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 would never buy a Kia.
Most wrong take here. The Soul is an underrated vehicle.
It is. I had one. The problem was they didn’t bother installing an immobilizer on them, hence the kiaboyz viral trend. I had to let go of my Soul because of that.
I find the hubris of a “soul” amusing.
I think so, but, to be fair, it simply isn’t a question that science could ever actually answer.
no it did answer it, the answer is “no”.
the easiest one is brain damage or drugs altering your consciousness…
if your mind can be permanently damaged or significantly altered via brain changes, then it’s in your brain.but there’s a lot of other reasons the “soul” myth doesn’t make sense.
Really? I’d be very interested in seeing a peer reviewed article in Nature in which someone reputable claims to have disproven the existence of the soul (especially without making a bunch of other ontological assumptions first). Can you point me to one?
As far as I can tell, the existence of a soul, like the existence of God, is inherently a non-scientific proposition–i.e., it is not falsifiable. But correct me if I’m wrong.
pretty sure both of those concepts have only remained ‘unfalsifiable’ via the immense power of shifting the goalposts whenever the evidence disproves them until they become so removed from reality as to be essentially meaningless.
It is primarily not falsifiable, because there is no clear definition of a soul. But something not being falsifiable or provable also means that it has no impact on reality. If it had an impact, we could measure that impact to prove that it’s there.
Until there’s a good definition of a “soul” that’s based in the natural world, there’s nothing to even evaluate. If it’s a definition based in not the natural world, then there’s no evidence that it even exists to begin with.
Do you have a working definition for a “soul”?
You’re right that we need a definition, but that doesn’t mean it has to be based in the natural world. Science could never conclusively prove/disprove the existence of a soul because it’s inadequate in this context.
The only scientific way to do it would be to compare a large group of people who definitely didn’t have a soul with another large group too see if there’s any consistent differences. Given that the experiment itself implies the existence of a soul it all becomes a little circular.
No.
Whenever I listen to that old-time 'a rock and roll I feel soothed, so I must.
No.
I self-evidently have a consciousness (cogito ergo sum), but logic, reason and the available evidence all point to that consciousness being a manifestation of brain activity and shaped by my genetics, environment and experiences, as opposed to an entity unto itself.
While I agree with you generally, “I think therefore I am” isn’t the big hitter it’s made out to be. I think it’s even followed in the original by a qualifier (don’t quote me though), and not as self evident as generally accepted.
It’s to do with there being no real way to determine if we are what we think we are. We could be a computer generated entity that’s programmed to experience.
Or we could be a brain in a vat, being fed computer generated experiences. There really is no way of knowing if we are actually humans experiencing life as we appear to be.
I expect that many here are aware of this concept, but my reason for laying it all out is for context of the rather succinct way it was once put to me -
“I think, therefore there is…something.”
Many think that cogito ergo sum somehow says or at least implies something about the nature of existence, when it in fact does not. So in that sense, it’s not the “big hitter it’s made out to be,” but that’s not a failure of the principle, but a failure of people to understand what it in fact says, or more precisely, does not say.
I suspect that the problem is that when people consider “I think, therefore I am,” they think that that “I” refers to the entirety of their self-image, and therefore says that the entirety of their self-image, in all its details, objectively exists.
That’s very much not what it means or even implies. It never did and was never intended to stipulate anything at all about the nature of this entity I call “I.” Not one single thing. All it ever said or intended to say was simply that whatever it is that “I” am, “I” self evidently exist, as demonstrated by the fact that “I” - whatever “I” might be - think I do.
It’s not a coincidence that Descartes himself formulated the original version of the brain-in-a-vat - the “evil demon.” He was not simply aware of the sorts of possibilities you mention - of the ramifications of the fact that we exist behind a veil of perception - he actually originated much of the thinking on that very topic. He was a pioneer in that exact field.
Cogito ergo sum doesn’t fail to account for those sorts of possibilities - it was explicitly formulated with those sorts of possibilities not only in mind, but at the forefront. And that’s exactly why it only stipulates the one and only thing that an individual can know for certain - that some entity that I think of as “I” self evidently exists, as demonstrated by the simple fact that “I” think I do, since if “I” didn’t exist, there would be no “I” thinking I do.
And more to the point, that’s exactly why it very deliberately says absolutely nothing about the nature of that existence.
Thank you for clarifying my clumsy attempt to lay this out, its great when I get a reply from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.
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
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.
Yes, when I meditate I can percive the soul of myself with my consciousness. This cannot be explained or thought, it can only be experienced. And as I am a typical human, I extrapolate that every human has a soul.
Yes and no. The idea that people are temporarily possessed meat puppets is just silly. But I do think there is something intangible that makes a person who they are. That we don’t have souls so much as we are “souls”.
Ug, I really don’t understand it enough to answer the question… it is sort of like the ship of Theseus. If we slowly replace, upgrade, or even modify each part of the ship, it remains the ship of Theseus even when every piece is replaced. There is something intangible left that makes it the ship of Theseus, makes all the old bits still part of it, and incorporates the changes into it as well.
That would be the consciousness that lives in the meat puppet, the experiences of life shaping it the whole time.
Not a soul, per se, just an accident of physics. Something as yet unquantifiable, but definitely something. Quite possibly something involving quantum physics, which would explain the difficulty in determining what makes us, us.
We’ve discovered that a number of life forms appear to use quantum effects in some way, the ones I remember were navigation oriented (ba dum tish). Having existing examples of biology making use of the quantum world makes the idea much less of a stretch.
Food for thought. 💛
Souls are just faerie tales people tell themselves to avoid feeling angst around death. There is absolutely no evidence they exist and plenty of evidence they don’t.
Define “soul” or the answer is entirely meaningless. I’m pretty sure I’m sentient and can feel emotions and think and reason.
I think the concept of a soul is too vague for that question to really mean anything
Nah, I’m just a flesh computer.
