Aristotle – Soul as the Organizing Form

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Aristotle – Soul as the Organizing Form

Source: De Anima (circa 350 BCE)

Summary: Aristotle described the soul as the “form” of a living body—its essential pattern of organization that gives matter its life functions. The soul isn’t separate from the body; it is the body’s realization of purpose and function.

Resonance with PET: PET agrees that a system’s identity lies in its pattern, not its matter. There is conceptual alignment in seeing consciousness not as a substance, but as a structure-in-motion.

Reframing: Where Aristotle grounds the soul in biology and telos, a natural end toward which a being strives, PET detaches from both. It replaces innate purpose with recursive function: the system’s ability to detect, evaluate, and adapt patterns in service of its own persistence. Consciousness, in PET, is not the expression of an intrinsic purpose, but the emergent byproduct of systems that try to stay.