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What is a Soul? III. The Many Souls of Man

  …[H]e who tries to cure the soul, wishing to improve the moral qualities, must have a knowledge of the soul in its totality and its parts…Maimonides[1] Maimonides opens his introduction to The Ethics of the Fathers with this statement: Know that the human soul is one, but that it has many diversified activities. Some of these activities have, indeed, been called souls, which has given rise to the opinion that man has many souls, as was the belief of the physicians, with the result that the most distinguished of them states in the introduction of his book that there are three souls, the physical, the vital, and the psychical.[2] While Maimonides lists three souls—the physical (tiv’it), the vital (chiyunit), and the psychical (nefoshit)—he believes them to be aspects of one soul—“Know that [...]

Abraham Meets Abraham From a Parallel Universe

And he [Abraham] lifted up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood over against him…  (Genesis 18:2) On this blog, we often discuss the collapse of the wavefunction as the result of a measurement. This phenomenon is called the “measurement problem.” There are several reasons, for which the collapse of the wavefunction—part and parcel of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics—is considered a problem. Firstly, it does not follow from the Schrödinger equation, the main equation of quantum mechanics that describes the evolution of the wavefunction in time, and is added ad hoc. Second, nobody knows how the collapse happens or how long the wave function takes to collapse. This is not even to consider that any notion that the collapse of the wavefunction is caused by human consciousness, as proposed [...]

613 Degrees of Freedom

Passover has ended. All Jews hastily return their Passover dishes to storage in special cabinets or the attic until the next Passover. After an eight-day break, home becomes filled with the aroma of freshly baked bread. Passover leaves us with the pleasant taste of burnt matzot, memories of the Seder spent with family, and stories of the Exodus. But did Passover really end? In the Mishnah (the precursor to Talmud), the holiday of Shavuot (Pentecost) is called Atzeret. This word is familiar to us from Shemini Atzeret—the holiday that follows immediately after the seven days of Sukkot, often simply viewed as the last day (or, in the diaspora, the last two days) of Sukkot. Either way, Shemini Atzeret is the conclusion of the festival of Sukkot. By designating Shavuot as Atzeret, the Mishnah seems [...]

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