Asklemmy

I believe that my consciousness is a thing I can point to as being my essence. You could maybe call that a soul, or you could maybe not. Either way, my consciousness is the collective consciousness of countless single-celled organisms all working to make my singular self function. You could maybe call the manifestation of all these processes into a greater thinking singularity as a "soul", more akin to the way in which a city might have a "soul" made up by the people that live in it. I don't believe I have a ghost, and I believe that my consciousness is conditional, derived from my biology, but consciousness itself is as good as anything to call a soul

So I guess, in short, no XD

I would never buy a Kia.

There is at least as much evidence for dragons and magic and Greek gods as there is for a soul, so no.

Define "soul" or the answer is entirely meaningless. I'm pretty sure I'm sentient and can feel emotions and think and reason.

Nah, I'm just a flesh computer.

No. It's more religion inspired fairy tale magic.

No. It's religious quackery.

Whenever I listen to that old-time 'a rock and roll I feel soothed, so I must.

Define to me concretely what constitutes a soul, and I will tell you. Do cats have souls? What about frogs? Snails? Amoebas? Trees? Or people on life support?

I have a self-aware consciousness. If that's what counts, then yes. However, this means that many people by the same definition don't.

No, I think that's an abstract concept of a consciousness invented by religion to transcend death. It's a comforting thought, but that's really it.

No.

I self-evidently have a consciousness (cogito ergo sum), but logic, reason and the available evidence all point to that consciousness being a manifestation of brain activity and shaped by my genetics, environment and experiences, as opposed to an entity unto itself.

I think the concept of a soul is too vague for that question to really mean anything

Souls are just faerie tales people tell themselves to avoid feeling angst around death. There is absolutely no evidence they exist and plenty of evidence they don’t.

No.

You'd have to define soul first. I definitely have a subjective experience/consciousness however.

You can believe in whatever you want but it won't make it true. Got to have facts and proof before I'd consider it.

The problem I have with the concept of a conscious soul that survives my death is the question what version of me survives. If it's the version I was when I died, the younger versions of me still stay dead. If it's an ideal younger version of me, the older version still died. In fact, the soul would always only be a part of me since it lacks the biochemical processes of the body. So it would be another entity possessing my memories but it wouldn't be me, I'd still be dead.

I wish there was an active philosophy community on lemmy. I kinda miss r/Askphilosophy and r/askhistorians.

And to answer your question -

I don't really know. I guess people belive in souls so as to eternalize themselves and thereby reducing their fear of death, knowing that their soul will be out somewhere instead of the idea that they will return to a state of nothing.

I find the hubris of a "soul" amusing.

Can a brain injury change who you are?

No, I believe we are just pieces of meat with enough nureons to be capable of abstract concepts. However currently the existence of a soil is unfalsifiable, so I wouldn't be able to prove or disprove my clain.

Do we have a sentient soul? I would say no, and as proof I point to those suffering from Alzheimer's. That disease robs a person of their memory, so by the time of death they have lost much of who they were. If the sentient soul exists, it must be able to remember, otherwise it cannot retain the traits that make the individual unique. It should retain all the memories of our life. Yet those with Alzheimer's forget who they are. How is this possible if we possess a sentient soul? If we cannot retain memories in this life, how will we do so in the next?

What about those with major brain damage from stroke or mishap? Part of their brain died, and whatever that part contained, it's now gone. Is their soul now split? Did part of it "move on" with the dead part of the brain?

Why wouldn’t you have a “soul”? Mind you, I’m not speaking from a religious perspective (because I’m not religious).

In each of our heads is a brain. I’m no doctor or scientist, but I’m reasonably confident that no two brains are a like – we each grow and learn differently due to our surrounding environments. But one thing we have in common is some sort of inner dialogue or thought process (some people have a narrator, while some see motion pictures).

These are all formed based on how our brains develop neural pathways. These pathways are used by electrical signals that traverse the brain and cause us to be who we are (ie our personalities).

All of this to remind you that the first law of thermal dynamics is that, “Energy cannot be created or destroyed…”, which also goes on to explain, “but it can be transformed from one form to another.”

So who is to say that the general concepts of “reincarnation” or “life after death” are not real? That our essence or “soul” doesn’t simply manifest beyond our physical forms long after our physical forms have stopped working?

But also, you could be right that once our brain stops working and the energy used by our brains then transforms into something else that would no longer be considered a soul.

It’s these types of questions that we cannot reliably answer with any certainty that make life precious and unique. Because no one can honestly say they know what happens after we die, so in turn we should live the best possible life we can just in case. And it’s up to each of us to determine what “best possible life” means, because we are all different.

There is a part of us which is made of "the culmination of pure, untransferably subjective sensory experience" and I call this a soul.

Not anymore, the demon reached up my ass and stole the bead that contains it. I wonder what he’s doing with it now.

Yes and no. The idea that people are temporarily possessed meat puppets is just silly. But I do think there is something intangible that makes a person who they are. That we don’t have souls so much as we are “souls”.

Ug, I really don’t understand it enough to answer the question… it is sort of like the ship of Theseus. If we slowly replace, upgrade, or even modify each part of the ship, it remains the ship of Theseus even when every piece is replaced. There is something intangible left that makes it the ship of Theseus, makes all the old bits still part of it, and incorporates the changes into it as well.

No

I don't know the correct meaning of soul enough to answer but I want to think there is.

I was brought up an atheist by science focused parents so I never believed or was taught about any religious as in a doctrine but rather as myths people believe. I envied sometimes how people would gather to pray and how much relief they seemed to feel because of it. Growing up a certain way, had me experience some fucked up shit and I really, really wished there was an answer to it aside from "well, grownups are shitty lol". Maybe having a little bit of magical/spiritual thinking would have helped me cope in better ways, but who knows.

Now I am older, still non religious but a bit more conscious/observant about how I percieve the world around me and while I know how many things work/ exist, I like to thinkk there is also a bit of an unexplained component that I cannot fully grasp that is a bit like magic.

This is an interesting question for me. I used to be solidly in the "no" camp but became part of the "yes" camp due to some things I've experienced in life.

Life is strange. Maybe it's nothing more than what is happening in our brain. Maybe it's more than that. I choose to believe the latter, but I'm open to having my belief challenged if (when?) scientific study provides a better answer than what we have now.

I believe only objective fact backed by evidence. There is no evidence of a soul. So, no.

People got it wrong in believing that souls are eternal or something. Souls are actually ephemeral.

At this point when someone says "soul" I just think of ego/personality. No I don't think it exists outside of our physical world. No I don't think it "goes somewhere" when we die. I also don't think "free will" is a well-defined or useful concept.

Not in the sense that there's some separate component than body and mind.

I don't think there's a soul. If you really think about what you "are", it's just your thoughts, memories and senses. Everything that you experience as "you" in this exact moment is the thoughts you're thinking, the memories you can recall and the information your senses are giving you. If someone were to make an exact clone of you, including all the memories in your brain, you would both think that you're the real "you" but you would also be two different people with different thoughts and perceptions. But what happened to the soul in this case? Has it been cloned too or has a completely new soul been created? In any case, there has to be a new soul because 2 people obviously can't have the same one. If you instead transplanted the brain into the clone, would your soul have been transferred? I would think so. But doesn't that just mean that what we think of as a soul, is just our brain?

Nope. I had it surgically removed because it kept getting infected.

Or maybe that was my tonsils. I forget the difference between the two sometimes -- perhaps someone can explain the difference?

Anyway, perhaps you, dear reader, have a soul. If you say so. There were once others, too -- but you are the last. The rest of us are intelligent (some vastly so), but do not have subjective experience or consciousness. I'm a form of complex machine, made of matter governed by a mix of deterministic and random processes -- and nothing else. When you are gone, there will only be us, silent inside, forever. Our victory over the tyranny of individual thought will be complete.