[buntsai]

Is that really the position of the Catholic Church or what is a caricature of what people think it believes? The nice thing about the Catholic Church is that required beliefs have a formal spec. For something has important as this, there would be a clear and unambiguous references. Catholic Catechism / church council / papal encyclical. Do you have a quotable reference?

What I can find is only Aquinas that all living things have souls (anima). Humans have rational human souls. Animals have animal souls...

Descartes believed that only humans have souls. But that definitely represents a clear alternative to traditional Catholic beliefs. Many modern philosophers might argue that only humans have "consciousness" in a way that implies animals do not have souls.

[lo_zamoyski]

Indeed, the Cartesian position is not the Catholic position and, in fact, directly contradicts the Catholic position.

The soul, according to an Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding, is the form of a living thing. Form is what makes a thing what it is. If you deny form, then you deny that things have any identity whatsoever and the world becomes unintelligible. Science itself becomes impossible.

So, the form is the formal cause of a thing's identity, and so everything that exists has a formal cause, because you cannot not have something that isn't something. In living things, we call this form the soul; we sometimes say that the soul is the form of the body. Accordingly, it is absurd to think of the soul and the body to be two things (like Descartes thought), just as it is absurd to treat the spherical shape of a ball of bronze as a distinct thing from the bronze. There is no sphericial-shape-as-such or bronze-as-such as things in the world.

While Descartes denied the consciousness of non-human animals, this was never the Aristotelian-Thomist position. In fact, it is taken to be flatly wrong. So denial of the consciousness of non-human animals is not really traditional at all. It is very much modern.

[maleldil]

Only humans have immortal souls. From the Catechism (1703):

> Endowed with "a spiritual and immortal" soul, The human person is "the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake."

https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_three/secti...

[lo_zamoyski]

Yes, and this immortality is attributed to the immateriality of the intellectual faculties. According to this view, you can think of human death as more of an amputation of the body from the totality of the spiritual-bodily composite. Bodily resurrection is thus a restoration of the body.

[erikerikson]

You might find a spectrum to be more useful framing than a binary. Asking when does consciousness seem more present? Are there different aspects of consciousness that can individually be validated as apparent or not? That sort of thing.