Director Roger Nygard traveled the world asking theologians, scientists, skeptics, and everyday people 85 tough questions to try to understand The Nature of Existence! Now that he’s asked the experts, it’s YOUR TURN! To offer your own insights on today’s question, “What is a soul?“, Leave a Reply below!
I believe that a “soul” is another word for self-awareness. It’s also partly the brain’s inability to detect itself, so the part of ourselves that is thinking and looking around doesn’t “know” it’s part of the rest of our body. People have taken that detachment and tried to explain it by using the soul as the explanation.
Kind of like a Higgs Boson I would guess. We won’t be able to hold one up for inspection anytime soon, given our primitive technology, so any body’s guess really.
A pragmatic definition would be that a/the soul is a numinous referent that is posited to exist not because the existence of dandelions, fire hydrants, nimbo-cumulous clouds, or the national debt, are indicated by it or call for it; but rather because people are terrified of coming to a final, full-stop ending and would very much like to have something eternal with their “name” on it to carry on like a good soldier when their own shelf life comes to an end.
But actually, fire hydrants, dandelions, and near-beer are conclusive evidence, after all, of this soul; or should we say: if you can’t beat them, join them…….
You don’t have a Soul, you ARE Soul!
An imaginary construct.
A concept imagined by human beings to suit their desire to live eternally and consist of more than impermanent matter. Please note that just because a concept has been imagined doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Before gravity was ever confirmed by statistics as a natural law it was imagined by the mind of Isaac Newton.
“What light is to the eyes – what air is to the lungs – what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man.” -Robert Ingersoll
I suppose ‘soul’ is not unlike ‘god’ in that people fill in the blank according to their wants. Varying across cultures and through time..
A soul is something I could still believe in, though I still class myself as Atheist (cum-Naturalistic Pantheist.) This is my own purely speculative, unscientific take on the soul which is probably utter bull but here goes anyway:
‘Soul’ is the embodiment of “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” It is the cumulative product of conscious, conscience, education, socialisation, experience, sensation, genetic and memetic information. As such it constantly is changing, growing, becoming more enriched with each passing day. It is somewhat akin to ‘identity.’ But it is not preset and given to us from some supernatural creator. It is the result of our being, not the cause of it.
(Now I’m gonna get a little hippy-dippy!)
Perhaps elements of our ‘soul’ remain encoded into our DNA, our genetics, our very molecules, even after death. Those molecules then return to the universe, are rehashed and reused… possibly with fragments of that previous life still in tact. Perhaps these molecules ‘remember’ and eventually reform into another being who may carry with them the basic ‘identity’ of a prior person? Yeah, I’m kinda talking pseudo-scientific reincarnation. Perhaps ‘consciousness’ and ‘identity’ are as much genetic information as any other personal trait…? (If anyone’s ever played Final Fantasy 7 this all might sound familiar…!)
Or perhaps ‘consciousness’ and ‘identity’ (collectively thought of as ‘the soul’) are just the cumulative products of all this information and cease to exist once that information break down upon death. Probably more plausible!
There is no soul. It is a religious concept used to lure people into faith based religious cults like Christianity, Islam or Judaism.
Soul is a fact for those who have experienced it. It is. Soul is the individuals awareness that is self aware. Soul is the eternal being which animates the body, the brain, generates thought, soul feels love, joy and bliss. There is brain chemistry and neurological impulses which accompany soul’s interaction with the physical being. The basis of all living beings is soul. Life would not exist without soul.
The belief that there is no soul is self denial and a lack of self awareness.
I think, therefore I am. One must exist in order to experience, and the fact you experience is convincing proof you exist.
You probably consider yourself to be ‘an existence’, which is obviously why you call yourself ‘I’ instead of ‘we’. But exactly what IS ‘an existence’?
Since the time of Democritus of Abdera (460-370 BC) it has been postulated the Universe is comprised of particles which – though they may be profoundly minute in nature – are not infinitely divisible. It is inherently logical that before the smallest non-empty set can be assembled, there must exist an individual element with which the set may be populated, a single existence that is not composed of independent parts, an irreducible physical manifestation consisting only of itself, an elemental identity I call an ‘entity’. But so far, physicists have not been able to find the elusive entity and it is entirely possible they would not recognize one even if they could isolate it.
The material objects with which we interact in our environment are composites. A chair, for example, is the label we use to conveniently describe a set of parts including a seat, legs, back and arms. If its construction is of wood, then those parts are made of sets labeled ‘cells’ which are comprised of sets labeled ‘molecules’ which are, in turn, formed by sets labeled ‘atoms’, whose protons, neutrons and electrons have been fundamentally superseded by hadron groups populated by even smaller sub-sets of quark and lepton particles and anti particles which may – or may not – be truly irreducable.
An irreducible physical entity is ‘an existence’. Everything comprised of those entities, from an atom to a galaxy, is a composite.
You are ostensibly ‘an existence’, but your body is a composite – a collection of billions of separate elements or fundamental particles, each with its own individual properties. Each basic particle pre-existed your birth and will ultimately survive your demise. Each has a unique history, a separate location and physical domain. Logically this presents a conundrum. How can you be ‘an existence’ if that manifestation which you consider to be yourself is a composite? Indeed, every existence has its own unique identity and a collection of existences will have as many separate, individual identities as there are elements in the set.
The Pinocchio Hypothesis
To reconcile this disparity, hordes of scholarly pundits with names swimming in alphabet soup profess that if you toss just the right combination of terrestrial ingredients into a primordial cauldron and stir it really, really hard for a very, very long time, you can produce a composite that thinks, propagates and experiences a single existence with an individual identity. That may sound silly (I call it the Pinocchio hypothesis), but which lowly layman in his right mind would dare contradict an entire horde of scholarly pundits, especially when they are immersed in alphabet soup. So, with an eye of newt and wing of bat, a pinch of this and a dash of that, the pundits dub this egregious departure from logic the phenomenon of “emergent properties” or EP and they credit it with the creation of all life on Earth.
But even the most tenured of scholars aren’t able to explain the specific mechanics of EP that transform a body with 8×1027 atoms into a single existence with an individual identity. In fact, there seems to be two distinct factions in the EP camp. The ‘integration’ group assures us without hesitation that some unknown power of unification melds a composite into a single identity and awareness. This faction would have us believe 8×1027 = 1. On the other hand, the ‘emergence’ group tries to convince us 8×1027 = 8×1027+1, claiming any sense of self is due to the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. They expect us to believe composites can conjure up a supervening entity, a temporary ego or virtual being with its own separate awareness and identity. In their practice of this mathematical sorcery, proponents of EP are idiomatically reduced to casting the incantations “integrated” and “emergent” because “abracadabra” and “hocus pocus” are still frowned upon within the orthodox scientific community.
Hogwarts! If this is science, then Harry Potter is the next Isaac Newton. If you believe you are the corporal product of emergent properties then you are claiming that you are an occurrence and not an existence. Merlin, himself, would be embarrassed by such magical thinking.
So what is life?
To quote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous character Sherlock Holmes in Chapter 6 of ‘The Sign of Four’, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Life is no chemical accident, nor was it conjured into fruition by some benevolent and omnipotent deity. Life is simply the product of a spectrum of undiscovered entities, irreducible elements with the attribute of natural animation; animated fundamental existences that long ago began to manipulate the resources of this planet or ‘wear the mud’ so to speak. Our physical size is extremely tiny prior to our trek into life (a feature for which anyone who is, was, or ever will become pregnant can be eternally grateful), so it comes as no surprise that we haven’t been able to isolate and identify that element within us that compiles and compels our corporal garb.
Your body is something you wear, not something you are. It does; however, seem to be a necessary tool in order for us to function and think in human terms. By rote and repetition you have been trained since birth to think you are that thing you see in the mirror – hair, eyes, nose, skin, and appendages. You have developed the self-image that your body is YOU. But your human corpse is, in fact, entirely removable – demonstrably so. If you cut off an appendage, it will suddenly be over there, yet you will not lose your identity. You will probably still have feeling in a phantom limb that isn’t there. Just because something was held onto your corpse by molecular bond didn’t make it YOU. Your corpse is simply the remnants of that hamburger and fries you ate a few years ago, that beer you had yesterday and that delicious Cesar salad from the 1990′s. Most of the cells you wear today will be replaced by new cuisine within the next seven years or so. The brain is said to be the home of the id, yet you can remove any number of its lobes and still retain your identity; there is no specific cell in your entire corporal structure whose removal would cause you significant distress, much less destroy your sense of self.
As strange as it may seem, you have no idea what you actually look like because consciousness, as we know it, only occurs when you are wrapped within your corporal shell. Even if you could strip away the blood and the bones just long enough to glimpse your true countenance, you might see nothing at all, for that fundamental element which is you may not have the property of mass. Like space, your essence may be transparent – more invisible than the air you breathe.
wishful thinking and imaginations reunion party