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 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.
It seems like a way to take all the things I don't understand particularly well, and put them in a category that I fail to define precisely.
My preference is not to do that, because I have a hard time believing in something that I can't characterize reasonably well.
all these "deleted by creator" posts in a thread about atheism sound a bit ominous. @Jongaros@lemmy.ml are you ok?
Check the post history. Its ok. Probably just lemmy lagging and he deleted the duplicate posts.
Curious, why did you group agnostics together with atheists?
Word games. "God" and "Soul" are so ill-defined you can get literally anyone to agree that those "things" (thinks?) exist. If I define "soul" as "repeating emergent pattern of genetically and environmentally internal state and observable behaviour in a sentient species" I maybe could even get some people in this community to agree that such a concept exists. If I use a more religious definition like "magic non physical entity bestowed by an eternal god" all I would get is a resounding "NOO!". It is the memetics strength of those concepts by being incredibly flexible and vague that will ensure their ongoing use and existence - and questions like this one.
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.
I haven't see any measurable proof of one, or any experiment proposed that would render the idea of a soul falsifiable or not. Honestly, the current debate in philosophy/neuroscience on the existence (or non-existence) of free-will seems like a more important question, that if answered in the negative would have major implications on even the definition of the word 'soul'.
Fun question though, I've enjoyed reading the diversity of thought on the matter in this thread. :)
Nope.
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.
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