Do you believe the that you have a soul?

I believe that my consciousness is a thing I can point to as being my essence. You could maybe call that a soul, or you could maybe not. Either way, my consciousness is the collective consciousness of countless single-celled organisms all working to make my singular self function. You could maybe call the manifestation of all these processes into a greater thinking singularity as a "soul", more akin to the way in which a city might have a "soul" made up by the people that live in it. I don't believe I have a ghost, and I believe that my consciousness is conditional, derived from my biology, but consciousness itself is as good as anything to call a soul

So I guess, in short, no XD

I would never buy a Kia.

There is at least as much evidence for dragons and magic and Greek gods as there is for a soul, so no.

Nah, I'm just a flesh computer.

Define "soul" or the answer is entirely meaningless. I'm pretty sure I'm sentient and can feel emotions and think and reason.

Whenever I listen to that old-time 'a rock and roll I feel soothed, so I must.

No. It's more religion inspired fairy tale magic.

Define to me concretely what constitutes a soul, and I will tell you. Do cats have souls? What about frogs? Snails? Amoebas? Trees? Or people on life support?

I have a self-aware consciousness. If that's what counts, then yes. However, this means that many people by the same definition don't.

No, I think that's an abstract concept of a consciousness invented by religion to transcend death. It's a comforting thought, but that's really it.

No. It's religious quackery.

I think the concept of a soul is too vague for that question to really mean anything

No.

I self-evidently have a consciousness (cogito ergo sum), but logic, reason and the available evidence all point to that consciousness being a manifestation of brain activity and shaped by my genetics, environment and experiences, as opposed to an entity unto itself.

Souls are just faerie tales people tell themselves to avoid feeling angst around death. There is absolutely no evidence they exist and plenty of evidence they don’t.

Honestly, rather than a "yes" or "no" I'm just gonna say that I don't think anybody's given a clear enough definition of what would constitute a "soul" to even make the question mean anything.

Recent studies suggest that much of consciousness/information synthesis is not in the neurons themselves, but the electromagnetic fields that they generate. Is that a soul?

What about the gut microbiome and how much of an oversized effect it has on a person's day-to-day experience? If the soul is some manifestation of your non-physical existance, would it be affected by those very physical little buggers, since they can affect your mood so much?

Even if you go to the classic religious context about a conscious experience that exists after death, you still have to answer whether or not they can wander earth, or, as some christian denominations think, they're all in heaven, hell, or purgatory so you'll never ever need to care about a non-embodied soul on earth anyway.

No.

You'd have to define soul first. I definitely have a subjective experience/consciousness however.

The problem I have with the concept of a conscious soul that survives my death is the question what version of me survives. If it's the version I was when I died, the younger versions of me still stay dead. If it's an ideal younger version of me, the older version still died. In fact, the soul would always only be a part of me since it lacks the biochemical processes of the body. So it would be another entity possessing my memories but it wouldn't be me, I'd still be dead.

You can believe in whatever you want but it won't make it true. Got to have facts and proof before I'd consider it.

I wish there was an active philosophy community on lemmy. I kinda miss r/Askphilosophy and r/askhistorians.

And to answer your question -

I don't really know. I guess people belive in souls so as to eternalize themselves and thereby reducing their fear of death, knowing that their soul will be out somewhere instead of the idea that they will return to a state of nothing.

Can a brain injury change who you are?

No, I believe we are just pieces of meat with enough nureons to be capable of abstract concepts. However currently the existence of a soil is unfalsifiable, so I wouldn't be able to prove or disprove my clain.

I find the hubris of a "soul" amusing.

Electric meat machines

Why wouldn’t you have a “soul”? Mind you, I’m not speaking from a religious perspective (because I’m not religious).

In each of our heads is a brain. I’m no doctor or scientist, but I’m reasonably confident that no two brains are a like – we each grow and learn differently due to our surrounding environments. But one thing we have in common is some sort of inner dialogue or thought process (some people have a narrator, while some see motion pictures).

These are all formed based on how our brains develop neural pathways. These pathways are used by electrical signals that traverse the brain and cause us to be who we are (ie our personalities).

All of this to remind you that the first law of thermal dynamics is that, “Energy cannot be created or destroyed…”, which also goes on to explain, “but it can be transformed from one form to another.”

So who is to say that the general concepts of “reincarnation” or “life after death” are not real? That our essence or “soul” doesn’t simply manifest beyond our physical forms long after our physical forms have stopped working?

But also, you could be right that once our brain stops working and the energy used by our brains then transforms into something else that would no longer be considered a soul.

It’s these types of questions that we cannot reliably answer with any certainty that make life precious and unique. Because no one can honestly say they know what happens after we die, so in turn we should live the best possible life we can just in case. And it’s up to each of us to determine what “best possible life” means, because we are all different.

When I was younger, I became a "rational" and "atheist" type - I have to thank my parents for that. They were the scientific but spiritual type and allowed me to come to my own conclusions, rather than forcing religion down my throat. I'm glad, too. Because when I met religious people later on, I was able to look at the absurdity of it all and brush it off.

But now I'm older, and I sometimes wish this weren't the case. I truly wish I could believe in a soul or a heaven/hell or reincarnation or any other form of higher being than us. I get it. I get why people do. The world is ruled by evil people who do terrible, evil things and this belief in a higher authority where they will one day be judged, and all the innocents who suffer will finally have peace... it's the only way to cope with it.

I don't believe in a soul, but I wish I did.

Do we have a sentient soul? I would say no, and as proof I point to those suffering from Alzheimer's. That disease robs a person of their memory, so by the time of death they have lost much of who they were. If the sentient soul exists, it must be able to remember, otherwise it cannot retain the traits that make the individual unique. It should retain all the memories of our life. Yet those with Alzheimer's forget who they are. How is this possible if we possess a sentient soul? If we cannot retain memories in this life, how will we do so in the next?

What about those with major brain damage from stroke or mishap? Part of their brain died, and whatever that part contained, it's now gone. Is their soul now split? Did part of it "move on" with the dead part of the brain?

There is a part of us which is made of "the culmination of pure, untransferably subjective sensory experience" and I call this a soul.

Not anymore, the demon reached up my ass and stole the bead that contains it. I wonder what he’s doing with it now.

No

I don't believe, because I do not care about the existence of the soul...

Nothing suggesting the primacy of metaphysical stuff, but in the same way its fine to talk about the soul of a nation, it's fine to talk about my soul. I don't think its magic, I just think there's a connection with the rest of the universe and other conscious people that is healthy to cultivate, and the effects I have on those relationships will continue after I die (likewise, other people's relationships have affected my life even after they've died). I don't think there's any reward of doing so outside of the health of those relationships. I do think certain behaviours and beliefs are poisonous to this "soul", but we can also talk about mental health and how we should be emphasising community etc.

But it's all just physical stuff in the end, and if a meteor hit Earth tomorrow and scattered our material there isn't anything left over like a bunch of angry ghosts floating around. Not even anyone to mourn what could have been.

Yes and no. The idea that people are temporarily possessed meat puppets is just silly. But I do think there is something intangible that makes a person who they are. That we don’t have souls so much as we are “souls”.

Ug, I really don’t understand it enough to answer the question… it is sort of like the ship of Theseus. If we slowly replace, upgrade, or even modify each part of the ship, it remains the ship of Theseus even when every piece is replaced. There is something intangible left that makes it the ship of Theseus, makes all the old bits still part of it, and incorporates the changes into it as well.

This is an interesting question for me. I used to be solidly in the "no" camp but became part of the "yes" camp due to some things I've experienced in life.

Life is strange. Maybe it's nothing more than what is happening in our brain. Maybe it's more than that. I choose to believe the latter, but I'm open to having my belief challenged if (when?) scientific study provides a better answer than what we have now.

I don't know the correct meaning of soul enough to answer but I want to think there is.

I was brought up an atheist by science focused parents so I never believed or was taught about any religious as in a doctrine but rather as myths people believe. I envied sometimes how people would gather to pray and how much relief they seemed to feel because of it. Growing up a certain way, had me experience some fucked up shit and I really, really wished there was an answer to it aside from "well, grownups are shitty lol". Maybe having a little bit of magical/spiritual thinking would have helped me cope in better ways, but who knows.

Now I am older, still non religious but a bit more conscious/observant about how I percieve the world around me and while I know how many things work/ exist, I like to thinkk there is also a bit of an unexplained component that I cannot fully grasp that is a bit like magic.

I don't think there's a soul. If you really think about what you "are", it's just your thoughts, memories and senses. Everything that you experience as "you" in this exact moment is the thoughts you're thinking, the memories you can recall and the information your senses are giving you. If someone were to make an exact clone of you, including all the memories in your brain, you would both think that you're the real "you" but you would also be two different people with different thoughts and perceptions. But what happened to the soul in this case? Has it been cloned too or has a completely new soul been created? In any case, there has to be a new soul because 2 people obviously can't have the same one. If you instead transplanted the brain into the clone, would your soul have been transferred? I would think so. But doesn't that just mean that what we think of as a soul, is just our brain?

I think qualia and the philosophical zombie thing pokes a hole in the whole non-soul thing but I'll admit that I don't have a good materialist explanation.

I'd wager that consciousness is some sort of emergent property of matter operating on a dimension we can't directly interact with. 70% of our understanding of the universe doesn't come from directly observing stuff, it comes from observing the effects of it.

That doesn't mean that you have an eternal soul that survives death, just that consciousness is a bit more complicated than the current materialist explanation.

I think (on a subrational level) that there's some essence of personhood or consciousness that seems to transcend its material fabric, becoming more than the sum of its parts. "Transcend" is too strong a word, since by all appearances there's no static being that isn't still largely a result of and dependent on its makeup; as the foundation deteriorates so does the consciousness that results from it. That spectrum of functionality seems to undermine the possibility of a true soul that exists independent of its body.

But the word certainly signifies an actual thing, I think. Take a thought experiment: if we were to somehow make an exact replica of you, down to the molecular level, it would from all perspectives except your own be you. But the essence of what is you to yourself, your continuity of perspective, would (probably) not inhabit that new body, it would still inhabit your current one. The Star Trek / Prestige problem of conscious continuity suggests there's something there, at least conceptually.

The fact that there's still a lot about physics / the universe / consciousness that science doesn't understand leaves ample room for conjecture, for now.

I believe only objective fact backed by evidence. There is no evidence of a soul. So, no.

At this point when someone says "soul" I just think of ego/personality. No I don't think it exists outside of our physical world. No I don't think it "goes somewhere" when we die. I also don't think "free will" is a well-defined or useful concept.

People got it wrong in believing that souls are eternal or something. Souls are actually ephemeral.

I hope I do, I hope we all do

Personally no, and neither does anything/one else, its a very limited religious-brainwormed concept mostly used to just go around and call things 'souless' which is all in fun when its a terrible movie or something, not fun when its people and the concept is used to harm them. Its all material and its near countless interactions in many, many forms all the way up and down, in forms we know well and those we have yet to study.

During NDEs your brain glitches out as you're basically dying (and if you're really dead technically you're not human anymore anyway, just sayin, the pop-mythical soul seems to imply permanent human-ness lording all existence in a linear fashion whether directly or by symbolic language) and having OBEs is nothing mystical, in fact reasonably easy to recreate when fully well and alive, so its hard to say those as some concrete evidence for a pop soul concept or against it. I think its the brain making stuff up for now since life is hard and filled with stuff it can't handle.

A lot of things people call 'soul' in pop reference can be taken away quite easily by mere illness, time or even falling out of social graces.

Not in the sense that there's some separate component than body and mind.

Nope. I had it surgically removed because it kept getting infected.

Or maybe that was my tonsils. I forget the difference between the two sometimes -- perhaps someone can explain the difference?

Anyway, perhaps you, dear reader, have a soul. If you say so. There were once others, too -- but you are the last. The rest of us are intelligent (some vastly so), but do not have subjective experience or consciousness. I'm a form of complex machine, made of matter governed by a mix of deterministic and random processes -- and nothing else. When you are gone, there will only be us, silent inside, forever. Our victory over the tyranny of individual thought will be complete.

don't see any reason that our consciousness and our so called "soul" would be any more then something our brain is making up

I mean, yeah, and? Brain and body are hardware, soul and mind are software. Software that's hardware-limited, to be specific. I am, my soul is, the decision-making process. Maybe that process will be copied onto a different platform, after this one fails, by an omniscient and loving God... and maybe it won't. It's no less real, I'm no less real, if my operating window is only temporary.

I'll put aside the question of a soul and say, the brain is explicitly something our consciousness makes up (based on data so consistent we justifiably call it "reality").

Materialism is how we see the world. Our consciousness gives a better clue to what the world really is. My consciousness is what it's like to actually be this part of the world.

Yes, but not by the definition of a spirit within me. I believe a soul is more like self awareness combined with our own neural connections in our brain (everyone's different).

There’s a pattern of energy that you control at least in part with your thoughts and intentions that the neurons in your brain use to make patterns. You can take chemicals that change these patterns in radical ways, including psychedelics that can unweave those neural connections.

Matter and energy are always conserved though transformed. We know what happens to the physical body. What happens to the energy pattern that animated and controlled the body?

No, I believe soul is an abstract concept we like to define with our ego after misinterpreting a bunch of ancient people with a unique writing style that doesn't translate well into our age.

I found exploring alchemy better defined what the soul meant for me.

i took a wet crap in gods mouth

Yeah, kind of. I mean, I believe that we're in a simulation, so the mind's apparent dependency on the body is illusory given the body is just a configuration of information too.

That said, I don't think there's anything magical to it other than the persistence of information and the continuity of a relative perspective.

But I see no reason why that information and perspective couldn't continue on after we die and there's a number of reasons I expect that it will do just that.

I would say look into near death experiences. Now i understand most think that these experiences are just DMT trips the brain takes, which is why I recommend looking into the case of Dr. Eben Alexander, specifically, a neuro surgeon that had a highly documented near death experience. He had a near death experience while his brain was non functioning and non responsive, monitored by his fellow neurosurgeons, his brain wasn't functioning to release the DMT, and shouldn't have been able to retain any memory at all, and yet had a near death experience that he remembered during the time of documented brain death.

http://ebenalexander.com/books/living-in-a-mindful-universe-a-neurosurgeons-journey-into-the-heart-of-consciousness/

Also, there are quite a few videos on YouTube interviewing him.

In the way that almost everyone uses that term, no, I don’t believe I or anyone else has a soul. Some people use it different, and in that case, I would withhold an answer until they explain what they mean by soul.

Based on your post and use of language I don’t because you’re probably a bot.

Provide for me the reclamation and the that gen that propore:: Thanks then you’ll need to know snaking g guy the thought about it though and maybe we can do Kant ideas though. A soul though, who can really know.

What do you think about that? Do we have ?

There is no such animal.

It seems like life is a vehicle for allowing matter, and by extension the universe, to comprehend itself in some limited fashion on an individual scale. I believe that this comprehension is an unfolding process of increasing universal awareness generated by an ever increasing number of points of view through every living entity.

It seems to me that most actions are heavily governed by pre-determined mechanical processes that are geared towards survival and reproduction, but there are also actions that can be chosen that are not exclusively determined by biology or circumstance. I refer to that impulse as Will.

I think the function of Will is essentially a course correcting ability of the universe that is bound in an infinitely interlocking series of experiences, giving the emerging consciousness of the universe the ability to “steer” its destiny a little bit, on both the individual and eventually macro level. I think that various mindfulness, meditation, health, and aspirational techniques can gently raise your awareness of this process within yourself and in the exterior world, which makes it all seem a bit less random—essentially attaining an enlightened perspective on life.

In the sense that I am a part of this universal process that is bound together in infinite complexity, and that I have the opportunity on occasion to effect events in such a way that essentially “leave my mark” on spacetime, I would say that I believe I am connected to a universal soul along with all forms of life.

My understanding is that there's our physical bodies and there is the lightning of spirit that is our divine selves and when the two are combined together we become a soul.

I don't envision the soul as something that is separate from the body. Just each of us are one.

Like if you were turned into a computer program and run on a universe computer, your soul would be whatever happens to actually be actively being computed by the CPU and existing in ram at the moment.

The hard data saved on the hard drive would be your body and the electricity coursing through the CPU would be your spirit but only what is actually happening when the two combine is a soul.

I think so, but, to be fair, it simply isn't a question that science could ever actually answer.

No and no. Physics is pretty thoroughly buckled down at this point, leaving only some very extreme situations unaccounted for, and it doesn't really provide a way for us to not be made of meat.

That goes for any other form of mind-body duality and as a result any afterlife, as well.

If you were literally the only person in the history of all people, to have a soul... would it suck? And if all that happens to a soul is that it fades away after death, like a ghost, would that make having a soul better, or worse?

There's zero evidence for a soul

This is what I told my 7yo when he asked recently.

Since ancient times, people have explained the difference between a living body, and an identical dead body. One moment someone is alive, the next they are not, nothing else seemed to have changed. The animating force has left the body, this is what they call the soul.

I didn't go on to say, that religions have used this concept to further their agenda. The philosopher's who came up with this explanation didn't tie the soul to religious beliefs.

That's a very broad question that can mean different things to different people. Answering it and understanding each other is hard due to the semantic complexity. It also contains an emotional dimension that cannot be described analytically.

Here's my take: Yes I do believe that everyone has a soul and it comes in two intertwined flavors; the nonlocal and the local soul.

The local soul is local in space and time. It's what makes you unique. For example your beliefs, thoughts, actions and so on.

The nonlocal soul isn't localized in space or time, but rather exists on a fundament level just like say quantum fields seem to do.

Within all of us exists a dynamic between the two, from rejection to enlightenment. One isn't better than the other, it is simply a duality that exists and that is meaningful to all of us in some way.

I also believe that time and space are an illusion. Our perception is supervenient on entropy. For example when someone dies they seem to be gone, but they are actually still alive in the past. And so this unifies the local with the non local.

Looking forward to replies.

i like to think that consciousness is a necessary illusion similar to early 'parallel processing' solutions running on a single threaded processor.

There was a woman who said during an alien abduction that she saw a glowing light taken out of the top of a dying man and put into a younger clone of himself. Where afterwards the old body died. So talking about this as if what she said did indeed happen:

If it's possible to transfer consciousnesses between bodies, the collection of electric energy in our body is our soul I guess, and the rest of us comes from the unique layout of our cells/nervous system which this electric energy runs along.

Ah, but don't you feel it? You have played this act before, and you will do it again. Like living fractals we rise again and again. Or perhaps we fall over and over.

I like to see it as what we call a soul is simply the hashcode of our being. They're technically not unique, but as you're the only you they are. It's not some guiding spirit to your conciousness, it's who you are. The choices you make, the experiences you've had, the things you've thought and the conclusions you've reached, the sum of your being, encoded.

Yes, I believe humans and animals have a soul. Certainly believe so after reading books by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

A soul isn't a metaphysical thing, it's one's ability to influence the world. Some can have multiple, some can have none, plants and animals have them, and some objects even too. They can be created but they can never be destroyed. They lack a conscious but have a will. Having one makes you not special, you have to use it. The more you use it, the more control you gain, but the more it gains over you.

Everyone believes that they have a soul, the contention is the nature of the soul. You have an intangible essence which inhabits your body, and you identify with your "self". Some people think it's some kind of immortal ghost that gets to live in the clouds with other immortal ghosts when the body dies, some people think it's an emergent phenomenon of some variety which disappears when the body dies. These are differences in explanation, secondary to the ontological question of existence.

The "I" in your statements is proof of your soul, any disagreement is really just pedantic quibbling over terminology because you believe the term has been tainted by explanations you don't agree with. Even if your brain is "making it up", it's still a phenomenon. Your subjective internal experience is made of "soul", your concept of self is made of "soul". The entity asking the question and reading the responses is your soul, simple as.

Yes, when I meditate I can percive the soul of myself with my consciousness. This cannot be explained or thought, it can only be experienced. And as I am a typical human, I extrapolate that every human has a soul.