Mind Morphology In class writing 1:
In the face of his imminent death, Socrates distinguishes the two both in the face of ideas of suicide and the philosopher. On the one hand we have the body, which in addition to the physical/material abilities, also represents our emotion, pleasure and pain, and most interestingly our perception and sensory input. The soul on the other hand is our rationality and ability to reason (over sensory information especially), the forming of abstract representations and our true underlying self.
For the soul to practice its best work, one must practice dying and separation from the body (the very definition of death being the separation of soul and body, the destruction of the body). Socrates says to be a philosopher one must practice/confront dying, as true reason comes from disregarding the instinct of the body (pleasure, sex, worldly stressors), only then can the soul operate at its best.
For this argument to work the soul must be immortal. If the best work is done when “dying” or attempting to get closer, then it must remain when the body/soul inevitably split. I feel at this point the argument becomes strained, as ironically the soul, source of reason, can do little to reason about what actually happens to the soul after death, non-falsifiable and non-observable. Socrates/Plato might counter that this is requiring of sensory information/perception (a function of the body), and that we cannot be certain of anything outside of our own mind (very Cartesian). I would say that while the soul/mind indeed cannot guarantee sensory information (controlled hallucination), we still are in need of these measurements to verify the model our reasoning invents, to see if it holds up to predicting and explaining future evidence.