Asklemmy

Word games. "God" and "Soul" are so ill-defined you can get literally anyone to agree that those "things" (thinks?) exist. If I define "soul" as "repeating emergent pattern of genetically and environmentally internal state and observable behaviour in a sentient species" I maybe could even get some people in this community to agree that such a concept exists. If I use a more religious definition like "magic non physical entity bestowed by an eternal god" all I would get is a resounding "NOO!". It is the memetics strength of those concepts by being incredibly flexible and vague that will ensure their ongoing use and existence - and questions like this one.

As an agnostic, I have two answers. On the spiritual side, maybe...? I mean I don't know if God stuff is real, so how could I know if a soul is real?

On the other side, I wonder if as we delve deeper into quantum mechanics, were going to discover things about the human body, and the nature of life, that could conceivably be called a soul

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.

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 would call myself an agnostic, and I suppose I believe in a soul... In that they are a (potentially inaccurate) way of describing the singularity of oneself.

We contain something which has conscious thoughts, and awareness of "itself" while existing. I suppose that would be a soul, no? We can remember and have individual lives with isolated moments no one else will ever know. Are those memories really only random creases in our brain? Do the feelings and deeper experiences for you wash away as nothing alongside the mechanics of those memories? What makes us... well, us?

I like to think the soul is just that, the part of ourselves that is truly unique, and can only fully be witnessed internally. The part of you that is only ever going to fully exist in the here and now, while still recalling the there and then. That which gives us the full breadth of emotion tied to deeper thought, and hopefully some understanding. That, at least, is a miraculous thing to get to experience... spiritually or not.

The immutability of a soul is a different question, one which we'll get an answer to after the physical living stops.

I haven't see any measurable proof of one, or any experiment proposed that would render the idea of a soul falsifiable or not. Honestly, the current debate in philosophy/neuroscience on the existence (or non-existence) of free-will seems like a more important question, that if answered in the negative would have major implications on even the definition of the word 'soul'.

Fun question though, I've enjoyed reading the diversity of thought on the matter in this thread. :)

Im Egoist, so technically atheist, there are none until proven otherwise.

I'm agnostic. I do believe we have a soul, I just think we haven't discovered what it actually is yet. Like, scientifically we're not quite able to explain yet what makes a soul a soul. I'm not sure if a soul disconnects and "moves on" somewhere/somehow after a body death, or if it also dies out with the body, but I like to think there is a disconnection there. I agree that it makes me feel better about death in general, so yeah, maybe that's why I so easily accept such an idea?

But, it feels like more than that to me. It's fundamentally what makes each of us individualistic in terms of the choices we make. It's what makes me, "me."

I'm going to tie this in with abortion, so I apologize in advance, Lol, but I'm 100% convinced that the abortion debate will never come to a conclusion unless we discover what a soul is scientifically. Right now the picking at random physical stages, like a heartbeat or lung formation/ability only goes so far, because it doesn't explain what makes each individual so individualistic. No one will ever convince someone who believes a soul starts at conception that abortion from the start is anything but murder. (To be clear, I'm pro-life, though 100% believe there's a cut-off point).

So, to sum it all up: yes, there's a soul, though i dont tie it to any god or religion. yes, I believe one day we'll prove there's a soul scientifically, we just aren't there yet.

Agnostic here brought up with Buddhist grandparents. I like the idea of reincarnation - (I don't deny not truly believe it) you need a "soul" to leave you physical body and to repeat in an endless cycle. Nirvana is when you break free of this cycle and gain enlightenment.

The idea that a part of us may live on has helped cope with mourning a lost one. But that's really it - in the face of mortality, sometimes you find mechanisms to cope. Don't think I answered your question...

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.

i don't believe in god but i think life is infinitely profound; as profound as an idea like the soul. so i guess it depends on your definition of soul and how creative or spiritual you are

Well, I use the word "soul" to sum up what makes a person a person, their base values, moral standpoint, what they love and hate etc. The warmth of a person. In the same way I would say that somebody forfeits their soul because of their acts. And I'd argue that our soul "lives on" after we die in the people we've made an impression on or in general through the effects of our actions. But some magic person-container? No. We die and then we're dead.

I don't believe it, but I some times wonder if some kind of self is preserved as energy within the universe somehow. Effectively being a soul, but in a sense of physics more than spirituality. Much like how the physical body will decay and return to the earth, the energy that makes up consciousness could simply return to the universe.

There isn't any particular definition of "soul" that I believe in, but I think that there are many open questions about what consciousness is and how it works. Until we know more about that, I reserve my judgement on whether something that could be called a soul exists.

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.

Nope.

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.