Okay, what do we typically mean by a soul, at least nowadays? By the word soul, most of us would use that word almost interchangeably with the word mind. We seem to operate implicitly by what Herbert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor call the dualist sorting. That is, we take as our default assumption that all things can be assigned to one of two exhaustive categories.

The mental or the material, or we might even say the physical.

On the one hand, there are ordinary attributes we find among physical objects, their location, their velocity, their mass, their charge when we're doing science.

On the other hand,

there are mental attributes such as thinking, willing, qualitative consciousness, etc. The former

are revealed by objective, quantitative methods of the natural sciences, whereas the latter are

accessible only through the first person awareness of some consciousness or other. That is, there are two distinct

aspects to the world, the mental and the physical, or so the story goes. I clearly have physical

attributes. I weigh 81 kilograms. I'm traveling at 30 kilometers per second along with the rest

of the earth, around the sun. I am located within a few meters of Professor

Johnston, et cetera. It is equally clear that I also have conscious or mental attributes. I am

thinking about the philosophy of mind. I see various colors. I believe today is Thursday,

and so forth. Though it has been claimed otherwise by various metaphysicians over the centuries,

it is hard to go in for the notion that attributes float freely from the things of which they are the attributes.

For example, where we find red, we also find an object or a substance to use the philosopher's term, that is red.

Attributes are ways of being. So for each case or instance of an attribute, there must be a

substance that is that way. What is the substance that exists in the ways that I just mentioned

as among my physical attributes? Well, it is pretty obvious that it is my body, this organism,

that weighs 81 kilograms, is traveling through space, and is located obvious that it is my body, this organism, that weighs 81 kilograms, is

traveling through space, and is located a few meters from Professor Johnston.

That is, it is a physical substance, my body, that has my physical attributes.

What has my mental or conscious attributes?

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