Hi! I'm an #atheist #humanist and #skeptic looking to respectfully engage online here with people I disagree with. And maybe people who agree with me too!
I don't believe in #god , and in fact I'm pretty sure no such thing exists, but I'm willing to consider the alternatives and change my mind.
Are you a #christian who believes in #jesus , or any other #religion , and want to explore whether or not you have good reasons to think that it's true? I'm happy to have that conversation!
I'm willing to admit when I'm wrong. Are you?
@lack I also think hard-atheist materialism, taken by itself without anti-Christian miso-theism, is a poorly thought out position. Either you accept the possibility of reincarnation or an afterlife of some sort, that just means you are re-inventing paganism… or, you deny the possibility of an afterlife or a soul, which is a difficult position to prove. Face it: consciousness is a hard problem, every AI developer or a sci-fi author knows that!
@b_chocolatey I think I see what you mean. But the way I approach the idea of afterlife and soul is not immediately denying the idea of either; I start with the idea that I should only believe in things when there's a good reason, and if I haven't heard a good reason to believe in an afterlife or a soul, I can just stop there and remain agnostic.
That said, I think there are some pretty compelling reasons to positively believe that there is no such thing as a soul (and if there is no soul, it doesn't matter if there's an afterlife or not since there's nothing to "go" there).
But before we go into chatting about either why you think the soul exists or why I think it doesn't (I think both would be interesting) my first concern is that I don't even fully understand what is meant by the word. It seems to be a slippery concept to pin down. Can you help me understand more explicitly what you mean by "soul"? What does it do? What parts of "me" are in my brain and which parts are in my soul? How does a soul interact with my brain or my body?
@lack the Buddha seemed to believe that the “self” is what experiences pleasure, pain, desire, fear… the self is what experiences self-ishness, psychologically and physically. And a computer will never experience that; it doesn’t enjoy a sense of accomplishment when it solves an equation. It doesn’t “crave” the electricity or bandwidth or experience physical hunger or emotional distress if it encounters RF interference blocking its signal.
@lack what I’m saying is the “self” can’t be entirely physical and chemical, and you counter-argue that the self is influenced by the physical and chemical world - which is obviously correct. Different perspectives, different parts of the elephant. If you allow that the human experience doesn’t arise entirely from the physical and chemical world - which appears to be the case - then you can’t reasonably conclude that human experience ends completely with the dissolution of the physical body
@b_chocolatey This is interesting; you are saying the self can't be entirely physical, and that the human experience doesn't arise entirely from the physical and chemical world.
I'd love to know why you think this is true!
@lack Ancient man speculated that maybe the breath of the dead ancestor goes back into the sky and it still present, watching you, entering you when you breathe. Maybe the ancestor is re-born as a human several generations into the future… or maybe an animal. Couldn’t really pin it down precisely, any more than you could predict next year’s harvest or the outcome of tomorrow’s battle. But that can’t possibly disprove the existence of a next life or previous lives.
@b_chocolatey So it sounds like you're equating the "soul" with the sense of "self"?
First of all, I think the claim that a computer will *never* experience this is a tough one to be sure about. I'm a software engineer in my day job, but I don't think I know enough about either computers (though I know a lot) or consciousness (where I know very little) to say whether some day they will or they won't.
But regardless, if the "soul" is the "self", but somehow non-physical, what happens when I'm asleep or under anesthesia? If there are periods of time when I am not experiencing, what is my soul doing then? Why can drugs or other physical things stop my "self" from "self-ing", unless that self is physical?