There is a tendency to regard the mind as existing separate to, and separable from, the body. Long ago a person once beheld a corpse of someone they knew, now devoid of motion and emotion, thought and dream, and they wondered where the flesh’s one-time inhabitant might have fled to. I don’t claim to have any final spiritual answers, but this strikes me now as being similar to the theory of phlogiston, the non-existent essence of fire. That is to say, we have a difficult time conceiving long term processes as being processes, as emerging from momentary circumstance, and assume there must be, somewhere hidden from sight, some sort of underlying irreducible material core to them.
This is, I think, what was originally meant by “the soul” – thought, emotion, personality, liberated from and evacuated of flesh, going somewhere else to lead a more carefree existence, lighter than air. This is, in many cases, still what people have in mind when they speak of the soul – yet now we have a much stronger conception of what the mechanical and chemical underpinnings of thought actually are, how the mind is situated in the brain. There are, naturally, still many holes in this understanding, but we now at least understand that the body sustains a complex process and that, rather than occupying the body and controlling the process, the mind is itself the process – and, when the body inevitably ceases its process, the remnants of that mind exist only as rusty and corroded gears, ruins, inoperable, inanimate.
Accordingly, the modern conception of the soul has shifted slightly to accommodate this changing role of body in mind. We now largely conceive of the soul as existing alongside the mind, of being some core spiritual spark which inhabits us, giving the mind a connection to some spiritual realm. The body tethers the mind to the material, the soul tethers it to the spiritual – and though they will one day part ways, the mind, or some component of it, will be borne far away by the soul to carry on, without interruption, Somewhere Else.
This approach to the soul makes enough sense to be acceptable if you wish to believe in souls without rejecting modern understanding of neurology – but, even granted this sleight of faith, we still have a hard time sometimes believing body and mind are part of the same process, are effectively the same thing. We resent our body for holding us back, blame its imperfections for our mental failings while ignoring that its continued warm, gurgling, aimless processes are all that keep that mind in operation, are what create everything good and beautiful about us – just as much as everything stupid and mean.
We are flesh. Even in this age of electronic communication, at every terminal of the network there is a creature made of meat, a mind made of meat-marination. Even if, perhaps, there were some artificial intelligence, it would still be no less beholden to its body, no less shaped by the foibles and needs of its circuits, than we happen to be – though, of course, the particular foibles would likely be quite distinct to ours.
This all may be quite self-evident to many people, but I often have a hard time living inside of myself, and my mind is often trying to float away like a balloon set free. There is no emancipation from the self, however – all we can do is shape our processes, guide our meat, towards the types of existence it yearns to lead.