Do you think you have a soul?

[johno]

I had a soul but I traded it to the Devil at midnight at the Crossroads for the ability to sing the blues.

On a less serious note, who here has "consciousness," and can prove it?

[Turdacious]

I wasn't questioning that you believe because you're afraid of what may happen to you if you don't. I was questioning the basis for thinking the odds of your belief being true are good in the absence of any material evidence to support it.

How do you find material evidence of something which is, by nature, immaterial?

You're the one ascribing "good odds" to it's existence. You tell me.

That's the rub-- the one being asked to prove their assertion will be on the back foot in a discussion like this. That's not how it works.

How the actual fuck pray tell does it works?

Do you think you have a soul. Y/N?

Why?

Those explaining their why not are on dead solid arguable territory. Their why is irrefutably correct given the known information. Those on the Yes column are leaning on treasured narratives, logical fallacies and arguments that can take in no new information. Beautiful arguments, crystalline palaces of "belief..." yet each a house of cards.

I love me a good archetype, love a great story of a "should"...narratives are important to our creating the story of self.....however false that story is.....and it if we know anything it's all a pack of lies. The human mind is the perfect engine for self deception. The most unreliable of all eyewitnesses. Thus I like to keep my "why" untainted by bullshit.

Missing my point. I'm not trying to convince you to change your mind.

However, no matter how many times you state that classical arguments are based on logical shortcuts and fallacies, and state your own intellectual superiority on this topic, it seems to be failing to convince the IGx crowd. Count me as one of the unconvinced.

[Blaidd Drwg]

Such the typical response from you. restate the terms of question, restate the nature of "success" in answering it.

You've made no argument, you believe what you believe regardless of evidence. I would have expected nothing less.

As to intellectual superiority, those are your words, not mine. I'm not terribly superior in any standing here...and I've next to no desire to convince anyone of the obvious. To the degree there are fools among us who believe in great heaping gobs of horseshit and can't see the glaring truth in front of them.There loss. It's a shame when so many can;t handle that two things are mutually compatible..Thing 1. .Myths are important, very useful fictions (free will, justice, love, hope)...Thing 2. At the end of the day, if you really believe in your unique and special insight into them, or their tangible reality, well....you've been duped by yourself.

Do what you like...Some people like to be subs and can't handle the fact the world divides into the real and the ideal. ...You and the Hebe are among those for whom the duality of man is a real hard slog. It's a Shame...I wish I could spare you my pity...but it's been exhausted.

[Blaidd Drwg]

Do you think/know/suspect you have a soul? Why?

I don't think so based on lack of any evidence. I am certainly open to evidence but likely couldn't view it without think it was bat shit crazy. That being said I used to believe a soul was a real thing because so many other people believed so how could everyone be so wrong, combined with never having a reason to question the concept.

Strongly suspect yes, will try to avoid religious argument. Science hasn't yet gotten to the point where we can understand how consciousness arises, let alone what happens to it, so this is a pretty binary "I can believe this without evidence" or "I won't believe this without evidence" choice. There's also the "I believe this because religious text X says so," but there's not much point discussing that with people.

So the first question for me is, "Could such a thing be possible?" I expect there's going to be a gradual shift from atheism to agnosticism as AI tech improves. Waitbutwhy has a great set of articles on AI and superintelligence:
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificia ... ion-1.html

It's very easy for an atheist, science-focused person to look at what is likely to happen if we can create superintelligent AI and say, "It's absolutely unknowable what something like that would be capable of after 1,000 years (or 100,000 years, or 10,000,000 years). But creating complete simulations of life/planets/galaxies" would not seem like a big stretch. If you can accept that, then saying "And I'm absolutely positive that's never been done anywhere else by any species ever, so it's impossible that someone made the reality I observe around me" is an odd follow-up thought. Once you have something that can shape simulated reality however it wants, complete with an Earth/humanity/etc., concepts like souls are trivial add-ons.

The possibility of all that seems indisputable to me at this point.

Looking at the history of religion and core truths that arise in multiple places, despite a ton of noise, I think it's believable that we have a larger story playing out that we aren't quite equipped to get. People who proceed with certainty as in "This is part of God's plan" or "Why would a benevolent god let that happen, must not be real" from the fundamentalists and rabid atheists are annoying. A god that is real, not magical, is going to have a degree of intelligence and power such that believing in one's ability to ascribe motivations and intentions is dumb. A goldfish who thinks he really gets you is being arrogant as fuck, and the smarts gap between us and a real God would be much greater.

This actually made sense - what the heck is this place coming to?

You're surely kidding?....that was a mess. Assumes a whole slew of facts not in evidence....no intangible ones either. facts like, this is what AI aficionados believe...

"real god"....why not real teapot? And YES..ALL these possibilities are utterly disputable. We can't produce a working definition of consciousnesses other than "the experience of being yourself"...we've absolutely no reason to infer that it is anything OTHER than an experience...and that it differs fundamentally from any other modestly self aware (although that's disputable as well) animal in not many ways.

The layering on of profundity to these questions, the vainglorious leaps of "possibility" of a soul which transcends the laws of nature to an all knowing god are simply beyond conceited. Most of this is like listening to a self report of a 17 year old's first acid trip.

Yeah...you saw the monkey god, I saw the monkey god...we all saw him...Oi..That's doesn't make anything realer than the grooves of narratives we use to organize. The simplest answer is so quickly overlooked in favor of faux spirituality.

[Grandpa's Spells]

BD, not sure what you're objecting to, that eventual ASI is more or less "godlike" or that simulated reality is impossible. Here's dullard Elon Musk on the simulation hypothesis:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KK_kzrJPS8[/youtube]

Setting the religious discussion aside, if you think this is completely crazy, you aren't applying the "logic and reason" stuff you're claiming informs your worldview.

Is it possible we're smart monkeys lying about what happens when we die? Sure. I think the arguments on how that could be are a little problematic, but it's certainly possible. What's more amusing is that in what is a massive, massive question about the nature of the universe, where we already know today's scientific tools are inadequate to describe it, you talk like a some zealot a thousand years ago who insists he knows EXACTLY HOW THINGS WORK when it comes to natural law.

[Blaidd Drwg]

Slow your roll tinkerbell. The most amusing thing is how clunky and uncharitably you attempt to summarize points you cannot disagree with but wish you could. If it's unclear to you what I disagree with perhaps you're simply not reading the words. I'm only pointing out that very point...we only know what we know. AND YET...every problem we have set ourselves to measure, disentangle, unravel, we';ve been able to work through a little bit here and there at developing a set of fairly dead reliable natural laws...they get tweaked, modified and with every step they appear to be getting more reliable at predicting outcomes. So we only know a sliver...but of what we know, it's a whole metric fuck ton of a lot.

Pan back a bit from the overeager masturbatory fantasies of AI...which swing both ways as a benevolent kitchenaid to Skynet, bent on pure evil.

Souls.

We know the concept of a soul does not conform to anything we know about the universe...(don;t go all Deepak on me here. Quantum entanglement creates more problems than it solves...all the things these nutters like to rely on is akin to answering a question with a question.)

Consciousness.

We cannot even really do much more than nip at the edges of consciousness as the real hard problem. We know that we have an experience of ...well...having an experience..we assume that machines might be able to do that as well some day. We know dogs and monkeys seem to exhibit signs of doing this as well....at least to a certain degree. From that basis...where the actual fuck do you arrive at anything beyond those things? Yes...it is POSSIBLE that there is something MORE there....but as of right now, we're not entirely sure there's any possibility of a there there.

Many things ARE/MAY BE possible.

Fuck Pascal, Let's wager a different thing altogether....Why do we wish there to be a soul? What about it is necessary? Does it solve an observation about how the universe appears to operate? ...nearly everyone on this thread has hinted towards that. It seems almost a prereq. for a number of other sacred ideas....So

What are the chances that we arrive at the notion of a soul/consciousness etc after being freighted with very likely more than 10k years of supernatural answers to vexing problems

versus...

We arrive at the notion of the soul because it so very clearly is a missing component of our understanding of how life on this planet appears to function. It's a necessary idea for the explanation of certain observable facts and functions? And therefore...why wouldn't a machine have one?

Which would you take were you a betting man?

[Thud]

St Peter urinates on a picture of BD as we speak.

[Blaidd Drwg]

St Peter urinates on a picture of BD as we speak.

:)....I've certainly savaged his acolytes hard enough to have earned that.

[buckethead]

According to Buddhist views all of us are part of the Universe. A momentary spark seemingly separated from the rest. Often quoted analogy - waves in the ocean; does the wave reincarnate? Not really, as it was never actually "born", in the sense that it was never separate from the ocean.

According to the Old Man Guatama himself (laid out in the Diamond Sutra) the illusion of being separate from the rest of Existence is the main source of suffering

I've tried the diamond sutra on Shapes mom. Painful but satisfying

[nafod]

The hardest thing for humans to do, it seems, is to settle for not-knowing. Just accepting lack of knowledge. Living with the unanswered question. As seaahill mentions, storytelling is in the blood. We inevitably take a bucket of facts and no matter how discordant thy are, we find a story that makes them fit. Inference to the cause.

I'm working on just accepting the not-knowing.

[DrDonkeyLove]

BD, not sure what you're objecting to, that eventual ASI is more or less "godlike" or that simulated reality is impossible. Here's dullard Elon Musk on the simulation hypothesis:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KK_kzrJPS8[/youtube]

Setting the religious discussion aside, if you think this is completely crazy, you aren't applying the "logic and reason" stuff you're claiming informs your worldview.

Is it possible we're smart monkeys lying about what happens when we die? Sure. I think the arguments on how that could be are a little problematic, but it's certainly possible. What's more amusing is that in what is a massive, massive question about the nature of the universe, where we already know today's scientific tools are inadequate to describe it, you talk like a some zealot a thousand years ago who insists he knows EXACTLY HOW THINGS WORK when it comes to natural law.

I did some rough interwebz monkey math. Apparently Cheetah the Tarzan chimp's IQ may have been in the 40 range and Einstein's was about 160. So, our best scientifical tool in this type of discussion (our reason) is, at best, is 4 times better than a chimp. In my case it's a solid 2x better than Cheetah but less than 3x.

I hope we have souls because my faith in our intellect just took a hit.

[Sangoma]

I had a soul but I traded it to the Devil at midnight at the Crossroads for the ability to sing the blues.

On a less serious note, who here has "consciousness," and can prove it?

+1

I would add the question, who has permanent personality or identity and can prove it.

[Gene]

The hardest thing for humans to do, it seems, is to settle for not-knowing. Just accepting lack of knowledge. Living with the unanswered question. As seaahill mentions, storytelling is in the blood. We inevitably take a bucket of facts and no matter how discordant thy are, we find a story that makes them fit. Inference to the cause.

I'm working on just accepting the not-knowing.

Been hard for me to accept not-knowing versus being apathetic about knowing. Also hard to successively approximate a "truth" and then have to toss it out because something doesn't make any damn sense.

[Alfred_E._Neuman]

Here's dullard Elon Musk on the simulation hypothesis:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KK_kzrJPS8[/youtube]

I've been listening to a few dudes who are much smarter than I can even imagine being discussing the simulation possibility, and I've accepted that it's quite possible that we're living in a computer generated reality. Then the question becomes why was the simulation made. Was it created just for us, or are we an emergent property of the simulation.

And if it was made just for us, was it made by some other intelligence and we're simply a hyper advanced Sims game? Or did we make it as a way to house our intelligence in some fashion to escape a harsher reality. For example, did we never figure out how to become an interplanetary species, so as our sun went red giant and destroyed the planet did we simply load our existence into a simulation.

[Hebrew Hammer]

The hardest thing for humans to do, it seems, is to settle for not-knowing. Just accepting lack of knowledge. Living with the unanswered question. As seaahill mentions, storytelling is in the blood. We inevitably take a bucket of facts and no matter how discordant thy are, we find a story that makes them fit. Inference to the cause.

I'm working on just accepting the not-knowing.

My sense is many (most?) thoughtful people who recognize they don't know, do accept it, but realize you need to make choices in life based on how you make sense of the world. The reasons for using certain materials to build a bridge are of a different sort from those used in deciding whether to risk your life for your country, help a neighbor in need, choose not to stick it to a co-worker to get ahead.

There is a wonderful book that won a Pulitzer prize, the Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker. He summarizes the thinking of Otto Rank, who basically said that personality is an outgrowth of the infant's core need to build myths so as to deny the risk of death -- the infant cries and he's fed -- and that we continue to build those myths in every aspect of our lives to give us the illusion we're in control and that death isn't randomly waiting to strike. My one line summary doesn't capture how powerful the book is, every page is filled with insights. He ends the book by saying that being heroic is accepting the irrationality of life, but acting right regardless. I don't think that that's heroic, but I think it's the way most of us live our lives regardless of which stories we tell (or don't tell) ourselves, though we regularly fail to live up to what's right.

Contra BD, knowing and not knowing is not either/or, it's a continuum. Belief or certain knowledge is overrated. We have to act every moment, every day, and to plan for our futures. Many may be on auto-pilot. But authentic living is using reason, however imperfect, to guide our actions.

[Blaidd Drwg]

Bunch of bitch-ass nihilists...all, y'all....

[Sangoma]

The hardest thing for humans to do, it seems, is to settle for not-knowing. Just accepting lack of knowledge. Living with the unanswered question. As seaahill mentions, storytelling is in the blood. We inevitably take a bucket of facts and no matter how discordant thy are, we find a story that makes them fit. Inference to the cause.

I'm working on just accepting the not-knowing.

My sense is many (most?) thoughtful people who recognize they don't know, do accept it, but realize you need to make choices in life based on how you make sense of the world. The reasons for using certain materials to build a bridge are of a different sort from those used in deciding whether to risk your life for your country, help a neighbor in need, choose not to stick it to a co-worker to get ahead.

There is a wonderful book that won a Pulitzer prize, the Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker. He summarizes the thinking of Otto Rank, who basically said that personality is an outgrowth of the infant's core need to build myths so as to deny the risk of death -- the infant cries and he's fed -- and that we continue to build those myths in every aspect of our lives to give us the illusion we're in control and that death isn't randomly waiting to strike. My one line summary doesn't capture how powerful the book is, every page is filled with insights. He ends the book by saying that being heroic is accepting the irrationality of life, but acting right regardless. I don't think that that's heroic, but I think it's the way most of us live our lives regardless of which stories we tell (or don't tell) ourselves, though we regularly fail to live up to what's right.

Contra BD, knowing and not knowing is not either/or, it's a continuum. Belief or certain knowledge is overrated. We have to act every moment, every day, and to plan for our futures. Many may be on auto-pilot. But authentic living is using reason, however imperfect, to guide our actions.

Living with uncertainty is a bitch. Though uncertainty is all there is. I completely agree about knowing vs not knowing. We tend to think in binary categories, but there are a few more possibilities. Nagarjuna's logic operates in a tetra-lemma (as opposed to a dilemma in Western logic). In that view the answer to a binary question can be "yes', "no", "yes and no" and "neither yes nor not yes". Something like this anyway.

There are many layers to reality. Looking at Van Gogh's painting one person can see a piece of canvas with oil based pigments scattered across it, another - a piece of art, yet another (an Ethiopian villager, for instance) a piece of cloth useful for wrapping stuff in. All of them are correct. Another aspect is the distance and perspective. The same painting under a microscope is one thing, another at a distance of three meters and a spot of color from one mile away. Which illustrates that we cannot appreciate anything - events in particular - without due perspective, which more often than not is not visible to us at the time of the event. Or, in other words, all news is good news. Victor Frankl talked about it at length.

As far as decision making is concerned, this is a can of worms. Are we deciding to do something based on the best information available? Or are we explaining our actions, arising from the dark depth of the subconscious, by seeking an explanation for what we have done and then retrospectively fitting it in, convinced that it was exactly as it happened. A lot of research points at the latter. Free will may well be an illusion. As well as identity. As well as consciousness as we perceive it.

[Turdacious]

knowing and not knowing is not either/or, it's a continuum. Belief or certain knowledge is overrated. We have to act every moment, every day, and to plan for our futures. Many may be on auto-pilot. But authentic living is using reason, however imperfect, to guide our actions.

This.

[Bedlam 0-0-0]

The hardest thing for humans to do, it seems, is to settle for not-knowing. Just accepting lack of knowledge. Living with the unanswered question. As seaahill mentions, storytelling is in the blood. We inevitably take a bucket of facts and no matter how discordant thy are, we find a story that makes them fit. Inference to the cause.

I'm working on just accepting the not-knowing.

My sense is many (most?) thoughtful people who recognize they don't know, do accept it, but realize you need to make choices in life based on how you make sense of the world. The reasons for using certain materials to build a bridge are of a different sort from those used in deciding whether to risk your life for your country, help a neighbor in need, choose not to stick it to a co-worker to get ahead.

There is a wonderful book that won a Pulitzer prize, the Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker. He summarizes the thinking of Otto Rank, who basically said that personality is an outgrowth of the infant's core need to build myths so as to deny the risk of death -- the infant cries and he's fed -- and that we continue to build those myths in every aspect of our lives to give us the illusion we're in control and that death isn't randomly waiting to strike. My one line summary doesn't capture how powerful the book is, every page is filled with insights. He ends the book by saying that being heroic is accepting the irrationality of life, but acting right regardless. I don't think that that's heroic, but I think it's the way most of us live our lives regardless of which stories we tell (or don't tell) ourselves, though we regularly fail to live up to what's right.

Contra BD, knowing and not knowing is not either/or, it's a continuum. Belief or certain knowledge is overrated. We have to act every moment, every day, and to plan for our futures. Many may be on auto-pilot. But authentic living is using reason, however imperfect, to guide our actions.

Insightful. Thanks Hammer. I will check out that book. A man's actions belie his true beliefs. Do I act as if everything matters or do I act as if nothing matters except my survival? Can I accept the suffering and, as you wrote, the irrationality of life? Have I exercised the muscle of acceptance of suffering enough to contain the energy of whatever I face today without falling apart or vomiting the experience on anyone who I think will give me pity? True power, not force, develops over a long period of time by the often arduous process of aligning one's belief with one's actions. For example if I believe corporations should not rip people off I must not to charge my client for an extra half hour even if we end 5 seconds before the clock ticks over and even if they act terrible towards me. I believe this is what religions are telling us with the "shalls and shall nots" the yamas and niyamas, golden rule, the eightfold path etc. These are rudimentary tools for developing power (not force) and self alignment. I posit that instead of speaking of the soul as some immaterial thing that may show up and float off when we die, we can think of it in terms of the development of true power through self discipline and self alignment. The few people I have met who have this to some degree or another have an effortless power, strength and flexibility about them that I admire and work to one day embody. To me this means that no one has a "soul" until they develop it in the crucible of life and suffering. What happens after death I don't know.

[terra]

No, IMO we don't 'have', as in own, our personal soul.

The concept of ownership is so fucking pervasive in the ego that saying something like that might cause some feathers to ruffle. I feel it's important to have a little perspective and realise we're not talking about a birth certificate or a social security number...

Organised religion wants you to have the illusion of a soul and a pious sense of stewardship over it, because it makes you easier to control and extort... Kind of like how the government wants to you to have a mortgage and all that other bullshit.

If I were to indulge the question and had to try to crystalise an answer into words, I think we share something that may be thought of as a soul. In the same way that indigenous people say the land doesn't belong to them, but they belong to the land...

And if so then that thing we are all benefiting from (shared soul, collective consciousness etc) is flashing us into and out of this material plane every instant, in an effort to better know itself... In living here for an instant in eternity we provide a minute blip of raw material to fuel the creation of the intelligence required to fill the gaps in an ever expanding universe that, when distilled down to its essence, is pure intelligence.

We are the zeros and ones of a self perpetuating supposition that began when absolutely nothing suddenly became self aware.
Individually we represent the insignificance of an unnecessary but eternal question. Even collectively we are probably little more than a pregnant pause of willfully ignorant arrogance.

[Blaidd Drwg]

"For me... I just feel like ....souls need to be real so my cultural nursery rhymes make sense..."

Where is it?
What's are its properties? Gas, semi solid? How old is it, did it exist before you, what's its half life after your meatsuit expires?
Is it intrdimensional? How many dimensions ? How does it propel itself?
Why does it need a meatsuit to communicate but not to "exist"
How do you know it's your soul?
How far canIs it like a ghost that gets stuck in specific location it time? Who organized the soul's travel needs across dimensions?
Is it a wave a particle or a beam of energy? If made of energy what prevents it from dissipating?
do souls have a smell?

[dead man walking]

He ends the book by saying that being heroic is accepting the irrationality of life, but acting right regardless.

sounds like camus. the plague comes to mind

[DrDonkeyLove]

"For me... I just feel like ....souls need to be real so my cultural nursery rhymes make sense..."

Where is it?
What's are its properties? Gas, semi solid? How old is it, did it exist before you, what's its half life after your meatsuit expires?
Is it intrdimensional? How many dimensions ? How does it propel itself?
Why does it need a meatsuit to communicate but not to "exist"
How do you know it's your soul?
How far canIs it like a ghost that gets stuck in specific location it time? Who organized the soul's travel needs across dimensions?
Is it a wave a particle or a beam of energy? If made of energy what prevents it from dissipating?
do souls have a smell?

Good questions that I can't answer. Every so-called solid thing, including humanity, is mostly "empty" space. What is that space? Is it someone, something, no-thing? Am I me, or a somewhat independent consciousness that is is lit up and sending a signal within the unknowable big it for a blinking nanosecond in the grand scheme?

Questions like this make me feel like a retarded kid in his first day of advanced physics class. The only thing I grasp is that I'm acute enough to know that this is interesting and I'm not going to pass the class.

I, and most people, need some kind of organizing principal to more or less sanely navigate our nanosecond of consciousness. A compassionate force I can connect to serves this purpose on a practical functional level whether actually being "real" or not. That such a force exists - whatever that means - isn't too great of a stretch in an unfathomable universe.

[Alfred_E._Neuman]

I like Carl Sagan's quote that we are a way for the Universe to know itself.

[Hebrew Hammer]

"For me... I just feel like ....souls need to be real so my cultural nursery rhymes make sense..."

Where is it?
What's are its properties? Gas, semi solid? How old is it, did it exist before you, what's its half life after your meatsuit expires?
Is it intrdimensional? How many dimensions ? How does it propel itself?
Why does it need a meatsuit to communicate but not to "exist"
How do you know it's your soul?
How far canIs it like a ghost that gets stuck in specific location it time? Who organized the soul's travel needs across dimensions?
Is it a wave a particle or a beam of energy? If made of energy what prevents it from dissipating?
do souls have a smell?

Where do you think these questions lead? What if you asked the same questions about beauty, a promise, laughter, your toothache, my toothache, fear, integrity, causation, squats, dreams, gravity, quantum entanglement, what existed beofre the big bang, what there is before the universe expands into it? You can measure aspects of some of these, or define them, or talk about their perceived effects, but it's not them themselves, which is what your questions ask about. All of those things are different from a kettlebell or perfume or pretzels or music, but just because you can't see, hear, taste, smell, or touch them simply leads to a new series of questions.

That doesn't mean your conclusion about the soul is wrong but it means that you're asking the simple questions The hard question is whether anything exists beyond what we can see, smell, hear, taste, or touch. Are they real or are they simply convenient explanations or lies? And then the hardest question is how to act if everything but materiality means nothing.