this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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It's proof of consciousness. If you're using "soul" synonymously to "consciousness", well, certainly not everyone does so.
In the use of language I learned, "soul" is the superstitious concept that religious people use, and since I don't believe in superstitions, I certainly don't believe that I have a soul.
I definitely possess consciousness, though, in the sense that I recognize contiguous piles of atoms as "objects" and one such object is my own body.
In turn, I would not say that my consciousness asks questions and reads the responses. My body does that. My 'mind' and 'consciousness' are just characteristics of my body. And "I" is my body, too.
Of what substance is your consciousness composed? Certainly your body is made of chemical matter: proteins, lipids, water, etc. Is consciousness itself, the subjective experience you identify as yourself, made of matter? Perhaps there are regions of the brain which fire in conjunction with a sensation, but is the sensation synonymous with the meat in which it resides? I'm speaking internalistically, how "you" "feel" from the inside.
A computer program can be likened to the electrical activity in the hardware. It is not itself the hardware, though it's certainly linked. Your body is the hardware, your consciousness is the program. Are "you" also organized electricity, or something similar? Does that imply that electricity can have the same subjective experience as you?
I think you have it backwards. You're prescriptively deciding that souls are superstitions, so you don't believe in them. I think descriptively, that we certainly observe souls, and it merely falls to us to discover their nature. Certainly some people ascribe superstitions to them, but tying superstitions to the weather or the sea or salt doesn't make any of those things less real. Why subjugate your own fundamental observations to someone else's superstitions?