If people don't have a soul, don't you think we're comparable to clones?

If humans had souls, why would clones be different?
Which one of a set of identical twins has no soul?

But humans do have souls.

I have to echo ragingloli. If humans have souls, then clones do too. I don’t know of a rule that states the soul is only present if a human is conceived naturally.

But to answer your question, @ragingloli, it’s the evil one, of course. :)

@ragingloli beat me to it.

Humans ARE souls, not that they HAVE souls —Adam was created a “living soul” (Nefesh) when God breathed life into him— Other animals are souls, too—Humans and Animals have a Nashama or Animal Soul meaning they are animated or alive—humans have in addition the Nefesh or breath of life.

Humans ARE bodies. It is not true that we HAVE bodies. We ARE bodies.

There is also the idea in the Hebrew word Nefesh that we have a spirit bestowed by God in the Breath of Life, of which our bodies are mere vessels. But the correlation between body and spirit are far more unified than most people think.

The Greek idea of a Psyche or Mind is something we “are” also—not merely have. It is a part of our cognitive abilities

Humans and animals can be cloned and probably made artificially if we ever get that advanced that we can do it. But they are far more complex than robots or androids.

It wouldn’t matter either way. Like @ragingloli said.

If souls exist, and clones are created from DNA, then I suppose a clone would also have its own soul.

I have no idea if “souls” exist, but there’s certainly something that make you, YOU and me, ME. Whether it’s just electrical impulse and biology or something currently undefinable, it comes from our “source code”, as it were.

Clones and identical twins would have separate souls, even if the souls were identical in nature/characteristic

@Yellowdog “Clones and identical twins would have separate souls, even if the souls were identical in nature/characteristic”

It could be argued that each twin only gets half a soul.

Tell that to my twin sisters.

The idea of a soul is so quaint. I am surprised so many here accept it. What happens to the souls of those embryos that don’t make it? To have a successful artificial insemination there will be a trail of failures. Should the process be made illegal? Do the souls of the failures get recycled? Is an embryo only given a soul after some minimum amount of time? What about miscarriages?

What happens when you immediately get shot when respawning in a video game? How is that different?

I don’t think anyone knows whether clones would have souls… or possibly, many not even very human has a soul… certainly some have lost touch with theirs.

And, what sort of clone do you mean? Some sci-fi clones are created from zygote cells like humans are. Others are created in a vat and somehow fast-aged… and some are created by duplication magic/technology that through one method or another duplicates the original… and Star Trek transporters supposedly disassemble and reassemble a person, and can sometimes make clones.

Since humans do not have a full understanding of souls/spirits/consciousness or agreement even on what a soul is, I don’t think we know the answer to this.

But to conjecture, I’d need more info on what you’re talking about.

For example, if you mean the type of clone where somehow you swap the original person’s DNA into a fertilized egg, and then let it grow like a normal test tube baby, I’d expect the soul to probably be more or less as if a child had been conceived naturally. But if you used some molecular duplication device to carbon copy an adult human, or fast-grow a new body with no life experience, I think those methods might tend to give you a soulless body.

” But if you used some molecular duplication device to carbon copy an adult human, or fast-grow a new body with no life experience, I think those methods might tend to give you a soulless body” I feel like such a scenario would be the perfect experiment to determine if souls exist in the traditional sense. If people are simply information: memories and an arrangement of molecules then that’s its own form of immortality.

@Demosthenes
I am not evil, just ahead of the curve.

Wow, I wrote “many not even very human has a soul” when I meant to write ”maybe not every human has a soul”.

Oh no. Nothing like clones. Each one of us is uniquely unique.

What about cojoined twins? That’s about as closed to cloned as you can get. Did they start out with one soul before the cell divided to create them? After that, do they have separate souls? Or does it depend on the percentage that they are cojoined?

Separate souls.

If a zygote divides into two persons, there were two souls to begin with in one zygote.
Cojoined twins are definitely two individuals, with separate brains, thoughts, desires, personalities.

We are thermodynamic machines consuming chemicals from our environment and reacting them with atmospheric oxygen and water to make energy.. We do mechanical and thermodynamic work at a nominal rate of 100 Watts. 20 Watts or so is used to power our brains, 20 watts is used for repair and replacement of damaged parts, 20— 400 Watts is used for mechanical work and 20 used to maintain body temperature. These numbers vary considerably throughout the day.

We inhale oxygen, react it in our lungs and blood stream and exhale about 4–5% CO2. That number drops to 0 when the body stops pumping blood into and out of the lungs.

And like a 1950s Betsy Wetsy doll we pee almost the same amount of water we consume.

^^^ Amen! Or… Awoman!