Do you believe in a soul?

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Do you believe in a soul or a personality that is seperate from the way you behave? I believe in that and it causes a lot of clashes with people. I don't define myself by the way I behave. Especially because all of the chemical imbalances make me behave in ways that just aren't me.

Some of my behaviors are me, but the majority aren't. Especially when you're talking about my body language, mannerisms and awkwardness. In some ways judging people by this is just as shallow as judging appearance.

It seems like the people who are the most interested in me tend to judge my superficial behavior the most. I generally push those people away because I find them incredibly shallow. Just as shallow as guys who get interested in girls because of big boobs.

I enjoy the internet because most of my superficial behavior is invisible. Except for my writing style. My writing style is weird a lot of the time, so people on the internet love to judge me because of my writing style. Those people tend to judge superficial behavior.

I know this post is weird. I really feel the chemical imbalance right now because I'm sick. It's like being high on drugs. I know a lot of skeptictards and extreme atheists will judge me and call me a huge aspie because of this post. I don't care. I'm not addicted to this forum anymore.

One of my very first posts was in response to someone with a very similar situation although it seems that he is no longer active on these forums. Anyway, I simply referred him to reading a book, then I later on received a message from him after he had read said book, and the contents of the P-M is as follows...

While I definitely don't believe in free will I also don't believe that we're utter slaves to our environments either. What's going on within us has too much complexity.

A few key examples:

1) Certain values are instilled in us, ie. 'this is good' or 'this is bad', and some of the right-way-to-be we just pick up from other cultural influences.
2) We have an internalized take on ourselves with respect to hopes, dreams, where we're going, etc.. and this is something that occurs in a much longer view than the immediate moment.

Both of those typically have a way of stopping immediate circumstances from dominating us, like having the sight of a couple million dollars turn us into murderers or one sharp zip of failure or hardship causing compulsory suicide. We resist all kinds of scams and snake oil all day long because we've acquired faculties to keep ourselves equilibrated over time - thus most educated people tend not to walk into a rally, hear a utopian ideologue speak, and march out of the auditorium goose-stepping in uniforms.

I had a friend who I was talking to about the issue of automation of the workforce, UBI, and the need to perhaps build smaller and smaller scale houses so that the increasing number of people below the current $$ poverty line can pay their bills - his argument was that would be a terrible idea in that it would create sprawling slums and that we'd be better off pushing for population decrease. I get the gist - ie. those places would create sprawling ghettos, the kids would be thugs, and many of them would be incarcerated or dead by the time they reached/would have reached adulthood. I also recently started listening to George Lakeoff's lectures on neurology, because he seemed to be articulating something that I wasn't hearing other people articulate well, but with his stance also - like my friend - seemed to come a complete docile acceptance of circumstances as such absolute shapers of people that the people themselves seem to have no control whatsoever over what they do, who they are, how they react, etc. etc.. and I've seen that increasingly where people are taking their reductive materialist view of neurology too seriously.

My problem with both of those:

a) My argument to my friend - it depends how this is structured. If you can proactively find ways to channel these people's evolutionary drives through games, sports, cultural activies, etc.. and keep these places from becoming culturally and sanitationally blighted - it's a different story. Really, by the time we hit the automation/labor wall hard enough we'll probably have enough virtual entertainment that a lot of the criminal impulses people would have otherwise had can be turned in at first-person shooter games and what not. Regardless, IMHO, it's coming and if we have to play totalitarian games like sterilizing the unemployed it would mean we've absolutely failed to put any effort forward in actually thinking our way through the matter, which is quite possible if you hand such decisions off to bureaucrats but that's precisely why you don't do that.

b) My argument against the new hopeless-passivity market where we're just natural forces, no one actually thinks (ie. there's no such thing), and that there's no point in doing anything - since we already don't do anything - aside from hope from good human weather; it really ignores the practical complexity of what I mentioned above. That 'I' experience does create urges in us that a zombie couldn't have, and if you want to get down to it I don't think you can really have a philosophic zombie unless it's been programmed by a non-zombie to emulate its behavior and styles of thinking - ie. a zombie can't evolve pangs of moral discomfort or driving urges to transcend either it's current state or even it's current state of being in total. Otherwise we're wrapped in zombies right now, I'm typing on one right now and have another one in my pocket, and so far their humanness seems minimal at best and really imprinted in its entirety.

So in that sense I don't buy neuro-pessimism or neuro-pacifism. The consequence of my not buying it - I do have to acknowledge a reserved prioritization zone or circuit in the brain that causes it to actively attend issues of fate, destiny, and transcendental goals. That part of us seems to separate as the observer as opposed to the observed.

As for the 'soul' in a metaphysical sense, I think the idea is loaded down with so much cultural baggage that it's like the word 'God' - if you bring it up thinking shuts off and people divide into their habitual tribes. I would at least say that the failings of neuro-pessimism suggest that we're doing a pretty poor idea of assessing how much our 'I' is involved in our governance, as well as our emotions, and we could discuss that but I think that might be a much easier conversation to have rather than jumping off into eastern and western mysticism and various nosebleed metaphysics, especially when that creates the same knee-jerk tribal/political reflex that I'd rather avoid.

I believe in that. I agree that behavior is separate from that, and there can be various levels of harmony or dissonance between your soul and behavior. Some people's behavior is more in harmony with their souls. Some intentionally behave differently. Some just can't help behaving differently.



With whom? Can you write something more about these clashes?



People tend to judge superficial things like appearance and behavior first, because these are the first things they see when they observe a person. It takes a much longer time to figure out someone's personality. And how are people supposed to know that there is a mismatch between your behavior and your personality which is caused by chemical imbalances influencing your behavior, unless you tell them? Some people will be able to "feel" that it is the case, but most people won't be able to figure this out and will judge you by the way you behave. Unless you explain them everything in an honest conversation.



So maybe they just don't know you very well. But again, you can't expect people who just met you to know a lot about you, especially when it comes to non-superficial things.



Aren't you just as shallow if you push away people based on your assumptions about what they think about you, instead of trying to get to know them better first, or asking them what they actually like about you?

The only difference is that getting interested in a girl because she has big boobs is "positive" shallowness (positive = causing action), whereas refusing to get to know someone because of your unconfirmed assumptions about that person is "negative" shallowness (negative = preventing action, or causing lack of action).

Coming back to your example with boobs - negative shallowness would be if a guy refused to date a girl just because she has small boobs. Based on this example, I think it is clear that positive shallowness is actually less shallow than negative shallowness.

Positive shallowness is about having shallow preferences. Negative shallowness is about having shallow deal-breakers. There is a world of difference between these two attitudes.

What puzzles me is consciousness, as the ability to experience. Otherwise, I'm somewhat personally convinced that man is no more than a mechanical machine, be it deterministic or not. One might with all one's powerful knowledge build a machine that thinks, but is it conscious then? I only need to know how consciousness arises in the first place.

If determinism is true, then punishment is still justified, except for retribution as a cause.

The current research on consciousness, makes the analogy that it is like the internet. It does not make decisions it just impliments the decisions of the subconcious in the outside world.

The internet doesnt decide what you read, view or buy, it just lets you do it. That is consciousness.

It the most basic terms matter is another form of energy and energy is eternal. There may end up being many states of energy that are dependant on past exeriences, so in a sense an eternal memory or soul.

Here is a short story The Egg by Andy Weir (The Martian)

It has a unique answer to the question "Do you believe in a soul?"

That relates well to this I think:
http://azothalchemy.org/azoth_ritual.htm

One of the more interesting descriptions I've heard of the nirvanic experience is it being called The Great Day 'Be With Us'. It's the day where the sun rises and never sets again (in a grand metaphysical sense). The day when one realizes they're floating on a vast sea in a bubble and they figure out that they can pop that bubble and rejoin the rest of the universe in a sort of timelessness. I believe most of that came from Manly P Hall's Self Unfoldment by Discipline of Realization, if not possibly AP Sinnett.

Something interesting to dabble with on that was the Google Tech Talk on zero universe with Ron Garret. Truthfully I don't know whether he has enough expertise in physics to be able to speculate in a particularly well-guided manner but he made it sound like this was all just separate reality bubbles colliding and no actual shared universe at least that we're interacting with. Might not be true at all but it's at least food for interesting contemplations.

I reject the idea of a non-material entity what can exist independent of the body. I believe I am a physical being in a physical university. I simply cannot accept the notion of souls, spirits and ghosts that can exist independent of physical bodies.

It seems that you define others by the way they behave. Don't they also have souls just like you do?

Am I still an extreme atheist if I don't judge you for it? Do I have to hand back my extreme atheist card?

I used to believe in souls. It's a common-enough belief to hold. I just now think it's incorrect. I don't buy the 'evidence' of OOB/near death experiences. I suspect that something interesting is happening neurologically in those cases that can tell us something about the dying process. There's no need to reach for that sort of dualism to explain these phenomena.

I think the way I'd put it is that the picture's frustratingly incongruent.

When I was going down the physicalist line of thought I found a lot of things happening in my life that I'd have to paper over rather badly to explain but at the same time almost no one's account of souls really holds particularly well against the rest when their compared to one another and absolutely no one's religions held that test. It's a lot easier, provisionally and for day-to-day living, to call the analytical structures you can depend upon and say sure - souls aren't real, deities aren't real, we can assume that we cease to exist when we die, all of that seems to fit square within a certain observed rule set. At the same time there does seem to be either an exception within that rule set or a glitch in it that exposes it as subsidiary within a larger and mostly unseen (and if true barely understood) structure or set. It doesn't lend itself to particularly straight-forward explanations, there have been authors and thinkers who've been able to rend the veil in the right ways but even at that it seems like the best they can do is give just the shortest glimpse of the context of such claims and the behavior that suggests deeper anomalies underpinning most of what we see and understand.

I would say that when we talk about 'souls' - it's a cultural word, a container, and we have absolutely no clue what it means, much like we might have when trying to discuss gods, goddesses, angles, demons, etc.. If there's anything real that resembles them we'll likely find it again at a date where we'd never think to call them that again nor contextualize them in quite so visceral a manner.

whatever you call it, I long have felt that a ghost was inside my machine and influencing its behavior. I cannot tolerate the thought that this hellworld is all that exists, that there is no heaven or greater existence in a higher or alternate dimension of being. I must believe that I have an eternal spirit/soul that will outlive/transcend this existence.

I sometimes wonder if we have Souls, but this is not what we think it is; that maybe the Soul is just the core vital spark that makes our consciousness possible by building upon it or around it.

It makes me think of phrases people say when in the presence of great art or music and they say they "Felt it in their Soul" kind of like when a person has a hunch or "Gut Feeling". They're attributing a response coming from something apart of them, but not necessarily them.

Maybe the Soul survives and takes with it a trace of the person it was a part of, but the mind is discarded and the brain decays.

I'm starting to dive into Jung right now and as far as I can tell with his claim of the archetypes he seems to be making quite a direct case for the sort of Platonic background to the universe that someone like Sir Roger Penrose might make, just that he's validating the ideas from the clinical psychology and comparative religion direction. If I understand what he's saying correctly its that archetypes even antedate symbols themselves and that common or powerful symbols/mandalas are the result of the archetypes, which are strictly structure and hold no content themselves, being clothed and fitted with concepts and emblems that we can understand. He also makes a clear distinction between archetypes and types, ie. he's not talking about something like a meme where it catches on when people see it for it's internal practical value but rather people will be using and employing archetypes that they've never heard about, read about, etc. and they can arrive at symbol sets independently that have come up before but which that person would have no access to (he gives the example of the schizophrenic who had a Mithraic adept/initiator complex and all of the symbols the man were using weren't available in print until four years after Jung had talked to him).

This is also another reason why I tend to shake my head at people's attempts to either over-extend Occam's razor to shave off things that they personally don't see a need for in the universe (something that empiricism reflexively has to overpower - otherwise there'd be no advancement) or on the other hand people trying to metaphysically explain the universe in verities based on what they can imagine with their capacity for imagination formulated on the basis of what they currently know or believe they know. I think if science has showed us anything repeatedly its that the universe is doing what it's doing and structured the way it is regardless of what we know or don't know at any given point, that and fault or shortage of human imagination will never square a theoretical or philosophic map to the universe simply because the person entertaining the delusions or falsehoods in question had their heart in the right place. If the later were true and 'heart' was what made successes or failures of experiments the scientific method would never have gotten off of the ground. Nature isn't inclined to give out participation trophies and for thousands of years part of the litmus test for human survival was that if your sense of reality mapped on to actuality poorly you'd pay the difference with your life.

I think another thing we constantly have to consider is frame. For example in my daily life I mostly function like a physicalist with some direct/routine nods to the more metaphysical aspects that I like to staple in. Most of us find reductive materialism highly intuitive and almost common sense because it seems to fit the relevant range that we operate in like a glove. It's also part of why, with so many of the most profound and truly odd/unexplainable experiences I have had their effect on my thinking will last a bit but overtime, with the constant wash of daily events I'm almost forced to question the veracity of such experiences not because I've found any facts or new insights into the nature of those experiences that would disqualify them but simply because they don't at all fit the relevant range of what I see and experience on a daily basis. I've had many times as well where I can re-immerse myself in another state, see that it just seems obvious that consciousness is eternal and regardless of whether we're at all human-like after death or whether any trace of imprint from a life is still there that it all goes on but all of that can be snapped away almost as fast by a later set of circumstances, really profound observation of a different rule set, and it can start looking like the dream I might have had the night before where I was getting profound epiphanies about one thing or another but lost it within a minute of waking up.

I think all of these things, especially the frame problem, do a lot of damage to our objectivity. It's also why I'm increasingly trying not to sweat people's emotional knee-jerks to one type of information or another, especially when I said above that I see it enough in myself to understand how and why it happens to people.