Souls and shadows live

Conversational Shadows: Describing Live Media Events Using Short Messages

Microblogging concurrently with live media events is becoming commonplace. The resulting comment stream represents a parallel, social conversational reflection on the event. Although not formally ‘attached’ to the actual event stream itself, we demonstrate it is possible to establish a relationship between the two streams by mapping their structural properties. In this article, we examine: How ...

Souls and Sentientism

I am a psychologist and not a theologian, so I do not know what the word "soul" means. What matters to me is a creature's capacity to feel, to suffer and to be conscious; its sentiency, not its soul, is the bedrock of my concern. Let us proclaim this creed of sentientism: that anything, human or nonhuman, terrestrial or extraterrestrial, natural or man-made, that can suffer should be included w...

Rational Souls and the Beginning of Life

Our previous essay to which Robert Pasnau responds in his article ‘Souls and the Beginning of Life’, took issue with several aspects of his original discussion in Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (hereafter ‘Aquinas’) of human ensoulment and of traditional Roman Catholic teaching on the matter of abortion and the value of human life. Our primary concerns were twofold. First, to provide readers, w...

Mind perception, autism and missing souls

Shadows.

We investigate the brightness distribution in and around outdoor shadows (for a variety of sky conditions) using modeling and field measurements. The dominant factor influencing the brightness of a shadow is the solid angle subtended by the object blocking the Sun. Occulters at the zenith that subtend a small solid angle cast shadows that are bright and possess a nearly uniform brightness acros...