dalton had been convinced that "matter might be composed of indivisible particles or atoms [which] went back to the Greeks", setting out to "give the elements a real, physical existence", in contrast to the "corpuscularianism espoused by previous chemical practitioners [and Boyle, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, etc]". He was "convinced that chemical atoms were real. In this he was probably in the minority[, as] certainly by the middle of the nineteenth century, few chemists took the physical reality of atoms seriously." Joseph Smith, then, by saying that all existence was physical, was operating at the cutting edge of the science of his day.)

So everything is “matter”. Everything is “spirit”. They are different names for different aspects of the same thing. It is impossible for there to be an ontological duality between incorporeal disembodied “mind” which exists in a separate realm outside of space and time and the physically-existing world. As Joseph Smith put it in the King Follett Discourse:

“Now I ask all who hear me why the learned men who are preaching salvation say that God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing. The reason is they are unlearned. They account it blasphemy to contradict the idea; they will call you a fool … The word ‘create’ came from the word baurau; it does not mean ‘to create out of nothing’; it means ‘to organize’, the same as a man would organize materials to build a ship. Hence we infer that God had materials to organize the world out of chaos - chaotic matter, which is element, and in which dwells all the glory. Element had an existence from the time He had. The pure principles of element are principles that can never be destroyed; they may be organized and reorganized but not destroyed.”

Here we should also note D&C 88:15, “and the spirit and the body are the soul of man."

So with this background, Mormonism is in a rather interesting theological place in regards to the spirit.

To riff off of the hand-and-glove idea: I can look at my hand and think of it as a single "thing"; yet I know that this "singular" thing is also a collection of smaller "things". The hand is composed of skin and cartilage, bones and sinew, blood and fat, etc. Yet even those biological materials are composed of smaller cells, each one of which is made of a plasma membrane, nucleus, golgi vesicles, etc. Yet the DNA in the nucleus is composed of even smaller elements - the "atoms", composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Yet the protons are composed of quarks ... Etc.

The point is, we simply don't know how far down it goes. We don't know what forces are the "cause" of things. We can't yet "see" it all; yet even though we cannot "see" (with our current eyes) the smaller particles which we are composed of, by searching with our "purer" eyes (Hadron colliders, for instance!) we can start to understand their effects. As Freeman Dyson states:

"There is a strict lack of determination in the microscopic world, so I think that may not be a coincidence, that it looks something like Free Will. I mean, it’s not, of course, I’m not saying that electrons actually has a consciousness of the kind that we have, but it probably has the rudiments of a consciousness, and, and, and in some rudimentary sense every atom has a mind, and, and then, what the brain is simply some sort of apparatus for amplifying the molecules, and amplifying the choices that are made by individual molecules and converting them onto the scale of human beings. So that seems to me to be very plausible, that the existence of quantum mechanics has something to do with the existence of human consciousness. Of course, that point of view is very unpopular among biologists; most biologists think quantum mechanics has nothing to do with it, but anyway, I beg to differ.

The sort of traditional God is thought of as outside of space and time; He sees everything, understands everything, knows everything, and He’s also omnipotent very often, but my God is different - He’s part of the universe, He evolves with the universe, He doesn’t know what’s going to happen, so His knowledge increases as time goes on. So He’s in doubt just as we are, and, and, of course, our contributions are in fact His, His growth, I mean, He grows through the contributions of creatures like us.”

Obviously Dyson is not a Mormon (though he studied the Mormon emigration to Utah when theorizing about space colonization costs!), but his point may be well-applied to our understanding of deity: his version of God, unlike many others, is compatible with the natural world. We simply don't have the technology yet to falsify the existence of the spirit; that's where faith comes in, though of course this may always be seen as a "God of the gaps" excuse, as Cinepro so eloquently attests. We are asked to trust that God, who presumably does have enough knowledge to verify its existence, has entrusted to us a simplified version of it in order to give us a basis for action.

In other words, what Joseph Smith gives us is scriptural support to the idea that we are utterly uncreated, and therefore responsible for our own actions. Our lives are not predestined; we have no Original Sin. We are free to make of ourselves what we wish. Through some chain of dominoes which we don't yet fully understand, God has sent us to inhabit our current homo sapiens bodies. From the doctrines of the Restoration, we can say that He did this in much the way that our parents do: by initiating a natural process of "creation" - creation not from "nothing", but rather by organizing preexisting materials into different shapes by following natural laws. He has also given us the means by which are able to judge whether He is acting in our best interests even though we are currently unable to verify even the existence of our fundamental self: He is working to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.

As Nibley writes:

“The creation process as described in the Pearl of Great Price is open-ended and ongoing, entailing careful planning based on vast experience, long consultations, models, tests, and even trial runs for a complicated system requiring a vast scale of participation by the creatures concerned. The whole operation is dominated by the overriding principle of love.”

So how does it all add up? We simply don't know - and we won't know unless we study things out in our minds to a more rigorous degree than we have attempted to this point! So questions like this are excellent! We should stop being so satisfied with the pat explanations we get as kids in Sunday School, while not making the mistake of thinking that whatever speculations we come up with should be binding on others.

I seem to quote this in practically every post, but I love Joseph Smith's saying:

“The things of God are of deep import, and time, and experience, and careful and ponderous and solemn thoughts can only find them out. Thy mind, O man! if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity.”

And as Nibley says in Lecture 93: Physical and Spiritual Bodies & Anthropomorphism:

"All week now, I've had visits, letters, calls, and complaints. People find themselves perplexed, as if their minds were darkened or something. What distresses them is that nobody answers the questions or will touch these things with a forty-foot pole. In the Sunday School everything is on the Creation now. This takes us back to some really elementary questions, and they don't like to handle them.

Usually, if they ask somebody, they are turned off or even rebuked by some local authority. The Stake President or Temple President tells them to [just] accept [their Sunday-school explanations] and not make trouble for themselves or others. That's no good; but if scientists can live with such galling limitations [we can]. As Hawking says, we are going to have to live with them forever. We've just got to make our simplifications; we'll never be able to solve it.

Why can't the priesthood do the same? If we shed our vanity, the limitations aren't galling - they're delightful. There's work to be done, great problems to get with it. Unexplored territory is always the most exciting.

Hawking says a very interesting thing here: "We have seen in this chapter how in less than half a century [that's since I've been at BYU, in other words] man's view of the universe, formed over millennia, has been transformed. Even Einstein's general theory of relativity cannot tell us how the universe started off because it predicts that all physical theories, including itself, break down at the beginning of the universe." This breakdown didn't cause the physicists to resign in disgust - though the head of the Physics Department at Harvard in 1928, in a famous story that's told a lot - told the students that it was all over; there was nothing else more to do. Just as Professor Linforth, my professor at Berkeley in Greek, told me there was nothing else to be done in ancient history. It had all been done, and we knew everything that happened. He actually told me that, and he was the top man in the country in that field."

I believe in evolution, but there are many details about how it fits in with the Plan of Salvation that are still utterly unclear. I believe in spirits (though not many of the stories I've heard of them by people whose judgment I could find no reason to trust) - yet how they fit in with quantum mechanics is still unclear. It seems that in both "religion" and "science", we are dealing with paradigms which are still incomplete. This is where continuing revelation is utterly indispensable: as history has shown, with further learning and understanding, we will no doubt find that our previous ideas of what is "true" will have to be utterly overturned. (Priesthood for women, anyone? *ducks fruit*)

This is the principle of abeyance; there is simply no story, no model, no linguistic construct which can account fully for all phenomena; there are holes and gaps and murky areas in every philosophy, science, and religion. The point is, we should be trying to fill in those gaps by studying it all out in our minds! Reproducible experimentation!

What we are given is enough to go on until we learn enough and develop enough language to comprehend more. But never all the answers; we are eternally-progressing, evolving with every new experience as we study it out in our minds. If we take no thought save to ask God, we'll never be able to learn. Creeds and dogma, whether religious or scientific (and there are plenty of examples of each in current science and religion, even within our own church, unfortunately), are the enemies of truth:

“I cannot believe in any of the creeds of the different denominations, because they all have some things in them I cannot subscribe to, though all of them have some truth. I want to come up into the presence of God, and learn all things; but the creeds set up stakes, and say, ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further’, which I cannot subscribe to.”

“I want the liberty of thinking and believing as I please. It feels so good not to be trammelled.”

- Joseph Smith

Edited October 27, 2011 by JeremyOrbe-Smith

[CV75]

the glove/body can't do anything by itself

I do believe this is correct under strictly religious principle: Our bodies are brought into this world for our spirits to use as part of the probationary step in the plan of salvation. So our bodies are only here because our spirits demand them (so to speak). Our bodies can only dwell in the resurrected state matching the glory of our spirits. I suppose if a body were created without a spirit it would have no purpose or place in exaltation (not to wax Shelleyesque), so ultimately it really can’t do anything of meaning or purpose by itself without a spirit.

[Maidservant]

It is an archaic Greek notion that we should only worship this Ultimate Cause, rather than the living person who is our Father - a man who has body, parts, and passions.

Read the 11th chapter of the Book of Jasher. Utterly hilarious.

[elguanteloko]

There is an object lesson I've seen used in the church several times. It is designed to teach the relationship between the spirit and the body. The teacher would hold up a glove and say that represents the body. The teacher would then hold up his/her hand and say that it is the spirit. He/she would then explain that the the glove/body can't do anything by itself but with the hand/spirit inside, it could then move.

Its a simple analogy and it made sense to me for a long time until I I started learning about human biology. After everything I've learned about the human body, there seems to be an explanation for how most things work, even at the cellular level. All the physiology is governed by natural laws. This got me wondering where the spirit fits into all this. Does the body really need the spirit like the glove analogy tells us? Is there any room for a spirit to be necessary in living things?

Very good question, Rivers. Frankly, the last grasp of any strong (as strong as it has been, at least) concept of the spirit resides in what we know least (not surprisingly - "God of the gaps" comes to mind): that is, consciousness and subjective experiences.

Not that many years ago, chemists used to believe organic molecules were the result of the 'vital force' and people took this to be a spirit or the force of the spirit. Then came the synthesis of urea from inorganic components and (after a while) this gap was filled and the spirit was displaced from chemistry.

Not that many years ago, scientists didn't know how very complex things like the eye and nervous system or muscles had come about and some people thought this was due to God or his powers. Then came evolution through natural selection and random mutation and showed how we can get order out of disorder, complexity from simplicity, and life from non-life (although the specifics of this one aren't very well understood yet as the previous 2 examples are).

Today there are two main gaps that natural theologians and believers still hold on to to make their beliefs appear as more plausible: the origin of the universe and the nature of consciousness or subjective experiences. (Not surprisingly these two happen to be areas we don't understand... a little bit suspicious, isn't it?)

[jo1952]

This is a fascinating subject, but as the replies here have shown, the only answers to be found are pretty speculative.

Some important things to keep in mind:

1. In Mormonism, God is not ontologically unique. He is one of an infinite number of uncreated Intelligences. There are many, many implications which can be extracted from this view.

2. Because God cannot create or destroy any other Intelligence, they are not contingent on Him for existence, since they've always existed in one form or another. Much of traditional Christianity is predicated on accepting Aristotle's (unscriptural) argument in favor of a First Cause, an ultimate Unmoved Mover, which is the final ground of being. It is an archaic Greek notion that we should only worship this Ultimate Cause, rather than the living person who is our Father - a man who has body, parts, and passions.

3. Mormonism is also quite amenable to materialism (as an epistemic philosophy of being, not the support of rampant consumerism which - because of the similar name - it is often mistaken for). This is because, as D&C 131 states, "there is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; we cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter."

(In the early 1800's, according to Bowler & Morus, only a few decades before Joseph Smith received this revelation, John Dalton had been convinced that "matter might be composed of indivisible particles or atoms [which] went back to the Greeks", setting out to "give the elements a real, physical existence", in contrast to the "corpuscularianism espoused by previous chemical practitioners [and Boyle, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, etc]". He was "convinced that chemical atoms were real. In this he was probably in the minority[, as] certainly by the middle of the nineteenth century, few chemists took the physical reality of atoms seriously." Joseph Smith, then, by saying that all existence was physical, was operating at the cutting edge of the science of his day.)

So everything is “matter”. Everything is “spirit”. They are different names for different aspects of the same thing. It is impossible for there to be an ontological duality between incorporeal disembodied “mind” which exists in a separate realm outside of space and time and the physically-existing world. As Joseph Smith put it in the King Follett Discourse:

Here we should also note D&C 88:15, “and the spirit and the body are the soul of man."

So with this background, Mormonism is in a rather interesting theological place in regards to the spirit.

To riff off of the hand-and-glove idea: I can look at my hand and think of it as a single "thing"; yet I know that this "singular" thing is also a collection of smaller "things". The hand is composed of skin and cartilage, bones and sinew, blood and fat, etc. Yet even those biological materials are composed of smaller cells, each one of which is made of a plasma membrane, nucleus, golgi vesicles, etc. Yet the DNA in the nucleus is composed of even smaller elements - the "atoms", composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Yet the protons are composed of quarks ... Etc.

The point is, we simply don't know how far down it goes. We don't know what forces are the "cause" of things. We can't yet "see" it all; yet even though we cannot "see" (with our current eyes) the smaller particles which we are composed of, by searching with our "purer" eyes (Hadron colliders, for instance!) we can start to understand their effects. As Freeman Dyson states:

Obviously Dyson is not a Mormon (though he studied the Mormon emigration to Utah when theorizing about space colonization costs!), but his point may be well-applied to our understanding of deity: his version of God, unlike many others, is compatible with the natural world. We simply don't have the technology yet to falsify the existence of the spirit; that's where faith comes in, though of course this may always be seen as a "God of the gaps" excuse, as Cinepro so eloquently attests. We are asked to trust that God, who presumably does have enough knowledge to verify its existence, has entrusted to us a simplified version of it in order to give us a basis for action.

In other words, what Joseph Smith gives us is scriptural support to the idea that we are utterly uncreated, and therefore responsible for our own actions. Our lives are not predestined; we have no Original Sin. We are free to make of ourselves what we wish. Through some chain of dominoes which we don't yet fully understand, God has sent us to inhabit our current homo sapiens bodies. From the doctrines of the Restoration, we can say that He did this in much the way that our parents do: by initiating a natural process of "creation" - creation not from "nothing", but rather by organizing preexisting materials into different shapes by following natural laws. He has also given us the means by which are able to judge whether He is acting in our best interests even though we are currently unable to verify even the existence of our fundamental self: He is working to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.

As Nibley writes:

So how does it all add up? We simply don't know - and we won't know unless we study things out in our minds to a more rigorous degree than we have attempted to this point! So questions like this are excellent! We should stop being so satisfied with the pat explanations we get as kids in Sunday School, while not making the mistake of thinking that whatever speculations we come up with should be binding on others.

I seem to quote this in practically every post, but I love Joseph Smith's saying:

And as Nibley says in Lecture 93: Physical and Spiritual Bodies & Anthropomorphism:

I believe in evolution, but there are many details about how it fits in with the Plan of Salvation that are still utterly unclear. I believe in spirits (though not many of the stories I've heard of them by people whose judgment I could find no reason to trust) - yet how they fit in with quantum mechanics is still unclear. It seems that in both "religion" and "science", we are dealing with paradigms which are still incomplete. This is where continuing revelation is utterly indispensable: as history has shown, with further learning and understanding, we will no doubt find that our previous ideas of what is "true" will have to be utterly overturned. (Priesthood for women, anyone? *ducks fruit*)

This is the principle of abeyance; there is simply no story, no model, no linguistic construct which can account fully for all phenomena; there are holes and gaps and murky areas in every philosophy, science, and religion. The point is, we should be trying to fill in those gaps by studying it all out in our minds! Reproducible experimentation!

What we are given is enough to go on until we learn enough and develop enough language to comprehend more. But never all the answers; we are eternally-progressing, evolving with every new experience as we study it out in our minds. If we take no thought save to ask God, we'll never be able to learn. Creeds and dogma, whether religious or scientific (and there are plenty of examples of each in current science and religion, even within our own church, unfortunately), are the enemies of truth:

Hi Jeremy,

I just had to tell you how much I enjoyed your post, the information you provided, your thought process, your reasoning, and, especially your open mind. Even though I may not agree with everything you believe (at least due to our definitions--which I think is where we mainly differ), I applaud what you allow your understanding to extend to - which is limitless knowledge not stuck within parameters set by the constructs of man. I have rejoiced in your comments! With our faith placed firmly in Father and our Savior, Jesus Christ, and our minds opened as we sincerely study and seek Truth, we can experience moments of oneness while in our mortal body. During those moments I am not surprised that our current mortal body could not withstand this purity of light for longer than a glimpse unless we are first protected. Thus it is that individuals such as Paul or Alma and others took days to recover from their experiences. Others first receive protection, such as Moses and those who got to witness Christ's Transfiguration, etc.

I think a reason that our leaders (AS leaders) do not allow us to have truly free discussions without limit to be presented AS doctrine [YET], is due to the restraints of very real differences in milk and meat understandings. I have no doubts that such individuals as the ancient Apostles, ancient Prophets (especially those who were taken in visions to view creation(s) past, present, and future), were then forbidden to disclose certain things they learned because the general membership of the church was not ready for it. I also believe that this is exactly how Father works with each of us individually as HE is the one who determines what additional revelation we are ready to receive; and the Holy Ghost immediately obeys Him and opens our spiritual minds. This would also explain why there are many times when I receive what I like to refer to as epiphanies, at which time I also receive the very distinct message that what has been revealed to me is NOT for general discussion - though I have felt impressed at certain times, that it IS okay to discuss the contents of these experiences with specific individuals. IOW, I somehow KNOW that it is okay because Father is telling me they will understand; and we are thus able to discuss and edify one another. This also works the other way around; i.e., they will discuss things with me which have been revealed to them. Nothing that has been revealed in this way has ever contradicted any previously revealed Truth. This, btw, is one of the tests I use to make sure that I am not labeling something as truth which is not actually truth. Rather, this knowledge always supports and adds upon what I already know.

I know that I have said this before; but it always seems applicable when I repeat it. I believe that the greatest dis-service Orthodoxy has done to mankind is to place God inside of their man-made box, along with their fear-based restrictions for people to NOT believe anything which disagrees with their constructs. They have even managed to make people afraid of the Holy Ghost. Thus their understandings remain fixed without the possibility of growth. OTOH, one of the most wonderful things about the LDS Church is how she encourages and teaches individuals to SEEK the Holy Ghost; giving endless instruction on how to do this and how to learn to discern Him. This is a most beautiful thing to do, and also a way for a sincerely seeking investigator to recognize that the LDS Church is indeed being led by God. Fortunately for many individuals who are members of Orthodox denominations, they have recognized that the Holy Ghost CAN be discerned and trusted; thus they allow themselves to be guided by Him; which then prepares them to receive more personal revelation whenever Father deems they are ready. They do not need to be a member of the LDS Church to receive Truth which they are ready for. We do NOT have exclusivity to ALL Truth.

Regards,

jo

[Cobalt-70]

There is an object lesson I've seen used in the church several times. It is designed to teach the relationship between the spirit and the body. The teacher would hold up a glove and say that represents the body. The teacher would then hold up his/her hand and say that it is the spirit. He/she would then explain that the the glove/body can't do anything by itself but with the hand/spirit inside, it could then move.

Its a simple analogy and it made sense to me for a long time until I I started learning about human biology. After everything I've learned about the human body, there seems to be an explanation for how most things work, even at the cellular level. All the physiology is governed by natural laws. This got me wondering where the spirit fits into all this. Does the body really need the spirit like the glove analogy tells us? Is there any room for a spirit to be necessary in living things?

The human body does not need an internal "puppet" in order to think and act. I think the best way to envision Spirit is to understand it as information. Matter is information too--there is nothing unique about the particular protons, neutrons, and electrons that make up our body. They are all mathematically interchangeable. The only thing that makes your material body different from mine is the information stored in the matter of our bodies. You could think of Spirit the informational content of our bodies. The afterlife could be understood as a repository, other than our bodies, in which the information that defines us is retained after we die. It is simply a "backup copy." Without getting too technical, perhaps we could imagine our Spirit as a copy of us that is quantum mechanically entangled with our brains. Or not. Maybe the information content of our bodies is simply stored on God's hard drive and paradise is a program running on some vast computer. It all makes for good science fiction.

What we do know, however, is that there is no separate conscious entity that serves as a "puppet" for our brain. Our brain embodies our consciousness. If our consciousness is also stored elsewhere, then that "stored" version is not really "us," unless and until we die and suddenly a "backup copy" becomes active that retains our memories.

[Cobalt-70]

There is an object lesson I've seen used in the church several times. It is designed to teach the relationship between the spirit and the body. The teacher would hold up a glove and say that represents the body. The teacher would then hold up his/her hand and say that it is the spirit. He/she would then explain that the the glove/body can't do anything by itself but with the hand/spirit inside, it could then move.

Its a simple analogy and it made sense to me for a long time until I I started learning about human biology. After everything I've learned about the human body, there seems to be an explanation for how most things work, even at the cellular level. All the physiology is governed by natural laws. This got me wondering where the spirit fits into all this. Does the body really need the spirit like the glove analogy tells us? Is there any room for a spirit to be necessary in living things?

The human body does not need an internal "puppeteer" in order to think and act. I think the best way to envision Spirit is to understand it as information. Matter is information too--there is nothing unique about the particular protons, neutrons, and electrons that make up our body. They are all mathematically interchangeable. The only thing that makes your material body different from mine is the information stored in the matter of our bodies. You could think of Spirit the informational content of our bodies. The afterlife could be understood as a repository, other than our bodies, in which the information that defines us is retained after we die. It is simply a "backup copy." Without getting too technical, perhaps we could imagine our Spirit as a copy of us that is quantum mechanically entangled with our brains. Or not. Maybe the information content of our bodies is simply stored on God's hard drive and paradise is a program running on some vast computer. It all makes for good science fiction.

What we do know, however, is that there is no separate conscious entity that serves as a "puppeteer" for our brain. Our brain embodies our consciousness. If our consciousness is also stored elsewhere, then that "stored" version is not really "us," unless and until we die and suddenly a "backup copy" becomes active that retains our memories.

Edited October 28, 2011 by Cobalt-70

[wenglund]

Can I just caution against taking instructional metaphors, typically geared towards the youth and new members, too far--i.e. beyond the simple principles intended to be conveyed.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

Edited October 28, 2011 by wenglund

[elguanteloko]

I think the best way to envision Spirit is to understand it as information. Matter is information too --there is nothing unique about the particular protons, neutrons, and electrons that make up our body. They are all mathematically interchangeable. The only thing that makes your material body different from mine is the information stored in the matter of our bodies. You could think of Spirit the informational content of our bodies.

could you please elaborate what you are trying to say here? this doesn't make any sense to me. You say at one point that matter is information but that it contains information, you say that particular protons and neutros are "mathematically interchangeable" as if someone claimed this should make a difference (as opposed to structures being what matters in our bodies and brains), etc. I really don't see what you are saying here.

[altersteve]

JeremyOrbe-Smith, that was probably the best post I've seen on this discussion board.

[Calm]

. (Priesthood for women, anyone? *ducks fruit*)

If you enjoy collecting fruit, may I suggest pointing out the logical inconsistency of believing that it would be less than paradise for a man to not be able to continue to love all the women he committed himself to in mortality....to force him to choose who he loves most, but the opposite is true for women so that choosing only one of the men she chose to be one flesh with in mortality while turning her back on any other such relationship is the highest expression of love for her so that while a man's sealings can be all in force at once, for women one sealing is in force and the rest are less that the paper they are recorded upon.

Sometimes it is just fun watching guys' faces turn red...or green depending on their temperament.

[Nofear]

[The hand and glove is] a simple analogy and it made sense to me for a long time until I I started learning about human biology. After everything I've learned about the human body, there seems to be an explanation for how most things work, even at the cellular level. All the physiology is governed by natural laws. This got me wondering where the spirit fits into all this. Does the body really need the spirit like the glove analogy tells us? Is there any room for a spirit to be necessary in living things?

While we certainly understand a lot more about our biological mechanisms... there is still a heck of a lot we don't know about how our body functions. That said, I fully reject Cinepro's jab of spirit being all the gaps as it were -- with one exception: free willed consciousness.

Humanity has yet to form any functional theory about how consciousness arises from biology. For Mormons, this consciousness needs to arise from an interaction of our spirit body with our physical body (unless one adopts a spirit as information type model such as outlined by Cobalt-70 and some of the members of the Mormon Transhumanist Association). But this is a tricky thing because we need to have the physical mind and the spirit mind intimately interact and yet not allow spirit matter to casually interact with physical matter (otherwise we'd see the spirit world). I have yet to see any model from we Mormons to adequately deal with this kind of challenge. One day. I echo JeremyOrde-Smith's assertion, "The point is, we should be trying to fill in those gaps by studying it all out in our minds!"

PS: If you are interested in how viable it is to reject the hand and glove argument this is basically discussed by non-lds philosophers with their "zombie" arguments. Some of the reasonings are directly portable to Mormonism.

Edited October 28, 2011 by Nofear

[Rivers]

This is the principle of abeyance; there is simply no story, no model, no linguistic construct which can account fully for all phenomena; there are holes and gaps and murky areas in every philosophy, science, and religion. The point is, we should be trying to fill in those gaps by studying it all out in our minds! Reproducible experimentation!

What we are given is enough to go on until we learn enough and develop enough language to comprehend more. But never all the answers;

"He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end." (Ecc. 3:11)

[Nofear]

"He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end." (Ecc. 3:11)

D&C 121:26-31

26 God shall give unto you ^aknowledge by his Holy ^bSpirit, yea, by the unspeakable ^cgift of the Holy Ghost, that has not been ^drevealed since the world was until now;

27 Which our forefathers have awaited with ^aanxious expectation to be revealed in the last times, which their minds were pointed to by the angels, as held in reserve for the fulness of their glory;

28 A time to come in the which ^anothing shall be withheld, whether there be ^bone God or many ^cgods, they shall be manifest.

29 All thrones and dominions, principalities and powers, shall be ^arevealed and set forth upon all who have endured ^bvaliantly for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

30 And also, if there be ^abounds set to the heavens or to the seas, or to the dry land, or to the sun, moon, or stars—

31 All the times of their revolutions, all the appointed days, months, and years, and all the days of their days, months, and years, and all their ^aglories, laws, and set times, shall be revealed in the days of the ^bdispensation of the fulness of times—

D&C 101:32-34 is good too. Seems cosmology might outpace geology.

[Deborah]

What an interesting question. I've used the hand in glove analogy with little children but as we know it's more complicated than that.

I think our spirits inhabit our bodies to try to prepare them to become more perfect (using the definition of whole) in preparation for the next life. I have observed that many people who live hard lives, drinking, smoking, immorality, begin to look old before their time and their bodies reflect their lifestyles. Now of course we can say the chemical reactions of harmful substances would have an affect but there is more than just this, especially when you look into someone's eyes. Even people who have devastating illnesses which have ravaged their bodies can have a look of peace. To me this is the spirit having its effect in either succumbing to the desires of the body or overcoming it.

[shalamabobbi]

That said, I fully reject Cinepro's jab of spirit being all the gaps as it were -- with one exception: free willed consciousness.

Free will seems to be the strongest support for something beyond the matter/materialist/reductionist worldview.

There is no basis for free will. Everything obeys laws that are deterministic. Even QM behaves without variation according to statistically deterministic outcomes.

I view intelligence not being created or made as a reference to free will being a primal reality that can't be reduced and built up from anything more fundamental.

That being said, I'm all for trying to prove the opposite if possible with science. I think artificial consciousness will be the most intriguing/interesting front for science in the next few decades.

There is a strict lack of determination in the microscopic world, so I think that may not be a coincidence, that it looks something like Free Will. I mean, it’s not, of course, I’m not saying that electrons actually has a consciousness of the kind that we have, but it probably has the rudiments of a consciousness, and, and, and in some rudimentary sense every atom has a mind, and, and then, what the brain is simply some sort of apparatus for amplifying the molecules, and amplifying the choices that are made by individual molecules and converting them onto the scale of human beings.

I'm not sure how consciousness could be shown to play into the atomic realm unless Dyson thinks that atoms are doing something different when we are not watching them.

There is a strict lack of causality in the microscopic world BUT on average the behavior is deterministic.

[jo1952]

One side of the discussion going on here which has not been approached is this: Satan's campaign to be chosen as the savior of our world was one which removed our free will from us. If this was indeed a possible option (i.e., removing a person's free will--and I have no reason to believe that it was not an option), then how do we reconcile our current explanations for what we are observing as manifestation of natural laws which need no intervention from God if the absence of free will had been the approved of version to be used in the Plan of Salvation? I certainly don't believe it was Satan's desire to use an impossibe option which caused Father to choose Jesus over Lucifer; it was his greed and desire to become more powerful and to receive the glory for himself rather than to give glory to the Father. So, all of this belief in natural law which many claim through theories such as evolution, are not possible to disturb because they ARE naturally occurring.....how could free will have been removed from the picture and still allowed natural law to proceed without intervention from God?

Regards,

jo

[Calm]

Think of a situation where there is no law and thus no eternal consequences to our behavior. We have no agency to choose God in this case because we are never given the chance to choose in the first place. No matter what we did, in the end Lucifer would make the choice for us. Think of it as attending a great school, perhaps some students devote themselves to learning just because they are curious but there is no real structure to the institution, no organized lessons, no one trained to be teachers that we can seek out for instruction. At the end of our attendance we all line up and are all granted the same diploma of graduation no matter what we have done...including those who chose to devote their efforts solely to making others' lives a living he-ll. And there is no appeal to some outside force to either interfere or judge us on our merits, etc. And remember this place is set up without consequences so even if one overindulges or commits horrors or if one is kind and generous to others there is no aftermath, life continues on just the same; certainly no one is helped by any positive behaviour, no one suffers because they chosen something that would be destructive in our world.

In what way can free will be said to exist in such a place?

[Cobalt-70]

could you please elaborate what you are trying to say here? this doesn't make any sense to me. You say at one point that matter is information but that it contains information, you say that particular protons and neutros are "mathematically interchangeable" as if someone claimed this should make a difference (as opposed to structures being what matters in our bodies and brains), etc. I really don't see what you are saying here.

I'm saying that the only thing that makes one clump of matter mathematically distinguishable from any other clump of matter is the information content stored in that matter. There is no scientific experiment you could possibly conduct to distinguish one electron from another electron, except for the information stored within it, such as its energy, momentum, position, etc. If you took all the information from your body and moved it to another clump of matter, then that other clump of matter would be mathematically indistinguishable from you, and thus would be you. This is what happens during teleportation. (Scientists have already teleported small groups of atoms, so this is all standard physics, but teleporting something as large as a human would be infeasible with any conceivable technology.)

What makes you or I distinct individuals is not the matter itself, but the information stored in that matter. So if there is anything within us that is a "spirit," it would be that information. So I'm saying that even though we know that our bodies do not need an inner "puppeteer" to function, there is according to modern physics something within the matter of our bodies that makes each of us an individual, and that could be called a "spirit." Also, if there is an "other us" that survives death, then that "us" must be a "backup copy" of the informational content of the matter in our brains. Otherwise, when our brains die, the information contained in our brain is lost.