Yep. I think I am the electrical activity in my brain. I have no idea how that works but I think that when that electrical activity stops I no longer exist except as electrical activity in other brains.
You are a soul. You have a body.
That’s not an example of Occam’s Razor. Or are we destroying that phrase too, along with “begging the question.”
“One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.” You need to demonstrate that whatever you are trying to explain needs an unproven entity - like a soul, in this thread. In other words, by Occam’s Razor, if there is no need for a soul to explain anything, you should act under the assumption that it doesn’t.
Der Trihs is right. Scientifically speaking, a “soul” is an unnecessary and superfluous entity which is nor required to explain any observable phenomenona.
“Life” is an emergent property of matter and energy and is not a substance in itself which can be “moved” or transferred anywhere.
The soul is a philosphical and religious conception of the core consciousness, identity, “self” which ostensibly resides in the flesh and which according to some religious beliefs, survives it after death. There is no empirical evidence that such a thing exists or needs to exist, though.
The Latin word for soul is anima meaning “wind” or “breath.” The ancients believed that breath was the animating life force (they literally thought that breath and the “lifeforce” were the same thing).
How is your soul any different than a collection of memories, which a lot of theists would find to be an insufficient definition, and almost no atheist would deny exists.
What do you mean by “hanging;” still there or gone? If still there, how is that even remotely plausible?
The soul represents the “energy” of the funtamentals that make us who we are. When we die, it is the “physical” body that stops functioning. However, our energy, therefore the soul still exists.
I have no idea for how long.
Above explanation is, obviously, my personal opinion and noone can know the exact answer to this question (this is assuming that there actually is an answer).
isn’t our internal energy being continuously used up in the processes of living? Things like moving our muscles; the electricty that activates muscles; maintaining our body temperature and things of that sort? And don’t we continually have to take in food to replenish that energy? So, if we don’t take in a supply of energy our onboard supply dissipates into our surroundings rather rapidy as heat. We cool off in a few hours so if “soul” is energy it doesn’t last long.
Well, self awareness and a sense of continuity of identity. I’m trying for a minimalistic definition here, one that most people can work with, without bringing in divisive theological argument. At first, anyway; I’m sure we’ll get there.
I honestly don’t know; that’s why I took that particular phrase. There are Biblical cites that seem to imply annihilation, punishment, self-judgment, so-called “soul sleep” between death and Last Judgment, etc., etc. And for all practical purposes, no non-religious evidence regarding any post-mortem survival of a “soul.” I can explain what I personally believe, but the discussion was not focused on that. Ergo, leaving the concept of what happens at death, at least to “the unsaved,” purposefully ambiguous, seemed appropriate.
The “energy” that makes up who we are is the electrical activity of our brain chemistry. When we die, that activity ceases. There is no other detectable energy which still exists after the physical death of the body. Maybe “energy” isn’t really the word you wanted but any literal energy would be detectable and observable. A “soul” obviously is not.
My take on this is along the lines of the computer analogy, only that our consciousness isn’t merely an emergent property of our brain activity, but rather a “screen”, which already is there.
When the organism dies, the screen isn’t shut off, it just ceases to receive meaningful input, at least for a while. Stress on “meaningful”, by the way, as by consciousness, I mean only experience of something, not awareness of that experience, and even less intellectual processes.
My reasoning for this is that while the brain, our body, and indeed most physical phenomena doesn’t have any clear boundaries, it indeed seems like consciousness does. I have an experience of a “me”, a single stream of consciousness, how can a fleeting assembly like the brain add up to something singular? Also, as the brain’s electrical activity is “something”, not just a description of how “atoms” (in the greek sense) interacts, I also feel that consciousness requires some sort of a substance (not necessarily “material”, but rather something fixed, instead of being something emergent).
Another way to explain it: Think of consciousness as another dimension. Each single consciousness is a point on that line, when the body it belongs to, dies, the point is still there, it just ceases to receive meaningful input.
As “soul” has, as most profound words, a rather vague definition, it could be applied to this view, but I’d consider it misleading; I believe in an undying consciousness, but I don’t add any religious baggage to that notion.
I hope I made myself as clear as possible, but admittedly, my view of consciousness is more of a set of postulates on which i base, or try to base, my worldview, so arguing for it is inherently difficult.
By the way, to better answer the OP, “life” would be a series of inputs considered coherent and meaningful, merely a fleeting (and infinitely reappering) state of the “soul” (or, rather, “consciousness”, to avoid religious implications).
It doesn’t, and the singularity of consciousness appears to be an illusion. Brain damage, for example, can screw up or destroy part of the conscious mind, but leave others alone. Nor does consciousness/mind have clear bounderies; the body and even the outside world are involved. People with a damaged brain/body connection lose emotions and become sociopaths, and people commonly use the external world as a subsidiary of the mind.
When you write down a note to remind yourself of something, you’ve just stuck a tiny portion of your mind in the outside world for a while. The mind is massively concentrated in the brain, but there’s no neat external/internal or hardware/software divide like in a human designed computer. Evolution does things differently.
We’re not using the same word. My “consciousness” is only the experience, the movie of my life (and my other lives, an my “un-lives”). I realize that the brain, in order to function, uses the outside world (eg., by using notes as an extention of memory). While our brains can interract, and in a way be a part of the same system, our consciousnesses can’t. I can’t experience your experience (your brain can tell my brain about it, but I can’t be you).
In my nomenclature, brain <> consciousness. Actually, as I see it, they are no more related than, say, a movie star and a camera. C. doesn’t require a brain at all, a brain is just something that happens to produce a meaningful input for consciousness, and it is not given that it is the only thing that can do this, nor is it given that it is the necessary cause of c.
Likewise, I suppose that a brain doesn’t need c. to function, just like at least some people wouldn’t consider a robot to be c. However, I do believe that all “atoms” (greek again) are c., and thus, all brains have in them at least one atom in a position to recieve meaningful input.
Problem is, there’s zero evidence for any of that, and plenty against. Like brain damage, or drugs; if consciousness isn’t the mind, how can consciousnees be affected or damaged by such things ?
If something happens to your computer, like a virus or some sort of an error, your screen shows a different “movie”, but it’s all just pixels to the screen. The screen shows the same number of them, with the same range of colours, but the input is different, and indeed appears damaged.
And I don’t suppose there’s much evidence against what I wrote, at least not in that caption (basically saying that brain and consciousness are independent of each other). Try to explain how your computer works. You don’t ever need to bring in c. (at least not my definition of it, which I do hold is a reasonable one), just like you don’t have to connect a screen to it. You could say that a c. requires a brain (if you don’t believe it to be a continous stream), but then you’d have to argue what makes a brain so special and why robots can’t be c.
I still don’t think we’re using the same word. You might disagree with my definition of c., but I don’t think I’m nearly alone in thinking that it is only experience, and if you define it as both experience and the sum of mental processes, you have a definition that can easily be divided in two words, so why not use to different words, so that you can adress both aspects of the one you use now?
I should add, with one important exception: The conscious mind. They still can’t explain that, nor come up with a “strong AI” equivalent. But that is not a defining feature of life, only of human life. And, possibly, the life of some other mammals – is a chimpanzee self-conscious? Is a dog or cat? Maybe. We don’t know, won’t really know until we come up with some kind of direct neural-electronic interface leading to mechanically assisted telepathy. But I very much doubt insects or plants or bacteria have anything remotely approaching self-consciousness. But that, again, probably can be explained in terms of the complexity of our brains and central nervous systems and does not require positing an extraphysical “soul” as a hypothesis.
I think the OP needs to be refined to specify what kind of “life” is being compared to “soul.” After all, plants, fungi, amoeba and the like are all life but I doubt those are included in the OP’s question about life and soul. What does all life has in common other than the ability to make new life from scratch? And how does life as defined that way relate in any way to the concept of “soul?”
This is basically what I was going to post. I just wanted to add that even if a soul was proven to exist, it would be different from life as it would be a “thing” vs a process or set of processes.
Not at all true, and this is what I do for a living. If a computer gets damaged, the impact can be it runs slower, it loses data, it does arithmetic incorrectly, it panics, it writes the wrong data into memory, or lots of stuff. The nastiest times are when the “screen” seems the same, and you won’t know for a long time that the data stored is corrupted.
You don’t need to bring in c. when describing how a computer works because there isn’t any. You don’t need to bring in c. describing bees either. But since, as Der Trihs said, damage to the brain causes changes to consciousness and thinking (even loss of same,) I think there is plenty of evidence that they are very dependent. Read Oliver Sacks for countless examples.