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.
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
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?
Yes, though when I use it to grow plants I can not provide any evidence that it is effective, so just like with my other claim you just have to take my word for it.
There is at least as much evidence for dragons and magic and Greek gods as there is for a soul, so no.
It boggles my mind that out of the two options, someone would choose to believe in none of these when you could just as easily believe in all of them.
Much as I would love to believe in dragons, belief is not usually a choice.
Whenever I listen to that old-time 'a rock and roll I feel soothed, so I must.
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.
Yeah, I’d also really like a active philosophy community. The ones I found around here also didn’t seam to do question asking, more “hey, here is a interesting read”.
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.
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 like to think that consciousness is a necessary illusion similar to early ‘parallel processing’ solutions running on a single threaded processor.
I would never buy a Kia.
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.
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?
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 (:
