How do you (personally) define the concept of "soul"?

Your thought processes and memories, self awareness. It’s not consciousness because that is a matter of physical being. Other than that, it is not a concept that continues after death.

The term soul has a religious connotation, which some of us find objectionable. We can still talk about our sense of self. This can be described but not defined. It is a little like asking how we define our perception of red. The sense of self is even trickier. As soon as you say “I”, you are in danger of reasoning circularly by presuming what you are trying to define.

One way of interpreting Descartes’ I think therefore I am is to say that the very act of asking whether we exist is a presumption of our existence, even if that existence is in a computer simulation.

The indwelling presence of the Divine that is inherent in everything.

fake news

It’s an ephemeral concept. I can think of a couple of scenarios where I would entertain the idea.

1. We can be reproduced using only information. For this to work consciousness is an illusion generated by the mind and there is no “connection” to anything outside the universe besides data. Your unique data set can be copied, replayed and even manipulated in the future. It can either be saved or simply exist in the range of infinite possibility with your data set unique and eternal.

2. The other is the “brain in a vat” our minds, parts of our minds or just consciousness are connected to some other “realm” by telemetery and we live in this world matrix style completely oblivious to our real existance.

3. The spirituality spoken of by religion is either true or partially true. Not the specifics of the religion itself but the concept of a soul and afterlife as described by it.

I like the odds of at least part of one of these scenarios being true.

The ability to make change. Time .

This or this

But not this.

I don’t have a concrete definition, but I think of it as my consciousness and essential self rather than my body and my ego and mind. It’s the thing that experiences waking up from sleep and sometimes having to remember what life and time and place I’ve awakened in.

(It’s not the Christian concept the churches often use to try to threaten/scare/shame people into submitting to their doctrines.)

I do think it probably does experience soul karma though, which the original core message in Christianity was about. That is, I am open to the idea that our soul focuses on lives to work out things, to learn/heal/develop, or something along those lines. And I don’t think souls are limited to one life at all. And I think people don’t begin to know the fullness of what that’s all about, as information. But I think maybe we all know about it at some level, if we let our attention separate from our ego.

Well, I don’t. The “soul” is a religious construct meant to assure us that that part of us, the embodiment of all that we are, will go on after death. It won’t. There is no such thing.

” It won’t. There is no such thing”
You don’t know that. Religion is bullshit yes but nobody “knows” even the slightest little thing about “after”

It’s only in the last ten years I use the term soul. Previously, it was a religious term to me, and so it was an uncomfortable term for me to hear much less use, but now I have changed my mind.

I define soul as a combination of our heart and our essence. It’s what makes each of us unique. Similar to the religious context, it’s who we are without our physical body. I don’t believe in the soul carrying on into an afterlife; for me it’s simply about the person while they are alive. It has to do a little with personality, and also with the person’s moral compass maybe. It’s very similar to inner beauty.

We can harm our souls by doing things that are not in line with how we want to see ourselves. Or, I’ve been known to say shame will rot the soul. The burden of shame doesn’t allow our soul to shine bright in my opinion.

I feel like I can see people’s souls more as I age. Their outer package means much less, and I just see the inner beauty of the person, or lack thereof. .

@ARE_you_kidding_me But one can’t believe in something that one cannot find the reason to believe in, or can see the logic in, or simply say, “Gee, I just don’t know and am too stupid to make up my mind about it.”. I may not know, for certain, that there is no afterlife, but I can ascertain to the best of my knowledge and beliefs that there is none, if that’s what makes me happy. It’s a leap of faith, possibly, and especially to you if I do make that leap, but it works for me.

I don’t believe in the concept of a “soul” any more than I believe in the concept of “God(s)” or religion.

So I guess my “definition” is along the lines of: what other people believe is the immortal being of humans. I don’t believe that human beings are immortal. Once you’re gone, you’re gone.

I think of the soul as the deepest layer of being. It is so deep that it is not affected by our desires and fears any more than the depths of the sea are disturbed by the winds. I don’t believe any part of us will survive death but the soul it seems to me is a little disconnected from time.

@kritiper I find it more of a stretch to think there is no after life at all for the reasons I listed in my first answer and I don’t even need religion to come to that conclusion. The opinion of “there for sure is no after life” does not hold any water logically since there is no concrete backing and there are scenarios that could prove it false.

@ARE_you_kidding_me You forgot to mention “In my opinion.” An Agnostic would say the same thing. And, in my opinion, Agnostics, while stating all of the logic behind there being no “God,” still think that there might yet be one since there is no evidence that there isn’t one. Thus, in my opinion, Agnostics are Theists.

If a dog or a cat or a worm doesn’t have a soul, then neither do I.

There does not have to be any god at all for there to be some sort of afterlife

I think a soul is our persona , our brain and emotions without a body. I didn’t think like this until decades ago my ex husband and I were sleeping in a bed at his mother’s house. We stayed two nights. The first night he told me (the next morning) that he had smelled a strong scent of body powder and just knew it was his dead grandmother and, he asked, did I want him to wake me up if she came that night again . I said yes , I guess. ” So that night (I want to add he was an Atheist at that time) he told me to wake up and asked me if I could ” smell that. ” And man, what a shocker and beautiful thing: there was this nice smell of flowers in the air above us . He made the mistake of saying, ” go away , Granny ” and slowly the smell dissipated. Next day we told his mom what happened and she said, ” yes; mama used to sleep in that bed”. meaning her mother Granny. This happened to me when I was alone after my mother died but I was in my office. We had long divorced since. It lasted longer and gave me a very loving, happy feeling .
So , because of these experiences and probably more of them I am sure, for myself, that there is an afterlife of some sort. And I have no idea why these things happened to me. And before anyone asks, no; there were no flowers in either room and the windows were closed (not that flowers smell that strongly) or that their scent would come and go away).
Bottom line: Good news ! There is an afterlife and you will see the people who have died that you wish to see again !

Soul being thought.
One does not know if there exists a parallel universe that ones soul or thoughts go.
Many believe that it exists and therefore brings hope to the hopeless.
I hope that there is such an existence as many Religions that believe that there are many universes and or parallel universes .

Barry White’s arse-soul?

Thanks for the interesting perspectives, I appreciate them.

Not having a religious background, my concept of “soul” isn’t based on that. I feel that one’s soul is that ephemeral thing that connects us to all other sentient (not necessarily sapient) things (beings, whatever) around us. A “collective unconscious” sort of thing.

@canidmajor Like a collective radio signal. That must be what that ringing in my ears is. But it’s probably just AM static.

But, in all seriousness, there is no such thing as a “soul.” It is an imagined construct.

Read how I worded the Q, @kritiper. It’s entirely subjective.

That’s how he personally defines it @canidmajor. And me as well. It’s an imagined construct. It’s not real, in our opinions.

Well, then, @Dutchess_III, maybe you guys should have said that.
And your add on post about worms and stuff further obfusc acted yOur point, by expressing a specifically organized religion view.

I did. Right here. I said, “Well, I don’t. The “soul” is a religious construct meant to assure us that that part of us, the embodiment of all that we are, will go on after death. It won’t. There is no such thing.”

@kritiper said, “But, in all seriousness, there is no such thing as a “soul.” It is an imagined construct.”

Were we not clear?

I didn’t wish to convey that I believed in such a thing, having answered in a subjective way.

LOL!

@kritiper “Thus, in my opinion, Agnostics are Theists”
Agnostics are not theists in any way, shape or form. They reject man made religion but admit they do not have any information about “after” or “before.” Speculation, entertaining different scenarios and thinking about the different possibilities and of which yes there actually are some is in an agnostics realm. One possibility is there is nothing. Atheists believe that and that only. Note the word “belief” because that is exactly what it is. There are all kinds of new definitions, explanations about what an “atheist” is. They often try to claim agnostics but they are not in the same circle. Frankly and simply they are of lesser character and completely lacking in any form of speculative imagination. There is plenty of pompous self aggrandizement to make them less worthy of my company than a theist would. There is no greater insult to an agnostic as to call one either a theist or an atheist. They are neither.
If an atheist is willing to admit that they do not know either how they came to be or what happens when we die then they are agnostic at heart. Crossing off the list of possibilities that there is nothing in death or that we were not created without evidence to disprove it is where I get cross with atheists. The simple fact that we exist at all and cannot explain it, yet can formulate ideas of how it’s possible puts those possibilities on the table. This in no way has anything to do with religion. Let me repeat, this in no way has anything to do with religion.

Wow @ARE_you_kidding_me. And all this time I thought atheists are just regular people who don’t believe there is a god. Nothing more or less. There is no other definition.

@ARE_you_kidding_me But they don’t not believe. They hold out some hope, however minimal, that some “god” may yet exist, in some form and in some place, otherwise they’d be full blown Atheists. Therefore, they are Theists. (IMO)
Your statement above leads me to think that you are somewhere between Theist and Agnostic. Feel free to conduct more research and thought on the subjects, like I have.

There is no way to talk around it. Atheists have a belief that they claim to “know” that there is both no god and also no afterlife thus are actually gnostics. On one side of the coin you have both atheists and theists and on the other there are agnostics. Atheists think they can “know” as do theists. Agnostics don’t think that’s the case, they are on the outside of that debate looking in.

“Feel free to conduct more research and thought on the subjects, like I have.”

Something a gnostic would say.

What does it matter, anyway @ARE_you_kidding_me?

agnostic is not a category.
it is a modifier applied to atheist or theist.
you can be a gnostic atheist, or an agnostic atheist, and you can be a gnostic theist, or an agnostic theist.
You will have difficulty finding even a single gnostic atheist, but you will have no trouble finding gnostic theists.

@ragingloli something you are leaving out is that you can also be a gnostic theist and an agnostic theist by the given definitions but most who identify as agnostic will not see it that way.

@Dutchess_III It matters when wars are fought and people are murdered over “beliefs” and other bullshit.

You can even be a Jewish atheist!

All the more reason for everyone to drop religion @ARE_you_kidding_me.

I mean I can be a “caucasian atheist” but ethnicity has nothing to do with it.

Sigh.

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”

The term soul is applied to many distinctively different concepts. To some, one’s soul existed before being incarnated and continues to exist after disembodiment. It is a cosmic string, the “silver thread” from the finger of God to the descending manifestation, the human you-you that reaching the limit spins thousands of turns before the string flicks and ascension begins. A group of these believers sees the yo-yo returning many times as the unchanging soul expresses a new spirit until returning to the beginning for the last time.

Many believing they have a soul think this property is limited to Homo sapiens. Others posit some or all animals (and possibly all life forms) do also. Some of these think depending upon your karma-ladened spirit you may be incarnated as a non-human animal, or you may finally be free from incarnation. Then there are those who defining soul demystify any spiritual aspect, reducing the term simply to self, a mental aspect. This domain is as nebulous as the other is, in that they fail to provide physical evidence of existence. They are purely hypothetical probabilities that if exist coexist.

I do not think the soul experiences. However, I think the accompanying spirit will reflect the soul’s state. A form of field, the interacting forces of adjacent spirits becomes the harbinger of new souls. Spirit is the manifestation of experience. My conception of soul requires diverting to my current thoughts on cosmology.

In the midst of nothing, for no reason I can discern a singularity exists. This is the beginning. At the speed of light, the singularity spherically expands. At the end of the first moment, reality exists at the instant of one Planck-time. No reality exists between the beginning and end of a moment. An imaginary line can be drawn from the singularity to any point on the sphere at the first instant. The point present is a soul. Reality is analogues to a hologram, information contained on a two-dimensional surface, Cosmic Time instant by instant.

My thinking is that converging ripples in spacetime act as particles. The interacting fields surrounding some sextillion souls (which only manifest during the instant between moments) produce matter, of which of course we consist. I am not one soul, but an uncountable numbers of souls manifesting my existence. If the singularity is the manifestation of God, the source for creation, then each soul is an aspect of the creator and of creation. Just as “we are all made of star dust,” we are all made of God. Consciousness, morality and the sense of self are mental aspects. This domain may reference spiritual aspects, actual or fabricated. The less we focus on our identity and more on others the better, I think.

@ARE_you_kidding_me Speak for yourself. You don’t know enough to speak for me.

Nor you me.

Some may say that since the existence of a “soul” cannot be proven, by the same logic, it cannot be disproven.
Some may say that the true existence of a “soul” cannot be known, and these same people claim that no one else can know either, and that no one should aspire to such. But how could these people who claim that no one can know be so self assured that no one else can know, despite how any believers/non-believers feel about how they believe? If I chose to believe that there is no “soul,” should I be denied that belief just because someone else who choses to continually question such beliefs claims that I can’t know?
If one wants to believe in the existence of a “soul,” then go ahead since there is no harm done. Likewise if one choses to not believe.
If one wishes to constantly question, then continue to question, but allow others to believe what they might.
Again, no harm done.

The question regarding the existence/non-existence of the soul, in the religious sense, falls outside of science, because it is untestable. That also means that there are no substantive statements that can be made about the soul. In practical terms, it makes no difference whether or not it exists.

@kritiper ”Some may say that since the existence of a “soul” cannot be proven, by the same logic, it cannot be disproven.” Same could be said about unicorns and Santa Clause.

@Dutchess_III That’s right!