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 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”.
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. It’s religious quackery.
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.
Is your soul a good fertilizer?
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.
Not anymore, the demon reached up my ass and stole the bead that contains it. I wonder what he’s doing with it now.
Probably a weird sex thing.
Most new actions are weird sex things.
No, I think that’s an abstract concept of a consciousness invented by religion to transcend death. It’s a comforting thought, but that’s really it.
Do we have a sentient soul? I would say no, and as proof I point to those suffering from Alzheimer’s. That disease robs a person of their memory, so by the time of death they have lost much of who they were. If the sentient soul exists, it must be able to remember, otherwise it cannot retain the traits that make the individual unique. It should retain all the memories of our life. Yet those with Alzheimer’s forget who they are. How is this possible if we possess a sentient soul? If we cannot retain memories in this life, how will we do so in the next?
What about those with major brain damage from stroke or mishap? Part of their brain died, and whatever that part contained, it’s now gone. Is their soul now split? Did part of it “move on” with the dead part of the brain?
Part of the problem with the analysis is that under the influences of Western Christianity the term ‘soul’ has become a very specific configuration of properties.
For example, in ancient Egypt there were over seven different types of what we consider ‘soul’ with biographical memory as only one type.
The ren was the name and identity of a person, the ba their personality, the ka as their “life force” of sorts.
Conversations like this one might be better served by a more nuanced vocabulary in its discussion.
You’d have to define soul first. I definitely have a subjective experience/consciousness however.
People got it wrong in believing that souls are eternal or something. Souls are actually ephemeral.
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.
I mean dragons did exist. We just call them dinosaurs.
Nope. I had it surgically removed because it kept getting infected.
Or maybe that was my tonsils. I forget the difference between the two sometimes – perhaps someone can explain the difference?
Anyway, perhaps you, dear reader, have a soul. If you say so. There were once others, too – but you are the last. The rest of us are intelligent (some vastly so), but do not have subjective experience or consciousness. I’m a form of complex machine, made of matter governed by a mix of deterministic and random processes – and nothing else. When you are gone, there will only be us, silent inside, forever. Our victory over the tyranny of individual thought will be complete.
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.
Define “soul” or the answer is entirely meaningless. I’m pretty sure I’m sentient and can feel emotions and think and reason.
i took a wet crap in gods mouth
I think the concept of a soul is too vague for that question to really mean anything
