And do believe that I, this random guy on the internet has a soul
I personally don’t believe that I anyone else has a soul. From my standup I don’t se any reason to believe that our consciousness and our so called “soul” would be any more then something our brain is making up.
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?
I believe only objective fact backed by evidence. There is no evidence of a soul. So, no.
Not in the sense that there’s some separate component than body and mind.
No
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 kife support?
I have a self-aware consciousness. If that’s what counts, then yes. However, this means that many people don’t.
Only correct answer here. First define “soul”. So far no human has ever been able to define it, so how do we know if we have one?
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?
Nah, I’m just a flesh computer.
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.
That’s a weak argument. Using this, anything you can refer to has a soul, which is just the idea of that thing in your mind.
The idea of Ohio is intangible, but does Ohio have a soul? How about Clippy? Betelgeuse? Every
selfcall ever made? That person who appeared in your dream once?You’ve quibbled yourself out of meaning anything. The existence of intangible identities is related to what people would call a soul, but you’ve reduced the definition to be unreasonably broad. Your idea of soul is meaningless and isn’t what the OP is talking about.
How did you come to that conclusion based on what I wrote? Nothing you’ve written bears any resemblance to what I said. The concept of Ohio does not inhabit your body, and you don’t identify as it. A thought and a soul are not the same thing just because they’re both intangible. Intangibility is necessary, but not sufficient.
No concept inhabits any body. One may identify as an Ohioan, but nothing about them changes if they do. Many Ohioans share cultural traditions and behaviors, which colour people’s perception of Ohio, and could be described as the Soul of Ohio. Yet you argue that Ohio has no Soul.
Similarly, does the concept of Zeitgeist suggest a spirit that controls people? Does the concept of the Will of the People suggest that countries have personhood?
What most people today mean when they use the word “soul” is much closer to “spirit” or “being” than “self”. Soul is often used poetically to refer to the essential aspects of something, living or otherwise. However when talking about whether souls actually exist, as opposed to simply being made up by the mind, they’re very much not talking about simply the character of an idea, but the vital spark, immortal essence, or animating principle that usually characterizes life.
OP isn’t asking if you believe people have a sense of self, they’re asking if you believe that there is an essence unique to living things that is lost after death, usually supporting the self and memories, which exists by itself rather than as simply a pattern in something else.
OP did not verbalize that as such, this sounds like your personal interpretation.
Regardless, vital spark = being = subjective experience = sense of self = animating principle = consciousness = soul. These are essentially synonyms.
Ohioans may have common attributes, these attributes will shape certain aspects of the soul. Souls are likewise shaped by religion, cultural ethnicity, philosophical beliefs, aesthetic preference, sexuality, and many other factors. These factors are like the hands and techniques that shape the clay, the soul is the clay. Being, at least one’s own (in the solipsistic extreme), is uncontested even by the strictest materialist atheist. It’s only the nature (origin, destiny, scope) that anyone disagrees on.
OP must be refering to the metaphysical definition, as they do not believe that souls exists. As you point out, denying the idea of personal experience is unreasonable, therefore OP must hold that “soul” refers to something more and is not synonymous with the sense of self.
You argue here that such a “something more” soul does not exist, reasonably attributing the idea to emergent properties of natural systems, yet you seem to argue that this constitutes every definition of soul, including the various flavours of “something more”, simultaneously answering yes and no.
This is where the confusing begins. Do you believe souls are emergent or elementary? Is there a persistent metaphysical aspect, or are they ephemeral at best? Are they simply produced by the flesh, or is the flesh just where they reside while alive? Do souls exist, or are they an illusion like a tree in a painting?
The “I” in your statements is proof of your soul
It’s proof of consciousness. If you’re using “soul” synonymously to “consciousness”, well, certainly not everyone does so.
In the use of language I learned, “soul” is the superstitious concept that religious people use, and since I don’t believe in superstitions, I certainly don’t believe that I have a soul.
I definitely possess consciousness, though, in the sense that I recognize contiguous piles of atoms as “objects” and one such object is my own body.
In turn, I would not say that my consciousness asks questions and reads the responses. My body does that. My ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ are just characteristics of my body. And “I” is my body, too.
I find the hubris of a “soul” amusing.
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.
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.
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.
That would be the consciousness that lives in the meat puppet, the experiences of life shaping it the whole time.
Not a soul, per se, just an accident of physics. Something as yet unquantifiable, but definitely something. Quite possibly something involving quantum physics, which would explain the difficulty in determining what makes us, us.
We’ve discovered that a number of life forms appear to use quantum effects in some way, the ones I remember were navigation oriented (ba dum tish). Having existing examples of biology making use of the quantum world makes the idea much less of a stretch.
Food for thought. 💛
I think the concept of a soul is too vague for that question to really mean anything
Define “soul” or the answer is entirely meaningless. I’m pretty sure I’m sentient and can feel emotions and think and reason.
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.
