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.
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.
Do you believe that we all share one nonlocal soul? Also the terms local and nonlocal doesn’t really make sense if you don’t believe in space and time, but it doesn’t really matter (:
Your first question is intriguing. The short answer is yes, but maybe not the way you imagine.
Imagine you could instantly copy yourself. Since there are two people now each with their own subjective experience, which is changing them over time, you can say that there are now two local souls. If one dies, something is lost, even if the other keeps living. That what is shared between them is the non local soul. It isn’t really a thing, but rather the quality of awareness.
That’s spatial locality and it’s the same for temporal locality. Say the current you vs the you 5 minutes ago. They both have different local souls in a certain sense, and their own subjective experience.
You could also imagine that with the multiverse, where every possibility splits off like branches on a giant tree, and so you are constantly split off into countless versions of yourself.
So space and time exist and introduce locality. However at the end of the day it all comes from the same fountain, and each droplet just lives in its own grand illusion. That is not to say that it has no meaning, mind you.
No. It’s religious quackery.
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.
No. It’s more religion inspired fairy tale magic.
And yet religion inspired fairy tale magic has gone on to inspire science and technology that enable that idea.
We’re literally talking as a society about resurrection consent directives but people are still spouting the age old “there’s no soul or afterlife” without regard for emerging science and technology just as the religious are committed to the belief in magic over reinterpreting their beliefs in the context of science.
You, right now, are in a world experimentally proven for nearly a century now not to be observably real (“a quantity that can be expressed as an infinite decimal expansion”) and instead is one only observably digital (“of, relating to, or using calculation by numerical methods or by discrete units”).
And while you’re alive you are producing massive amounts of data being harvested up by algorithms simulating the world while some of those technologies are being put to recreating the deceased at such increasing scale that as mentioned, we’re starting to discuss if that’s okay to do retroactively without consent.
I’m not a betting person, but the intersection of those two things (that our universe behaves in a way that seems to track stateful interactions with a conversion to discrete units and that we’re leaving behind data in a world increasingly simulating itself and especially its dead) would at very least give me pause before dismissing certain notions even if the original concept inspiring the latter trend was originally dreamt up by superstition and wishful thinking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
the existence of a soil is unfalsifiable, so I wouldn’t be able to prove or disprove my clain.
As is the existence of the great juju on top of the mountain or the existence of goglack the toenail king who lives under your bathroom sink. The unfalsifiable nature of a claim doesn’t warrant it any extra consideration.
Is your soul a good fertilizer?
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.
i like to think that consciousness is a necessary illusion similar to early ‘parallel processing’ solutions running on a single threaded processor.
If consciousness is an illusion, then what is it that’s experiencing that illusion?
prolly the same thing listening to that tree fall in the forest
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
my consciousness is the collective consciousness
THE UNENLIGHTENED MASSES
Yes, I believe humans and animals have a soul. Certainly believe so after reading books by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.
I haven’t read any of her works. Any recommendation on where to get started?
I think so, but, to be fair, it simply isn’t a question that science could ever actually answer.
Until there’s a good definition of a “soul” that’s based in the natural world, there’s nothing to even evaluate. If it’s a definition based in not the natural world, then there’s no evidence that it even exists to begin with.
Do you have a working definition for a “soul”?
You’re right that we need a definition, but that doesn’t mean it has to be based in the natural world. Science could never conclusively prove/disprove the existence of a soul because it’s inadequate in this context.
The only scientific way to do it would be to compare a large group of people who definitely didn’t have a soul with another large group too see if there’s any consistent differences. Given that the experiment itself implies the existence of a soul it all becomes a little circular.
no it did answer it, the answer is “no”.
the easiest one is brain damage or drugs altering your consciousness…
if your mind can be permanently damaged or significantly altered via brain changes, then it’s in your brain.but there’s a lot of other reasons the “soul” myth doesn’t make sense.
Really? I’d be very interested in seeing a peer reviewed article in Nature in which someone reputable claims to have disproven the existence of the soul (especially without making a bunch of other ontological assumptions first). Can you point me to one?
As far as I can tell, the existence of a soul, like the existence of God, is inherently a non-scientific proposition–i.e., it is not falsifiable. But correct me if I’m wrong.
pretty sure both of those concepts have only remained ‘unfalsifiable’ via the immense power of shifting the goalposts whenever the evidence disproves them until they become so removed from reality as to be essentially meaningless.
It is primarily not falsifiable, because there is no clear definition of a soul. But something not being falsifiable or provable also means that it has no impact on reality. If it had an impact, we could measure that impact to prove that it’s there.
