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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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'm agnostic, so obviously my view on that is that we simply don't know.

  • 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.

    • That's still "you" when no molecule was left of you?

      • It's still an exact arrangement of matter that's identical to your original configuration. So one would think that all the properties arising from it (such as consciousness) would be the same. So it's You Part 2 (or Part two quintillion, there's really no way to know which loop we're on).

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

      • Your example is flawed because the hard drive is also hardware and can also develop problems aside from everything else. I feel like a closer match would be information stored on the cloud, but that's just someone else's hard drive, so.... Yeah, I find the concept of a soul very weird.

      • Your example is flawed because the hard drive is also hardware and can also develop problems aside from everything else. I feel like a closer match would be information stored on the cloud, but that's just someone else's hard drive, so.... Yeah, I find the concept of a soul very weird.

      • Your example is flawed because the hard drive is also hardware and can also develop problems aside from everything else. I feel like a closer match would be information stored on the cloud, but that's just someone else's hard drive, so.... Yeah, I find the concept of a soul very weird.

  • 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.

  • 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 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.

    • Always glad to find another student of Hofstadter in the wild. G.E.B. blew my mind wide open when I read it in my early 20s.

      I Am a Strange Loop is a far more accessible distillation of some of the same ideas, but I recommend both to anyone who wants a better grasp on how something seemingly infinitely complex like a human mind can emerge from mere atoms dancing around one another - and how we are, in actual fact, greater than the meaty sum of our parts.

      • I'd recommend people to read past the sections with logic and mathematics in them, and just read the textual chapters. So minutes the overly Gödel pieces. It gets across the point very well.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 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 wonder if the sex slaves in heaven have souls? Also do they live as virgins until they are of an appropriate age for you? Are they some sort of angel clone? Or clones of humans who have lived before, or are still alive? Or are they bred for that task? Do they just appear when you're horny? The logistics of god's brothel is quite funny to think about. I guess they're some magical hand-wavy entities of some sort. I mean, the same could also be said for god's park areas. Who does the gardening? Maybe god does all of it. So those 72 virgins are god in a skin suit. Very theological.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I think 'soul' is not something which exists in itself - it is the idea of the essence of a thing, the thing which causes an individual life.

    So theories go around that there are spiritual beings separate from the physical (debatable) and I personally think that it extends to all life, such that trees can have awareness which can also extend beyond their physical bodies.

    As such, they obviously exist - but their exact definition and nature is quite hard to grasp. I don't think they can survive physical death.

150 comments