Posted: Jun 25, 2010 6:11 pm
Shrunk wrote:
Is light considered "something"? I would think it would be, but of course I wouldn't be surprised if Muhammed got that wrong.
Photons or electromagnetic waves are physical somethings, but I doubt that any physicist will affirm that there could be conscious living beings solely consisting of light.
By the way, the philosophical notion of an angel is that of a completely nonphysical being, while the notions of angels and other spirits one finds in religious folk mythology are ones of "paraphysical" beings:
"We commonly think that we, as persons, have both a mental and a bodily dimension—or mental aspects and material aspects. Something like this dualism of personhood, I believe, is common lore shared across most cultures and religious traditions, although it is seldom articulated in the form of an explicit set of doctrines as in modern western philosophy and some developed theologies. It is often part of this 'folk dualism' that we are able to survive bodily deaths, as souls or spirits, and retain all or most of the mental aspects of ourselves, such as memory, the capacity for thought and volition, and traits of character and personality, long after our bodies have crumbled to dust.
Spirits and souls as conceived in popular lore seem not be entirely without physical properties, if only vestigially physical ones, and are not what Descartes and other philosophical dualists would call souls or minds—wholly immaterial and nonphysical substances with no physical properties whatever. For example, souls are commonly said to leave the body when a person dies and rise upward toward heaven, indicating that they are thought to have, and be able to change, locations in physical space. And they can be heard and seen, we are told, by people endowed with special powers and in an especially propitious frame of mind. Souls are sometimes pictured as balls of bright light, causing the air to stir as they glide through space and even emitting faint unearthly sounds. But souls and spirits depicted in stories and literature, and in films, are not the immaterial minds of the serious dualist. These latter souls are wholly immaterial and entirely outside physical space."
(Kim, Jaegwon. Physicalism or Something Near Enough. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. p. 73)