If you do, then what exactly defines a soul in your view?
Im apatheist, so like agnostic just that i think that even if some god exists it would be totally irrelevant for us. I always viewed the soul as more of the mental state of a person rather than some “magic” energy which makes one up. We have our physical form and then we have whats controlling the physicial form, little voltages all through our body and especially brain. That somehow was always the soul to me. And when we die the systems holding those small voltages up stop working and our soul fades away while our physical form persists.
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, obviously not. The existance of souls is an equally non-falsifiable hypothesis as the existance of a god.
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 as step one, everything that ever was eventually 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.
That’s still “you” when no molecule was left of you?
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).
I’d consider that identical, but not the same
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.
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.
“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.
This makes no sense to me. It’s just generic platitudes and a wild claim.
You say “quite the contrary”, claiming there is scientific evidence of consciousness having nothing to do with our brains. Where can I find this evidence?
I couldn’t follow any of your reasoning. Can you summarize your central thesis? Because we observe…?
I don’t see how conscience could not have anything to do with our brain when that is where it arises.
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.
