What are you?

Discussion in 'Discussion' started by Makaze, Jun 27, 2016.

  1. Makaze Some kind of mercenary

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    Do you believe that we have what you might call a soul? How does it interact with the body? Could we prove that that is the case? What does it mean to die? Why or why not?
     
  2. Patman Bof

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    As far as I can tell my conscience is a byproduct of my brain' s activity. It converts food and oxygen into electricity. No more eating or breathing, no more electricity, the computer shuts down. Problem is that' s pretty much what I call "me". Even if there is such a thing as a soul on top of that, whatever that is, I' m not sure I' m willing to call it me just yet. It' s a piece of me. I mean if you were to take one of my cells (also a piece of me) and clone me, would you say I' m the same person as my clone ? Cause I sure as hell wouldn' t. So even if my soul was to move on and become something else ... woop dee ****ing doo, Patman would pull the curtain either way.

    As for whether you could prove the existence of souls, well it' s hard to track something you can' t even begin to define. I guess if it was to happen it would likely happen by accident, the Becquerel way.
     
  3. Calxiyn Keyblade Master

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    I believe in ghosts and I guess ghosts are just the "soul" part right, so I believe in souls too. I don't know when someone would get a soul, maybe it's at birth or maybe it's before you're born. Maybe you only have one soul and you're born and you die as the same person, but maybe you keep reincarnating into a different person with the same soul. But if you're shaped by environment and circumstance, how much of the soul is permanent? And when you die do you remember all of your other lives? If your soul has some part of your personality or how you act then does that mean criminals or very good people can't REALLY change because it's what their soul dictates? There was a scientist who weighed someone as they were dying, and right when they died they got lighter. Some people say that proves it, but I don't know.

    I've always been afraid of what happens after I die, I can't imagine being nothing, or feeling nothing. Not even feeling nothing like sometimes people feel nothing, but just, nothing. The fact that we don't know is even scarier, and the idea that when we die that's the last time we'll 'be' is anxiety inducing. I feel like these questions, for me, always lead to even more questions.

    If we have a soul then are we doomed to wander around forever? Or does that mean we go to a heaven? Then which religion is the one that heaven is tied to then? If we have a soul then there must be other supernatural things, like a god, but where are they? And how many?

    I personally want to believe in a soul because there are some people on this earth I never want to not have to be around, but it's also because permanently being in sleep mode doesn't sound fun.
     
  4. Shuhbooty moon child

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    I've always compared a personality to a soul. But at the same time, when I get sad, depressed and feel like I can't function and go on with my life- I feel like I'm soulless. I've never thought about it MUCH, but I do believe in reincarnation. I don't believe in karma tho, I don't see me right now and my choices in life will set how my soul will carry on.

    I think about this sometimes though. I don't live for the things in my life (I think anyways) I feel alive when I feel something. When something gives me emotion. I honestly can't imagine feeling nothing. I've felt empty before but never that sense of "nothing" and that is truly terrifying. I hope the afterlife is something like, where we can just roam and explore like ghosts do but in our own world. (if that makes sense).
     
  5. Makaze Some kind of mercenary

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    I tend to believe that "I" am my memories and inclinations, the things that make me different from everyone else. So that even if my body dies, "I" could live on if my memories were transferred to another body.

    Then came the dilemma of the teleport. If I step into a teleport, my body is de-atomized here and other atoms are constructed to recreate me on the other side. Am I the same person on the other side, or was I killed, and someone else came out the other? I would say that the person on the other side is me. No one would be able to tell the difference except in esoteric terms.

    But what if I were not deatomized in the original place? What if the teleporter glitched, and a copy of me came out the other side while I never stopped existing where I started? Are they both me? I would say no, because each of us is experiencing different things while completely convinced that they are me. From that moment onward, they have different memories, so they must be different people by my definition.

    If that is the case, then what counts as an interruption; does every change in memory create a completely different "me"? When I wake up in the morning, how do I know I'm not a clone, and the old me was killed after falling asleep? How do I know my memories happened to me, to these atoms? What if I am the one who came out the other side of the teleporter?

    In that sense, "I" must be not a stream of consciousness, not a set of atoms, but the entity that experiences the stream in the moment. Makaze-from-five-minutes-ago and Makaze-right-now are two distinct people. If Makaze-from-five-minutes-ago somehow got transported to the present, we would behave in subtly different ways and have subtly different memories. This leads to the unintuitive conclusion that I am just the feeling that I exist in this moment. I am not my body. I am not my mind. I am not my memories. I am right now, because I feel I am. I may not have always been. Death is pretty meaningless when I think of it like that, because the fact that there will not be a Makaze-five-minutes-from-now doesn't matter when all I am is Makaze-right-now at every second of every day.
     
  6. Ars Nova Just a ghost.

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    I personally choose to believe that the sum of consciousness, what we feel and experience and how we interact with the world, is something that no other construct or entity existing in the world can replicate. That belief is harder to hold these days, with mounting advances in technology that make it look like our brains are basically just computers. But I still think there's something unaccounted for in technology. Something in our heads we take for granted. A kind of substance that gives us purpose and perspective. If you wanna call that a soul, go for it; if you wanna say God gifted this to us, be my guest. All I'm positing is that we have it.

    A skeptic might dismiss this out-of-hand. A biologist almost certainly would. But I also know from a brief glance at history that lots of things have been dismissed out-of-hand before that turned out to be pretty close to the truth later. Our present understanding of epigenetic inheritance, for instance, is starting to resemble the theory of adaptation posed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a theory which not more than a decade ago would've been laughed out of any classroom.

    So yes, whether it's thought-form or energy or some unseen aspect of our genetic makeup, I believe in a soul of sorts. And even if I didn't, I couldn't fathom that all that energy, all that consciousness, could just up and vanish at the point of brain death. It makes no sense. Surely it persists in some form, as do most things in the natural world. Maybe I'm biased because I dread that outcome, but it is what it is.