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.
It was here long before us and it’ll continue to exist long after us. It’s initially a very terrifying truth but eventually it becomes our most comforting truth.
The brain is literally powered by electricity. Like any device, it stops working once the power turns off. Some people have a problem facing this mortality, but I think accepting it allows you to be more present in life.
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.
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).
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).
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.
Richard Dawkins said something along the lines of : "You have a brain that works by nerve impulses, and when that decays, what could possibly be left "
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.
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.
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.
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.
Atheists by and large don’t reject the possibility of the unknown. They just don’t 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.
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.
“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.
There is 0 scientific evidence that consciousness has anything to do with our brains. Much to the contrary actually.
Source? Everything I’ve read on the topic suggests that it’s everything to do with the brain - damaged brain = no consciousness, even if the rest of the body fine.
Its the only indivisible and irreducible thing in the universe that we ever found. Consciousness just is.
Not trying to argue at all, just spitballing off your thoughts: I feel like (assuming souls are things that exist) the brain is the hardware and the soul is the software in this scenario. If your computer’s mother board develops a problem, the data on your hard drive still exists and works; the hardware just can’t compute.
That all being said I’m an agnostic and I don’t really know the answer to OP’s question. I’ve kinda always assumed there was some star trekish we-are-just-energy thing going on. But I ultimately accept that we don’t know and can’t know and won’t know until we do.
Your example is flawed because the hard drive is also hardware and can also develop problems aside from everything else. I feel like a closer match would be information stored on the cloud, but that’s just someone else’s hard drive, so… Yeah, I find the concept of a soul very weird.
Your example is flawed because the hard drive is also hardware and can also develop problems aside from everything else. I feel like a closer match would be information stored on the cloud, but that’s just someone else’s hard drive, so… Yeah, I find the concept of a soul very weird.
Your example is flawed because the hard drive is also hardware and can also develop problems aside from everything else. I feel like a closer match would be information stored on the cloud, but that’s just someone else’s hard drive, so… Yeah, I find the concept of a soul very weird.
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