Robbie: Your explanation helps me understand better what you meant: I think I agree with every aspect of your interpretation of the comic.

Nick: You wrote: "Moreover, I also think nearly everything constantly changes and would count self-identity as a resemblance as well, which may be going farther than Nate." I agree emphatically that self-identity is a resemblance, though I am a fairly recent convert to this position.

hb: I'll address only your second comment, though it is not a comment on the interest or worth of your first. Just seems simpler.

"'A provisional, temporary continuity of causes.' This explanation strikes me as a faulty and imprecise explanation of what's happening in your example of DNA. What are these causes, exactly? Of what sort are they?"

I think I could better answer this question if I had any idea what you found faulty or imprecise about my explanation. Unfortunately, that brief sentence of mine is a rather powerful personal code: it has so much meaning bound up in it to me that I'm not sure how useful I'm able to be in fully explicating what I mean by it to another party. I'll hazard into some very general pictures to try to illustrate my meaning.

I mean to say that the expanding ripples following a pebble thrown into a body of water have what I might venture to call formal similarity. That first ripple causes a dozen others, very like it, to procreate outwards. But there's no thinghood to the ripples: they're just a chain of causes, with resemblances created by the particularities of their causation: mathematical relationships that hold for a while, then fade into noise.

DNA is like this, too, though it is, of course, remarkable for the strength of its thrust forward through time. It can cause so many recurrences of similarities that it can look like self-persistence on a short time-line, though from any broader perspective it begins to look exactly like Robbie's God's-eye.

No plans to come to DC anytime, though I might visit the mainland over Christmas vacation. I live in Honolulu now. I actually would like to visit, but haven't had the chance.

Actually, I think the comic is talking about an idea of the soul (or lack thereof) similar to Buddhism or Hume (or Simmias from the "Phaedo"). I don't see the Aristotle connection, but then again, I probably wouldn't even if it was there.

The "absurd fears" are whatever fears that keep people from donating their organs. I think some people still identify themselves with their body even after they die. They can't stand the thought of being in the grave and eaten by worms. Similarly, they can't stand the idea of being divided up and given to others.

And yeah, Robbie and I are probably coming from the place, though I would say Zhuang Zi is more philosophical than poetical--though of course he writes beautifully, and surprisingly clearly.

I have to say I don't see the appeal of immortality (except in Zhuang Zi's sense, which I don't actually think is relevant to the comic). I'm not sure xkcd does either. Any case, you're certainly right Zhuang Zi's immortality is not similar to Aristotle's. I just think it fits immortality-through-organ-donation better than Aristotle's.

But whatever. It's only a comic strip, and we already knew we liked different philosophers.

Maybe I'll try it like this.

Nate: "A provisional, temporary continuity of causes." This explanation strikes me as a faulty and imprecise explanation of what's happening in your example of DNA. What are these causes, exactly? Of what sort are they?

I think this question has bearing on Robbie's "infinitely differentiated" idea. Robbie, would you say that this notion extends to individuals? That is, that the plant from ten minutes ago is not the same this as the plant right now? And, if so, why is it different?

I think your interpretation of the girl's motives is not so different from mine, Nate. I agree that the lego lesson primarily serves to remove the obstacle. I only emphasized the altruism because I take it that the absence of an obstacle is not sufficient to account for a positive action. Presumably she's ordinary enough to think, even fairly passively, that it's a good thing to help somebody who needs it, and the "negative" force of obstacle-removing allows this otherwise dormant notion to be expressed in action.

And I think there's something important to the larger conversation in your reference to the smallness of "the timeline of our own perception."

Take, say, a dog and a bear. (Or whatever other two species you like.) The distinction is so obvious that the categories seem to define themselves, and doubting their reality seems absurd. But suppose you can line them up along with all of their dead ancestors, going back to their most recent common one, and only then commence your taxonomic effort. Perhaps you'll concede that it's impossible to separate the mass of animals into categories. Or perhaps you'll categorize them, but it will be obvious to you that you're making some arbitrary, or merely functional, decisions in order to do so.

I think more and more that if you could see the world as God sees it, everything would look like this. It doesn't seem quite right to say non-differentiated; infinitely differentiated? In any case, "thinghood" looks different, I think. We're like flatlanders, seeing only two-dimensional cross-sections of three-dimensional figures, and concluding things about them that are consequences of our limited perspective as much as they are of the things themselves.

I should confess, in case it wasn't obvious, that my angle on this may be similar to Nick's in that most of my doubt has been provoked by certain Eastern (especially Indian) thinkers. (Incidentally I think Zhuang Zi is great in a lot of ways but that his bearing here is more poetic than strictly philosophical.) The Buddhists basically reject this sort of "soul" (or at least most of them do, including the earliest), and even suggest that deeply penetrating this truth is central to ending one's suffering; and most of the orthodox Indian schools take this to be nonsense. For myself, I don't know which side to take, but I find both pretty compelling in different ways. (And I wrote some about the Buddhist position over here.)

Nick,

Thanks! Due in March. Where are you these days? Any plans to come to our nation's capital?

On the comic: I just don't see any context for absurd fears in the text. Where are you getting this? Why do we suppose that the girl had them before?

On the metaphysics: Good to know some folks are reliable. It's interesting to know about those other perspectives, although I should be clear that their connections to the comic are on the same level as I perceive Aristotle's to be, namely, I'm asserting the connections because the comic reminded me of his account of the soul. For the record, Aristotle's answer to the "where's Grandpa?" question is likely to be "nowhere," too, so it's not really right to say that this response alone answers the question of whether the soul is more than simply arrangement, although it certainly is this, too. In fact, as I said above, for Aristotle it's not ever going to be right to say that a soul would ever exist "independently" if you mean this to say "independent of the body."

On immortality: it seems pretty clear to me that the immortality Aristotle's speaking of, the sort that one might have by means of one's children, or organs, is only a partial sort. To me, the obvious frailness of this thing we might call immortality underscores the very real destructibility of the soul, and indeed the necessary destruction of each of our souls. On why it might be correct in some sense to talk about this pale thing as immortality, after a fashion, well, that's clearly not going to match up with Zuang Zi's transformation.

Reading the comments, I agree with Nate (an honor you can most certainly decline-most do). I don't see any connection to Aristotle, but was reminded of the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta where the soul is compared to fire, being merely an arrangement of conditions, not something existing independently. The caption, "Dad, where is Grandpa now?" strengthens that, since the presumed answer is nowhere, just like fire after it is extinguished is nowhere.

I also don't see any relation to immortality. If you really want immortality, I guess you could side with Zhuang Zi and say death is a transformation of the arrangement of your matter (v. chapter 6), but I don't see that in the comic. Getting rid of absurd fears about donating organs seems more to the point.

And, like Nate, I think we only say things have essential characteristics because we view them on a short time scale (and we often ignore exceptions). Most things have "family resemblances" and nothing more. Moreover, I also think nearly everything constantly changes and would count self-identity as a resemblance as well, which may be going farther than Nate.

But the real reason I wrote was to congratulate you on becoming a prospective partaker in immortality. So congratulations.

Nate:

On the poetic interpretation, I admit I have a hard time imagining what barriers there would be to organ donation, so it's difficult for me to read one in the comic. On the order of principle, I'm only familiar with Jehovah's Witnesses (I think). Are there others? The other barrier I can imagine is something like ignorance: people don't want to think about death and thus sort of don't get around to positively deciding to be organ donors. Thus, when they have their ignorance lifted, they can feel more comfortable examining the possibility of organ donation, such that they might decide to do it? Is this more what you mean?

Even then, the presentation of the comic makes the train of the girl's reasoning seem to me both positive and negative, to use your terms. Specifically, the striking thing about the comic is how quickly the girl makes the entirely unstated connection from arrangement of legos, to arrangement of bodies, to a choice to make her arrangement continue in some fashion. Perhaps we can read some earlier conversation on organ donation into the comic, or some earlier resistance to it on her part, including possibly quasi-willful ignorance. Even if the last explanation were so, I feel that, after having this true thing revealed about the soul's destructibility (and recall that Aristotle would agree with Munroe on this point), there's a positive thrust that leads her to do what she does, distinct from the stripping away either of ignorance or a belief in the soul's immortality. Put another way, even after we did all this good negative work, Robbie's "why not?" explanation for organ donation seems pretty frail, and the context of the comic--this big reveal, this cataclysmic moment, in which she does all this theoretic work about connecting the destruction of form in general to destruction of humans to her destruction--puts that frailness further relief. The artist shows her doing this thing, not any number of others. Like I said, we can fault her or call her wrong, but the purely negative explanation seems inadequate to providing the simplest or the most complete explanation of the art.

(I think Munroe, like Lucretius, can take the teasing on the evangelistic streak in his materialism.)

As to your other concerns: those, too, seem like very fair statements of the problem. (I'm not certain I follow the reasoning of your last paragraph, if you mean to give souled a positive meaning. If you're pointing to the inadequacy of that category by showing that it can apply to all matter, however, then that's a likewise fair device.) It seems like both you and Robbie are pushing concerns about the metaphysical category of form (formal cause, thinghood, etc.), which has to be a living question for all people, I think. I'm not sure how to get at thinking together about them in this forum at this time. The DNA example you and Robbie both cite might be a starting point, but I suspect we really need to talk about the metaphysical questions, not the biology, there.

I'll just say that understanding Aristotle's thinking on the question of thinghood isn't easy, but he does go into the question in a likewise fair manner. Maybe I'll have the good luck of seeing a comic while reading the Metaphysics sometime soon.

HB wrote:

"Somehow it holds that form within itself, or perhaps holds itself to this form. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to say that it grows or dies. Likewise wouldn’t be able to call it as this, at all."

And in a later comment:

"Somehow over the course of generations, that same form persists: it is at work being itself."

This was the kind of reasoning I used throughout college to try to understand and argue for the existence of things like souls or selves that were somehow different from matter. I wonder, six years out, if there is any truth in this focus on thises that is not related to man, language, and his perception. Much is frequently made of the necessity for there to be things that precede our ability to point at them and say this, yet the actual evidence for that seems to me to be entirely lacking.

When we say that the form of a tree persists throughout generations, we mean, of course, that what we consider to be the essential or even definitional characteristics of the tree reappear in subsequent generations, whereas the accidental characteristics continually change. Naturalists spend much energy trying to get our opinions about what is essential to match the agenda of the plants themselves, and continually revise these definitions. And DNA, of course, helps us see even more obviously what is actually the form of the tree: a provisional, temporary continuity of causes. There is no single thing that persists, rather a root cause that creates the long-term recurrence of many attributes of a thing. But there is no true stasis of thinghood: it's just close enough, and the timeline of our own perception small enough, that we think of it as thing.

But from the perspective of thinghood, the lego house is as souled as a pile of legos as it is when it is a house, and our inclination to talk about the arrangement of the house but not all the arrangements that inevitably follow and never leave the bricks is pure, reflexive preference of our own perceptions and purposes. Absent this, all matter is quite equally and indifferently arranged and souled.

I have a hard time reading either the desire for a kind of immortality or the desire to be useful into the motivation of the girl in the referenced XKCD comic.

The closest we have to textual evidence is the argument of the dude, who says, "No, [the bits of house that are in the bin] are just pieces. They could become spaceships or trains. The house was an arrangement." So there's a slight hint that the girl could, possibly, want her organs to contribute to the human equivalent of future spaceships and trains.

My reading of the comic, though, is that it is principally negative, in the sense that it is about removing the illusion of self-persistence and, therefore, removing the obstacle for organ donation.

I also think saying that Munroe felt "boldly transgressive" in denying a persistent, immaterial self is unfairly patronizing. It strikes me as far more likely, judging him by this and his other comics, that he simply considers belief in "arrangements" rather than immaterial souls to be true and beneficial as well as something that needs to be evangelized, as it is not universally shared. That the latter of these is true is quite obvious, removing any need for further justification of the writing of a tract like this one.

I believe "cross-posted" is the term people use in situations like this.

"I’m just not settled on whether this reflects a fundamental reality, or a phenomenological one, or a merely functional/conventional one." A very fair statement of the question. That said, I do want to refine the account a little more. I'll see what tomorrow can bring by way of a response.

Joe: I'm not knowledgeable enough to speak on whether and to what extent those other folks are Aristotelians. It would seem that it's in general harder than it looks to be an -ian of anyone, since it requires first to know what that person said, which is frequently pretty hard, and for 'Stots particularly so. That said, De Anima does talk about a different kind of immortality and it is related to nous. Rest assured, however, that it in no way requires that the soul outlive the body or be separable from the body.

After a third reading of Robbie's question, I'll take another crack at a response: I think we can tell based on observation that things grow according to certain arrangements, and I think that the common observations of human beings, as collected in our speech, are a good starting point for our statements about this. But it seems like you wanted to focus more on what in our observations, as opposed to our common speeches, shows us that soul is present there, and I didn't pick up on that immediately.

First, we see that certain living things produce other living things that look like them: maple trees produce seeds that produce maple trees. Their similarity in appearance shows us that there's a similarity, and in fact a continuity, of form: you don't get dogs growing from seeds or rocks growing in dolphins' wombs. DNA, for instance, is the name of one of these structures; it too is a sign of the continuity of shape or form or look that's consistent over generations. (We're not worried about genetic mutations, say, in pointing to this underlying principle because the material isn't the same between a parent and a child, or even a particular child and the particular adult he becomes. Somehow over the course of generations, that same form persists: it is at work being itself.)

Second, we note that living beings are in some way self-limiting. Aristotle distinguishes between fire and living things in De Anima by noting that fire grows as long as there is fuel it can burn. Living things, by contrast, do not grow unchecked, in every direction, when presented with food. Somehow the plant holds together as it grows downward for water and upward towards photosynthesis. They hold together, checking themselves, in order to persist in being themselves.

To be fair, I put "grows toward" and "decays away" in quotation marks, since they were your formulations and since their reality is exactly what I was wondering about. I think you're probably right about how we mean the word "grow" (and "decay," too).

But suppose the legos come and go, and reorient themselves apparently after some mostly but imperfectly consistent procedure. And suppose I have some attachment to some particular shape or arrangement of them—perhaps it is justifiable or functional, or perhaps not—which, roughly, comes and goes. I suppose I could call the approach "growth" and the receding "decay." But what am I talking about except my attachment?

Or using the biological examples:
You often hear people speak of DNA with the metaphor of "blueprints," but as I (quite poorly) understand it, this is notably inaccurate. The genetic information is not so much an image of your adult self, which is built and then maintained until entropy gets the better of it, as it is minute instructions along the lines of "bind this protein," which do not clearly distinguish between the "growth" and the "decay." The very same process accounts for both, and also for crippling defects and cancers that might destroy the organism.

I do think I'm quite naturally and justifiably attached to my current arrangement of parts, and to the usefulness of saying things like "might destroy the organism." So I'm certainly not suggesting throwing that out. I'm just not settled on whether this reflects a fundamental reality, or a phenomenological one, or a merely functional/conventional one.

It may also be useful to point out that the idea I'm talking about, the Aristotelian account of the soul, isn't opposed to nature or even in some sense "naturalistic" arguments. That is, there's no reason why things like DNA or our chemical composition argue against or oppose the idea of a soul. (In fact, I'd also argue that accounts that posit "mechanistic" causes are based on unexamined premises, whereas in talking about form at all (as a metaphysically necessary distinction) Aristotle's account of souls is more rigorous and philosophically precise.)

I definitely saw the girl as signing up to donate a piece of herself, because she realizes that she won't need it anymore. That's why she looks down at the red brick in the fourth panel. I took it as a recognition that to withhold her piece would be senseless and vain. She is giving herself a kind of immortality, though, since it's clear she wants her brick to be reused.

Your statement "It seems to me that, for Aristotle, the destruction of an individual soul is a given" sounds fine to me, but it seems like other kinds of Aristotelians disagree with you. It's funny; the lecturer for my Thomas Aquinas course keeps bringing out the wax and the impression made in the wax as a way to demonstrate that the soul is not a thing added on to the body, but it's also an arrangement image similar to the comic. At the same time, the intellectual soul for Thomas is both the "substantial form" of the body (the principle of its arrangement) and a "subsistent form"--a form that outlasts matter and has its own kind of existence apart from the form-matter combination (this apparently helps explain not just the immortality of the soul but also the ability for the soul to become reunited with a body during the resurrection). All of this is just desperation and probably a blatant misreading of Aristotle, who does seem to emphasize arrangement, organization and the apparent unity of the organism over other more abstract or elementary first principles.

What the pomo French philosopher Deleuze would do with the bricks and the arrangement is say that the contained bricks are straining to break off and become stray particles again while flows of other bricks are washing against the structure trying to glom onto it. These flows interact with the arrangement which is in the process of becoming an interpretation of itself. This process is never complete and cannot complete, because of the lack of finality of the death of the arrangement. In a play example, this would be like setting out to build a house and in the process of building the house realizing that the house is better suited to be a rocket ship and so building that out of the half-formed interpretation of the house. This is totally how Legos work, btw.

Robbie asks, "how can we know that a plant's growing towards something?" The answer is that in order to say that it's growing at all, as opposed to accreting, we must be positing this thing towards, or according to which, it's doing what it's doing. The plant isn't simply adding mass, like a heap. It's growing, which is distinguishable from just getting bigger. Specifically, growing is changing with respect to a particular form. A seed grows into a tree. A child grows into an adult. You can't just add water: the plant has to add it in a particular way and into a particular shape. The verb, and what we're pointing to with it, is the important difference. (As a hedge: no need to be suspicious of linguistics or word choice here, I'm just using these words to point to a particular difference that we acknowledge in common speech.)

As to the poetic interpretation of the girl's action: I could see where you're coming from with that, although I wouldn't call that the only or the primary meaning. I admit to being influenced by the mouse-over text on this point.

Also, I'm not sure of your interpretation of the comic girl's motives. It hadn't occurred to me that "she wants her body to continue on past death"—though perhaps she does. My first reading was that the explicit realization that she's just parts led her to want to re-use those parts, because Why not?, they're just parts and they might as well help make a rocket ship (or whatever) once the house comes apart, and not because she thought some part of HER would meaningfully live on in them. In other words, the block is recycled for sake of the rocket ship, not for sake of the disassembled house's living on—and she seeks to donate organs for sake of the recipient, not her own immortality.

How do we know that the plant, or the person, "grows toward" something and then "decays away" from it? I surely grant that it seems that way to me (especially in the case of the plant; somewhat less in the case of the person), but I'm not sure that it seems that way because it's true rather than because I'm already positing the "soul."

From a purely naturalistic sense, if there is no girl guiding the legos according to her will, but pieces are always coming and going according to some mechanism that never ceases and doesn't favor particular moments in the process, how can we be sure the "house" is more than a functional category?

Mr. Sullivan:

Well, apart from what you mentioned in the latter paragraph of your comments; for me, it is precisely Batman's/Bruce Wayne's natural human limitations that are the most endearing and consequential, which are, in fact, the very things that not only provide him those significant opportunities to excel above and beyond the natural bounds of his human person but ironically also enable him to do so and conquer those very obstacles, which Superman (i.e., the character of earlier, the 1950s George Reeves' Adventure of Superman, and current serials, Smallville) seems only capable of doing so by brute strength alone.

Yet, I must admit, I've never run across an analysis concerning the subject matter as eloquent and well thought-out as yours.

The following is the kind of run-down I've typically encountered concerning the topic:

Top Ten Reasons Why Batman Kicks Superman’s Ass:

10. The Batcave.

9. Superman’s secret identity is a clumsy, nerdy reporter with glasses. Batman’s: billionaire playboy.

8. The Batplane.

7. Batman wears a cool black and gray costume. Superman looks like someone vomited rainbow all over him.

6. Superman is an alien. You know… like E.T.

5. Batman doesn’t need any powers to beat up bad guys.

4. The Batmobile.

3. Batman’s purple and green arch-villain: Joker. Superman’s purple and green arch-villain: Mr. Mxyzptlk.

2. Frank Miller says so.

1. To Batman, Kryptonite is a paperweight.

I am now a few months from 40 years old and I had this type of injury in 1989.I was only 19 years old at the time and didnt know much about the injury.there was no internet at the time.This type of injury takes time to heal but will never get to full strength again.The appearance doesnt bother me as much as the strength issue,suudden unexpected movements bother me even right now.You can live a very productive life with this injury without having surgery.The thing to do for a real young person is to have surgery and let it get back to normal.For an older person I would advise to let it heal naturally and then lift with dumbells and machine weihgts unless you can afford to be out of work for a good while .

voces,

you are describing the Frank Miller version of Superman, and as presented by him you're perfectly correct. However probably not even Miller would deny that Kal-El has a super-brain as well as super-muscles and so forth. Again, it's just that he doesn't use it well. For Miller Superman's faults are primarily moral: he's basically both naive and a coward, and this makes him stupid. Furthermore one can have enormous cognitive ability and still be more or less an idiot when it comes to making right decisions or coming to the correct conclusion. I'm sure we each know at least one impressively clever person whose opinions are nevertheless almost uniformly moronic. Look at politicians! Whatever your leanings are, there are certainly intelligent people on the opposite side who you think constantly do, say, and think ridiculous things, regardless of their pure mental powers. It's just not reasonable to believe that only people with IQs of less than 100 can be Republicans, say. But you might see lots of Republicans with PhDs spouting what you judge to be inanities and call them idiots, using the term secundum quid,, in a certain respect, rather than absolutely. They are stupid (ex hypothesi) because of a profoundly flawed ideology and their unexamined adherence to it, rather than because of any cognitive defects. And of course Republicans might believe the same of Democrats. We have to judge between their positions, just as we have to side with either Superman or Batman in a Frank Miller book, based on the wisdom of each course of action and the mental orientation that leads to it, rather than by giving either side an IQ test and seeing who comes out ahead.

One can of course still have a fairly lunk-headed Superman without accusing him of these moral faults, which is how I remember the portrayal in Loeb and Sales' "Superman For All Seasons", though I only read it once and it was a long time ago.

Many other stories, however, including recent ones, would not accept any part of the Miller "iconography". For instance Grant Morrison's "All-Star Superman" shows its titular hero as, among other things, a colossal genius, inventing technologies beyond human comprehension, tinkering with the basic elements of life, and peering into the deepest mysteries of the physical universe. Of course this kind of Superman is hard to contrast with Batman in a satisfying way, as they seem to simply belong to different cosmi. One might be tempted to chalk up the different versions to people who are at some basic level more sympathetic or attuned to either Superman or Batman--so that if you're a Batman person Superman needs to be able to provide a good contrast--if not for the fact that Morrison has also written some very good Batman stories.

Now that I'm thinking about it, however, it occurs to me that no matter which kind of Superman you're dealing with, there's one moral failing that it's almost impossible to avoid accusing him of: laziness. As Clark Kent he spends an awful lot of time on a mundane career and his private relationships, which might very well seem like a waste for someone with his potential. What makes Bruce Wayne so exceptional is not merely his extraordinary natural capacities but, even more than this, the fact that he attempts to use every single waking moment actualizing those capacities and putting them to the best use he can find for them. It's telling that, though Batman could never save the planet from a cosmic threat the way Superman can, Bruce Wayne does far more good as a philanthropist, patron, researcher, etc., than Clark Kent does as a reporter--and that's just part of the front.

This laziness of Superman's seems to stem partly from his ambivalence about his identity, and partly from a willingness to fall back on his physical strength when there's a crisis. He's never been forced to develop the habit of thinking strategically (of course he can use his various strengths to different tactical advantages), whereas Batman is the ultimate strategist (precisely because physical training can only take him so far), and always has a judo-move to turn Superman's strength against him if he has to.