Souls........

[Budder81]

I had a thought about souls, I hear people say that souls are your personality and character. Isn't the human part of us that gives us our personality and our soul would just be energy that has no emotions or feelings, because us being human and have to react to a certain reaction to have a feeling. So after we die, and if our 'soul' leaves our body, we won't have any of our human emotions or human thoughts. We are energy that seeps back into earth somehow and eventually be used to create life and grow nerves again to start feeling again. Really stoned right now, hope anyone can understand this.

[skywalker]

no, we're not energy, we dont exist except on a physical sense. the only amazing thing about us is that we're aware of our environment, and aware of this awareness. other than that our sense of self is a delusion; you are literally a collection of trillions of different people existing moments apart from each other. you're not really a continuous experience, like a flipbook with a different pose on each page. doesnt really mean anything for social life, just makes you see 'yourself' differently. so, no soul, just delusion to keep you content with your existence.

[Rasta_Man]

skywalker, man, you rock.

[Digit]

here's how it is

[Budder81]

Haha, it took a bowl of OG to make me understand it, last night I wasn't understanding of that.

Nice.

[Iscariot]

Originally Posted by Budder81

I had a thought about souls, I hear people say that souls are your personality and character. Isn't the human part of us that gives us our personality and our soul would just be energy that has no emotions or feelings, because us being human and have to react to a certain reaction to have a feeling.

Personality, character, consciousness, empathy, if humans have a soul its a organ located in the skull called the brain. and when we die it shuts down.

So after we die, and if our 'soul' leaves our body, we won't have any of our human emotions or human thoughts. We are energy that seeps back into earth somehow and eventually be used to create life and grow nerves again to start feeling again. Really stoned right now, hope anyone can understand this.

I guess you could say energy in the strictest sense but i doubt in the way you're talking about.

[Iscariot]

Originally Posted by skywalker

no, we're not energy, we dont exist except on a physical sense. the only amazing thing about us is that we're aware of our environment, and aware of this awareness. other than that our sense of self is a delusion; you are literally a collection of trillions of different people existing moments apart from each other. you're not really a continuous experience, like a flipbook with a different pose on each page. doesnt really mean anything for social life, just makes you see 'yourself' differently. so, no soul, just delusion to keep you content with your existence.

We're not trillions of different people existing momemts apart from each other. You too much.

[hozomeen]

i think instead of "soul" i'll start calling it my "internal super-monologue," so then i could say to people, "my internal super-monologue feels heavy today," or, "my internal super-monologue goes out to you all!" or, "back off, my internal super-monologue is totally on its fucking period right now."

[skywalker]

Originally Posted by Iscariot

We're not trillions of different people existing momemts apart from each other. You too much.

Hahaha, I do smoke too much, but that's beside the point. Our streaming consciousness is not a stable continuous phenomenon, just an emergent property of our biology. We need to be aware of our environment, so we have senses to inform us of what's going on around. We recieve this sensory informaton via a stream of electrical impulses, but... if we are using electrical impulses(via neuronal discharges) this cannot be a continuous stream, otherwise they would not be impulses, simply a flat current. However, we know that nerves do not discharge a flat current, but rather a series of electrical bursts.

What I am saying is that our conscious experience can be likened to a computer screen being refreshed, the nerves bringing in new information every so-and-so microseconds(I think its microseconds, if you want I'll get that for you), the result appearing to be a continuous stream, when in fact it is a series of several different states occuring simultaneously.

Edit: I forgot to add the most important point. These impulses are sent to the brain, which recieves this information and updates itself. In this computer screen analogy, the brain cells would be the pixels on the screen and the sensory nerves, obviously, the feed cables, and the mind would be the resulting image. When we watch a video on the screen, the mind becomes the emergent phenomenon of images dancing around on the screen. The brain cells, the pixels, find themselves in one state for a moment, and in another the next moment. Even when nothing is occurring, these pixels are reupdating themselves based on the information they keep on recieving, whether it is changing or not.

I hope this isn't getting overdone, but the point is that the brain doesnt exist in a continuous state, but one that updates itself rapidly. In my philosophy, the only difference between myself now and myself ten years ago would be the number of frames that have passed in the time between. How then do I decide when I as an organism have made a significant change? Do I say 'Today is my birthday, so I must be significantly different from myself the day before'?, or do I say 'Well, last month I was a buddhist and now I'm a muslim, so now I have significantly advanced from that point in time'?

It's impossible to put specific markers on mental progress, as it moves so fluidly... the only objective way to do this is to find a means of breaking down mental progress into quantifiable units. To me, this cannot be any simpler than using the brain's refresh rate: this is the smallest observable change in brain states. I simply reason that since we exist in a different state every moment, and over very long periods of time we observe large changes, and it is impossible to identify any other kind of transitional point higher than this, we simply must be a different person every time we refresh, albeit only minutely different.

I don't think I've explained this well enough, but I'll post it anyway and if you don't understand I'll clarify it. *shrugs* Text is so last century.

[.ViciouS.]

Originally Posted by skywalker

Text is so last century.

Once you can get over that, much more things become clear.

[Iscariot]

Originally Posted by skywalker

Hahaha, I do smoke too much, but that's beside the point. Our streaming consciousness is not a stable continuous phenomenon, just an emergent property of our biology. We need to be aware of our environment, so we have senses to inform us of what's going on around. We recieve this sensory informaton via a stream of electrical impulses, but... if we are using electrical impulses(via neuronal discharges) this cannot be a continuous stream, otherwise they would not be impulses, simply a flat current. However, we know that nerves do not discharge a flat current, but rather a series of electrical bursts.

What I am saying is that our conscious experience can be likened to a computer screen being refreshed, the nerves bringing in new information every so-and-so microseconds(I think its microseconds, if you want I'll get that for you), the result appearing to be a continuous stream, when in fact it is a series of several different states occuring simultaneously.

Edit: I forgot to add the most important point. These impulses are sent to the brain, which recieves this information and updates itself. In this computer screen analogy, the brain cells would be the pixels on the screen and the sensory nerves, obviously, the feed cables, and the mind would be the resulting image. When we watch a video on the screen, the mind becomes the emergent phenomenon of images dancing around on the screen. The brain cells, the pixels, find themselves in one state for a moment, and in another the next moment. Even when nothing is occurring, these pixels are reupdating themselves based on the information they keep on recieving, whether it is changing or not.

I hope this isn't getting overdone, but the point is that the brain doesnt exist in a continuous state, but one that updates itself rapidly. In my philosophy, the only difference between myself now and myself ten years ago would be the number of frames that have passed in the time between. How then do I decide when I as an organism have made a significant change? Do I say 'Today is my birthday, so I must be significantly different from myself the day before'?, or do I say 'Well, last month I was a buddhist and now I'm a muslim, so now I have significantly advanced from that point in time'?

It's impossible to put specific markers on mental progress, as it moves so fluidly... the only objective way to do this is to find a means of breaking down mental progress into quantifiable units. To me, this cannot be any simpler than using the brain's refresh rate: this is the smallest observable change in brain states. I simply reason that since we exist in a different state every moment, and over very long periods of time we observe large changes, and it is impossible to identify any other kind of transitional point higher than this, we simply must be a different person every time we refresh, albeit only minutely different.

I don't think I've explained this well enough, but I'll post it anyway and if you don't understand I'll clarify it. *shrugs* Text is so last century.

I'm well aware how the brain works (well to what extent modern science understands it) i've been reading about that for quite a few years. I'm not sure what that has to do with what I originally quoted though.

[skywalker]

Originally Posted by Iscariot

I'm well aware how the brain works (well to what extent modern science understands it) i've been reading about that for quite a few years. I'm not sure what that has to do with what I originally quoted though.

What I'm saying is that there is nothing constant about the brain. Nothing which can be found at birth and also at death. It will be in one state now and another in the next, for the rest of your life. Similarly, whatever we use to describe our personality is far from constant, becuase it is found, as you said, in this same organ in our skull.

Building on that, I say there is no reason to believe we are in any way continuously existing. For all we know, our life span is only a few seconds: it could be that the being which is experiencing this very moment in your body will die (cease to exist) in the next while still passing its memory to the next being created out of the next brain state. I'm not trying to push pseudoscience here, all I'm saying is that the only thing we can identify as the core of a person is not even stable, so there is no way to prove that we are living in a continuous stream, as opposed to a set of frames instantly occurring and dissappearing so rapidly that it appears to be a moving stream. Since memory is retained from this experience, it makes no difference even if we are trillions of entities being generated in an electrical impulse and dying as the impulse fades.

I mentioned above that this is irrelevant in the end, because it wouldn't change anything about the way we live our lives. It only means that for a soul to exist, there would probably have to be one for each of these moments in which we exist, which, I have to stress, are distinct entities from each other.

In summary, our consciousness is an illusion created by rapidly successive(and brief) states of self-awareness spanning our lives. This does not help the idea of the soul being a singular, constant element.

[thegreenfairy]

i think of a soul as like a substance or texture to the nonphysical side whereas i see thoughts and emotions more like colors and shapes. lol. that sounds pretty flakey - i know - but i'm not coming with a better metaphor.

and yes, for the record - i am aware of how incredibly ignorant and delusional my beleif in a soul may be to many of you.