Philosophy (NOT religion): is there a soul?

very simple question, with an undoubtedly complicated answer, if given fully - do you believe there is a soul? Please give more than a yes or no answer.

 

soul\life force\astral body whatever you want to call it, yes I believe we are separate from the shells we drive around on a daily bases

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I suppose it depends on what the definition of "soul" is. What is a "soul?"

 

1soul noun \ˈsōl\
: the spiritual part of a person that is believed to give life to the body and in many religions is believed to live forever

: a person's deeply felt moral and emotional nature

: the ability of a person to feel kindness and sympathy for others, to appreciate beauty and art, etc.

By definition, I say yes, but something of us that lives forever. Probably not.

 

There is no separate from the body soul. People are just mixing up consciousness and soul. Death is end of soul. Be prepared.
Can be soul without free will?

 

No, I have never seen any evidence that there is anything more than our organic bodies. I've never seen any credible research showing that our consciousness does not originate in our brains and is not dependent upon that brain. I HAVE, however, seeing tons of research showing just how dependent we are on those brains and how manipulating different parts of the brain will change your personality, memories, sense of morality, etc.

 

is that a religious belief?

 

i don't believe that souls exist .
Both Platon and Aristotelis had their own philosophical ideas about soul and it's function . I find the idea of endelecheia ( Ενδελέχεια ) quite interesting .

 

religious belief\Spiritual belief, yes, many religions, both theists and atheists believe we are more then just our bodies


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No as a soul is the dogmatic construct of religion. Philosophy is the study of ideas whereas a soul is put forth by religion/spiritualists as a real thing that exists beyond the realm of ideas and can be manifested in the material and/or spiritual world.

 

ok, the op said "Philosophy (NOT religion): is there a soul?"

I guess it is like belief in god, it feels good to think there is a soul, despite
there being no actual non emotional reason to.

 

The physicalist will argue the theory that matter is the only reality, that the brain creates consciousness and when the brain dies so does consciousness with it. Even using a physicalist approach to the topic, remember that based upon the physical law of Conservation of Energy, Energy can neither be created or destroyed it can only change forms. Let's assume consciousness or "the soul" is electro-magnetic energy. This "energy" even at death, does not cease to exist, it changes forms. However with brain death, consciousness as we perceive, dies as well.

The conumdrum is of course, the assumption that the physicalist approach to reality is all there is; materiality is the final arbiter of defining truth. Our consciousness is merely a bio-chemical process involving billions of neurons, and when this bio-chemical process stops..in other words death; consciousness dies too. This is the physicalist approach to defining our mind. The problem is, quantum mechanics points to a non-local Universe. To define what a non-local Universe is, it's perhaps best to define it's opposite..a local Universe. The principle of locality, states objects are influenced only directly by its immediate surroundings. Given that quantum mechanics points to a non-local Universe, our day to day experiences are thus not an accurate reflection of the deeper workings and mechanics of the universe, which seem to defy logic.

Richard Feynman, a respected physicist once said,
"I can safely say, that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

As far as science knows, when we die, when our bio-chemical selves...die...we cease to be aware, our consciousness dies. The electro-magnetic energy of the brain changes to another form of energy that is incapable of perception and awareness, as we perceive it as living persons. The "soul" therefore ceases to exist after the brain and body dies. This hypothesis is based upon a materialist, physical view of reality...which may not be an accurate portrayal of what reality really is.

 

Not entirely. You might want to look at this:

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/presentations/whatisconsciousness.html

I didn't read the whole thing but it strikes me as being very close to David Hume's idea of the "self", which Hume sees as simply an illusion produced by ideas within the brain. It's a rather well-known rejoinder to Descarte's "I think therefore I am" as being actually "I think therefore I think". A strange consequence of believing this, however, is that it reduces the terror of death almost as much as religion, since, according to it, we cannot really die because we have never been alive in the first place.

 

Are you trying to tell me that you honestly believe that the force which brought this adorably cute kitty into existence could ever blot out the eternal essence of it?

What sort of conspiracy of the universe would do such a monstrous thing?

The atoms of rocks and dust have no conception of cuteness whatsoever.

 

religious belief\Spiritual belief\Philosophy , yes, many religions, both theists and atheists believe we are more then just our bodies

 

Thanks for the link to the article. I intend to read it.

“Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.” - Epicurus

The only problem with this idea is that it has not yet been proven that the "soul" does not survive death.

Many people have experienced the phenomenon of being unconscious under anesthesia or perhaps from having been knocked out.

I'm speaking of an absence of consciousness which is devoid of dreams or any sensation, a sort of "nothingness".

During these periods we are equally unaware of the lapse of time. So from the instance we go under or to the time we wake up on the pavement, we do not experience anything.

Epicurus may have gotten his conception of death from having had the "experience" itself. That's if you want to call total unconsciousness an "experience", since by definition nothing is experienced.

All we "experience" then is a memory of having our lights put out conjoined to a memory of having awoken.

During this period of time when we are unaware of anything, it cannot be said that we were dead, since our hearts and life processes were still functioning and doing what they do.

You may be familiar with the stories of people who were declared to be clinically dead, yet upon being resuscitated told of being aware during the period that they were supposed to be dead and incapable of experiencing unconsciousness.

Without trying to sort through the many occasions where sensationalists and attention seekers have spun yarns about these events for ulterior reasons unrelated to telling the truth, let's suppose that some of them have merit.

That still does not provide adequate proof to skeptics since the science of the brain has not advanced enough to say with much certainty what may or may not occur during these kind of episodes.



I mention this because IF such instances could be proven, ie that there was conscious activity in the absence of any brain function whatsoever, that would pretty much seal the deal that consciousness, hence something on the order of a "soul" could indeed survive the mortal coils of the meat machines we call our brain.

Until such time that we can disprove or totally "debunk" ALL such accounts or can prove objectively that these were only near death experiences, the question of the survivability of the soul remains open.

In other words, the existence of a soul which continues long after the body has decayed remains a possibility so far as we know since we are not yet to the point where we can rule it out.

For to do so, one would have to totally understand the process by which consciousness is generated and know with certainty that there is no other process other than the one which depends upon the presence of the brain.
Assuming that the material dimension which we observe is all that can exist, it is still an assumption unless we can also know how the material itself came to be in the first place.

Personally, my own hunch, which comes from a sort of poetical intuition, is that the "soul" or spirit of a being, once it has come into existence can never be erased from the eternal store of all knowledge. The fact remains that such a thing DID exist. Therefore the image of it as it once existed would remain imprinted on the face of the universe exactly as it was entirely, throughout the entire duration of it's time, and appears there in the absence of temporal existence ALL AT ONCE.

Just as the consciousness of the brain can be removed without removing the life of the body, an unconscious mind may be reawakened in some other form after the body has been removed.

For if the consciousness we experience in this life which emerges from our physical brains, exists within that structure which is contained within that skull, is cognizant of itself as a result of electrical and magnetic forms of energy then who can say for certain that those energy fields or whatever they are (for lack of a better description) can not be regenerated in the absence of matter?

If one were to view a persons entire life as if it was one complete hologram sort of stretched out over the period of time of his life from beginning to end, then he would be able to see it ALL AT ONCE. Think of it as a "tracer" comprised of all of the movements and actions contained over the entire period of ones life.
To see this "apparition" ALL AT ONCE, would not require the passage of time and would therefore be timeless in the sense that it would not require the viewer to stand for the entire period of time that it originally took the person to experience it.
Remember, what he is seeing is not the events unfolding , but rather all the events which have already unfolded. That's because the "tracer" picture is all joined together like a panoramic picture and one is not required necessarily to focus on one particular event at a time and in sequence the way we are experiencing it now.

You are sitting right now in a particular TIME. You can look at your watch and give a corresponding date.
After that INSTANT passes you still retain the MEMORY of the past few moments (barring a brain infarct or some other malfunction of the brain in the same way that time passed while you were unconscious yet alive) .

So WHERE then did that TIME go and all the details that were associated with that moment? Were they an illusion?
If not, then why after things age, deteriorate, and decay can they never be exactly the same as they were in the moment in which they first existed?

We have historical monuments which have been restored to look much as they did at first. But we know that when we visit a battleground or other memorial that every blade of grass and every leaf on a tree is not now as it was then. We know that the direction of the wind and the earth have shifted. We cannot experience the ACTUAL event as it was no matter how realistic and historically accurate the scene and circumstance have been recreated to resemble the original.
We feel somewhat empty and left with an unfulfilled craving to know exactly what it felt like when private so and so took his first step towards the enemy lines at Pickett's charge. All the reenactors and cannon smoke in the world cannot assure us of a faithful reproduction because we KNOW that we were NOT THERE.

We don't have to kid ourselves about our own past though because we KNOW WE WERE, despite all the distortions and confabulations that our faulty memories and emotional overtones have embellished and added to it.

The point was brought up by an earlier poster that someone had suggested that maybe that life as well as death are both an illusion, I presume because of problems similar to the ones I have attempted to describe in summing it all up.

But how many of us are going to conclude that we don't exist? By the same token it could never be said by anyone TRUTHFULLY that we never did!

Yet that is where death and decay lead us, to a situation that for all practical purposed amounts to the same thing.

I find that a very gigantic pill to swallow. I could just as easily believe that whatever "force?" that caused time, space, and matter to result in my existence or the existence of ANYTHING at all, could just as easily account for a reassembly of consciousness in some other form or dimension. It is certain that one is no more certain in my mind, easier to explain, or for all of my knowledge explainable.

 

I would not say "pi"(=3.14...) exists without mathematics - although circles are existing - so why should "soul" exist without religion? Nevertheless let me try this: Hegel for example saw in a soul something what I could call "evolution of the spirit". So perhaps we could ask first a more simple question like: "Has a constitution a spirit?" We Germans are for example allowed to resist against everyone who tries to change the spirit of our constitution. So for our culture this would be a very important question. If someone could find an example where one is convinced "spirit is more than only an empty phrase" then this could explain both: as well soul (individual spirit) and spirituality or religion in general - in a spectrum of individual spirituality, spirituality of groups or spirit of the world, univers[es] or god . But now we are back and it seems to be impossible to say something about the expresssion "soul" without being religious the same time. On the other side: Everyone is religious, so this is not really a big problem. Even atheists are believers in Not-God and Not-Souls for example - the problem of this group of people is only that they are often thinking they know what they believe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFLqGqmIrQU

 

The term "souls" is widely used on military aircraft passenger manifest as "soul's on board." We counted the number of people on board a flight, including ourselves as the crew, and this would be part of the official manifest. Should we be carrying human remains, they would not be included as souls. In other words "souls" referenced living people. This wasn't a philosophical statement regarding the term; only delegating living people as souls. It was based on the practical aspect of alerting emergency rescue and/or recovery how many living people were on board the aircraft so as to account for them. The origin of using the term "soul" on a manifest, I don't know. Seems throughout history, both in maritime and aviation, the living people on board a vessel were referred to as souls.

Personally, I do believe in the concept of a soul, but of course in terms of providing mathematical proofs and verification...well this is beyond my knowledge base. We are told, as living entities...we're just the activity of carbon and some proteins; we live awhile and die. I do not fully embrace this rather bleak paradigm.

In default of any other proof, the thumb would convince me of the existence of a God.
~ Sir Issac Newton

 

An interesting question. Is the dream of a book the same, if it is written on paper or electronical paper? ... This makes me think about Leibniz - I never liked his idea of a prestabalized harmony between spirit and matter - but if we would be a printout of our soul while the 'real' book is in a computer - how could we find the computer although we would somehow know something about the writer because the writer is nevertheless "I" in this imagination. ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgGAzBDE454

 

yep, both theists and atheists can believe in a afterlife

 

It is an absurd notion if you actually stop and think about it.

 

If after my ife here on earth comes nothing then I don't have any problem with this imagination. If it should be gods will to let it be this way - why not? His will decides this - not my will. I 'm even able to enjoy this imagination. But I don't believe in this. I believe Jesus is preparing for us a place in our heavenly home where we will live with a body after our death - maybe after some cleanings in the purgatorial fire - and I believe there's also existing a danger to go forever to hell, so it's important for everyone on this planet to do good deeds and to avoid evil deeds. And if someone did evil deeds then it's important to ask for forgiveness and to try to correct every wrongdoing in the best of all possible ways. Do we need a soul for this all? A wide true loving heart should be enough to avoid the dangers of hell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1SZYYsFYIg

 

“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law…We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory, experience, and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody.” - Rust Cohle

 

If by 'soul' you mean something supernatural, then no. Due to the fact that not one single supernatural thing has been shown to have ever existed, and the total lack of objective evidence.

 

if you say so