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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.
It was here long before us and it'll continue to exist long after us. It's initially a very terrifying truth but eventually it becomes our most comforting truth.
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.
A soul is a concept to make death less scary.
Or more scary, if one doesn't do as one is told.
No.
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?
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.
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'd imagine you're rather unique. I have a hard time imagining atheists believing in something as nebulous as a soul.
EDIT: Please don't downvote OP, if anything this is a more interesting discussion thread than just "No, we're just meat and electricity"
Atheists by and large don't outright reject the possibility of the unknown. They just don't hang their whole lives on it and make up stories to make it less unnerving to contemplate. The fact is we can't know everything, and our collective knowledge as a species probably barely scratches the surface of reality. But we can rule certain specific use cases out on a logical basis.
Almost anything is possible. Likely? Fuck no. But possible.
there’s something in our consciousness that gives you identity and defines who you are
Identity, personality, soul ... I feel these terms are somewhat synonymous, if we exclude the spiritual connation, which I'd like to.
why you perceive the flow of time and the sequence of events that happens to a specific person (you).
Not sure what that means or wether that question makes sense. As I see it, all the above mentioned synonyms emerge from the brain doing it's thing. A human brain working under normal condition creates a 'you perceive the flow'.
Nope.
The mind is what the brain does; when the brain stops doing, the mind stops being.
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.
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.
This conversation reminds me of the book, Fall, by Neil Stephenson. In it, the main character dies but his essence is captured in software. It raises a ton of interesting questions about that process, including how would a software version of the brain function without the other organs, blood flowing through it, etc. In my head canon, it couldn't. I.e., we are the sum of all of our parts.
Well the thing is, it would change without those inputs. It would have to adapt to new inputs.
One would imagine that any successful replication of a human mind in technological form would also need to replicate those inputs - at least at first, until the pure mind itself could be weaned off them - if that's even possible. They are, after all, just another series of electrical signals, but they are also integral to a sense of self.
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.
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.
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.
No.
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.
I don't believe in a soul that's separate from the body, or that lives on afterward. But the way that "inanimate" matter can spin up thoughts and feelings and a consistent personal experience that can last for decades... It's almost fair to call that thing a soul. It's fair to talk about nurturing your soul and growing a soul.
To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we are the universe's way of understanding itself.
The universe growing souls like flowers, or something
Hmm, I like this too, very interesting to think over.
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.
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. Souls dont exist.
Im Egoist, so technically atheist, there are none until proven otherwise.
As an agnostic, I have two answers. On the spiritual side, maybe...? I mean I don't know if God stuff is real, so how could I know if a soul is real?
On the other side, I wonder if as we delve deeper into quantum mechanics, were going to discover things about the human body, and the nature of life, that could conceivably be called a soul
I'm agnostic. I do believe we have a soul, I just think we haven't discovered what it actually is yet. Like, scientifically we're not quite able to explain yet what makes a soul a soul. I'm not sure if a soul disconnects and "moves on" somewhere/somehow after a body death, or if it also dies out with the body, but I like to think there is a disconnection there. I agree that it makes me feel better about death in general, so yeah, maybe that's why I so easily accept such an idea?
But, it feels like more than that to me. It's fundamentally what makes each of us individualistic in terms of the choices we make. It's what makes me, "me."
I'm going to tie this in with abortion, so I apologize in advance, Lol, but I'm 100% convinced that the abortion debate will never come to a conclusion unless we discover what a soul is scientifically. Right now the picking at random physical stages, like a heartbeat or lung formation/ability only goes so far, because it doesn't explain what makes each individual so individualistic. No one will ever convince someone who believes a soul starts at conception that abortion from the start is anything but murder. (To be clear, I'm pro-life, though 100% believe there's a cut-off point).
So, to sum it all up: yes, there's a soul, though i dont tie it to any god or religion. yes, I believe one day we'll prove there's a soul scientifically, we just aren't there yet.
No