If you do, then what exactly defines a soul in your view?
deleted by creator
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.
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 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.
No.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?”
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.
Nope.
Nope.
The mind is what the brain does; when the brain stops doing, the mind stops being.
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.
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’d recommend people to read past the sections with logic and mathematics in them, and just read the textual chapters. So minutes the overly Gödel pieces. It gets across the point very well.
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”
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 :)
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.
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’.
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?
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.
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.”
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.
Because our personality is defined by the brain. It’s fully physical. I never said I believe souls have anything to do with personality.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Many others don’t believe animals have souls
But many do.
