Atheists/agnostics of Lemmy, do you believe in the existence of souls?

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.

No

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.

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.

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.

No.

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No, how would it work with Alzheimer's, brain tumours and other things that affect behaviour?

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".

No. Souls dont exist.

I'm agnostic, so obviously my view on that is that we simply don't know.

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.

Nope. There's no spiritual anything. The whole universe is kinda magic on its own, why people have the need to make up bullshit is beyond me.

Souls don't exist, you're just your body (and brain), try to enjoy the life you have, there will be nothing else afterwards.

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.

I want to believe in the existence of souls, however ultimately we just don't have the evidence to back it up.

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.

I slid gently into atheism and my total failure to believe in souls was the way I realized I was in fact an atheist.

I was reading something that was discussing something about souls and I thought, pfft, there's no such thing as souls.

I think we're made out of meat. The thing that makes me me is a series of electrical impulses in (mostly?) my brain meat. That's why I find sports that involve repeated head trauma (football, boxing, etc) viscerally upsetting: by getting concussed a bunch of times you are, in my view, literally risking obliteration of the self.

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.

No.

I think that people are attracted to the idea of a soul because they would like to think that there is something unchanging about them. A desire for constancy in an inconstant world.

What I have experienced is wild changes in my own behavior, thoughts, desires, fears, drives, and whatever-might-have-you. Certainly, I am not the same person I was when I was an infant or when I was a child or when I was a young man or - I suppose in a more subtle way - I will be after I finish posting this and get some lunch.

I argue with myself. Blame myself. Bargain with myself. Pump myself up. All as though there are different selves within me at all times. By this I conclude that I don't really have a self, but more of a collection of personalities, characteristics, and traits that are more or less dominant at any given moment. I am large, I contain (thank you Walt) multitudes.

I am comfortable with my inconstancy and inconsistencies. Generally at peace about having selves rather than a self.

I see no evidence of a soul. And I haven't the need for one that would drive me to delude myself into thinking I have one nonetheless.

I don't think humans have souls. When we die, we do just that. I don't think we are so special to have something other species don't, so if we (humans) have them, then other species also can.

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.

I believe in our consciousness giving us unique personalities and the ability to make complex decisions. Anything past that doesn't make sense to me, and goes against all logic or understanding we have of the universe.

Nope. I think the idea of a soul, afterlife comes from humans deep seated need to be special. We're just animals, enjoy your life while you can.

Nope.

The mind is what the brain does; when the brain stops doing, the mind stops being.

I don't think soul has a good enough definition to say whether or not it does exist.

Soul kinda just means nothing to me.

No. Smell the flowers while you can.

No.

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.

As in dualism? Nope, I'm a fairly strict physicalist. Consciousness is the brain doing brain-things.

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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’m kind of an agnostic, so naturally my point of view is: it’s hard if not impossible to tell.

I don’t really believe in a soul but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was such a thing. Maybe we’re all going back home after we die, maybe we just stop existing. Maybe it’s both. It’s hard to tell.

I like Douglas Hofstadter's concept of the soul as a self referential mechanism. His book: 'I am a strange loop' expands on this, which is a bit more spiritual (for lack of a better word) expansion of his ideas in Gödel, Escher Bach.

It also explains how your own loop incorporates and curates the memories of the people you love and how you're able to live, and see though their 'eyes' after they have died.

So the soul of others finds an explanation in yourself, and allows you to live in in other people's minds, without any super natural constructs.

If we mean "consciousness that can exist separate from the body", then no.

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.

As an atheist, I would love to be proven wrong - that there's a benevolent all-knowing entity who guarantees eternal life in meadows lush with rivers of milk and honey (throw in the 72 virgins while we're at it). If there's any one thing that even remotely has a chance of changing my mind to accept this fantasy, it is the thought of being reunited with my pets when I die.

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.

Nope.

Agnostic here brought up with Buddhist grandparents. I like the idea of reincarnation - (I don't deny not truly believe it) you need a "soul" to leave you physical body and to repeat in an endless cycle. Nirvana is when you break free of this cycle and gain enlightenment.

The idea that a part of us may live on has helped cope with mourning a lost one. But that's really it - in the face of mortality, sometimes you find mechanisms to cope. Don't think I answered your question...

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.

I believe that what defines a person is a pattern of neurons firing in the brain. I also believe that if said pattern could be perfectly replicated on some other medium (along with all the associated physiological inputs that keep it humming and changing), that new pattern would be indistinguishable from the original.

There are infinite possible outcomes to every action, branching off from each moment. And there are also infinite parallel realities that branched off of previous moments. The pattern that is your consciousness will also branch off infinitely. But imagine a fork in the road where one direction is death. Your consciousness cannot take that route, because it no longer exists on that branch. But it DOES still exist in the other, and it has no choice but to continue onward.

Thus, you will never experience death.

Your consciousness may change along its beaching paths, perhaps contorting into something completely new, but it will never truly end.

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. :)

I'm agnostic. I do believe we have a soul, I just think we haven't discovered what it actually is yet. Like, scientifically we're not quite able to explain yet what makes a soul a soul. I'm not sure if a soul disconnects and "moves on" somewhere/somehow after a body death, or if it also dies out with the body, but I like to think there is a disconnection there. I agree that it makes me feel better about death in general, so yeah, maybe that's why I so easily accept such an idea?

But, it feels like more than that to me. It's fundamentally what makes each of us individualistic in terms of the choices we make. It's what makes me, "me."

I'm going to tie this in with abortion, so I apologize in advance, Lol, but I'm 100% convinced that the abortion debate will never come to a conclusion unless we discover what a soul is scientifically. Right now the picking at random physical stages, like a heartbeat or lung formation/ability only goes so far, because it doesn't explain what makes each individual so individualistic. No one will ever convince someone who believes a soul starts at conception that abortion from the start is anything but murder. (To be clear, I'm pro-life, though 100% believe there's a cut-off point).

So, to sum it all up: yes, there's a soul, though i dont tie it to any god or religion. yes, I believe one day we'll prove there's a soul scientifically, we just aren't there yet.

Im Egoist, so technically atheist, there are none until proven otherwise.

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.

i don't believe in god but i think life is infinitely profound; as profound as an idea like the soul. so i guess it depends on your definition of soul and how creative or spiritual you are

I don't believe in a soul that's separate from the body, or that lives on afterward. But the way that "inanimate" matter can spin up thoughts and feelings and a consistent personal experience that can last for decades... It's almost fair to call that thing a soul. It's fair to talk about nurturing your soul and growing a soul.

“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.

Curious, why did you group agnostics together with atheists?

No

No. Soul = personality, nothing magic.

No. If you can't find it in an autopsy, did it ever exist in the first place? Too many people confuse 'soul' for 'mind' (IMHO)

I don't believe it, but I some times wonder if some kind of self is preserved as energy within the universe somehow. Effectively being a soul, but in a sense of physics more than spirituality. Much like how the physical body will decay and return to the earth, the energy that makes up consciousness could simply return to the universe.

I think 'soul' is not something which exists in itself - it is the idea of the essence of a thing, the thing which causes an individual life.

So theories go around that there are spiritual beings separate from the physical (debatable) and I personally think that it extends to all life, such that trees can have awareness which can also extend beyond their physical bodies.

As such, they obviously exist - but their exact definition and nature is quite hard to grasp. I don't think they can survive physical death.

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.

all these "deleted by creator" posts in a thread about atheism sound a bit ominous. @Jongaros@lemmy.ml are you ok?

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.

It's a useful term in sentences like "This hurts my soul", but I don't need the metaphysical claims around it.

I don't think humans have souls. When we die, we do just that. I don't think we are so special to have something other species don't, so if we (humans) have them, then other species also can.

No. Souls dont exist.

I don't think humans have souls. When we die, we do just that. I don't think we are so special to have something other species don't, so if we (humans) have them, then other species also can.

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.

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.

I don't think humans have souls. When we die, we do just that. I don't think we are so special to have something other species don't, so if we (humans) have them, then other species also can.

It really depends on what you mean? It's a purposely, nearly obtusely, intangible concept. I'm not unwilling to talk about it if I get a proper definition, but my opinion would be a mere opinion formed from the facts I have on hand. I have some suppositions that are outside the realm of what science has been able to dig in to, but without actually factual backing, I also acknowledge that my ideas are conjecture that line up with how I perceive the world.

I don't think humans have souls. When we die, we do just that. I don't think we are so special to have something other species don't, so if we (humans) have them, then other species also can.

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.

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.

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