I’m curious how Dopers feel about the presence of souls. I know lots of Dopers are agnostic/atheist, and also aghostic (great word, misnomer) and quite vehement about there being no god and no such thing as the supernatural, but do you guys believe that humans have a soul? Do you believe animals have souls? How about insects? Bacteria? Viruses? Computers? Robots?
My belief is simple; anything alive has a soul. Bugs have teeny little bug souls.
What say you all?
(This is half poll, half debate, so feel free to say what you believe and why.)
No, I don’t believe humans or animals have souls. Some have conciousness generated from advanced brains, but as soon as the brain dies, that’s it. Finis.
I’ll answer. No, I sure don’t. I think all of our emotions and everything else that is attributed to a soul comes directly from our hormones.
I use the word soul sometimes, but what I mean I suppose is the anima, the life presesence of a person. Humans are one of the instances where the sum of the parts is definitely greater than the whole, but I still don’t believe there’s anything remotely supernatural about it.
If I did decide to go mystic, the closest I’d lean is thinking of something similar to the Force…just a neutral sort of…connection between all living things. I certainly think that could exist without souls or a god but not without life…but even as I write it I realize I can’t even come close to expressing what I mean. If you’ve heard of or played Final Fantasy 7, and heard of the Lifestream, you may get me a bit better. Some sort of force of nature, I guess.
I believe in souls… however, I’m doubtful that souls really ‘exist’ in the sense that some people believe that they do… they’re not made out of energy, or matter, or tachyons or pure ectoplasm or anything like that…
To me, souls exist in the same way that freedom exists or mathematical laws exist. It’s slightly conceptual, but a useful shorthand term to describe a bunch of stuff that gets very complicated in terms of real-world details.
To go down the list:
humans: definitely
mammals and birds: yes, not in the same way that humans do of course, but I’d say they have souls of a sort.
insects: Borderline case. They’re still remarkable enough that the spark of life and thought in them is close enough to, arguably, make up a sliver of soul, but it’s very small and a little twisted compared to the above two cases.
Bacteria & Viruses: No. Even though bacteria are alive, I don’t think that ‘soul’ is a useful term in reference to single-celled or simpler life forms.
Computers & Robots: Possibly, but certainly not with any example of either that I’m aware of that’s been constructed on planet earth by human beings, yet. Once we get to the point of making computers & robot brains that are definitely as complicated, as capable of learning, as your average mammal/bird species, then we can start to argue whether they’re developing souls or not, and what it means if they are.
And to finish up, do I believe that souls persist after the body dies? That I’m not sure of. On a rational basis I can’t get myself to really believe it, on an intuitive level I can’t quite force myself to DISBELIEVE that something as incredible as consciousness, as soul, can’t find a way to resonate throughout all of past and future time. (Probably just building my own security belief, though.)
I believe that beneath my ruggedly handsome looks, beneath my often cynical and frequently distant demeanor, beneath my stoic resilience and deeply curious nature about many things in life, beneath my resilient and surprisingly kind nature; beneath all that… is underground parking.
I believe we should move this to Great Debates, which it will certainly become, so as to avoid snippy Mods in their Underoos coming in here and yelling at us every five posts or so.
And no, I don’t believe in “souls.” Bunch of romantic medieval nonsense. I believe in brains, that’s where the thought processes are contained.
I do like to use the word soul, e.g. this musician is showing a lot of soul in his art. But I don’t extend that to something bigger. So it’s a no for me.
I just don’t know. I have for years tried to reconcile free will, which I believe in, with a simple biological machine, which is what we are without a soul, and I can’t.
How can consciousness exist in something made of elaborate carbon molecules and energy? I just don’t get it, yet I have rejected all the arguments I’ve heard that consciousness is an illusion. There’s no need for it to be an illusion if there’s no consciousness you need to “fool.” My PC has no need of a mechanism to tell it it’s conscious (in order to pacify it), because it never asks itself the question.
The existence of a consciousness, apart from the simple biological machine, satisfies the definition of “soul,” as I understand it.
, but since there is no evidence for a soul, I don’t believe in the concept.
