Soul and mind
This theme runs through several big questions. Here are the ones where it plays out.
The questions that illuminate it
Does something of us survive death?
It may be humanity's oldest question: graves are older than writing. If a soul survives, if something is reborn, death changes meaning and this life becomes a preparation, a trial, or a passage; if nothing survives, everything that matters must fit between birth and the end. To take a position is to say what death really ends, and what we can honestly hope escapes it.
What is reality made of: matter, mind, or both?
What, at bottom, is the world made of? To say that everything is matter, that everything is mind, or that reality comprises two irreducible orders is to set the background for everything else: what God, life, and thought are, and what an understanding of the world can hope to achieve. The question is the oldest and most abstract in metaphysics, yet every worldview answers it, often without realizing it.
What makes me remain myself through time?
What makes me the same person as the child in the old photographs, or as the one I will be in thirty years? If nothing stable endures, promises, remorse, and pride in a past self lose their footing; if a core remains, no change ever truly remakes me. To take a position is to say what exactly we are holding onto when we say "me."
Can a science of the brain fully explain lived experience?
Pain, the red I see, the taste of coffee: cognitive science describes ever more finely the brain mechanisms that accompany them, but does it explain what it is like to undergo them? To take a position is to say whether lived experience is a mechanism like any other, an illusion of introspection, or the sign that the mind exceeds anything neuroscience will ever grasp.