Do you think you have a soul?

[Blaidd Drwg]

This thread highlights why using faith as a benchmark for discourse.

The faithful across this board fail to recognize no one needs play with their particular franchised tar-baby.
Produce evidence of your notion or jog the fuck on. Absent any evidence and any methodology for investigating, experimenting or developing evidence... then there's no need to take anything they say seriously.

Do you reckon everything can and has to be methodologically proven? I don't. For example, practicing Buddhists have way more insight into the workings of the mind by observing their own on regular basis, without systematic measurements and statistical analysis.

It's not close to convincing until it is...so Yes. Yes it does. Otherwise you're just reciting dogma

[Blaidd Drwg]

Turd,

You do realize at a certain point in Western Civ, it would have been incredibly rare for anyone with the basic education necessary for rational discourse to be anything other than a priest, rabbi or imam? The contortions needed to stitch our modern body of knowledge back to it's initial adherents shows a pathological lack of contextual thinking on your part. At one point, everyone was a writer of just so stories...(Alexander above is a great example)...that should chasten us but never hinder us shrugging off the detritus of our past.

Polanyi and LeMaitre were both 20th century thinkers.

I'm reading this as-- disagree with it, haven't studied it, don't understand it, and don't want to. That's cool, but it really limits your ability to criticize it effectively.

Wrong. there's not need to rehash College reading. Philosophy is fascinating, it does fuck all in most cases to answer factual questions. Ergo...I have no need to criticize it. It's not remotely relevant. You mistake my affection for the just so stories of Jordna Peterson as evidence I'll buy any old fairy tale. I've read portions of The Soul's upward Yearning...it is a fascianting little tale...it says NOTHING USEFUL about the facts that might underpin the existence of a soul...just the standard discussion of "feelings" that portends most people's beginning and end analysis of what is....Not Good Enough.

Alchemy was a science before we had chemistry. Astrology was the current thinking before we had reliable astronomical instruments. Most of your philosophical machinations get shit out the leaf blower now that we have FMRI.

I think you are being one-sided. The origins of astronomy lie in cosmological, religious, mythological and other practices, including astrology, and observations of the skies for purposes of astrology helped create astronomy as the science. The same with alchemy, which methodologically studied the properties of the substances, that part of it being nothing other than chemistry. I also think philosophy gets us closer to understanding of consciousness and human nature than science. Of course, fairy tales won't cut it, but I also think that most important and often most basic concepts cannot be conveyed in words. Only experience and eventually knowing. What's gravity? What's time? Space? Quality? Kindness? Compassion? Which, funny enough, comes back to support your view: reading someone else's ideas about soul is pretty useless, as - again - they cannot be adequately expressed.

Like all other elements of theory which proved baseless, useless and non-predicative...meaning. Astrology is a basis of astronomy but it's completely discounted because it holds up to ZERO scrutiny. Philosophy which comports with data is useful to expanding our knowledge just as religion is useless and counterproductive to expanding our knowledge. I'm ashamed for you that this is at all confusing.

[Turdacious]

You still haven't demonstrated that your conclusion is the result of rational examination rather than blind faith. Ignorance of the positions you disagree with is not a badge of honor.

[Blaidd Drwg]

You still haven't demonstrated that your conclusion is the result of rational examination rather than blind faith. Ignorance of the positions you disagree with is not a badge of honor.

Actually, the reverse the case. I simply don't hold reverence for the same drab tired stories you cling to.

I see no evidence in any aspect of life for a "soul"
There is no evidence in the science that such a thing exists.
All the proponents ( and yes, lad, I've read reams of your philosophical blathering,i just don't see how it advances the ball. ) are just so easily swept away at the very simplest of inquires. You remain woefully ignorant of any number of alternative traditional "just so stories", yet this ignorance only emboldens your conclusions.

There's simply no more reason to believe in the soul than there is to believe in magic. To the degree that some forms of deeply complex theories of physics *Sound* like magic does not undermine the central easily reached conclusion... there is no reason to believe in a soul.

You fall prey to such a classic series of fantasies about how the world may be constructed.., essentially because I wish something to be true, and my wishes comport with a worldview I find comforting, therefore: EVIDENCE.

It's cowardly at bests

[Turdacious]

And you're missing the point. Again.

I'm not trying to prove the religious concept of the soul to you, just pointing out that there's more to the Christian arguments than you read in Chick Tracts growing up.

[Blaidd Drwg]

And you're missing the point. Again.

I'm not trying to prove the religious concept of the soul to you, just pointing out that there's more to the Christian arguments than you read in Chick Tracts growing up.

You're such a sniveling projecting twat. and a liar as well...You can take nearly every one of your posts and reliably assert the opposite to be true.

There's more to the Buddhist or Athabascan conceptions of the soul than you you've read..nonetheless, they are useless in resolving factual claims. If anything, the Xtian conceptions of the soul are broader than most as it is like most of Xtianity, stolen from other schools of thought. The problem you have is they are still based on Zero Evidence. So..once again, no credit need be given for effort of the ancients, they fall short on resolving factual claims.


Once you inject a requirements for evidence, there are no compelling arguments for the existence of a soul. There are lots of compelling arguments for why it would be neat to have one...but the question,"Do You have or do you not have a soul?" quickly reaches only one logical conclusion. Should evidence appear that allows us to observe the presence of a soul outside of a body or other magic, this conclusion can be revised. Until then, Jog The Fuck On with that nonsense.

[Turdacious]

You have wise blood, this is obviously.

[davidc]

Yeah, I do. I think we all have something near to whatever your definition of a soul is.

And this is about as mystical as you'll ever hear me get.

Because I tell stories for a living, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the concept of story. On those occasions where I'm paid to teach writing, I teach story. A story is a lens through which we apprehend our world, our circumstance. Everyplace I go --- and I've gone to well over 100 countries --- I ask about the local creation myth. It is always, of course, a story.

We Homo sapiens told stories --- I'm assuming --- from our earliest days on earth. We told stories around the campfires, Homer spoke his epic poems, Guttenberg allowed us to widely disseminate stories and we read stories on the internet.

Telling stories is what humans do to make sense of our world. Your ancestors were good hunters and gatherers, otherwise, you wouldn't be here. And if we listen to the stories of hunter-gatherers --- those of the Australian Aboriginals, for instance --- we hear explanations of why we exist, why certain trees bloom in certain parts of the year, and how a geological formation came to be.

Stories are baked into our DNA.

In my mind, I have always envisioned a blinding curve of energy, a great story arc in the sky.

When I write, the first 20 minutes or so is generally throw away stuff. But as my friend Richard Wheeler (author of 60 novels) says, "it is like a rusty old outdoor water pump. You work the handle and all you get at first is rusty muddy water. But if you keep pumping, the water runs clear and clean."

So it is with writing. If you are working well, sometime in that first 20 minutes you forget yourself. The prose becomes cleaner, the story sharper, elements you hadn't even considered in your outline enter the flow and those annoying loose ends begin the tie themselves up into neat little knots.

Meanwhile, you may have been sitting there for 3 hours, but it seems like you've only been working for 30 minutes. You went somewhere for a while and there you consulted the Great Story Arc and it was there that the stories of our history on earth lit you up and informed the best of your writing.

I know you've all had roughly similar experiences writing, even for some essay project in school. Couldn't get the damn thing started and now it's four in the morning and, damn, this isn't bad.

I think the act of losing yourself in the work is much akin to Eastern Meditative states.

I am not alone in this thought. In 1990, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian psychologist, and (at the time) University of Chicago Psych professor wrote a book entitled Flow, the Psychology of Optimal Experience. He found that painters, for instance, experienced flow states while working. A musician writing a passage on paper may not hear the doorbell ring. A neurosurgeon may experience a complex five hour operation as 15 minutes of work. A ballerina, on the other hand, may sense that two seconds of movement have slowed down to two minutes. An athlete in the flow is said to be "in the zone."

Csikszentmihalyi described the flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."

Some folks use meditation to get to that state of ego-less flow and what I think of as "creatural" thinking (rather than thinking in the ordinary brooding mode). Without self critical thought or ego, these folks may feel they've begun the perceive the meaning of life.

I think a basketball player in the zone shares some of that comprehension. I mean, I guess you can get there doing a Buddist "stare at the wall for a day" exercise. Some of us just need a little harder bump.

Which brings us back to the soul.

When I'm writing and in the flow, I often have no idea where that element of the story just came from and why the piece wants to finish the way it demands to finish. I just pulled that stuff down out of that blinding curve of energy, the Great Story Arc.

And what that has to do with the soul is this: you are part of it. I am part of it. Every human being is part of it. As soon as you are born, your parents start telling your story. And as a child, you will skin your knee or walk naked into your parent's dinner party, you'll suffer a broken heart, hit the zone in your chosen sport, have children of your own. And that all becomes part of the human story. It folds into the Great Story Arc and alters it if only very slightly. And there it is --- in that blinding curve of energy that lasts forever --- that is where your soul resides.

That was a blessing. Thanks for sharing it.

That was Garbage.

There's a reason he's paid to write down his thoughts. When's the last time someone paid you for yours?
Whether one believes in souls or not, the poetic way he described his view on the subject has value, and was a blessing to me. It doesn't really matter if one can objectively measure the "facts" of his perspective any more than one can measure love, or beauty, or faith. Try objectively measuring humor, or using data to generate jokes. Maybe you can quantify what constitutes a great poem, or the best piece of music.
Best of luck with all that.

[Blaidd Drwg]

There's a reason he's paid to write down his thoughts. When's the last time someone paid you for yours?
.

This morning....literally 20 seconds ago...and for the balance of the day...and tomorrow...and sadly for the foreseeable future.

Poetic blathering is wonderful....for the blatherer...for most of us, and throughout most of this thread, is the sound of a stoned person describing what it's like to be be stoned to a sober person who already knows. Just keep staring at your hands bro, it's all good.

Truth, beauty, and the color blue I see.....Oi..such a waste.

[davidc]

There's a reason he's paid to write down his thoughts. When's the last time someone paid you for yours?
.

This morning....literally 20 seconds ago...and for the balance of the day...and tomorrow...and sadly for the foreseeable future.

Poetic blathering is wonderful....for the blatherer...for most of us, and throughout most of this thread, is the sound of a stoned person describing what it's like to be be stoned to a sober person who already knows. Just keep staring at your hands bro, it's all good.

Truth, beauty, and the color blue I see.....Oi..such a waste.

If you don't value the immeasurable, try going a day without listening to music or watching a movie or tv show, or reading a book.

[Blaidd Drwg]

There's a reason he's paid to write down his thoughts. When's the last time someone paid you for yours?
.

This morning....literally 20 seconds ago...and for the balance of the day...and tomorrow...and sadly for the foreseeable future.

Poetic blathering is wonderful....for the blatherer...for most of us, and throughout most of this thread, is the sound of a stoned person describing what it's like to be be stoned to a sober person who already knows. Just keep staring at your hands bro, it's all good.

Truth, beauty, and the color blue I see.....Oi..such a waste.

If you don't value the immeasurable, try going a day without listening to music or watching a movie or tv show, or reading a book.

Don't be needlessly obtuse. It's not that I don;t appreciate it...it's that it is NOT REMOTELY RELEVANT.

Stick to your lane counselor.

[Herv100]

[Blaidd Drwg]

Both predictably stupid.

[Hebrew Hammer]

There's a reason he's paid to write down his thoughts. When's the last time someone paid you for yours?
.

This morning....literally 20 seconds ago...and for the balance of the day...and tomorrow...and sadly for the foreseeable future.

Poetic blathering is wonderful....for the blatherer...for most of us, and throughout most of this thread, is the sound of a stoned person describing what it's like to be be stoned to a sober person who already knows. Just keep staring at your hands bro, it's all good.

Truth, beauty, and the color blue I see.....Oi..such a waste.

If you don't value the immeasurable, try going a day without listening to music or watching a movie or tv show, or reading a book.

Don't be needlessly obtuse. It's not that I don;t appreciate it...it's that it is NOT REMOTELY RELEVANT.

Stick to your lane counselor.

The relevance is this: You wield materialism like a second grader who asks why the sky is blue, gets an explanation, asks why is that, then repeats and repeats until we finally give up, realizing that ultimately we'll need to get into the thicket of the consciousness of perception of color, and then we'll have to say I don't know. The second grader always wins that game.

Materialism always wins in any argument that challenges something not material, which would include beauty or truth or consciousness or a soul.

To move beyond 2nd grade arguing tactics, you have to argue for materialism as the right way to understand the world, rather than rotely trot it out as the answer to everything.

[Blaidd Drwg]

Not remotely, you impudent cunt.

This is not a question of should. This is a question of IS.

It's a factual question. If you and the other delusional swishes want to answer, " I believe I have a soul because it underpins ever other aspect of the way I wish to think about the world, well then there's no argument from me. There's not much argument to be made. People choose to believe in all sorts of silly things.

[Testiclaw]

If something is immaterial, how does it interact with the material world?

If we can't test for the thing, we can still test for the phenomenon. If the immaterial doesn't interact with the material world, what use is it?

[davidc]

I get agnosticism. Saying you honestly don't know is a legitimate answer.
Atheism and its certainty can be every bit as fundamentalist and intellectually dishonest as any other religious tradition.
You don't know if you have a soul or not. You can believe it. You can disbelieve it. But you don't know it. Any you can't prove it.

[buckethead]

I get agnosticism. Saying you honestly don't know is a legitimate answer.
Atheism and its certainty can be every bit as fundamentalist and intellectually dishonest as any other religious tradition.
You don't know if you have a soul or not. You can believe it. You can disbelieve it. But you don't know it. Any you can't prove it.

So you're agnostic about unicorns? Crystal healing? ESP? Homeopathy?

[DrDonkeyLove]

I get agnosticism. Saying you honestly don't know is a legitimate answer.
Atheism and its certainty can be every bit as fundamentalist and intellectually dishonest as any other religious tradition.
You don't know if you have a soul or not. You can believe it. You can disbelieve it. But you don't know it. Any you can't prove it.

So you're agnostic about unicorns? Crystal healing? ESP? Homeopathy?

I knew you were going to say that.

[buckethead]

I get agnosticism. Saying you honestly don't know is a legitimate answer.
Atheism and its certainty can be every bit as fundamentalist and intellectually dishonest as any other religious tradition.
You don't know if you have a soul or not. You can believe it. You can disbelieve it. But you don't know it. Any you can't prove it.

So you're agnostic about unicorns? Crystal healing? ESP? Homeopathy?

I knew you were going to say that.

The less you post, the more potent it is

[Sangoma]

This thread highlights why using faith as a benchmark for discourse.

The faithful across this board fail to recognize no one needs play with their particular franchised tar-baby.
Produce evidence of your notion or jog the fuck on. Absent any evidence and any methodology for investigating, experimenting or developing evidence... then there's no need to take anything they say seriously.

Do you reckon everything can and has to be methodologically proven? I don't. For example, practicing Buddhists have way more insight into the workings of the mind by observing their own on regular basis, without systematic measurements and statistical analysis.

It's not close to convincing until it is...so Yes. Yes it does. Otherwise you're just reciting dogma

I disagree. There are always two sides (at least) of reality: Yin-Yang, Day-Night, Male-Female and so on. Mind and Soul, the latter in figurative sense. Some questions can be quantified and answered by science, some cannot and belong to the philosophy. You cannot dismiss the subjective part of the reality. After all, all we have is subjective experience.

Here is an old and good essay on the purpose of philosophy which I think is relevant for this discussion. It's worthwhile reading in full.

The Purpose of Philosophy

So, too, in our own time, such disciplines as economics, psy- chology, semantics, logic itself, are gradually shaking themselves free from everything that is neither dependent on observation nor formal; if and when they have successfully completed this process they will be finally launched on independent careers of their own as natural or formal sciences, with a rich philosophical past, but an empirical and/or formal present and future. The history of thought is thus a long series of parricides, in which new disciplines seek to achieve their freedom by killing off the parent subjects and eradicating from within themselves whatever traces still linger there of ‘philosophical’ problems, that is, the kind of questions that do not carry within their own structure clear indications of the techniques of their own solution.

[Blaidd Drwg]

I disagree. There are always two sides (at least) of reality: Yin-Yang, Day-Night, Male-Female and so on. Mind and Soul, the latter in figurative sense. Some questions can be quantified and answered by science, some cannot and belong to the philosophy. You cannot dismiss the subjective part of the reality. After all, all we have is subjective experience.

Here is an old and good essay on the purpose of philosophy which I think is relevant for this discussion. It's worthwhile reading in full.

The Purpose of Philosophy

So, too, in our own time, such disciplines as economics, psy- chology, semantics, logic itself, are gradually shaking themselves free from everything that is neither dependent on observation nor formal; if and when they have successfully completed this process they will be finally launched on independent careers of their own as natural or formal sciences, with a rich philosophical past, but an empirical and/or formal present and future. The history of thought is thus a long series of parricides, in which new disciplines seek to achieve their freedom by killing off the parent subjects and eradicating from within themselves whatever traces still linger there of ‘philosophical’ problems, that is, the kind of questions that do not carry within their own structure clear indications of the techniques of their own solution.

Again. No. No. No. Stop reciting these tropes. Stop with the pathological reductivity...(it's all just subjective)..It won;t be long before y'all are scurrying back to "non-overlapping magisteria"

Just so stories do not bear any relevance here. Was the dose lethal? Yes or No...Did the building collapse, yes or no, Does the human mind have the capacity for telepathy? spell casting or "willing things into being. ......NO. Your reference to the purpose of philosophy IS as relevant as tits on a boar. There is no question of Sides...there is no presumed validity to one persons nonsense (it is wrong to draw the prophet) and another persons clear and convincing observations and evidence (the act of drawing a picture does no overt violence to any person, place or thing..) You are entitled of course to an opinion...but there's no presumed validity simply because you have it.

Think this through,,,for fuxsake. In matters of fact, there are very often only one "side" which is correct within its frame of reference. The fact we all have different fantasies about how the world works bears none percent on how it actually does or does not work. There may always be reasonable minds disagreeing on matters of perspective, in which case there are always as many sides as there are internal dialogues. Do souls exist? Yes or no? based on the evidence? Have you asked the wrong question? Is the concept or a "soul" so lost in dogma or mired in other hard to explain phenomena (consciousness) that we are prevented from even contemplating the possibility correctly (maybe this).

On the OP's query though..it's again, "Do you believe you have a soul"

Potential answers...yes you do believe that for good reason (none offered yet) or no you do not for good reasons or.... as is the larger part of consensus here. I believe I have one because the western conception of a soul is critical to my view of how the world works. So far.. SAG you're almost as bad an offender as the others, the who's answer is....BUTBUTBUT what about (insert pet narrative). In short, most of you seem stymied at even answering honestly because you would prefer a different question. What philosophy is FOR in this case, is obfuscating and avoiding some extremely valid experience. No one has yet observed or shown even a uniquely experienced or described depiction of their particular soul....just a whole lot of horseshit where people go back to why it's so very dire that the answer be yes or alternatively, why the question is LESS important to them than some other long cherished cultural fiction.

That's fine. Truly, I enjoy my fictions a great deal ( I prefer Kubrick and Pratchett and Shakespeare to most of the gunk that appears to be cluttering most of your minds but hey..horses for courses) But where I am distinctly advantaged in my affection for fictions here is that I have the self respect to accept that these fictions or just tools for comforting oneself with the idea of how it *feels* to be human, Very little of the rubbish being extruded here passes any muster with regard to saying what IS actually going on with this collection off meat running around on the planet. As is all too often the case..you have too many feels to do any thinks.

[Sangoma]

Well, my reference to philosophy was only to remind the respectable brethren that there is more to reality that can be amenable to scientific analysis. As far as soul os concerned - I already said I personally do not believe it exists. But then again, there are some funny things - near death experiences, for example. I am skeptical about them myself, but some phenomena that happen during NDEs don't fit the oxygen starvation theories. Some of the "dead" folks that have been brought back report seeing seeing things they are not supposed to - is this soul leaving the body? There is some medium research - Julie Beischel - that demonstrates some strange things. There are some cases of past lives memories which cannot be explained. Funny thing is, while I am arguing about this I don't believe scientific methods should be applied to these phenomena. As I mentioned, Buddhists have more understanding of the mind as the results of decades of practice - looking into ti - than neuroscientists with their complicated machinery.

So, is there a soul? Who the fuck knows.

[nafod]

. So, is there a soul? Who the fuck knows.

The question I am after, in reading and experience, is, is there a self? What is it?

My theory on near death experience is that that the brain shuts down from the new things to the old, the self is a relatively new brain construction, and you experience enlightenment when all that crap gets turned off first. Wish I could ask David Carradine about it.

[Turdacious]

I get agnosticism. Saying you honestly don't know is a legitimate answer.
Atheism and its certainty can be every bit as fundamentalist and intellectually dishonest as any other religious tradition.

THIS.

The better arguments will state what they know, what they don't know, and what they take on faith.