Do you believe in a soul? - Page 2 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14758378
B0ycey wrote:I like to believe we all have a soul, but the way the brain functions pretty much debunks this notion. I mean, an outer body experience can be explained if you know anything about lucid dreams. All I know for sure is that when your brain deteriorates, your essence (soul) seems to go with it. I hope I'm wrong though. I quite like the notion that I am more than just neurons transmitting with each other and a spirit of me could lingers forever while my body decays.


Do we need to automatically connect the soul with the afterlife though? This is a religious favourite but doesn't seem necessary in order to start considering the idea.
As I said earlier:

jakell wrote:The idea of a soul as a facsimile of our 'self' at death (or alternatively a previous version of this) is pretty much reflected in transhumanist fantasies of detaching ourselves from our physical bodies and pouring ourselves into a machine that will maintain our 'pattern'. There are many technical problems with the maintenance of a such a complex and functioning (ie living) pattern.
The idea of the soul as a very basic version of us (like a spark in relation to the fire it creates) is easier to contemplate.

In both these cases we are talking of something that lives after our death (although we might consider the second to be unrecognisable as our self), but do we always need to immediately connect the idea of the soul with the afterlife, as if that is its only function? Can the soul be addressed as something important whilst we are alive?

Materialism likes to reduce the human to its component parts, and posit that somehow our sense and awareness of self, plus all we think and feel arises (magically) from this complexity. Our metaphysical self is enormous though, to the extent that can overwhelm the physical, something that is self-evident in a digital environment.
I would suggest that the soul can be considered to be analogous to our metaphysical self, something that is not really recognised as a 'thing' by materialists, so here I am giving it a name so that religious and non-religious folks may at least find some common ground if they wish. Of course, the religious may want to take this basic idea a lot further, that's their prerogative.
#14758394
jakell wrote:Do we need to immediately connect the soul with the afterlife though? This is a religious favourite but doesn't seem necessary in order to start considering the idea.
As I said earlier:


Very true, but it all comes down to what you believe a soul is. I have no idea, so I am open to the concept that a soul doesn't have to be immediately connected to the afterlife. Every idea has as much foundation as the next.
#14758395
B0ycey wrote:Very true, but it all comes down to what you believe a soul is. I have no idea, so I am open to the concept that a soul doesn't have to be immediately connected to the afterlife. Every idea has as much foundation as the next.


Too many discussions like this trundle onwards without people trying to pin down the central concept (the soul here).

Materialism would have trouble locating the metaphysical self, and the more fundamentalist ones would therefore declare that it doesn't exist. Every one of us knows differently though, even those reluctant to admit it... We think (or feel) therefore we are.
#14760243
I totally lack the philosophical chops to have an even slightly confident assertion, but I wasn't raised under religious conditions really and so tend to have a knee jerk to a lot of metaphysical stuff. That somethings I have read have me resonate with a conclusion of a non-self, like no ultimate self (enduring metaphyiscal soul), but I don't think i've fleshed out those things enough to see how vulnerable such a position is to certain points.

Something I'd like to share though was something interesting I watched where people were able to connect in a virtual reality that was pretty much just as real to those experiencing it as reality. One of the people in this virtual reality, is in fact bed ridden outside of the virtual reality, they have no function of their legs and were close to death. They did what they referred to a 'pass over' where they uploaded her consciousnesses to the program permanently. So her physical body was dead, but what we might consider to be her in terms of her personality, memories, desires and so on were able to be transcribed to this virtual space where she continued in her existence without a material body.
It hinted pretty hard at it being like a technological equivalent of a virtual heaven after death, which strongly hinted that it was as if it were her immortal soul, considering her consciousness 'lived' on in spite of no longer being in her material body. This of course glosses over any lack of understanding about the nature of consciousness and whether one could effectively transcribe/transfer what we see as the essence of a person over into a program. But assuming it were possible, I could see myself accepting someone labeling that consciousness as being their soul. Which seems to boil down to what ever it really is the thing we are trying to refer to with the term consciousness.
That it would seem a case of technology actualizing what was previously seen by many as merely a mythology, in the same way that no longer need to reference demons to conceive of an apocalypse when we've created atomic bombs.
#14760248
consciousness 'lived' on in spite of no longer being in her material body


I wonder what that consciousness would be like without it's connection to the parts of us that are considered not conscious. Would we recognize it as us? Would it be simply a recording without the ability to reason? Having observed someone after a serious concussion, I have been intrigued at how we can act as extremely precise playback machines. Each comment causes an identical playback from the injured person no matter how many times you repeat it.
#14760710
One Degree wrote:I wonder what that consciousness would be like without it's connection to the parts of us that are considered not conscious. Would we recognize it as us? Would it be simply a recording without the ability to reason? Having observed someone after a serious concussion, I have been intrigued at how we can act as extremely precise playback machines. Each comment causes an identical playback from the injured person no matter how many times you repeat it.


I would argue that this can't be done. It is a dream of the Transhumanists, who think we can somehow contain this consciousness within a machine, but I think that if they got even close to achieving this then it would be a nightmare for the remnants of the person in question. So much of what we are is embedded in the way we experience the world through our physical bodies.

The religious concept of the soul is unclear on what the soul is. Is it a facsimile of us at the point of death which is what most people would understand by 'living on', or is it a basic germ of us that is far removed from our present complex selves.

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