No. Soul = personality, nothing magic.
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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It's a useful term in sentences like "This hurts my soul", but I don't need the metaphysical claims around it.
No.
Now ask me whether I believe in free will!
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.
Best answer here. Soul is more of a high level concept, I'm not a spiritual person by any means, but say there was a fully conscious AI, I would say there is a difference between that and human consciousness, and that would be what I define as the soul. What is that, is that neurons in the head or is that an amalgamation of our entire being? Idk.
I don't believe anything happens after death, I think ashes to ashes, but I do think there is a spark, something there that we can't quite quantify... yet.
Worded even more succinctly than my rambling did! It's a loaded question, one that has a lot of answers that may all be wrong for what we currently know.
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.
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.
As soon as someone gives me a good reason to, I'll believe it.
So probably never.
No. We are nothing but bags of meat that, over millions of years, evolved a way to think. We feel so high and mighty about ourselves that we made up "something special" about ourselves to set us apart from every other bag of meat on the planet.
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There isn't any particular definition of "soul" that I believe in, but I think that there are many open questions about what consciousness is and how it works. Until we know more about that, I reserve my judgement on whether something that could be called a soul exists.
Nope.
Curious, why did you group agnostics together with atheists?
Im agnostic, and kinda yeah. When my grandpa died, i was there when they pulled the plug, and i could've swore that something left the body.