Asklemmy

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.

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.

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.

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".

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. Souls dont exist.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

No

I want to believe in the existence of souls, however ultimately we just don't have the evidence to back it up.

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

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, how would it work with Alzheimer's, brain tumours and other things that affect behaviour?

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.

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.

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 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’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.

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.

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 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.

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.

As in dualism? Nope, I'm a fairly strict physicalist. Consciousness is the brain doing brain-things.