If you do, then what exactly defines a soul in your view?

  • Midas@ymmel.nl
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • ConditionOverload@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • cpoc@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      The brain is literally powered by electricity. Like any device, it stops working once the power turns off. Some people have a problem facing this mortality, but I think accepting it allows you to be more present in life.

  • Kissaki@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • SpaceBar@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • ByDarwinsBeard@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • 211@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    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”.

  • sotolf@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • czarrie@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • morgan423@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • morgan423@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s still an exact arrangement of matter that’s identical to your original configuration. So one would think that all the properties arising from it (such as consciousness) would be the same. So it’s You Part 2 (or Part two quintillion, there’s really no way to know which loop we’re on).

  • juliebean@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • fuck reddit@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I believe in anything that can be proven scientifically to actually exist. Show me evidence, not anecdotal stories which further an idea of “just believe me.”

    • fuck reddit@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I believe in anything that can be proven scientifically to exist. Show me evidence, not anecdotal stories which further an idea of “just believe me.”

    • Kissaki@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      A part of humans regarded as immaterial, immortal, separable from the body at death, capable of moral judgment, and susceptible to happiness or misery in a future state.

      • juliebean@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        considering many non-humans seem perfectly capable of making moral judgements, and feeling happiness or misery (all actions which appear to be explicable by purely material means), a ‘soul’ seems unnecessary to explain such things in humans. and it seems the very height of anthropocentrism to say that humans are immortal (despite all evidence to the contrary) while everything else just dies. why would just humans have these souls instead of, say, dolphins, or wild boars, or rattlesnakes, or coastal redwoods?

    • fuck reddit@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I believe in anything that can be proven scientifically to actually exist. Show me evidence, not anecdotal stories which further an idea of “just believe me.”

    • fuck reddit@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I believe in anything that can be proven scientifically to actually exist. Show me evidence, not anecdotal stories which further an idea of “just believe me.”

    • fuck reddit@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I believe in anything that can be proven scientifically to actually exist. Show me evidence, not anecdotal stories which further an idea of “just believe me”

  • Jongaros@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Chufi@lemmy.oneB
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      1 year ago

      Richard Dawkins said something along the lines of : "You have a brain that works by nerve impulses, and when that decays, what could possibly be left "