The Soul?

[l33tminion]

Do people have souls? Do things other than people have souls? Does nothing have a soul?

What is a soul? Where is the soul located? What is the soul made out of? Can the soul be examined empirically, or is it something supernatural? Is it silly to talk about the soul like it is an object with location and composition?

Discuss.

x-posted to atheism, antitheism, heated_debate, religiousdebate, philosophy, and my personal journal.

Comments

[socraticmachine.livejournal.com]

I believe you know my answer to these questions, and I see no compelling reason to look for other answers.

[l33tminion]

I know your answer to some of these questions, anyway... I'm not sure if you think things other than humans have souls, and I'm not sure how you define the soul or what you think the soul is...

We've probably discussed some of those things already, though... I apologize for my deficient memory.

[vitalycherno.livejournal.com]

Blind theism....::sigh::

[kristinanity.livejournal.com]

I believe that we have souls...I know I learned in my biology class that we are more than just the sum of our parts, and this makes sense to me since I think the soul represents an intangible animating force, God's fingerprint on our lives. We just had this discussion in my physics class, believe it or not, and according to the professor it has been observed that dying men suddenly lose weight (the quoted figure was 21 grams but several people said that this is not an accurate figure, so we'll just go with "lose weight") at the moment of their death. On the other hand, this kind of weight loss was not observed in dogs and other animals, so maybe only humans have souls.

I guess I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the matter. Why wouldn't humans have souls? What conclusions have you come to?

[l33tminion]

I've never heard anything about something like that being empirically observed. I could point out all sorts of flaws with that, but it seems like such a ridiculous rumor (especially since you know it would be the sort of research that would be all over the news, reliable or not) that I won't believe this one without some kind of a citation.

I define the soul as the difference between consciousness and unconscious behavior. Of course, that definition doesn't make it any easier to tell if something has a soul or not (although, by that definition, I believe that humans have souls). However, I think that it's as absurd to try to assign a location (much less a weight) to an abstract concept like the soul or the self.

[kai.livejournal.com]

Dude, that experiment was last performed almost a hundred years ago, and not under strict conditions (only four people were actually tested). It's foolish to put much confidence in the results.

Humans don't need souls.

[vitalycherno.livejournal.com]

or for that matter, even have them

[kai.livejournal.com]

Well, I cannot confirm that.

[kihou.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I tend to think of just about everything as having a soul... I'm not quite confident in where I believe this soul comes from. I [the vast majority of me] don't believe souls are divinely created or something similar. Part of me wants to say that when another soul cares about x, that gives x a little more of a soul, but part of me thinks that's too smarmy. I guess that would have souls being similar to love, but not quite congruent, or something. I guess this isn't any smarmier than your typical religious interpretation... Anyways, for the second paragraph: undefinable, usually colocated with the physical form, energy, depends on your definition of empirically/I don't know, not particularly more so than anything else.

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