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Do you believe the that you have a soul?
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this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Everyone believes that they have a soul, the contention is the nature of the soul. You have an intangible essence which inhabits your body, and you identify with your "self". Some people think it's some kind of immortal ghost that gets to live in the clouds with other immortal ghosts when the body dies, some people think it's an emergent phenomenon of some variety which disappears when the body dies. These are differences in explanation, secondary to the ontological question of existence.
The "I" in your statements is proof of your soul, any disagreement is really just pedantic quibbling over terminology because you believe the term has been tainted by explanations you don't agree with. Even if your brain is "making it up", it's still a phenomenon. Your subjective internal experience is made of "soul", your concept of self is made of "soul". The entity asking the question and reading the responses is your soul, simple as.
It's proof of consciousness. If you're using "soul" synonymously to "consciousness", well, certainly not everyone does so.
In the use of language I learned, "soul" is the superstitious concept that religious people use, and since I don't believe in superstitions, I certainly don't believe that I have a soul.
I definitely possess consciousness, though, in the sense that I recognize contiguous piles of atoms as "objects" and one such object is my own body.
In turn, I would not say that my consciousness asks questions and reads the responses. My body does that. My 'mind' and 'consciousness' are just characteristics of my body. And "I" is my body, too.
Of what substance is your consciousness composed? Certainly your body is made of chemical matter: proteins, lipids, water, etc. Is consciousness itself, the subjective experience you identify as yourself, made of matter? Perhaps there are regions of the brain which fire in conjunction with a sensation, but is the sensation synonymous with the meat in which it resides? I'm speaking internalistically, how "you" "feel" from the inside.
A computer program can be likened to the electrical activity in the hardware. It is not itself the hardware, though it's certainly linked. Your body is the hardware, your consciousness is the program. Are "you" also organized electricity, or something similar? Does that imply that electricity can have the same subjective experience as you?
I think you have it backwards. You're prescriptively deciding that souls are superstitions, so you don't believe in them. I think descriptively, that we certainly observe souls, and it merely falls to us to discover their nature. Certainly some people ascribe superstitions to them, but tying superstitions to the weather or the sea or salt doesn't make any of those things less real. Why subjugate your own fundamental observations to someone else's superstitions?
That's a weak argument. Using this, anything you can refer to has a soul, which is just the idea of that thing in your mind.
The idea of Ohio is intangible, but does Ohio have a soul? How about Clippy? Betelgeuse? Every
selfcall ever made? That person who appeared in your dream once?You've quibbled yourself out of meaning anything. The existence of intangible identities is related to what people would call a soul, but you've reduced the definition to be unreasonably broad. Your idea of soul is meaningless and isn't what the OP is talking about.
How did you come to that conclusion based on what I wrote? Nothing you've written bears any resemblance to what I said. The concept of Ohio does not inhabit your body, and you don't identify as it. A thought and a soul are not the same thing just because they're both intangible. Intangibility is necessary, but not sufficient.
No concept inhabits any body. One may identify as an Ohioan, but nothing about them changes if they do. Many Ohioans share cultural traditions and behaviors, which colour people's perception of Ohio, and could be described as the Soul of Ohio. Yet you argue that Ohio has no Soul.
Similarly, does the concept of Zeitgeist suggest a spirit that controls people? Does the concept of the Will of the People suggest that countries have personhood?
What most people today mean when they use the word "soul" is much closer to "spirit" or "being" than "self". Soul is often used poetically to refer to the essential aspects of something, living or otherwise. However when talking about whether souls actually exist, as opposed to simply being made up by the mind, they're very much not talking about simply the character of an idea, but the vital spark, immortal essence, or animating principle that usually characterizes life.
OP isn't asking if you believe people have a sense of self, they're asking if you believe that there is an essence unique to living things that is lost after death, usually supporting the self and memories, which exists by itself rather than as simply a pattern in something else.
OP did not verbalize that as such, this sounds like your personal interpretation.
Regardless, vital spark = being = subjective experience = sense of self = animating principle = consciousness = soul. These are essentially synonyms.
Ohioans may have common attributes, these attributes will shape certain aspects of the soul. Souls are likewise shaped by religion, cultural ethnicity, philosophical beliefs, aesthetic preference, sexuality, and many other factors. These factors are like the hands and techniques that shape the clay, the soul is the clay. Being, at least one's own (in the solipsistic extreme), is uncontested even by the strictest materialist atheist. It's only the nature (origin, destiny, scope) that anyone disagrees on.
OP must be refering to the metaphysical definition, as they do not believe that souls exists. As you point out, denying the idea of personal experience is unreasonable, therefore OP must hold that "soul" refers to something more and is not synonymous with the sense of self.
You argue here that such a "something more" soul does not exist, reasonably attributing the idea to emergent properties of natural systems, yet you seem to argue that this constitutes every definition of soul, including the various flavours of "something more", simultaneously answering yes and no.
This is where the confusing begins. Do you believe souls are emergent or elementary? Is there a persistent metaphysical aspect, or are they ephemeral at best? Are they simply produced by the flesh, or is the flesh just where they reside while alive? Do souls exist, or are they an illusion like a tree in a painting?
I did no such thing. I argue for a descriptivist, rather than prescriptivist, perspective on the subject. I argue that questions of the nature of the soul are separate from questions of the existence of the soul, the latter being fairly obvious. The "something more" aspect is a question of nature. I deliberately abstained from arguing any specific claims regarding the nature of the soul, that lies beyond the scope of the question.
I engaged with the question as OP posed it. If they would like to refine the question to narrow the definition of "soul" then I will engage with that new question.