In my view, humans are a composite of mind and body, and both these have their own matter and form. As for spirit, I see this as an eternal continuation of these outside space-time and natural law.
Understanding the matter and form of body and mind are made difficult by their dynamic nature. These are not objects like a chair where the material and form are fixed, but more an event like entity such as a hurricane or tornado. The material composition is not only constantly changing but of much less significance than the dynamic process. This is even more true of the mind than the body which is almost like it is at a higher abstract/meta level of organization. While the substance of the body is actual molecules however dynamic they may be, the substance of the mind is language which learned neurological structures and even more event oriented.
I agree that sex is not evil. I believe in what is told as the words of Jesus regarding marriage, interpreted so that it includes marital life. In addition, the lack of reproduction is a logical companion to living eternally - reproduction without death leads finally to suffering.
Despite my belief about this detail, I do accept the suggestion that after resurrection, we may experience much that we cannot even guess now. Not marital life or reproduction but something else.
I want to understand this before trying to dig into the rest. I can’t tell if you are advocating for dualism or hylemorphism? Or are you saying mind and body are both material? I guess I am confused because if the mind is reduced to the brain, I am seeing a redundancy.
I think we use substance, form and matter in a different sense that would lead to confusion. Let’s use the example of a red bouncy ball. I would describe this red bouncy ball as I would any other substance (a tennis ball, a tree, a human): it is a composite of form and matter. The matter or material is the rubber (polymers) it is made of and the form is being round and red. You are calling the matter the substance. I do not use that term in that way. A red bouncy ball cannot be be fully defined as molecules without reference to their organization.The rubber itself (molecules) could be a cube, a shoe, an eraser or something else. Form also cannot fully define the ball either. You can’t bounce red or bounce roundness.
So this is the sense in which I I say a red bouncy ball (substance) is a composite of form and matter. This is hylomorphism in a nutshell. In the same sense I say a human is a composite of form and matter whereas the matter is the physical material making us up which includes our brains and the soul is the organizing principle or form of the human being. I also believe our intellect–when it comes to concepts like “triangularity”–is not something material. Thus, for me, what you define as mind and spirit would probably be merged.
I have a weakness of saying my opinions sometimes too directly, especially when I am tired. Although I may have written in a too uncharitable way, that does not change that I see a weakness in the way how ‘freedom’ was defined.
We may define the word ‘freedom’ in different ways. The definition I was thinking could be: "Freedom is the power of a sentient being to exercise its will*.
Freedom could also be defined as “the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved”. This latter definition might be a bit closer to the Thomistic perspective in the sense that a free person is not enslaved by sin.
The hypothesis that there are objective ends towards which a human is oriented is something I can accept through faith. God has a plan and I believe that will happen. Yet, it is a matter of faith, not a logical necessity. If we define freedom as doing what a human should do according to our faith, we have a skewed definition of the term ‘freedom’. Defining the term through “what it objectively means to be a human being” is also tied to a religious opinion about what a human being is (tied to personal faith). So not really ‘objectively’ but ‘according to my belief’.
dualism? No. Not actual dualism but only at most effective dualism. I am pretty much a physicalist on the mind-body problem, but not in the broader sense of thinking everything is physical.
hylemorphism? Yes. Well modified anyway.
Both are material AND form… The important point being they are different things rather than merely aspects of the same thing. The mind is not the form of the body, and the body is not the material of the mind. The effective dualism is that mind and body are two different living organisms with their own needs and inheritance – interdependent sure as is frequently the case with living organisms. So the mind is definitely NOT reduced to the brain.
Not surprising. While I see much value in Aristotle’s hylomorphism, what I believe is definitely a reformulation in terms of modern science. I think ancient Greek philosophy was too language bound and a lot of its conclusions were essentially artifacts of language rather than an accurate description of reality. I think modern science has provided a means of seeing reality apart from language and human perception. And I see a pattern in its discoveries which is very much like hylomorphism – many different forms of a single substance – energy.
You just did use it in that way when you said the matter of the ball is the rubber.
The reality is that the red color is an additive and the bounce a property of the rubber while the roundness is from the shape it was solidified in. In this way, science helps us go beyond the mere langauge, showing us that things are not nouns to which adjectives have been attached.
And I say the only organizing principle are the mathematical space-time laws of nature, which act according to current substance, structure, and dynamics. But within that framework, living organisms develop their own “organizing principles” encoded in their own substance. For biological organisms this is in the chemistry of molecules like DNA and for the human mind it is in the dynamics of human language concepts and choices. You call some of those things by words such as “soul” if you want, but none of evidence supports the existence of some non-physical thing giving life or personhood to the person. All of it is traceable to measurable physical structure and dynamic physical processes.
I am Christian not because I believe in some magical alternative to science making everything work but only because I don’t think the natural/physical is the limit of reality. But just because I think reality is more, doesn’t mean I think it is part of how things work. I believe in what the evidence shows but not that the evidence shows everything which exists.
You are correct in this. I believe one reason for such behaviour is that those people do not really know God. After the resurrection, we can truly know God and that matters.
I also believe that many of the motives behind such bad decisions are tied to the desires of this mortal life. If not lusts, then perhaps fears, like the fears of not being accepted otherwise or being killed. If we are released from some of those desires and fears, that gives us more freedom - we are not anymore slaved by the strong emotional reactions in our mortal being.
When I say this, it does not mean that I would think that our bodies are somehow bad.
I think it is primarily because we are creatures of habit. IOW we are self programming entities, making choices of how to program our own reactions to events. The difficulties of changing such programming is the reason for considerable skepticism that people can change. And people actually changing is the greatest of miracles.
No it is not knowledge which changes people. It is a miracle. It is God. Not the knowledge of God, but the action of a real and living God who participates in the events of the world.