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
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, 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.
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No.
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.
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
Hmm, I like this too, very interesting to think over.
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.
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.
Tbf I don’t see anything weird in being an atheist and believing in souls in the philosophical sense, as a part of consciousness in humans, animals and perhaps advanced AI in the future (but it’s a whole different topic) that lets us experience reality rather than being glorified chunks of matter which just exist.
Maybe there’s a better term than soul for this, but it has nothing to do with the concept of afterlife.
I feel like what you’re referring to is higher order thought. Do you think that beings might exist in this universe that are beyond our thought process? Would they view us as lacking a “soul” like we would view insects as lacking a soul?
No worries about the downvoting. There’s no karma display :P
I think low voted comments still get pushed to the bottom though, is that not right?
Yes, I believe that’s true on childcomments, but not root comments, as they are sorted by new as default.
But some people choose to sort by top, and some clients probably do that as default. But generally in web UI what I wrote above should be the case :)
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.”
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.
Richard Dawkins said something along the lines of : "You have a brain that works by nerve impulses, and when that decays, what could possibly be left "
I’m agnostic, so obviously my view on that is that we simply don’t know.
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.
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
