Asklemmy

43962 readers

1587 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Do you believe the that you have a soul? (feddit.nu)

submitted 8 months ago by Hjalamanger@feddit.nu to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

133 comments fedilink hide all child comments

And do believe that I, this random guy on the internet has a soul

I personally don't believe that I anyone else has a soul. From my standup I don't se any reason to believe that our consciousness and our so called "soul" would be any more then something our brain is making up.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

OP did not verbalize that as such, this sounds like your personal interpretation.

Regardless, vital spark = being = subjective experience = sense of self = animating principle = consciousness = soul. These are essentially synonyms.

Ohioans may have common attributes, these attributes will shape certain aspects of the soul. Souls are likewise shaped by religion, cultural ethnicity, philosophical beliefs, aesthetic preference, sexuality, and many other factors. These factors are like the hands and techniques that shape the clay, the soul is the clay. Being, at least one's own (in the solipsistic extreme), is uncontested even by the strictest materialist atheist. It's only the nature (origin, destiny, scope) that anyone disagrees on.

[–] Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca -1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

OP must be refering to the metaphysical definition, as they do not believe that souls exists. As you point out, denying the idea of personal experience is unreasonable, therefore OP must hold that "soul" refers to something more and is not synonymous with the sense of self.

You argue here that such a "something more" soul does not exist, reasonably attributing the idea to emergent properties of natural systems, yet you seem to argue that this constitutes every definition of soul, including the various flavours of "something more", simultaneously answering yes and no.

This is where the confusing begins. Do you believe souls are emergent or elementary? Is there a persistent metaphysical aspect, or are they ephemeral at best? Are they simply produced by the flesh, or is the flesh just where they reside while alive? Do souls exist, or are they an illusion like a tree in a painting?

[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 months ago

You argue here that such a "something more" soul does not exist

I did no such thing. I argue for a descriptivist, rather than prescriptivist, perspective on the subject. I argue that questions of the nature of the soul are separate from questions of the existence of the soul, the latter being fairly obvious. The "something more" aspect is a question of nature. I deliberately abstained from arguing any specific claims regarding the nature of the soul, that lies beyond the scope of the question.

I engaged with the question as OP posed it. If they would like to refine the question to narrow the definition of "soul" then I will engage with that new question.