Q&A: The World Before the Era of Free Will and Souls
Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.
The World Before the Era of Free Will and Souls
Question
Was it the case that a billion years ago, or even a million years ago, when there were no spiritual entities (souls) in the world and there was no free will, the world was basically 100% physicalism and determinism?
Answer
Apparently so
Discussion on Answer
I have no idea. But they exist in the world of Ideas. That is not existence in the same sense as the existence of a soul, which is an entity of a different kind in our world.
So maybe one could say that even without a soul, there exists a physical world and a spiritual world, except that the spiritual world (the world of Ideas) is not located in the dimension of our world but in another dimension. But it does exist.
Would you agree with that formulation?
I have no interest in these word games
Michi, why exactly?
After all, moral values, universals (Ideas, in Plato’s terminology), and aesthetic values are not physical things, and they have always existed. Haven’t they?