If you do, then what exactly defines a soul in your view?
I do not. When the brain stops working it's just the end. I wasn't raised religious and I've never 'felt' anything spiritual. I respect people who do, but I just don't - it doesn't make sense to me.
Not that I've a choice but I do feel a sense of calm in the fact that when I die there's nothing. We're just a blip in a never ending universe.
It was here long before us and it'll continue to exist long after us. It's initially a very terrifying truth but eventually it becomes our most comforting truth.
The brain is literally powered by electricity. Like any device, it stops working once the power turns off. Some people have a problem facing this mortality, but I think accepting it allows you to be more present in life.
I was raised Roman Catholic.
A soul is a concept to make death less scary.
All life is an organic computer. When something dies, the computer is off, never to be rebooted again. That's ok though.
A soul is a concept to make death less scary.
Or more scary, if one doesn't do as one is told.
No. Soul is an imaginary concept for ideas and claims. And people think of different things when they think of it.
We are an inherently physical entity. A vastly complex system that very interestingly enables consciousness to arise from it.
But when you remove the body it lives in there is nothing left of it. Other than the influences it had in its past.
No.
No, how would it work with Alzheimer's, brain tumours and other things that affect behaviour?
Not trying to argue at all, just spitballing off your thoughts: I feel like (assuming souls are things that exist) the brain is the hardware and the soul is the software in this scenario. If your computer’s mother board develops a problem, the data on your hard drive still exists and works; the hardware just can’t compute.
That all being said I’m an agnostic and I don’t really know the answer to OP’s question. I’ve kinda always assumed there was some star trekish we-are-just-energy thing going on. But I ultimately accept that we don’t know and can’t know and won’t know until we do.
Your example is flawed because the hard drive is also hardware and can also develop problems aside from everything else. I feel like a closer match would be information stored on the cloud, but that's just someone else's hard drive, so.... Yeah, I find the concept of a soul very weird.
Your example is flawed because the hard drive is also hardware and can also develop problems aside from everything else. I feel like a closer match would be information stored on the cloud, but that's just someone else's hard drive, so.... Yeah, I find the concept of a soul very weird.
Your example is flawed because the hard drive is also hardware and can also develop problems aside from everything else. I feel like a closer match would be information stored on the cloud, but that's just someone else's hard drive, so.... Yeah, I find the concept of a soul very weird.
No. Souls dont exist.
No. I believe soul is a human construct that is meant to be self defense mechanism to feel like we are special instead of bunch of meat with chemicals.
To be honest, I'm not even sure what "soul" is supposed to mean. If your definition of soul is an ethereal consciousness separate from your physical body than I can honestly say that i believe that doesn't exist. We have plenty of evidence that your consciousness is a function of your brain, we can see this when people experience personality changes as a result of chemical influence or damage to the brain. Someone suffering a stroke can come out of it with changes to their temperment, tastes, even interests. Anyone who's suffered chemical depression should be familiar with the way their neurochemistry effects their personally, and the effects of drugs on people is well known.
I've seen no useful evidence that a soul, based on that definition, does or even can exist. The evidence I do have looks very much like no such thing is happening.
Nope. There's no spiritual anything. The whole universe is kinda magic on its own, why people have the need to make up bullshit is beyond me.
Souls don't exist, you're just your body (and brain), try to enjoy the life you have, there will be nothing else afterwards.
Something I take some comfort in is that regardless of what your soul does upon death in the short term (whether it's an afterlife of some sort that we don't understand, a nihilistic void of nothingness, reincarnation as the soul attaches to a newly created body somewhere else in the world... whatever, no one alive truly knows or could ever know), science believes in a sort of reincarnation.
Where eventually as step one, everything that ever was ends up in black holes, and those black holes eventually decay until the universe is nothing but a uniform background of unchanging radiation, referred to as the heat death of the universe (because nothing can really physically change on macroscopic scales anymore, in order to convert energy into new heat).
And then, after ridiculously long time periods, quantum fluctuations cause the machinery of the universe to start back up again, everything re-forms, and eventually our universe ends up back where it started at the beginning of your life.
So it's possible that you will live again, and again, and again, forever, just with no ability to remember how it went down last time. And an incredibly long wait between lifetimes (though, to be fair, if death is a nihilistic void for each person, that wait is only going to feel like two seconds and bam, you're right back in the womb).
So if nothing else, at least there's that.
That's still "you" when no molecule was left of you?
It's still an exact arrangement of matter that's identical to your original configuration. So one would think that all the properties arising from it (such as consciousness) would be the same. So it's You Part 2 (or Part two quintillion, there's really no way to know which loop we're on).
I'd consider that identical, but not the same
A soul is at best a description of the electrical and quantum interactions that take place in our brain, a personified phenotype of the sum of these things occurring in our head (and to a degree our eyes, mouth, ears, and skin).
I don't believe in the soul in the traditional sense as it implies that there is one version of me -- is my soul my 9yo self, my 20-something alcoholic self, the self as of this moment, or my Alzheimer's-ridden self when I die? If it's supposed to be a "perfect" version of me when I pass, then it's kind of funny, because my spirit is, in a sense, a version of me that I've never actually met and wouldn't recognize.
I slid gently into atheism and my total failure to believe in souls was the way I realized I was in fact an atheist.
I was reading something that was discussing something about souls and I thought, pfft, there's no such thing as souls.
I think we're made out of meat. The thing that makes me me is a series of electrical impulses in (mostly?) my brain meat. That's why I find sports that involve repeated head trauma (football, boxing, etc) viscerally upsetting: by getting concussed a bunch of times you are, in my view, literally risking obliteration of the self.
if someone can give me a good definition of what they think a soul is or does, maybe i'll have a response, but quite often, i find the concept less false, and more just ill-defined.
I believe in anything that can be proven scientifically to actually exist. Show me evidence, not anecdotal stories which further an idea of "just believe me."
I believe in anything that can be proven scientifically to exist. Show me evidence, not anecdotal stories which further an idea of "just believe me."
A part of humans regarded as immaterial, immortal, separable from the body at death, capable of moral judgment, and susceptible to happiness or misery in a future state.
considering many non-humans seem perfectly capable of making moral judgements, and feeling happiness or misery (all actions which appear to be explicable by purely material means), a 'soul' seems unnecessary to explain such things in humans. and it seems the very height of anthropocentrism to say that humans are immortal (despite all evidence to the contrary) while everything else just dies. why would just humans have these souls instead of, say, dolphins, or wild boars, or rattlesnakes, or coastal redwoods?
I believe in anything that can be proven scientifically to actually exist. Show me evidence, not anecdotal stories which further an idea of "just believe me"
I believe in anything that can be proven scientifically to actually exist. Show me evidence, not anecdotal stories which further an idea of "just believe me."
I believe in anything that can be proven scientifically to actually exist. Show me evidence, not anecdotal stories which further an idea of "just believe me."
I don't believe in a soul that's separate from the body, or that lives on afterward. But the way that "inanimate" matter can spin up thoughts and feelings and a consistent personal experience that can last for decades... It's almost fair to call that thing a soul. It's fair to talk about nurturing your soul and growing a soul.
To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we are the universe's way of understanding itself.
The universe growing souls like flowers, or something
No
No.
It comes down to how you define "soul".
Do I believe there's a consciousness that transcends death or exists separately from our physical existence, no.
But if you start talking of ship of Theseus/transponder incident/mind upload -type mental exercises, then yes, I believe "self" is an evolving pattern and a collection of experiences that could theoretically be replicated in another physical manifestation or even in a completely different medium. You could call that, too, "soul".
That's about how it's explain it.
I want to believe in the existence of souls, however ultimately we just don't have the evidence to back it up.
It's kind of really hard to say if I belive in something or not when you don't offer a definition, I don't believe in anything outside of the brain, consiousness and what makes me me, which could be a definition of soul, I do believe in, but again, that's just a result of my brain braining.
I’m kind of an agnostic, so naturally my point of view is: it’s hard if not impossible to tell.
I don’t really believe in a soul but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was such a thing. Maybe we’re all going back home after we die, maybe we just stop existing. Maybe it’s both. It’s hard to tell.
Is it, though? Nothing in physics supports the existence of, or even the need for, a soul.
That is the view of the atheist faith (that all that is currently known by science is enough to know), but the replier is agnostic, in which we don’t know what we don’t know.
Atheist faith doesn't exist, atheism is absence of faith. Atheists are more into facts and less into belief. If you have to believe in something for it to become true, it's nonsense.
I know that it’s a common belief in atheists that it’s not a faith. But if you take a step back, it’s hard to deny that there is some belief in the sentence: “if science has neither evidence of something nor of its absence, it doesn’t exist”.
The opposite of that is: “if science has neither evidence of something not of its absence, then science doesn’t know yet, and until then, neither can we”.
It’s fine to believe in things. I’d say it’s not great though, to think so highly of one’s own belief that one wouldn’t want to call if a belief.
And it's common belief of theists that everyone has to believe in something. I don't believe in anything. I believe people, like the scientists that discover stuff, but that's believing someone, not in something. Pretending it's the same is ridiculous.
I don’t know if that’s what you were implying, but I’m not at all a theist. And as a scientist, I can remind you that the scientific method is to keep researching topics that are inconclusive. To conclude something as non-existent because the research is inconclusive is not the scientific method.
What you are doing is listening to the science indeed, and drawing faith-based conclusions that something doesn’t exist because it wasn’t proven to exist. Which is fine, a lot of people do that to base all kinds of faiths, but it’s disingenuous to pretend that you’re not.
It's not inconclusive, it's improvable which basically means "why even bother?"
atheist faith describes people who BELIEVE that god does not exist
besides the fact that I do exist...
if there is no evidence that god doesn't exist, or that god does exist, then yes, there is no reason to believe god exists, but apart from the absurd and extremely vast absence of evidence that would point towards proving even the slimmest of traces of existence, that is also an epistemological challenge in that our perception is extremely limited and we don't know, as ritswd said, what we don't know.
so we have a lot of evidence, but there exists an extremely small and remote possibility that our theories are wrong, just because we're dumbfucks with very smol brains & tiny eyes that can only see 3 dimensions
so saying with 100% certainty that god does not exist is a dogmatic belief in our conclusions.
To be clear, it's highly likely that what we consider to be a "god" or a "satan" (as well as physical places we cannot see/reach where these two reside) isn't real, based on evidence that we've come upon today scientifically, but that also doesn't mean there isn't some form of a higher being that we are unable to recognize as such because of our limited abilities that you've explained above.
No, it's a logical conclusion. God isn't needed for the existence of the universe and thus doesn't exist. Sure, there's minuscule chance that's wrong and if it ever happens I'll be among the first who'll say I was wrong. Until then, science says God doesn't exist.
You're right. Just a note
there’s minuscule chance that’s wrong
This is the scientific perspective. All signs point to no. But as always, we might have missed something. I think this is the agnostic perspective, even the "agnostic atheist" perspective. I think, and I might be wrong, that the pure "atheist" perspective is that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is no God.
But if there's a tiny retarded chance that for some reason there is something as absurd as a god... lol.
...then that'd be me of course
Atheism doesn't mean belief in nothing. It means a lack of belief. They don't have "faith in science". They simply have no need for faith. And they certainly don't believe that everything that is currently known is all we will ever know, only that there's no point in basing your life on things you can't know.
Agnostics are willing to speculate or hedge their bets, whereas atheists prefer to assume the obvious: that there probably is nothing higher guiding our lives, we're on our own and should not deceive ourselves otherwise.
It’s a common misconception, but agnosticism is the one that is the lack of belief, and applying the scientific method to one’s belief system. It’s the “we don’t know what we don’t know” approach, which defines the scientific method.
there’s no point in basing your life on things you can’t know
I certainly don’t disagree.
Sure. Given that the realm of souls claims to be outside of physics, this isn't surprising. Now whether that all makes sense or not, I do not know. As I said, I don't believe in it but I accept the possibility 🤷♂️
Well, quite literally everything is physics, so if a soul exists, it has to be supported by physics.
True, but physics does not explain everything yet. Ask an astrophysicist, and neurophysicist, or a quantum physicist, and they'll probably have a long laundry list of things we don't understand yet.
And so, accepting the possibility does not mean rejecting physics. It only means we haven't gotten there yet, and maybe there are things about the human experience that physics hasn't yet even begun to grapple with.
The soul lives in the gaps in our knowledge. It is an artifact of the conscious mind, the part of us that allows us to reconcile the unknown and unknowable with the everyday experiences of our senses.
It is immortal in the sense that nothing is ever truly gone, both because echoes of it ripple outward across time and space, but also because the experience of time itself is inextricably bound with consciousness.
I'm agnostic, so obviously my view on that is that we simply don't know.
Answering my own question: I've always identified as an atheist but I still believe there's more to us than just atoms.
In my view, there's something in our consciousness that gives you identity and defines who you are, why you perceive the flow of time and the sequence of events that happens to a specific person (you). It's why from my perspective I'm the main character of my story and everyone else is essentially an NPC.
This is what I would call a soul. I don't believe they're immortal or anything, however.
I'd imagine you're rather unique. I have a hard time imagining atheists believing in something as nebulous as a soul.
EDIT: Please don't downvote OP, if anything this is a more interesting discussion thread than just "No, we're just meat and electricity"
Atheists by and large don't outright reject the possibility of the unknown. They just don't hang their whole lives on it and make up stories to make it less unnerving to contemplate. The fact is we can't know everything, and our collective knowledge as a species probably barely scratches the surface of reality. But we can rule certain specific use cases out on a logical basis.
Almost anything is possible. Likely? Fuck no. But possible.
No worries about the downvoting. There's no karma display :P
there’s something in our consciousness that gives you identity and defines who you are
Identity, personality, soul ... I feel these terms are somewhat synonymous, if we exclude the spiritual connation, which I'd like to.
why you perceive the flow of time and the sequence of events that happens to a specific person (you).
Not sure what that means or wether that question makes sense. As I see it, all the above mentioned synonyms emerge from the brain doing it's thing. A human brain working under normal condition creates a 'you perceive the flow'.
Tried to edit the post but for some reason it didn't work.
I feel like the question was poorly worded (English is my second language). By soul I meant a part of consciousness that makes us more than mere collections of atoms, not necessarily an immortal entity capable of afterlife/reincarnation.
So why do brain accidents change your personality, if we're more than atoms? Shouldn't the soul preserve you even if the atoms in the brain are broken from their place?
Because our personality is defined by the brain. It's fully physical.
I never said I believe souls have anything to do with personality.
But if they don’t have anything to do with who you are as a person (aka personality), and they aren’t your body (aka “just atoms”), then what do they have any impact on?
So what exactly does soul do? Just exists and that's it?
I think they give some kind of meaning to the entire universe.
The universe mostly consists of particles that just exist. For inanimate things that do not perceive the flow of time, a Planck time is the same as the universe's entire lifetime. So without sentient observers, time would make no sense. The universe would instantly jump from its initial state to the final one, so it might as well not exist.
It's like in that philosophical question about a tree falling in the forest where no one hears the sound, but instead of the sound it's about time and therefore all existence.
Sorry for bad English, I hope I made myself clear.
Sense of self does not have to be connected to one's personality.
It does. For example many people with depression feel they're worthless (their sense of self), which is fixed by using anti-depressants, meaning it happens in the brain/body. Unless of course anti-depressants are some magical thing that somehow can fix soul.
What you're describing are just feelings, the sense of self-worth. Those are indeed just brain chemistry. What I (and presumably OP) mean by sense of self is the conscious experience of you being a "self" inside your body, separate from the other. This self could still be the same even with a completely different personality and different feelings. Or maybe it wouldn't be. But the point is that we currently know very little about how we get a consciousness or what it's made of. This may change in the future, but until then I can't say we don't have some form of "soul" with any confidence.
As someone with clinical depression my whole life, I can answer this as no, the depression making me feel worthless is not connect in any way to my sense of "self." That's very seperate from any feeling in general, it just "is."
Sometime I get a feeling/swell of "wonderment" in response to my sense of self if I really concentrate on that "sense," but that feeling of wondermemt is just that: a response.
Also, anti depressants don't work the way most people think they do. In the cases of situational depression, they keep a person getting up and out of bed until they naturally start to feel better, in which case the meds are stopped. In cases of clinical depression though, it's more of a life-long medication that gets them out of bed in the morning. It dulls the depression, but it doesn't get rid of it.
All of that is disconnected from one's sense of "self."
I like Douglas Hofstadter's concept of the soul as a self referential mechanism. His book: 'I am a strange loop' expands on this, which is a bit more spiritual (for lack of a better word) expansion of his ideas in Gödel, Escher Bach.
It also explains how your own loop incorporates and curates the memories of the people you love and how you're able to live, and see though their 'eyes' after they have died.
So the soul of others finds an explanation in yourself, and allows you to live in in other people's minds, without any super natural constructs.
Always glad to find another student of Hofstadter in the wild. G.E.B. blew my mind wide open when I read it in my early 20s.
I Am a Strange Loop is a far more accessible distillation of some of the same ideas, but I recommend both to anyone who wants a better grasp on how something seemingly infinitely complex like a human mind can emerge from mere atoms dancing around one another - and how we are, in actual fact, greater than the meaty sum of our parts.
I believe in our consciousness giving us unique personalities and the ability to make complex decisions. Anything past that doesn't make sense to me, and goes against all logic or understanding we have of the universe.
No. We are nothing but bags of meat that, over millions of years, evolved a way to think. We feel so high and mighty about ourselves that we made up "something special" about ourselves to set us apart from every other bag of meat on the planet.
We feel so high and mighty about ourselves that we made up “something special” about ourselves to set us apart from every other bag of meat on the planet.
Not necessarily. If there is such a thing as a soul, I see no reason why all the other bags of meat wouldn't have one as well.
I don't think soul has a good enough definition to say whether or not it does exist.
Soul kinda just means nothing to me.
No.
I think that people are attracted to the idea of a soul because they would like to think that there is something unchanging about them. A desire for constancy in an inconstant world.
What I have experienced is wild changes in my own behavior, thoughts, desires, fears, drives, and whatever-might-have-you. Certainly, I am not the same person I was when I was an infant or when I was a child or when I was a young man or - I suppose in a more subtle way - I will be after I finish posting this and get some lunch.
I argue with myself. Blame myself. Bargain with myself. Pump myself up. All as though there are different selves within me at all times. By this I conclude that I don't really have a self, but more of a collection of personalities, characteristics, and traits that are more or less dominant at any given moment. I am large, I contain (thank you Walt) multitudes.
I am comfortable with my inconstancy and inconsistencies. Generally at peace about having selves rather than a self.
I see no evidence of a soul. And I haven't the need for one that would drive me to delude myself into thinking I have one nonetheless.
I haven't see any measurable proof of one, or any experiment proposed that would render the idea of a soul falsifiable or not. Honestly, the current debate in philosophy/neuroscience on the existence (or non-existence) of free-will seems like a more important question, that if answered in the negative would have major implications on even the definition of the word 'soul'.
Fun question though, I've enjoyed reading the diversity of thought on the matter in this thread. :)
I don't think humans have souls. When we die, we do just that. I don't think we are so special to have something other species don't, so if we (humans) have them, then other species also can.
Nope.
The mind is what the brain does; when the brain stops doing, the mind stops being.
I don't believe it, but I some times wonder if some kind of self is preserved as energy within the universe somehow. Effectively being a soul, but in a sense of physics more than spirituality. Much like how the physical body will decay and return to the earth, the energy that makes up consciousness could simply return to the universe.
No. Smell the flowers while you can.
I would call myself an agnostic, and I suppose I believe in a soul... In that they are a (potentially inaccurate) way of describing the singularity of oneself.
We contain something which has conscious thoughts, and awareness of "itself" while existing. I suppose that would be a soul, no? We can remember and have individual lives with isolated moments no one else will ever know. Are those memories really only random creases in our brain? Do the feelings and deeper experiences for you wash away as nothing alongside the mechanics of those memories? What makes us... well, us?
I like to think the soul is just that, the part of ourselves that is truly unique, and can only fully be witnessed internally. The part of you that is only ever going to fully exist in the here and now, while still recalling the there and then. That which gives us the full breadth of emotion tied to deeper thought, and hopefully some understanding. That, at least, is a miraculous thing to get to experience... spiritually or not.
The immutability of a soul is a different question, one which we'll get an answer to after the physical living stops.
Best answer here. Soul is more of a high level concept, I'm not a spiritual person by any means, but say there was a fully conscious AI, I would say there is a difference between that and human consciousness, and that would be what I define as the soul. What is that, is that neurons in the head or is that an amalgamation of our entire being? Idk.
I don't believe anything happens after death, I think ashes to ashes, but I do think there is a spark, something there that we can't quite quantify... yet.
Worded even more succinctly than my rambling did! It's a loaded question, one that has a lot of answers that may all be wrong for what we currently know.
Nope.
Well, I use the word "soul" to sum up what makes a person a person, their base values, moral standpoint, what they love and hate etc. The warmth of a person.
In the same way I would say that somebody forfeits their soul because of their acts.
And I'd argue that our soul "lives on" after we die in the people we've made an impression on or in general through the effects of our actions.
But some magic person-container?
No. We die and then we're dead.
Im Egoist, so technically atheist, there are none until proven otherwise.
also, i see your 20d ago meme, it just so happens that i posted that meme elsewhere too, we are not just ego gang but also meme gang
Nice.
This pleases my Ego.
Word games. "God" and "Soul" are so ill-defined you can get literally anyone to agree that those "things" (thinks?) exist. If I define "soul" as "repeating emergent pattern of genetically and environmentally internal state and observable behaviour in a sentient species" I maybe could even get some people in this community to agree that such a concept exists. If I use a more religious definition like "magic non physical entity bestowed by an eternal god" all I would get is a resounding "NOO!".
It is the memetics strength of those concepts by being incredibly flexible and vague that will ensure their ongoing use and existence - and questions like this one.
Nope. I think the idea of a soul, afterlife comes from humans deep seated need to be special. We're just animals, enjoy your life while you can.
As an atheist, I would love to be proven wrong - that there's a benevolent all-knowing entity who guarantees eternal life in meadows lush with rivers of milk and honey (throw in the 72 virgins while we're at it). If there's any one thing that even remotely has a chance of changing my mind to accept this fantasy, it is the thought of being reunited with my pets when I die.
No. If you can't find it in an autopsy, did it ever exist in the first place?
Too many people confuse 'soul' for 'mind' (IMHO)
I think 'soul' is not something which exists in itself - it is the idea of the essence of a thing, the thing which causes an individual life.
So theories go around that there are spiritual beings separate from the physical (debatable) and I personally think that it extends to all life, such that trees can have awareness which can also extend beyond their physical bodies.
As such, they obviously exist - but their exact definition and nature is quite hard to grasp. I don't think they can survive physical death.
It's a useful term in sentences like "This hurts my soul", but I don't need the metaphysical claims around it.
No
Agnostic here.
I do not think what people refer to as 'souls' has to have a physical existence nor a spiritual existence (whatever that means). What I think is that the word 'soul' refers to the sum total of a person's feelings, thoughts, and actions. That entity, even though it doesn't have any physical existence, could have effects that can be argued to be immortal.
I believe that what defines a person is a pattern of neurons firing in the brain. I also believe that if said pattern could be perfectly replicated on some other medium (along with all the associated physiological inputs that keep it humming and changing), that new pattern would be indistinguishable from the original.
There are infinite possible outcomes to every action, branching off from each moment. And there are also infinite parallel realities that branched off of previous moments. The pattern that is your consciousness will also branch off infinitely. But imagine a fork in the road where one direction is death. Your consciousness cannot take that route, because it no longer exists on that branch. But it DOES still exist in the other, and it has no choice but to continue onward.
Thus, you will never experience death.
Your consciousness may change along its beaching paths, perhaps contorting into something completely new, but it will never truly end.
This conversation reminds me of the book, Fall, by Neil Stephenson. In it, the main character dies but his essence is captured in software. It raises a ton of interesting questions about that process, including how would a software version of the brain function without the other organs, blood flowing through it, etc. In my head canon, it couldn't. I.e., we are the sum of all of our parts.
Well the thing is, it would change without those inputs. It would have to adapt to new inputs.
One would imagine that any successful replication of a human mind in technological form would also need to replicate those inputs - at least at first, until the pure mind itself could be weaned off them - if that's even possible. They are, after all, just another series of electrical signals, but they are also integral to a sense of self.
I think I'll remain agnostic on that one. Ask me again in 50 years and I'll probably know the answer by then. Unless I happen to somehow reach the age of 106 without dying, in which case I'll take a raincheck.
I don't think humans have souls. When we die, we do just that. I don't think we are so special to have something other species don't, so if we (humans) have them, then other species also can.
I don't think humans have souls. When we die, we do just that. I don't think we are so special to have something other species don't, so if we (humans) have them, then other species also can.
I don't think humans have souls. When we die, we do just that. I don't think we are so special to have something other species don't, so if we (humans) have them, then other species also can.
I don't think humans have souls. When we die, we do just that. I don't think we are so special to have something other species don't, so if we (humans) have them, then other species also can.
No. All evidence points towards “you” being nothing more than your body. Mess with the brain and the whole personality can change. What would then constitute the soul if it’s completely divorced from both physical reality and who you subjectively are as a person?
As an agnostic, I have two answers. On the spiritual side, maybe...? I mean I don't know if God stuff is real, so how could I know if a soul is real?
On the other side, I wonder if as we delve deeper into quantum mechanics, were going to discover things about the human body, and the nature of life, that could conceivably be called a soul
I kinda do but I believe that a soul is just what drives a person in their lifetime. It is made up of their thoughts, emotions, and experiences. After a person dies their soul goes too and that’s the end of it.
It seems like a way to take all the things I don't understand particularly well, and put them in a category that I fail to define precisely.
My preference is not to do that, because I have a hard time believing in something that I can't characterize reasonably well.
No. Soul = personality, nothing magic.
all these "deleted by creator" posts in a thread about atheism sound a bit ominous. @Jongaros@lemmy.ml are you ok?
Check the post history. Its ok. Probably just lemmy lagging and he deleted the duplicate posts.
It really depends on what you mean? It's a purposely, nearly obtusely, intangible concept. I'm not unwilling to talk about it if I get a proper definition, but my opinion would be a mere opinion formed from the facts I have on hand. I have some suppositions that are outside the realm of what science has been able to dig in to, but without actually factual backing, I also acknowledge that my ideas are conjecture that line up with how I perceive the world.
The ephemeral pattern of personhood or consciousness that appears to animate animals and that disappears when they die
What does consciousness mean on a material level? Do you just mean the brain? The brain does exist, yes.
Like the difference between a computer and the software running on it
I mean, ya, if that's how you wanna define a soul, I'll say that exists.
As for the more common definitions which tend to extend to moving that software around and that software moving to the cloud in the case of a system failure, I have no reason to believe the brain has wifi, gps, or satellite functionality.
But if we simply describe it as "the software on the brain", I hold no objection and can comfortably say it exists.
Curious, why did you group agnostics together with atheists?
“Soul” is just consciousness. Which many people seem to equate to the brain here.
There is 0 scientific evidence that consciousness has anything to do with our brains. Much to the contrary actually.
Consciousness truly is one of the biggest mysteries of life. We all experience it, but the more you observe it, the less you can find it.
It may feel at first as it’s a phenomena of the brain, of the mind. But soon after you start paying really close attention to it, you realize that consciousness is behind the mind. It’s underneath it.
It observes the mind. It observes everything. And that’s what it is. Perceiving. Aware of everything.
Its the only indivisible and irreducible thing in the universe that we ever found. Consciousness just is. It is the awareness in you. It is the awareness in everything.
When we crack consciousness, all these talks of “souls”, “god”, “atheism”, will seem just silly tbh.
There is 0 scientific evidence that consciousness has anything to do with our brains. Much to the contrary actually.
Source? Everything I’ve read on the topic suggests that it’s to do with the brain - damaged brain = no consciousness, even if the rest of the body fine.
Its the only indivisible and irreducible thing in the universe that we ever found. Consciousness just is.
Elementary particles would like a word.
This makes no sense to me. It's just generic platitudes and a wild claim.
You say "quite the contrary", claiming there is scientific evidence of consciousness having nothing to do with our brains. Where can I find this evidence?
I couldn't follow any of your reasoning. Can you summarize your central thesis? Because we observe...?
I don't see how conscience could not have anything to do with our brain when that is where it arises.
Im agnostic, and kinda yeah. When my grandpa died, i was there when they pulled the plug, and i could've swore that something left the body.
I do not. When the brain stops working it's just the end. I wasn't raised religious and I've never 'felt' anything spiritual. I respect people who do, but I just don't - it doesn't make sense to me.
Not that I've a choice but I do feel a sense of calm in the fact that when I die there's nothing. We're just a blip in a never ending universe.
It was here long before us and it'll continue to exist long after us. It's initially a very terrifying truth but eventually it becomes our most comforting truth.
The brain is literally powered by electricity. Like any device, it stops working once the power turns off. Some people have a problem facing this mortality, but I think accepting it allows you to be more present in life.
I was raised Roman Catholic.
A soul is a concept to make death less scary.
All life is an organic computer. When something dies, the computer is off, never to be rebooted again. That's ok though.
Or more scary, if one doesn't do as one is told.
No. Soul is an imaginary concept for ideas and claims. And people think of different things when they think of it.
We are an inherently physical entity. A vastly complex system that very interestingly enables consciousness to arise from it.
But when you remove the body it lives in there is nothing left of it. Other than the influences it had in its past.
No.
No, how would it work with Alzheimer's, brain tumours and other things that affect behaviour?
Not trying to argue at all, just spitballing off your thoughts: I feel like (assuming souls are things that exist) the brain is the hardware and the soul is the software in this scenario. If your computer’s mother board develops a problem, the data on your hard drive still exists and works; the hardware just can’t compute.
That all being said I’m an agnostic and I don’t really know the answer to OP’s question. I’ve kinda always assumed there was some star trekish we-are-just-energy thing going on. But I ultimately accept that we don’t know and can’t know and won’t know until we do.
Your example is flawed because the hard drive is also hardware and can also develop problems aside from everything else. I feel like a closer match would be information stored on the cloud, but that's just someone else's hard drive, so.... Yeah, I find the concept of a soul very weird.
Your example is flawed because the hard drive is also hardware and can also develop problems aside from everything else. I feel like a closer match would be information stored on the cloud, but that's just someone else's hard drive, so.... Yeah, I find the concept of a soul very weird.
Your example is flawed because the hard drive is also hardware and can also develop problems aside from everything else. I feel like a closer match would be information stored on the cloud, but that's just someone else's hard drive, so.... Yeah, I find the concept of a soul very weird.
No. Souls dont exist.
No. I believe soul is a human construct that is meant to be self defense mechanism to feel like we are special instead of bunch of meat with chemicals.
To be honest, I'm not even sure what "soul" is supposed to mean. If your definition of soul is an ethereal consciousness separate from your physical body than I can honestly say that i believe that doesn't exist. We have plenty of evidence that your consciousness is a function of your brain, we can see this when people experience personality changes as a result of chemical influence or damage to the brain. Someone suffering a stroke can come out of it with changes to their temperment, tastes, even interests. Anyone who's suffered chemical depression should be familiar with the way their neurochemistry effects their personally, and the effects of drugs on people is well known.
I've seen no useful evidence that a soul, based on that definition, does or even can exist. The evidence I do have looks very much like no such thing is happening.
Nope. There's no spiritual anything. The whole universe is kinda magic on its own, why people have the need to make up bullshit is beyond me.
Souls don't exist, you're just your body (and brain), try to enjoy the life you have, there will be nothing else afterwards.
Something I take some comfort in is that regardless of what your soul does upon death in the short term (whether it's an afterlife of some sort that we don't understand, a nihilistic void of nothingness, reincarnation as the soul attaches to a newly created body somewhere else in the world... whatever, no one alive truly knows or could ever know), science believes in a sort of reincarnation.
Where eventually as step one, everything that ever was ends up in black holes, and those black holes eventually decay until the universe is nothing but a uniform background of unchanging radiation, referred to as the heat death of the universe (because nothing can really physically change on macroscopic scales anymore, in order to convert energy into new heat).
And then, after ridiculously long time periods, quantum fluctuations cause the machinery of the universe to start back up again, everything re-forms, and eventually our universe ends up back where it started at the beginning of your life.
So it's possible that you will live again, and again, and again, forever, just with no ability to remember how it went down last time. And an incredibly long wait between lifetimes (though, to be fair, if death is a nihilistic void for each person, that wait is only going to feel like two seconds and bam, you're right back in the womb).
So if nothing else, at least there's that.
That's still "you" when no molecule was left of you?
It's still an exact arrangement of matter that's identical to your original configuration. So one would think that all the properties arising from it (such as consciousness) would be the same. So it's You Part 2 (or Part two quintillion, there's really no way to know which loop we're on).
I'd consider that identical, but not the same
A soul is at best a description of the electrical and quantum interactions that take place in our brain, a personified phenotype of the sum of these things occurring in our head (and to a degree our eyes, mouth, ears, and skin).
I don't believe in the soul in the traditional sense as it implies that there is one version of me -- is my soul my 9yo self, my 20-something alcoholic self, the self as of this moment, or my Alzheimer's-ridden self when I die? If it's supposed to be a "perfect" version of me when I pass, then it's kind of funny, because my spirit is, in a sense, a version of me that I've never actually met and wouldn't recognize.
I slid gently into atheism and my total failure to believe in souls was the way I realized I was in fact an atheist.
I was reading something that was discussing something about souls and I thought, pfft, there's no such thing as souls.
I think we're made out of meat. The thing that makes me me is a series of electrical impulses in (mostly?) my brain meat. That's why I find sports that involve repeated head trauma (football, boxing, etc) viscerally upsetting: by getting concussed a bunch of times you are, in my view, literally risking obliteration of the self.
if someone can give me a good definition of what they think a soul is or does, maybe i'll have a response, but quite often, i find the concept less false, and more just ill-defined.
I believe in anything that can be proven scientifically to actually exist. Show me evidence, not anecdotal stories which further an idea of "just believe me."
I believe in anything that can be proven scientifically to exist. Show me evidence, not anecdotal stories which further an idea of "just believe me."
considering many non-humans seem perfectly capable of making moral judgements, and feeling happiness or misery (all actions which appear to be explicable by purely material means), a 'soul' seems unnecessary to explain such things in humans. and it seems the very height of anthropocentrism to say that humans are immortal (despite all evidence to the contrary) while everything else just dies. why would just humans have these souls instead of, say, dolphins, or wild boars, or rattlesnakes, or coastal redwoods?
I believe in anything that can be proven scientifically to actually exist. Show me evidence, not anecdotal stories which further an idea of "just believe me"
I believe in anything that can be proven scientifically to actually exist. Show me evidence, not anecdotal stories which further an idea of "just believe me."
I believe in anything that can be proven scientifically to actually exist. Show me evidence, not anecdotal stories which further an idea of "just believe me."
I don't believe in a soul that's separate from the body, or that lives on afterward. But the way that "inanimate" matter can spin up thoughts and feelings and a consistent personal experience that can last for decades... It's almost fair to call that thing a soul. It's fair to talk about nurturing your soul and growing a soul.
To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we are the universe's way of understanding itself.
The universe growing souls like flowers, or something
No
No.
It comes down to how you define "soul".
Do I believe there's a consciousness that transcends death or exists separately from our physical existence, no.
But if you start talking of ship of Theseus/transponder incident/mind upload -type mental exercises, then yes, I believe "self" is an evolving pattern and a collection of experiences that could theoretically be replicated in another physical manifestation or even in a completely different medium. You could call that, too, "soul".
That's about how it's explain it.
I want to believe in the existence of souls, however ultimately we just don't have the evidence to back it up.
It's kind of really hard to say if I belive in something or not when you don't offer a definition, I don't believe in anything outside of the brain, consiousness and what makes me me, which could be a definition of soul, I do believe in, but again, that's just a result of my brain braining.
I’m kind of an agnostic, so naturally my point of view is: it’s hard if not impossible to tell.
I don’t really believe in a soul but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was such a thing. Maybe we’re all going back home after we die, maybe we just stop existing. Maybe it’s both. It’s hard to tell.
Is it, though? Nothing in physics supports the existence of, or even the need for, a soul.
That is the view of the atheist faith (that all that is currently known by science is enough to know), but the replier is agnostic, in which we don’t know what we don’t know.
Atheist faith doesn't exist, atheism is absence of faith. Atheists are more into facts and less into belief. If you have to believe in something for it to become true, it's nonsense.
I know that it’s a common belief in atheists that it’s not a faith. But if you take a step back, it’s hard to deny that there is some belief in the sentence: “if science has neither evidence of something nor of its absence, it doesn’t exist”.
The opposite of that is: “if science has neither evidence of something not of its absence, then science doesn’t know yet, and until then, neither can we”.
It’s fine to believe in things. I’d say it’s not great though, to think so highly of one’s own belief that one wouldn’t want to call if a belief.
And it's common belief of theists that everyone has to believe in something. I don't believe in anything. I believe people, like the scientists that discover stuff, but that's believing someone, not in something. Pretending it's the same is ridiculous.
I don’t know if that’s what you were implying, but I’m not at all a theist. And as a scientist, I can remind you that the scientific method is to keep researching topics that are inconclusive. To conclude something as non-existent because the research is inconclusive is not the scientific method.
What you are doing is listening to the science indeed, and drawing faith-based conclusions that something doesn’t exist because it wasn’t proven to exist. Which is fine, a lot of people do that to base all kinds of faiths, but it’s disingenuous to pretend that you’re not.
It's not inconclusive, it's improvable which basically means "why even bother?"
atheist faith describes people who BELIEVE that god does not exist
besides the fact that I do exist...
if there is no evidence that god doesn't exist, or that god does exist, then yes, there is no reason to believe god exists, but apart from the absurd and extremely vast absence of evidence that would point towards proving even the slimmest of traces of existence, that is also an epistemological challenge in that our perception is extremely limited and we don't know, as ritswd said, what we don't know.
so we have a lot of evidence, but there exists an extremely small and remote possibility that our theories are wrong, just because we're dumbfucks with very smol brains & tiny eyes that can only see 3 dimensions
so saying with 100% certainty that god does not exist is a dogmatic belief in our conclusions.
To be clear, it's highly likely that what we consider to be a "god" or a "satan" (as well as physical places we cannot see/reach where these two reside) isn't real, based on evidence that we've come upon today scientifically, but that also doesn't mean there isn't some form of a higher being that we are unable to recognize as such because of our limited abilities that you've explained above.
No, it's a logical conclusion. God isn't needed for the existence of the universe and thus doesn't exist. Sure, there's minuscule chance that's wrong and if it ever happens I'll be among the first who'll say I was wrong. Until then, science says God doesn't exist.
You're right. Just a note
This is the scientific perspective. All signs point to no. But as always, we might have missed something. I think this is the agnostic perspective, even the "agnostic atheist" perspective. I think, and I might be wrong, that the pure "atheist" perspective is that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is no God.
But if there's a tiny retarded chance that for some reason there is something as absurd as a god... lol.
...then that'd be me of course
Atheism doesn't mean belief in nothing. It means a lack of belief. They don't have "faith in science". They simply have no need for faith. And they certainly don't believe that everything that is currently known is all we will ever know, only that there's no point in basing your life on things you can't know.
Agnostics are willing to speculate or hedge their bets, whereas atheists prefer to assume the obvious: that there probably is nothing higher guiding our lives, we're on our own and should not deceive ourselves otherwise.
It’s a common misconception, but agnosticism is the one that is the lack of belief, and applying the scientific method to one’s belief system. It’s the “we don’t know what we don’t know” approach, which defines the scientific method.
I certainly don’t disagree.
Sure. Given that the realm of souls claims to be outside of physics, this isn't surprising. Now whether that all makes sense or not, I do not know. As I said, I don't believe in it but I accept the possibility 🤷♂️
Well, quite literally everything is physics, so if a soul exists, it has to be supported by physics.
True, but physics does not explain everything yet. Ask an astrophysicist, and neurophysicist, or a quantum physicist, and they'll probably have a long laundry list of things we don't understand yet.
And so, accepting the possibility does not mean rejecting physics. It only means we haven't gotten there yet, and maybe there are things about the human experience that physics hasn't yet even begun to grapple with.
The soul lives in the gaps in our knowledge. It is an artifact of the conscious mind, the part of us that allows us to reconcile the unknown and unknowable with the everyday experiences of our senses.
It is immortal in the sense that nothing is ever truly gone, both because echoes of it ripple outward across time and space, but also because the experience of time itself is inextricably bound with consciousness.
I'm agnostic, so obviously my view on that is that we simply don't know.
Answering my own question: I've always identified as an atheist but I still believe there's more to us than just atoms.
In my view, there's something in our consciousness that gives you identity and defines who you are, why you perceive the flow of time and the sequence of events that happens to a specific person (you). It's why from my perspective I'm the main character of my story and everyone else is essentially an NPC.
This is what I would call a soul. I don't believe they're immortal or anything, however.
I'd imagine you're rather unique. I have a hard time imagining atheists believing in something as nebulous as a soul.
EDIT: Please don't downvote OP, if anything this is a more interesting discussion thread than just "No, we're just meat and electricity"
Atheists by and large don't outright reject the possibility of the unknown. They just don't hang their whole lives on it and make up stories to make it less unnerving to contemplate. The fact is we can't know everything, and our collective knowledge as a species probably barely scratches the surface of reality. But we can rule certain specific use cases out on a logical basis.
Almost anything is possible. Likely? Fuck no. But possible.
No worries about the downvoting. There's no karma display :P
Identity, personality, soul ... I feel these terms are somewhat synonymous, if we exclude the spiritual connation, which I'd like to.
Not sure what that means or wether that question makes sense. As I see it, all the above mentioned synonyms emerge from the brain doing it's thing. A human brain working under normal condition creates a 'you perceive the flow'.
Tried to edit the post but for some reason it didn't work.
I feel like the question was poorly worded (English is my second language). By soul I meant a part of consciousness that makes us more than mere collections of atoms, not necessarily an immortal entity capable of afterlife/reincarnation.
So why do brain accidents change your personality, if we're more than atoms? Shouldn't the soul preserve you even if the atoms in the brain are broken from their place?
Because our personality is defined by the brain. It's fully physical. I never said I believe souls have anything to do with personality.
But if they don’t have anything to do with who you are as a person (aka personality), and they aren’t your body (aka “just atoms”), then what do they have any impact on?
So what exactly does soul do? Just exists and that's it?
I think they give some kind of meaning to the entire universe.
The universe mostly consists of particles that just exist. For inanimate things that do not perceive the flow of time, a Planck time is the same as the universe's entire lifetime. So without sentient observers, time would make no sense. The universe would instantly jump from its initial state to the final one, so it might as well not exist.
It's like in that philosophical question about a tree falling in the forest where no one hears the sound, but instead of the sound it's about time and therefore all existence. Sorry for bad English, I hope I made myself clear.
Sense of self does not have to be connected to one's personality.
It does. For example many people with depression feel they're worthless (their sense of self), which is fixed by using anti-depressants, meaning it happens in the brain/body. Unless of course anti-depressants are some magical thing that somehow can fix soul.
What you're describing are just feelings, the sense of self-worth. Those are indeed just brain chemistry. What I (and presumably OP) mean by sense of self is the conscious experience of you being a "self" inside your body, separate from the other. This self could still be the same even with a completely different personality and different feelings. Or maybe it wouldn't be. But the point is that we currently know very little about how we get a consciousness or what it's made of. This may change in the future, but until then I can't say we don't have some form of "soul" with any confidence.
As someone with clinical depression my whole life, I can answer this as no, the depression making me feel worthless is not connect in any way to my sense of "self." That's very seperate from any feeling in general, it just "is."
Sometime I get a feeling/swell of "wonderment" in response to my sense of self if I really concentrate on that "sense," but that feeling of wondermemt is just that: a response.
Also, anti depressants don't work the way most people think they do. In the cases of situational depression, they keep a person getting up and out of bed until they naturally start to feel better, in which case the meds are stopped. In cases of clinical depression though, it's more of a life-long medication that gets them out of bed in the morning. It dulls the depression, but it doesn't get rid of it.
All of that is disconnected from one's sense of "self."
I like Douglas Hofstadter's concept of the soul as a self referential mechanism. His book: 'I am a strange loop' expands on this, which is a bit more spiritual (for lack of a better word) expansion of his ideas in Gödel, Escher Bach.
It also explains how your own loop incorporates and curates the memories of the people you love and how you're able to live, and see though their 'eyes' after they have died.
So the soul of others finds an explanation in yourself, and allows you to live in in other people's minds, without any super natural constructs.
Always glad to find another student of Hofstadter in the wild. G.E.B. blew my mind wide open when I read it in my early 20s.
I Am a Strange Loop is a far more accessible distillation of some of the same ideas, but I recommend both to anyone who wants a better grasp on how something seemingly infinitely complex like a human mind can emerge from mere atoms dancing around one another - and how we are, in actual fact, greater than the meaty sum of our parts.
I believe in our consciousness giving us unique personalities and the ability to make complex decisions. Anything past that doesn't make sense to me, and goes against all logic or understanding we have of the universe.
No. We are nothing but bags of meat that, over millions of years, evolved a way to think. We feel so high and mighty about ourselves that we made up "something special" about ourselves to set us apart from every other bag of meat on the planet.
Not necessarily. If there is such a thing as a soul, I see no reason why all the other bags of meat wouldn't have one as well.
I don't think soul has a good enough definition to say whether or not it does exist.
Soul kinda just means nothing to me.
No.
I think that people are attracted to the idea of a soul because they would like to think that there is something unchanging about them. A desire for constancy in an inconstant world.
What I have experienced is wild changes in my own behavior, thoughts, desires, fears, drives, and whatever-might-have-you. Certainly, I am not the same person I was when I was an infant or when I was a child or when I was a young man or - I suppose in a more subtle way - I will be after I finish posting this and get some lunch.
I argue with myself. Blame myself. Bargain with myself. Pump myself up. All as though there are different selves within me at all times. By this I conclude that I don't really have a self, but more of a collection of personalities, characteristics, and traits that are more or less dominant at any given moment. I am large, I contain (thank you Walt) multitudes.
I am comfortable with my inconstancy and inconsistencies. Generally at peace about having selves rather than a self.
I see no evidence of a soul. And I haven't the need for one that would drive me to delude myself into thinking I have one nonetheless.
I haven't see any measurable proof of one, or any experiment proposed that would render the idea of a soul falsifiable or not. Honestly, the current debate in philosophy/neuroscience on the existence (or non-existence) of free-will seems like a more important question, that if answered in the negative would have major implications on even the definition of the word 'soul'.
Fun question though, I've enjoyed reading the diversity of thought on the matter in this thread. :)
I don't think humans have souls. When we die, we do just that. I don't think we are so special to have something other species don't, so if we (humans) have them, then other species also can.
Nope.
The mind is what the brain does; when the brain stops doing, the mind stops being.
I don't believe it, but I some times wonder if some kind of self is preserved as energy within the universe somehow. Effectively being a soul, but in a sense of physics more than spirituality. Much like how the physical body will decay and return to the earth, the energy that makes up consciousness could simply return to the universe.
No. Smell the flowers while you can.
I would call myself an agnostic, and I suppose I believe in a soul... In that they are a (potentially inaccurate) way of describing the singularity of oneself.
We contain something which has conscious thoughts, and awareness of "itself" while existing. I suppose that would be a soul, no? We can remember and have individual lives with isolated moments no one else will ever know. Are those memories really only random creases in our brain? Do the feelings and deeper experiences for you wash away as nothing alongside the mechanics of those memories? What makes us... well, us?
I like to think the soul is just that, the part of ourselves that is truly unique, and can only fully be witnessed internally. The part of you that is only ever going to fully exist in the here and now, while still recalling the there and then. That which gives us the full breadth of emotion tied to deeper thought, and hopefully some understanding. That, at least, is a miraculous thing to get to experience... spiritually or not.
The immutability of a soul is a different question, one which we'll get an answer to after the physical living stops.
Best answer here. Soul is more of a high level concept, I'm not a spiritual person by any means, but say there was a fully conscious AI, I would say there is a difference between that and human consciousness, and that would be what I define as the soul. What is that, is that neurons in the head or is that an amalgamation of our entire being? Idk.
I don't believe anything happens after death, I think ashes to ashes, but I do think there is a spark, something there that we can't quite quantify... yet.
Worded even more succinctly than my rambling did! It's a loaded question, one that has a lot of answers that may all be wrong for what we currently know.
Nope.
Well, I use the word "soul" to sum up what makes a person a person, their base values, moral standpoint, what they love and hate etc. The warmth of a person. In the same way I would say that somebody forfeits their soul because of their acts. And I'd argue that our soul "lives on" after we die in the people we've made an impression on or in general through the effects of our actions. But some magic person-container? No. We die and then we're dead.
Im Egoist, so technically atheist, there are none until proven otherwise.
ego gang
Is Egoism a gang?
not really
but there's egoist memes
I just put a bunch o links on the sidebar here: https://sh.itjust.works/c/fullegoism
also, i see your 20d ago meme, it just so happens that i posted that meme elsewhere too, we are not just ego gang but also meme gang
Nice.
This pleases my Ego.
Word games. "God" and "Soul" are so ill-defined you can get literally anyone to agree that those "things" (thinks?) exist. If I define "soul" as "repeating emergent pattern of genetically and environmentally internal state and observable behaviour in a sentient species" I maybe could even get some people in this community to agree that such a concept exists. If I use a more religious definition like "magic non physical entity bestowed by an eternal god" all I would get is a resounding "NOO!". It is the memetics strength of those concepts by being incredibly flexible and vague that will ensure their ongoing use and existence - and questions like this one.
Nope. I think the idea of a soul, afterlife comes from humans deep seated need to be special. We're just animals, enjoy your life while you can.
As an atheist, I would love to be proven wrong - that there's a benevolent all-knowing entity who guarantees eternal life in meadows lush with rivers of milk and honey (throw in the 72 virgins while we're at it). If there's any one thing that even remotely has a chance of changing my mind to accept this fantasy, it is the thought of being reunited with my pets when I die.
No. If you can't find it in an autopsy, did it ever exist in the first place? Too many people confuse 'soul' for 'mind' (IMHO)
I think 'soul' is not something which exists in itself - it is the idea of the essence of a thing, the thing which causes an individual life.
So theories go around that there are spiritual beings separate from the physical (debatable) and I personally think that it extends to all life, such that trees can have awareness which can also extend beyond their physical bodies.
As such, they obviously exist - but their exact definition and nature is quite hard to grasp. I don't think they can survive physical death.
It's a useful term in sentences like "This hurts my soul", but I don't need the metaphysical claims around it.
No
Agnostic here.
I do not think what people refer to as 'souls' has to have a physical existence nor a spiritual existence (whatever that means). What I think is that the word 'soul' refers to the sum total of a person's feelings, thoughts, and actions. That entity, even though it doesn't have any physical existence, could have effects that can be argued to be immortal.
I believe that what defines a person is a pattern of neurons firing in the brain. I also believe that if said pattern could be perfectly replicated on some other medium (along with all the associated physiological inputs that keep it humming and changing), that new pattern would be indistinguishable from the original.
There are infinite possible outcomes to every action, branching off from each moment. And there are also infinite parallel realities that branched off of previous moments. The pattern that is your consciousness will also branch off infinitely. But imagine a fork in the road where one direction is death. Your consciousness cannot take that route, because it no longer exists on that branch. But it DOES still exist in the other, and it has no choice but to continue onward.
Thus, you will never experience death.
Your consciousness may change along its beaching paths, perhaps contorting into something completely new, but it will never truly end.
This conversation reminds me of the book, Fall, by Neil Stephenson. In it, the main character dies but his essence is captured in software. It raises a ton of interesting questions about that process, including how would a software version of the brain function without the other organs, blood flowing through it, etc. In my head canon, it couldn't. I.e., we are the sum of all of our parts.
Well the thing is, it would change without those inputs. It would have to adapt to new inputs.
One would imagine that any successful replication of a human mind in technological form would also need to replicate those inputs - at least at first, until the pure mind itself could be weaned off them - if that's even possible. They are, after all, just another series of electrical signals, but they are also integral to a sense of self.
I think I'll remain agnostic on that one. Ask me again in 50 years and I'll probably know the answer by then. Unless I happen to somehow reach the age of 106 without dying, in which case I'll take a raincheck.
I don't think humans have souls. When we die, we do just that. I don't think we are so special to have something other species don't, so if we (humans) have them, then other species also can.
I don't think humans have souls. When we die, we do just that. I don't think we are so special to have something other species don't, so if we (humans) have them, then other species also can.
I don't think humans have souls. When we die, we do just that. I don't think we are so special to have something other species don't, so if we (humans) have them, then other species also can.
I don't think humans have souls. When we die, we do just that. I don't think we are so special to have something other species don't, so if we (humans) have them, then other species also can.
No. All evidence points towards “you” being nothing more than your body. Mess with the brain and the whole personality can change. What would then constitute the soul if it’s completely divorced from both physical reality and who you subjectively are as a person?
As an agnostic, I have two answers. On the spiritual side, maybe...? I mean I don't know if God stuff is real, so how could I know if a soul is real?
On the other side, I wonder if as we delve deeper into quantum mechanics, were going to discover things about the human body, and the nature of life, that could conceivably be called a soul
I kinda do but I believe that a soul is just what drives a person in their lifetime. It is made up of their thoughts, emotions, and experiences. After a person dies their soul goes too and that’s the end of it.
It seems like a way to take all the things I don't understand particularly well, and put them in a category that I fail to define precisely.
My preference is not to do that, because I have a hard time believing in something that I can't characterize reasonably well.
No. Soul = personality, nothing magic.
all these "deleted by creator" posts in a thread about atheism sound a bit ominous. @Jongaros@lemmy.ml are you ok?
Check the post history. Its ok. Probably just lemmy lagging and he deleted the duplicate posts.
It really depends on what you mean? It's a purposely, nearly obtusely, intangible concept. I'm not unwilling to talk about it if I get a proper definition, but my opinion would be a mere opinion formed from the facts I have on hand. I have some suppositions that are outside the realm of what science has been able to dig in to, but without actually factual backing, I also acknowledge that my ideas are conjecture that line up with how I perceive the world.
The ephemeral pattern of personhood or consciousness that appears to animate animals and that disappears when they die
What does consciousness mean on a material level? Do you just mean the brain? The brain does exist, yes.
Like the difference between a computer and the software running on it
I mean, ya, if that's how you wanna define a soul, I'll say that exists.
As for the more common definitions which tend to extend to moving that software around and that software moving to the cloud in the case of a system failure, I have no reason to believe the brain has wifi, gps, or satellite functionality.
But if we simply describe it as "the software on the brain", I hold no objection and can comfortably say it exists.
Curious, why did you group agnostics together with atheists?
“Soul” is just consciousness. Which many people seem to equate to the brain here.
There is 0 scientific evidence that consciousness has anything to do with our brains. Much to the contrary actually.
Consciousness truly is one of the biggest mysteries of life. We all experience it, but the more you observe it, the less you can find it.
It may feel at first as it’s a phenomena of the brain, of the mind. But soon after you start paying really close attention to it, you realize that consciousness is behind the mind. It’s underneath it.
It observes the mind. It observes everything. And that’s what it is. Perceiving. Aware of everything.
Its the only indivisible and irreducible thing in the universe that we ever found. Consciousness just is. It is the awareness in you. It is the awareness in everything.
When we crack consciousness, all these talks of “souls”, “god”, “atheism”, will seem just silly tbh.
Source? Everything I’ve read on the topic suggests that it’s to do with the brain - damaged brain = no consciousness, even if the rest of the body fine.
Elementary particles would like a word.
This makes no sense to me. It's just generic platitudes and a wild claim.
You say "quite the contrary", claiming there is scientific evidence of consciousness having nothing to do with our brains. Where can I find this evidence?
I couldn't follow any of your reasoning. Can you summarize your central thesis? Because we observe...?
I don't see how conscience could not have anything to do with our brain when that is where it arises.
Im agnostic, and kinda yeah. When my grandpa died, i was there when they pulled the plug, and i could've swore that something left the body.
No