A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
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.
No
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
if someone can give me a good definition of what they think a soul is or does, maybe i'll have a response, but quite often, i find the concept less false, and more just ill-defined.
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'm agnostic, so obviously my view on that is that we simply don't know.
No. Souls dont exist.
I slid gently into atheism and my total failure to believe in souls was the way I realized I was in fact an atheist.
I was reading something that was discussing something about souls and I thought, pfft, there's no such thing as souls.
I think we're made out of meat. The thing that makes me me is a series of electrical impulses in (mostly?) my brain meat. That's why I find sports that involve repeated head trauma (football, boxing, etc) viscerally upsetting: by getting concussed a bunch of times you are, in my view, literally risking obliteration of the self.
A soul is at best a description of the electrical and quantum interactions that take place in our brain, a personified phenotype of the sum of these things occurring in our head (and to a degree our eyes, mouth, ears, and skin).
I don't believe in the soul in the traditional sense as it implies that there is one version of me -- is my soul my 9yo self, my 20-something alcoholic self, the self as of this moment, or my Alzheimer's-ridden self when I die? If it's supposed to be a "perfect" version of me when I pass, then it's kind of funny, because my spirit is, in a sense, a version of me that I've never actually met and wouldn't recognize.
I want to believe in the existence of souls, however ultimately we just don't have the evidence to back it up.
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.
It's kind of really hard to say if I belive in something or not when you don't offer a definition, I don't believe in anything outside of the brain, consiousness and what makes me me, which could be a definition of soul, I do believe in, but again, that's just a result of my brain braining.
I don't think humans have souls. When we die, we do just that. I don't think we are so special to have something other species don't, so if we (humans) have them, then other species also can.
Nope. I think the idea of a soul, afterlife comes from humans deep seated need to be special. We're just animals, enjoy your life while you can.
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.
I believe in our consciousness giving us unique personalities and the ability to make complex decisions. Anything past that doesn't make sense to me, and goes against all logic or understanding we have of the universe.
No.
I think that people are attracted to the idea of a soul because they would like to think that there is something unchanging about them. A desire for constancy in an inconstant world.
What I have experienced is wild changes in my own behavior, thoughts, desires, fears, drives, and whatever-might-have-you. Certainly, I am not the same person I was when I was an infant or when I was a child or when I was a young man or - I suppose in a more subtle way - I will be after I finish posting this and get some lunch.
I argue with myself. Blame myself. Bargain with myself. Pump myself up. All as though there are different selves within me at all times. By this I conclude that I don't really have a self, but more of a collection of personalities, characteristics, and traits that are more or less dominant at any given moment. I am large, I contain (thank you Walt) multitudes.
I am comfortable with my inconstancy and inconsistencies. Generally at peace about having selves rather than a self.
I see no evidence of a soul. And I haven't the need for one that would drive me to delude myself into thinking I have one nonetheless.
I believe that what defines a person is a pattern of neurons firing in the brain. I also believe that if said pattern could be perfectly replicated on some other medium (along with all the associated physiological inputs that keep it humming and changing), that new pattern would be indistinguishable from the original.
There are infinite possible outcomes to every action, branching off from each moment. And there are also infinite parallel realities that branched off of previous moments. The pattern that is your consciousness will also branch off infinitely. But imagine a fork in the road where one direction is death. Your consciousness cannot take that route, because it no longer exists on that branch. But it DOES still exist in the other, and it has no choice but to continue onward.
Thus, you will never experience death.
Your consciousness may change along its beaching paths, perhaps contorting into something completely new, but it will never truly end.
This conversation reminds me of the book, Fall, by Neil Stephenson. In it, the main character dies but his essence is captured in software. It raises a ton of interesting questions about that process, including how would a software version of the brain function without the other organs, blood flowing through it, etc. In my head canon, it couldn't. I.e., we are the sum of all of our parts.
Well the thing is, it would change without those inputs. It would have to adapt to new inputs.
One would imagine that any successful replication of a human mind in technological form would also need to replicate those inputs - at least at first, until the pure mind itself could be weaned off them - if that's even possible. They are, after all, just another series of electrical signals, but they are also integral to a sense of self.
If we mean "consciousness that can exist separate from the body", then no.
Edit:
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.
Oh. Yes, consciousness itself is some kind of strange emergent order that appears to be more than just the sum of all our atoms.
As in dualism? Nope, I'm a fairly strict physicalist. Consciousness is the brain doing brain-things.
No. Smell the flowers while you can.
I don't think soul has a good enough definition to say whether or not it does exist.
Soul kinda just means nothing to me.
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.
As an atheist, I would love to be proven wrong - that there's a benevolent all-knowing entity who guarantees eternal life in meadows lush with rivers of milk and honey (throw in the 72 virgins while we're at it). If there's any one thing that even remotely has a chance of changing my mind to accept this fantasy, it is the thought of being reunited with my pets when I die.
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.
I think I'll remain agnostic on that one. Ask me again in 50 years and I'll probably know the answer by then. Unless I happen to somehow reach the age of 106 without dying, in which case I'll take a raincheck.
It seems like a way to take all the things I don't understand particularly well, and put them in a category that I fail to define precisely.
My preference is not to do that, because I have a hard time believing in something that I can't characterize reasonably well.
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.
No.