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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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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.
No worries about the downvoting. There's no karma display :P
I think low voted comments still get pushed to the bottom though, is that not right?
Yes, I believe that's true on childcomments, but not root comments, as they are sorted by new as default.
But some people choose to sort by top, and some clients probably do that as default. But generally in web UI what I wrote above should be the case :)
Tbf I don't see anything weird in being an atheist and believing in souls in the philosophical sense, as a part of consciousness in humans, animals and perhaps advanced AI in the future (but it's a whole different topic) that lets us experience reality rather than being glorified chunks of matter which just exist.
Maybe there's a better term than soul for this, but it has nothing to do with the concept of afterlife.
So why do brain accidents change your personality, if we're more than atoms? Shouldn't the soul preserve you even if the atoms in the brain are broken from their place?
Because our personality is defined by the brain. It's fully physical. I never said I believe souls have anything to do with personality.
But if they don’t have anything to do with who you are as a person (aka personality), and they aren’t your body (aka “just atoms”), then what do they have any impact on?
So what exactly does soul do? Just exists and that's it?
I think they give some kind of meaning to the entire universe.
The universe mostly consists of particles that just exist. For inanimate things that do not perceive the flow of time, a Planck time is the same as the universe's entire lifetime. So without sentient observers, time would make no sense. The universe would instantly jump from its initial state to the final one, so it might as well not exist.
It's like in that philosophical question about a tree falling in the forest where no one hears the sound, but instead of the sound it's about time and therefore all existence. Sorry for bad English, I hope I made myself clear.
Sense of self does not have to be connected to one's personality.
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.
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."
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.
Tried to edit the post but for some reason it didn't work.
I feel like the question was poorly worded (English is my second language). 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.
Identity, personality, soul ... I feel these terms are somewhat synonymous, if we exclude the spiritual connation, which I'd like to.
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'.