This is a great question!

I don’t know the answer, but I’d like to add a comment for the discussion. I think that even if the physical sciences cannot explain everything about consciousness, that is not a great reason to assume there is a soul. Neuroscience is in its infancy. Maybe scientists will eventually be able to totally explain consciousness as something purely physical. And, even if it can’t be explained physically, maybe it is not non-physical, but simply something beyond our understanding. In that case we should be very skeptical of a soul. I’m very curious to hear what others think about this one. This one is really tough.

I think that this is a great, open-ended question; if energy is always constant, and can’t be destroyed, does that speak for the human soul (as well as the soul of everything else)? is the idea of the soul a human construct for morality or something that is intuitive in all of us? or as einstein said, “I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.”

there is also the idea of the Quantum Soul:
http://www.humantruth.info/quantum_soul.html

Personally, there is something that I feel is beyond the animal of my existence, a simple tug that connects me to the people I love or see everyday. It speaks with something that I feel is unnecessary to explain and that I might be too young to understand.

Thanks, Joe, for getting the conversation started.

To begin, I find it fascinating that we approach the question of the soul with a degree of skepticism, assuming that materiality is an indisputable given. Being rather found of Platonism and Neo-Platonism, I’m not so sure that materiality has any greater claim to being the case than a soul we cannot touch or see. IOW, be skeptical of your body: it might be nothing more than the visible unreality.

While it is certainly true that religious thought about the soul has often spent much of its time worrying about the soul vis-a-vis some afterlife, this does not have to be the case. Nor is the question of the immortality of the soul something limited to religious discourse (e.g., Plato and Aristotle, whose constructs I wouldn’t place in the religous category). The soul can be discussed along the lines of substance dualism without introducing immortality into the equation.

Full disclosure: I am a religionist, but I personally don’t subscribe to the immortality of the soul. I believe that the soul is mortal, which places me in the thnetopsychist camp (yes, I am a heretic according to Lateran V). I believe that it dies with the body. Believing also in the resurrection, I believe that the soul is resurrected with the body. Part of the reason that I can hold this position is that I am also a trichotimist, believing that “soul” and “spirit” are not synonyms. In this, I hold that the body and soul, while a duality, are inextricably linked. This connection of the two is such that what affects the one affects the other. At the same time, however, the resurrection is not dependent upon a soul so long as the resurrection is an eschatological (end-time) event. You only absolutely need a soul if you want the personality of the deceased to go somewhere while the corpse is still in your presence.

OK, can we test this theory? Probably not, but it does provide an alternative explanation for the apparent link between, e.g., pyhsical illness and mental illness. It also provides an alternative to the immortality and embodiment questions.

P.s., I am also a traducian, but maybe we should save that for another day.

Great question. It’s such a complex one it’s really hard to find a place to start. First off how would you even go about finding a universal definition for a soul? I personally, feel like everyone has their own interpretation on it. To me it’s an abstract & timeless inner essence of myself that works as a construct to correlate my emotional consciousness into something that is worldly and is typically responsible for most of the illogical and truly creative things that I’ve been able to imagine. To some people it may be a conduit in how one reaches an afterlife and to others it may be so abstract that it’s embodied in their favorite pair of shoes.
For me, I think the best way to look at it is where do truly illogical thoughts stem from? Or a better way to look at it is, does such thing as a truly illogical thought exist? My reasoning being that just because something is wrong doesn’t necessarily make it illogical and if ideas are preconceived within a logical universe, along with everything else, how can they truly be “outside the box?”
My personal opinion appended onto the previous one above is that we currently don’t have the technology or the evolved intelligence for a society to really say that we understand the universe enough to make solid judgments on what it is or it isn’t. For the most part we’ve postulated a few educated theories in the past century as to what time and matter are, but we still don’t have the ability to prove any of them conclusively. This inevitably leaves deductive reasoning at a standing point and forces the individual outside of a societal conclusion and into having to decide for themselves what makes them, them.

I think the question of the soul was answered best by Schoepenhauer. “What happens to us when we die? We return to that which we were before we were born.” I think the concept of soul began when the Neanderthals began having ceremonial funerals. We want to believe that we can cheat death and live again, life is that way. And statistics show that we also live in alternate universes but so what? Today is all we have, to see eternity in a grain of sand is spectacular. Nice to think about a soul but far too much to worry about.

Like everyone before me has stated, this is complex, at least in terms of analyzing it. In my opinion we can discount religion as simply just a way of trying to make sense of what we do not know. Not to say that religion may not have positive effects in society but if you really think about it it is just a cop out and was invented by man to serve multiple purposes.
Our behavior is a product of evolution and survival and there is a method to the madness. Intelligence, especially human intelligence is astounding but it is performed by the nervous system. It allows us to process images through the use of certain wavelengths of light, recognize chemical compounds for scent and taste and receive messages for touch and store memories.Hormones make us feel hungry or full or help us recognize the need for fighting or flight. These kinds of interactions make up our individual existence.
Mental illness is a great example of how problems with body chemistry can affect someones outlook on their world, it is all governed in the head.
We would all love to think we are not animals but it was just the roll of the dice and we evolved a brain through trial and error which gave us the ability to solve problems, farm, domesticate animals, construct economies and to have the wonderful debates on things such as this.
I believe that a soul is an abstract idea. It is character and personality accquired throughout a lifetime. This accumulation of experiences influence our decisions, interests, etc.
It’s not so bad that we may just be turned back into assorted amino acids, raindrops, converted into bacteria and fungi, it’s just the cycle of things and we should be glad that we are here to enjoy today and each other. My favorite saying on this subject is an old norse proverb about how life is just like a bird flying into a lit banquet hall from the cold dark night and then back into the darkness just to briefly enjoy the light (consiousness).
This is an opinion based upon our current technology which is still limited like others have said previously and i’m excited to see what research in physics, biology, and sociology can shine light on in my lifetime.

Every thought or concept has it’s own existence regardless of physical shape or observable behavior. After all, the term “Existence” is itself a man-made concept to label the known. The idea of a soul, by whatever means you define it, exists as a concept for each of us.

Whether or not the idea shows itself under physical form or any observable effects is as we all know unknown, otherwise this question wouldn’t exist. Even if such a presence does show itself in the future, it may be nothing like what we think of a soul being right now. A soul is a soul because we may know it’s there but we will never know it’s there. If some identifying energy was inside of us or some presence that lasted after death was discovered, I’d bet it would be named something completely different and scarcely compared to what we call a soul. A soul is a concept, meant to be a part of our beliefs of the unknown and never meant to actually be real. That doesn’t mean we can’t have one if we wish to, though. After all, our minds are great at thinking up concepts that are sometimes even more important than anything tangible and ‘real’.

I think we have a soul in the sense that we have a core self. It is the part of us that remains constant throughout a lifetime of changes in our bodies and psychological outlook. It is the true and secret self that nobody else really knows. I don’t know if it is just physical, but I am not convinced that it would need to be non-physical to help with any philosophical puzzles. Call me cranky, but I hope we only get one life. I kind of hope there isn’t more life after death. And, if there is life after death, and we don’t get our bodies back, it would be very difficult to find your old friends in the afterlife. Would they be there? If I don’t get my body in the afterlife, would I still enjoy playing the piano. If not, would it really be me. If so, would I play the same way? How could I if I don’t have my fingers and my brain?

I do have a soul. I believe a soul is not so complicated as many people think, the soul to your shoe keeps it from falling apart, the soul to your being keeps your being from falling apart. I believe without my soul, I would not be whole. My soul keeps me in my moral boundaries, some think this a conscience and I agree with that to a point, but there have been moments when my conscience does not kick in, and it is my soul that keeps me from doing something that I would regret. when people have lost all the hope, happiness and sanity, often times it is their soul that brings them back. Some people have lost their souls, damaged them, or simply forgotten them. But that doesn’t mean they can’t come back. Your soul is you, it is the essence of you that only you will know. It is the pure you, the you that is not tainted by anything else.

This is a subject that I have put a lot of thought into. To start, do we even know what we truly are? We observe this world (to call it) through our senses. We only know what has been told to us by our elders as they were told by their elders. We try to speculate where we came from and how it all works. In reality, we know nothing for certain. Where did it all start, and what was before that… More importantly why are we even here?

As I sit here and type on my computer, my children are playing in the other room. I am communicating through a wire to other beings some where else in different settings. Am I just a figment of your imagination, or maybe just words put on what you call a computer screen from your own mind? Am I just typing to no one but myself?

As a “human being” am I different from a tree, or a rock? We are all just matter, aren’t we. Could what simply makes us different from a rock be energy? Then wouldn’t we be the same as a tree? Maybe a tree has its own consciousness that we don’t understand. Maybe we differ from the tree simply by that same energy having the ability to interact through our bodies physical senses where trees can’t (or possibly can through outlets we don’t know). In that case, because Energy can never cease to exist (compliment of Einstein), are we immortal? Are we just energy changing forms and experiencing consciousness through different outlets?

The only thing we truly know right now is that we exist, and as far as we know, we didn’t create ourselves. We know we interact in a “physical world” that has certain natural laws and apparently has other beings like us to interact with. What else do we know for certain?

Maybe we look in the wrong places for answers. Couldn’t it be possible that whatever or whomever created us gave us more then we know or use?

We continue to look outward for answers, and never contemplate that we could already have the answers we are searching for.

Have you ever taken a moment and tried to forget what others have told you (you don’t even know if that information is reliable)? Have you ever just forgotten momentarily all scientific theories or religious beliefs? What do you feel? Look inward and ask yourself.

To me it comes down to one simple question- do you believe this is all an accident, or is their a purpose? Why exist in the first place if this is just a series of random events that amount to nothing. As I view the beauty of it all, and the harmony in which things connect I can’t think it is all an accident. I can’t believe that there was nothing, and then some how there was something. I can’t believe that out of nowhere I came into existence like a flick of a light from nothing.

When I stop and look inward I feel certain truths: I am the part of me that knows I exist, the part of me that makes the ultimate decisions when an animal instinct pulls me in one direction, and another underlining force or feel of morality pulls me in another. I do feel that I am both, part of one big whole and at the same time, completely individual of everyone else. What feels right to me is that we are part of something bigger, call it God, call it the universe, maybe even just call it life. At the same time I know am an individual; I am the I, the me, the observer, the soul…

Maybe the reason we live these short mortal lives with no recollection of what we were before this or what we are going to be after, is to experience it all and learn some lesson in order to develop spiritually, maybe it’s simply so that we won’t get bored in eternity. Maybe we are here to define ourselves and bring our own gifts to one another.

I say just live- stop worrying about what one believes and what one does not- what do you believe? What does your heart (figuratively) tell you is right?

i believe that the fashion in which we reason this question may be flawed. We are looking at it from a sense of dualistic material realism, in which matter and mind are fundamentally different things, and where our environment is created by matter. While this may, in fact, be the case, i feel that there is another whole side to this argument that unfortunately has been pushed aside due to how we’ve been raised and how we’re told our World is. i feel that maybe if we take a shift in our viewpoint, maybe we’ll see the true interconnectedness of us.
i propose that in the stead of our materialistic dualist approach, with which we were raised, we view it from another angle, one where consciousness, matter, the soul, and energy are all the same, a monistic view we may have better luck.
Rae stated, as many have, that they feel a connection, or some sort of tug that connects us to the ones the ones we love. It feels to be something outside of matter, and i feel that it is, but in a different way. i feel that this world is not set in black and white. Matter, in fact, can be energy or be converted into, and there are experiments that are geared to showing and have shown that energy can become matter as well. Over the years experiments have become less and less geared towards the distinct items of energy and matter, but we now look at the similarities.
i feel that all of this, but specifically for the argument, matter and energy, are varying shades of the same thing. Just as with enough paint, gray can become either more black or more white, our universe is a colossal differing shades of sameness.
To relate this to the question, i don’t feel that we have a separate soul, but through this view i feel we are our souls which are our animals of existence which is you, and it is me, which is us, our “selfs”. This argument could lead to the sameness of you and i, but that is for another time. back to this though, as i want to drive the point home, we aren’t so much in a world with the Cartesian Duality, as our world and most inhabitants believe, but i feel that we are in a world of one, and of differing sameness, where our souls are our bodies which are our minds which are us. It’s a difficult thought to formulate into some sort of easily understandable English. i feel that we do not HAVE souls, but we ARE our souls, which in turn, are all of us.

One of my favorite questions. I am most comfortable with the idea of universes of different dimensionality to explain my point of view. Throughout these universes there is a common connection upon which information can be passed. Our soul would be the link to this common connection. Similiar to an avatar on the internet, it communicates and gathers information for us without us knowing where this information came from. If the physical being no longer exists, this avatar continues to function within its domain.

With this analogy, I believe that there is an interconnectedness not only in this universe, but through all universes if they exist. Our soul is our image as it relates to the interconnected medium of this multiverse.

Yes, I believe people have souls, just as I believe we have a spirit. The spirit is the on/off switch to life. Either its there and you are alive, or its not and you are dead. The soul is that other “something” that is part intuition, cognition, conscienceness, telepathic ability and maybe even collective knowledge that makes us each an individual. I believe some people see souls in auras, others feel the soul by being comforted or comfortable in anothers presence. One example of this is a baby and his relationship with the parent. It cries when mommy or daddy leaves the room, but will stop when they re-enter, all without being able to see or hear the individual.
AS human beings, why do we have to explain things scientifically? WHy do we have to be able to quantify or qualify each and every thing in our lives to say it exists or is fact? Can’t we just have faith (and I’m NOT talking religion) that some things are unexplainable?

Cum-by-ya moments aside, everyone seems to be hugging this question rather than directly answering it; whether through quick statements that give some movement’s view of the soul, including antiquated notions like Descartes’ dualism which should have been buried with him, or giving an appeal to sentiment that contradicts modern understanding.
Before one answers ‘Do we have a soul?’ it’s requisite to answer the question, ‘What is a soul?’ Answer the latter and then you can properly approach the former. Many of the respondents are keyed in to common notions of the soul given by Descartes given by Plato; Aristotle is completely shortchanged in this discussion, simply said the soul is that which give organic life self-movement, more or less. Point is there’s variety to the term: everybody gets his or her personal one.
If you’re going to hold it as some mysterious domain of selfdom lying JUST beyond the frontiers of science, take a religion class, where you can continue to play-a cat with a ball-with this remnant from the more adorable period of manunkind.

If you want to consider something similar to soul but philosophical by modern standards try the irreducible interactions of cultural phenomena on for size.

-David Sadd

i have not seen a soul
if it exists , where does it exist? in your heart?
then what about people who have robotic hearts
i don’t think it can be proved by science,

actually i want to know how people come to believe the existance of a soul.

Bo—Your soul wouldn’t exist physically, but emotionally/mentally. In my belief, each has a soul that keeps them alive.

Cheers from an agnostic.

in my opinion, human beings do have some sort of “soul” which gives us the sense of “self” or “I” as a separate existence or individualism different from everyone else. I believe that rather than environment designing consciousness per say consciousness rather designs environment and the nature of one’s soul decides where they will be placed during their lifetime. I think there is something beyond the intelligent matter of which we are composed, we are all here for a definitive reason, and something does exist after death or maybe it is just comforting not to incessantly ponder the inevitability of eternal nothingness, but who really wants to believe that? i don’t know if we reach some sort of higher level of existence or perhaps are reincarnated after the demise of our physical being but I like to think that our soul and individuality carries on. If you really think about it, our own humanity limits our perception to what we know as touch, sight, taste, smell and these senses likely cannot perceive all there is to perceive within our universe. A new concept has emerged proposing that perhaps we are residing in a hologram of sorts based on the discovery that the fabric of time and space may be fragmented or pix-elated on minute levels insinuating that we do have some kind of creator or God if you will, something had to create this hologram it can’t simply spawn from nothing. As individuals we cannot even be sure of the existence of other people’s consciousness and as I type this now the only consciousness I am truly aware of and existence I am truly aware of is my own, “I” think therefore I am. I am aware of my own existence but not that of others although I like to believe others do exist and are not simply figments of my own mind (i know this seems absurd but hear me out) so how can we as human beings really believe anything that we feel is absolute truth and really rule out anything as impossible or implausible. Anything can be true but constantly pondering these impossible questions is not doing us any good and we are not getting any closer to the truth. Some things we just won’t know for sure so all you can do is enjoy life and enjoy the moment and see where life takes us.