this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
41 points (95.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43989 readers
574 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It does. For example many people with depression feel they're worthless (their sense of self), which is fixed by using anti-depressants, meaning it happens in the brain/body. Unless of course anti-depressants are some magical thing that somehow can fix soul.
What you're describing are just feelings, the sense of self-worth. Those are indeed just brain chemistry. What I (and presumably OP) mean by sense of self is the conscious experience of you being a "self" inside your body, separate from the other. This self could still be the same even with a completely different personality and different feelings. Or maybe it wouldn't be. But the point is that we currently know very little about how we get a consciousness or what it's made of. This may change in the future, but until then I can't say we don't have some form of "soul" with any confidence.
As someone with clinical depression my whole life, I can answer this as no, the depression making me feel worthless is not connect in any way to my sense of "self." That's very seperate from any feeling in general, it just "is."
Sometime I get a feeling/swell of "wonderment" in response to my sense of self if I really concentrate on that "sense," but that feeling of wondermemt is just that: a response.
Also, anti depressants don't work the way most people think they do. In the cases of situational depression, they keep a person getting up and out of bed until they naturally start to feel better, in which case the meds are stopped. In cases of clinical depression though, it's more of a life-long medication that gets them out of bed in the morning. It dulls the depression, but it doesn't get rid of it.
All of that is disconnected from one's sense of "self."