Phaedo Redux

Phaedo is Plato's account of Socrates' death from the perspective of Phaedo,  it is one of Plato's most well known dialogues which I read many years ago.  The only recollection I have now is how calm Socrates was while waiting for his own death, he and many of his friends and students took the occasion to discuss death and the everlasting soul. According to Phaedo, a student, he did not feel pity and Socrates himself was "happy in manner and words".  In fact,  his mourning wife was sent home so the the BS session wouldn't be disrupted.

Given Socrates' circumstances, he had little reason to be happy. he had been sentenced to death by poison and it was his final day.  His ankles hurt from the chains and he made a remark about how he wished Easop could write a fable about how pleasure and pain are always joined together, one cannot get one (the pleasure of rubbing his ankles) without the other (the pain of the chains), what a weirdo!

The reason I don't remember the rest of the dialogue is I don't believe in eternal soul. I have no patience for that sort of arguments. A cousin of ours died 2 days ago quite unexpectedly, I re-read Phaedo and I feel different reading it this time, one of the arguments "prior knowledge" makes me sit up for the first time.  Socrates believed knowledge is just recollection, we are born with all the knowledge which is passed from generation to generation which could be called the soul. In today's terminology, he's saying genetic memory is our soul.  Recently, experiments have been done to suggest we could in fact change our genetic memory (or genome by default).  For example,  a calf born of stock that is used to cattle grids but has never seen one itself and introduce it to lines painted on a road to resemble a grid. It will not cross. Another well known example is the Överkalix study in Sweden. The link is to European Journal of Human Genetics.

A plausible explanation is that some acquired information is passed from parents to children through genetic materials. I don't want to go crazy about prior lives and prior knowledge beyond hardwired instinctive behaviors, but maybe there is something in this life that can live on forever in our genes. (Unfortunately, the selfish straits may have a better chance in natural selection.)