Asklemmy

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.

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

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.

“Soul” is just consciousness. Which many people seem to equate to the brain here.

There is 0 scientific evidence that consciousness has anything to do with our brains. Much to the contrary actually.

Consciousness truly is one of the biggest mysteries of life. We all experience it, but the more you observe it, the less you can find it.

It may feel at first as it’s a phenomena of the brain, of the mind. But soon after you start paying really close attention to it, you realize that consciousness is behind the mind. It’s underneath it.

It observes the mind. It observes everything. And that’s what it is. Perceiving. Aware of everything.

Its the only indivisible and irreducible thing in the universe that we ever found. Consciousness just is. It is the awareness in you. It is the awareness in everything.

When we crack consciousness, all these talks of “souls”, “god”, “atheism”, will seem just silly tbh.

No. Smell the flowers while you can.

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.

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.

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.

No, I wanted to explain why I don't believe in their existance, but I couldn't write something without comming off as an asshole, so sorry.

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.

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.

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.

Curious, why did you group agnostics together with atheists?

It's a useful term in sentences like "This hurts my soul", but I don't need the metaphysical claims around it.

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

No

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. :)

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.

No. If you can't find it in an autopsy, did it ever exist in the first place? Too many people confuse 'soul' for 'mind' (IMHO)

No. Soul = personality, nothing magic.