The body is some kind of image of you, it's kind of something that's just attached to your soul, some kind of outside principle, which doesn't really represent who you really are.

The world around you is some kind of distraction at best, and evil at worst, and you should be turning away from it.

Assuming there is an intellect, we're clearly not this universal intellect or we would know it. So that's one function of soul.

This condition of uncertainty and unrest in the Roman Empire might explain why at Plotinus' philosophy encourages us to sort of flee from the physical world and towards the world of ideas.

Plotinus, when he thinks about mind or intellect, the Greek word is 'nous', he thinks about something that's very different, it's much more elevated and special, more abstract, you might say more philosophical than the very broad range of mental events that we talk about in contemporary philosophy of mind.

Plotinus thought that the entire world has a single soul. He also thought that each animal and plant and of course human, has an individual soul.

The body is some kind of image of you, it's kind of something that's just attached to your soul, some kind of outside principle, which doesn't really represent who you really are.