AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Not to throw shade on the concept, just the word. Maybe "openness" is better, but friendliness engages something more. Minds can be open but friendliness engages the soul .
My MIT training is to scorn the very idea. I'm trying to change that – it offends people. Somehow when you say the soul and self are illusory, they get mad. Also, its just wrong in a stupid way, like almost all the dumb eliminativism versions of materialism.
For some reason Minsky (or my cartoon version of him, sorry Marvin) is an eliminativist of soul but not of mind. What's the difference? Mind is real but is generated by causal mechanisms, like everything else. The soul is supernatural, and nothing is outside nature.
Maybe Chapman/Buddhism eliminates both.
Self: In this book, when written "Self", the myth that each of us contains some special part theat embodies the essence of the mind. When written as "self", the word has the ordinary sense of a person's individuality. – Society of Mind glossary
[paste sec 4.3, The Soul]
I had a margin note in my paper copy – "I think in karma-based religions, souls do learn in a sense". He means the xian idea of an immortal, eternal soul – which, right, does not learn which is change over time.
Wow there's a paragraph there that sounds way more holist than my cartoon version of Minsky would allow! Where he says that a painting's value is consituted by the "great network of relationships among its parts". and uses this as metaphor between thre relationshiop of agents and self (kind of the language here is very hincky – "what counts is what we make of them", whatchu mean "we" white man).
Incoming
Feser, Immortal Souls Feser is obnoxious but probably makes a good case for the traditional view.