Some people believe that humans have souls and some believe that they don’t. I think they do. Does this make any sense?
Given the idea that spirits did exist, they are conceived of as things not made of matter, but they can influence matter, like a poltergeist that throws stuff around. (if there are spirits, this is what they are like, according to people who believe in them)
If the human body is just a massive group of cells, and cells are just a massively complex group of chemical reactions, humans should act in ways that are totally predictable based on instincts determined by brain chemistry.
If humans have free will, they must have some ability to choose something, not following a course predetermined by chemical reactions.
Anyone who has been in a situation where they had to make a difficult choice between what would be most comfortable/practical and doing what they should do, for instance supporting/decrying mainstream racism or some other common evil, can tell that they had a choice.
If they have a choice, there must be something that can influence the matter that forms their brain chemistry according to an actual whim.
The only thing that can influence matter like this is a spirit, or what would be the human soul.
Therefore, I suggest that humans have souls.
Re #2 - one answer is that you could theoretically determine how someone would act if you had full knowledge of the state of their brain cells, hormones, environment, etc. but that there are just too many possibilities for the all the individual states to be able to predict anyone’s behaviour. Remember we have many many millions of brain cells; you’d have the state of a very large chunk of them to predict with certainty how someone will behave.
Doesn’t necessarily mean people don’t have souls. It makes sense to argue that if there is free will there is some kind of soul, otherwise there can’t be any choices.
Um…okay? Are you an arguing this is true, or are you just telling us what people believe? Because people believe a lot of untrue things.
Google “emergent properties”. Just about every interaction you can think of is more than the sum of its parts. The human individual is the result of different layers of organization (atoms, molecules, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, systems) interacting within themselves and each other AND the environment. At each nexus, there are different emergent properties that have their own cascading effects on the system. If you can’t predict how an ocean will behave based on the characteristics of a glass of water, why do you think you’d be able to predict what a human does?
I’m really not following you. Are you saying that humans have free will because we make tough decisions all the time? And that these choices are never driven by internal coercive forces (fear of losing one’s job, fear of dying, fear of being abandoned, fear of embarrassment) that exist in a person due to their social/cultural programming and neurological dispositions (i.e., things they have no control over)? Your implicate the “soul” in this higher-level decision making, whereas I would attribute it to uninhibited unconscious processes. Those same processes that allow you to walk and chew gum at the same time and give you nightmares. Are these the handiwork of the “soul” too?
Our minds give us limited access to our own cognition. This is a more defensible hypothesis than blaming the mystery of the mind on the “soul”.
There are a lot of people out there who don’t make any choices or decisions, because they’re in vegetative states or they are profoundly mentally disabled. I’m fine with concluding these people don’t have a consciousness the same way that you and I do due to their cerebral deficits. Are you comfortable with denying these people of souls? Because by framing “souls” in terms of decision-making and free will, that’s exactly what you’re doing.
Two problems here. Firstly: “totally predictable” in a system so complex is ages away. You’re asking, basically, to simulate the universe. And even then, quantum effects ensure a certain degree of randomness.
Secondly, “free will”? Can you demonstrate that this is the case?
This is easily defeated by the notion that the brain merely tricks itself into thinking it had a choice. Nothing in here demonstrates free will, or any sort of “choice”.
Even accepting every one of your premises (which I won’t), you have only demonstrated that there is a “something” outside of the inherent biology of the human being which is apparently immune to causality.
Why would you call this a “soul”?
This is like defining a “something” outside of reality with no qualities we can determine and labeling it “god”. Terms like “soul” are loaded. They carry a metric ton of baggage with them. People hear “soul” and immediately think of the religion of their choice and the concept of life after death. What you’ve done is taken a word with a very clear meaning, attempted (and failed miserably, by the way) to prove that something only remotely, tangentially related exists, and then created a different definition of the word. There’s gotta be a term for that… “Begging the equivocation”, maybe? The point is, what you’ve proven has about as much to do with a soul as a “first mover” has to do with the Christian God of the Bible.
We don’t have souls. We’re hairless apes with the ability to reason and use speech. We’re no different from other mammals apart from those two abilities.
And if we did have souls, one would have to explain when, in the evolutionary process, we acquired them and how. “God did it” is not a testable hypothesis.
The impression of having free will does not necessarily mean we are not deterministic.
Free will is a very difficult subject: hard to define, hard to resolve. We make choices! That’s true; that’s undebatable. But perhaps given the same circumstances, the same brain chemistry and the same options, we’d always choose the same thing. (Or it could be nondeterministic; there could be a random variable in the equation, so we don’t always make the same choice. Is that free will? I don’t think so.)
IMHO, “free will” only exists from a subjective point of view.
Someday, when we have machines that behave so much like us that most of us assume they have consciousness (and they’ll assert that indeed they do), we’ll be able to make a very simple experiment that’ll prove that the impression of free will does not rely on the lack of determinism. Until then, I take it as a given, but it’s not proven and it might not be true.
And even then, some will say that these machines don’t have consciousness/awareness the way you and I do. Of course, I can’t even prove to you that I have it. You just assume I do, since I’m somewhat like you.
Again, one argument is that “free will” is simply the result of the astronomical number of different states that your brain can be in. Remember, there are over 2 billion combinations of only 31 different yes/no choices. When you are getting into many millions of yes/no’s (i.e. the firings of your neurons) the number of combinations is far beyond the number of atoms in the universe. If you couldn’t observe the individual neurons firing, how could you distinguish that from “free will”? Maybe we don’t have it in the sense you are talking about.
Before the OP’s question can be considered, would Othello1 mind:
1.) Describing a “soul”, and
2.) Give us evidence that such a thing even exists?
Before trying to find out if people have something called a “soul”, it would be nice to know what it is we are talking about, and whether it even exists in the first place.
I’ve seen zero evidence of poltergeists and zero evidence that the ‘soul’ can influence matter. So, this is not a given at all, in fact it’s pure speculation.
Why? Organisms besides humans act in unpredictable ways…do they have souls as well?
Again, you are making an assumption that I am not seeing. Why are ‘chemical reactions’, presumably in the brain, subject to prediction? Again, other organisms besides humans act unpredicatably, so does that mean they must have souls as well? Does everything that happens without prediction mean a soul is involved?
So, since this is a pregnant QED waiting for you to pounce, does everything and every creature that makes a choice necessitate a soul being involved?
Again, why? Since we actually DO have scientific evidence and observations of and on how the brain operates, and none about a ‘soul’, I’d say that Occam is going to go with brain chemistry as the likely culprit.
You have built an argument out of tissue paper, conjecture, speculation and then wrap it all up with a statement. Sorry, but there is no evidence for any of your suppositions, thus your conclusion is built on less than sand…it’s built on nothing at all.
Yeah, it’s easy to forget how incredibly problematic evolution is for the concept of a soul, especially one limited to humans.
Does a chimp have a soul? No? Well how about our common ancestor? If not, when did we acquire souls, and how? If so, does a dog have a soul? No? Well how about our common ancestor? If not, when did we acquire souls, and how? If so, does a bird have a soul, and so on, and so forth, until we reach the primordial sludge and are left to ponder the same question at the vague line between complex organic chemicals and self-replicating life. No matter where you draw that line, you need a justification and an explanation. Maybe random amino acid chains had souls?
The whole concept is just silly. What is even the point of proving this in the first place? What does it tell us? Anything? Does it have any explanatory or predictive power in the real world? I doubt it - the only mystery it solves (“do we have free will, or why do we appear to have free will”) is solved by instituting another, bigger mystery. It’s like if you asked “why is there life”, and I answered “magic!”. Even if I was right, I haven’t done anything to further anyone’s understanding of anything. We’ve just gone from “I don’t know” to “Magic”, and the answer to “what is Magic” is still a big fat “I don’t know”.
As much fun as it might be to break down each statement, I’m just perplexed by the overall argument. It seems to go like this. “I’ll prove that souls exist. 1. Given that spirits exist…”
Why not just start with “1. Souls exist” and then drop the mike?
Spirits don’t exist, and if I’m not inclined to believe in souls, why would I believe spirits exist?
We’re not yet able to model a human mind. Even if we could, there might be some quantum effects that we can’t model with certainty.
If things are uncertain, you can’t predict a human’s decisions perfectly, so that human would still have free will. And even if you could emulate someone’s mind perfectly, that doesn’t take away the original’s free will.
Think of it this way, say I’m a time traveler and I watch your every decision throughout your life and note it my notebook. If I go to you today, with that notebook filled with your future decisions, did I rob you of your free will? You still make those decisions, I just know what they’ll be.
And that process could certainly be meat and chemicals trying to suss out the correct course of action.
The chemistry is what has the whims.
You are asserting that gratuitously. And a gratuitous assertion can be gratuitously dismissed.
I suggest not. Also, we can damage your brain to take away abilities. A cut here and you lose the ability to walk. A cut there and you lose sight. A cut over there and you lose the ability to remember visual memories. The more we cut away at your physical brain, the more of you is lost.
Why on Earth would we assume, that when your brain is completely destroyed by rotting, that those abilities would spring back? A soul makes no sense.
If I think of a spirit as a nonmaterial entity, a soul would be a spirit linked to a material body, which could actually be anything, like a computer, a human, a frog, etc. A spirit is anything in a theoretical class of nonmaterial entities that have some influence over matter. evidence for their existence is based in part on longstanding human tradition, and also on miracles that are well documented, such as incorruptible saints or the miracle of lanciano, which can both be seen on wikipedia. a soul does carry connotations of various religions, but in this sense I am just speaking of it as the theoretical spirit that is coupled with a body.