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Notes for those planning to sell your soul online: eBay specifically prohibits such transactions. [1] Compared to some online bans, the reasoning is pleasingly

Notes for those planning to sell your soul online: eBay specifically prohibits such transactions. [1] Compared to some online bans, the reasoning is pleasingly coherent. eBay does not allow the auctioning of human souls for the following reasons: If the soul does not exist, eBay could not allow the auctioning of the soul because there would be nothing to sell. However, if the soul does exist then, in accordance with eBay's policy on human parts and remains, we would not allow the auctioning of human souls. This is unfortunate. eBay seems perfect as souls are by definition somewhat used. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/soul-listing-policy-ebay-2012- https://www.businessinsider.com/soul-listing-policy-ebay-201...

the_only_law 5y ago
Given what I know from retrocomputing eBay, I imagine people would try to sell their souls at much more than they’re actually worth.
- classified 5y ago
  But in the long term the market would determine a fair price. Assuming demons are rational economic actors, that is.
ithinkso 5y ago
To this day, constructive mathematicians at eBay are trying to close the remaining loophole in the ban's reasoning
- hodgesrm 5y ago
  Given the subject matter, I'm going to hazard a guess they are somehow getting stuck on the Axiom of Choice.
- jesuslop 5y ago
  They could use a paraconsistent logician also
- a1369209993 5y ago
  Not really. The axiom of excluded middle is false* because it's a universal quantification, and consequently includes pathalogical cases like "This proposition is false."; there are plenty of specific classes of proposions on which resticted versions of excluded middle are valid, just like there are plenty of classes of sets (eg all well-founded sets) that have well defined membership despite Russel's paradox. *: Give or take technicalities.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    I've seen the law of excluded middle used to deny the existence of platonic idealism. But I really don't get it. I'd love to understand your explanation better. If soul=psyche (as in Plato) then it seems easy to sell access to the attention. But if soul is referring to an ideal noetic form, then it's hard to understand how immaterial ownership would work without a material intermediary.
    - a1369209993 5y ago
      The axiom of excluded middle is that for every proposition, either that proposion is true or it is false. That's a universal quantification, so any counterexample makes it false. "This proposition is false." is such a counterexample (it can't be true, because than it's false and your logic is inconsistent, and it can't be false, because than it's true and ditto). This reasoning applies to pretty much any recognizable system of propositional logic (including, per Godel nineteen-thirty-something, systems that explicitly prohibit the basic self-referential counter example, as long as they're expressive enough to describe arithmetic), so it's at least colloquially correct to simply dismiss it as false, even if the pedantic version is that it's a axiom that cannot be part of a consistent set of axioms. The theorem of included middle doesn't prevent specific classes of propositions from being exclusively divided into true and false, though. As a simple example, any proposition of the form "natural number SSS...SS0 is prime" will be either true or false, and there's nothing inconsistent about (say) "for every proposion P matching regex /(S)*0 is prime/, either P is true or P is false". Just like there's nothing weird about a linter that can reliably tell you that "while(1) {...}" doesn't terminate, halting problem or not.
dv_dt 5y ago
If it were a financial market, one could perhaps sell the option to buy a soul pending resolution of the matter.
- mimixco 5y ago
  You've just invented a new kind of "futures trading" and the mother of all kinds of innovative financial scams. Awesome! Someone should definitely start a business trading in "souls" and NFTs seem to be of the same ilk, so you guys are onto something.
  - classified 5y ago
    Couldn't the Bockchain be used to make sure souls can be optioned away only once? We would have finally found a use for the Blockchain after all!
    - mimixco 5y ago
      Fantastic! Surely someone will torture you for your key, no? This needs to be an episode of Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell.
      - classified 5y ago
        Even with the key the transaction cannot be deleted. The eternity of the soul is a perfect fit for an append-only ledger.
    - dv_dt 5y ago
      Starting a timer to see how long it takes for a soulchain to be offered.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      This already exists - that's how Heaven and Hell keep track of souls. You know why it's so hot in Hell? Because that's where the exhaust ports of the AC units cooling the soulchain mining servers are.
dkersten 5y ago
Surely the modern way to sell your soul online is through NFTs?
- praptak 5y ago
  Not necessarily. It is speculated that the Devil can solve any mathematical problem and thus human crypto is useless to him, as he can just reverse all hashes, compute the discrete logarithms and factor arbitrarily large numbers. So an NFT (or any other cryptographic artifact) is rather something that Satan can offer you for your soul.
  - alangibson 5y ago
    That's not the way math works. G-d himself can't reverse a hash. Before you go invoking the "miracle" loophole, consider that miracles are logically impossible. If an impossible thing happens, then it was not in fact impossible. We just didn't understand the rules.
    - ithinkso 5y ago
      That's how maths works. Hashes are trivially reversible, all it takes is time, no miracle needed. Oracles in complexity theory are a bread and butter concept
      - pjbeam 5y ago
        If two different x can produce the same y information is lost on the hash transformation. Finding _an x_ for your y is not the same as finding _the x_. That said, Laplace's Demon is, well, a demon. Presumably the devil can get the demon to unspool time to see what the input was and the math doesn't matter, collisions or not.
        ithinkso 5y ago
        In cryptography either you only need 'an x', in cases that the original x does not matter, or if it does, then you can just as easily find all x of size less than large enough N and find 'the x', it is still solely restricted by time. Laplace's demon, information loss, Landauer's principle etc. are at most tangentially related to the problem discussed
prpl 5y ago
I tried to buy a soul ~2004 but got the auction cancelled when I saw there was a duplicate auction
- hansvm 5y ago
  So long as they were transparent about the soul having been split I'm not sure I see the issue.
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    Didn't you read the ending of Harry Potter? Split souls are not something most people would want around!
abecedarius 5y ago
About a dozen people sold their souls on Twitter a while back, so there's another venue. E.g. https://twitter.com/liminal_warmth/status/1421350119023136770 https://twitter.com/liminal_warmth/status/142135011902313677... Terms: https://liminalwarmth.com/contract-for-sale-of-soul/ https://liminalwarmth.com/contract-for-sale-of-soul/ Discussion: https://liminalwarmth.com/the-questionable-ethics-of-buying-and-selling-souls/ https://liminalwarmth.com/the-questionable-ethics-of-buying-... As a total atheist I'd still say don't do it. It's not farfetched to interpret the word 'soul' as a future high-res brain scan runnable in emulation on future hardware. There may be other pitfalls.
- samatman 5y ago
  My argument against this is as follows: would you sell your dignity for $10? Now, my dignity doesn't exist in any sense which makes selling it meaningful. So it's kind of like free money. But really it isn't. There's someone out there who can say "I own samatman's dignity, and I got it for cheap". I'm a guy who sold his dignity, and everyone knows it. I feel like people would judge me for that. There are definitely people out there who will judge you for selling your soul. It doesn't have to exist for that to be real. Is it actually worth ten bucks? I expect there aren't many people who would see that and say "oh cool, you sold your soul for less than a sandwich in SF! You must be an interesting person, I think better of you now that I heard that".
  - diegoperini 5y ago
    Humans usually put their dignity on rent.
    - tuckfrump666 5y ago
      Nobody has come up with a SaaS for renting your dignity
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        Instagram and YouTube are two known sites for doing just that. You loan out your dignity when you become an influencer, and have it come back when everyone forgot about that chapter of your life.
Adverblessly 5y ago
They brought up Death Note, but not Jigoku Shoujo ("Hell Girl"), presumably because one is vastly more popular and well-known than the other. Going by Jigoku Shoujo you can actually sell your soul online, though it is a bit closer to a "contact me" form, you only really get to buy "revenge" and only on one person. Definitely a far cry from what you'd expect of modern online commerce.
swayvil 5y ago
As I understand it, "soul" is synonymous with "attention". That is : you direct it and concentrate it. And it is prone to distraction (temptation?). Given that, we are all well familiar with our soul. And its manipulation is a common everyday occurrence.
- mbfg 5y ago
  I think many religious people would disagree with your definition. That's the problem with any discussions of the "soul". It is poorly defined.
  - swayvil 5y ago
    Better to refer to an observation than a definition, when discussing real stuff. It's the more solid reference. We can observe attention. Can we observe this alternative to which you refer?
    - mbfg 5y ago
      No of course not. However, changing a definition away from what billions of people believe doesn't seem productive. If you want to talk about attention, cool, but call it attention. Most religious people don't consider the soul to be a synonym for attention. It's similar to how some people want to redefine god as the universe. Ok, then just call it the universe, doing otherwise drags all kinds of assumptions and presuppositions that muddy the waters.
      - swayvil 5y ago
        Then you refer to a fantasy. Billions are immersed in fantasy. One might call that a classically religious debacle.
        mbfg 5y ago
        I'm not saying that's what i believe. I don't believe a soul exists, or could exist. But I'm saying that's what billions of people believe. It doesn't help to redefine away a problem.
varelse 5y ago
Sell your soul: not OK Sell your best years to the man(tm): 100% OK
vinceguidry 5y ago
You're really better off selling it to a demon anyway. If you get nothing out of it then when you get to the afterlife you can convincingly claim that the demon reneged on the deal.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

the_only_law 5y ago

Given what I know from retrocomputing eBay, I imagine people would try to sell their souls at much more than they’re actually worth.

classified 5y ago
But in the long term the market would determine a fair price. Assuming demons are rational economic actors, that is.

ithinkso 5y ago

To this day, constructive mathematicians at eBay are trying to close the remaining loophole in the ban's reasoning

hodgesrm 5y ago
Given the subject matter, I'm going to hazard a guess they are somehow getting stuck on the Axiom of Choice.
jesuslop 5y ago
They could use a paraconsistent logician also
a1369209993 5y ago
Not really. The axiom of excluded middle is false* because it's a universal quantification, and consequently includes pathalogical cases like "This proposition is false."; there are plenty of specific classes of proposions on which resticted versions of excluded middle are valid, just like there are plenty of classes of sets (eg all well-founded sets) that have well defined membership despite Russel's paradox. *: Give or take technicalities.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  I've seen the law of excluded middle used to deny the existence of platonic idealism. But I really don't get it. I'd love to understand your explanation better. If soul=psyche (as in Plato) then it seems easy to sell access to the attention. But if soul is referring to an ideal noetic form, then it's hard to understand how immaterial ownership would work without a material intermediary.
  - a1369209993 5y ago
    The axiom of excluded middle is that for every proposition, either that proposion is true or it is false. That's a universal quantification, so any counterexample makes it false. "This proposition is false." is such a counterexample (it can't be true, because than it's false and your logic is inconsistent, and it can't be false, because than it's true and ditto). This reasoning applies to pretty much any recognizable system of propositional logic (including, per Godel nineteen-thirty-something, systems that explicitly prohibit the basic self-referential counter example, as long as they're expressive enough to describe arithmetic), so it's at least colloquially correct to simply dismiss it as false, even if the pedantic version is that it's a axiom that cannot be part of a consistent set of axioms. The theorem of included middle doesn't prevent specific classes of propositions from being exclusively divided into true and false, though. As a simple example, any proposition of the form "natural number SSS...SS0 is prime" will be either true or false, and there's nothing inconsistent about (say) "for every proposion P matching regex /(S)*0 is prime/, either P is true or P is false". Just like there's nothing weird about a linter that can reliably tell you that "while(1) {...}" doesn't terminate, halting problem or not.

dv_dt 5y ago

If it were a financial market, one could perhaps sell the option to buy a soul pending resolution of the matter.

mimixco 5y ago
You've just invented a new kind of "futures trading" and the mother of all kinds of innovative financial scams. Awesome! Someone should definitely start a business trading in "souls" and NFTs seem to be of the same ilk, so you guys are onto something.
- classified 5y ago
  Couldn't the Bockchain be used to make sure souls can be optioned away only once? We would have finally found a use for the Blockchain after all!
  - mimixco 5y ago
    Fantastic! Surely someone will torture you for your key, no? This needs to be an episode of Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell.
    - classified 5y ago
      Even with the key the transaction cannot be deleted. The eternity of the soul is a perfect fit for an append-only ledger.
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    Starting a timer to see how long it takes for a soulchain to be offered.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    This already exists - that's how Heaven and Hell keep track of souls. You know why it's so hot in Hell? Because that's where the exhaust ports of the AC units cooling the soulchain mining servers are.

dkersten 5y ago

Surely the modern way to sell your soul online is through NFTs?

praptak 5y ago
Not necessarily. It is speculated that the Devil can solve any mathematical problem and thus human crypto is useless to him, as he can just reverse all hashes, compute the discrete logarithms and factor arbitrarily large numbers. So an NFT (or any other cryptographic artifact) is rather something that Satan can offer you for your soul.
- alangibson 5y ago
  That's not the way math works. G-d himself can't reverse a hash. Before you go invoking the "miracle" loophole, consider that miracles are logically impossible. If an impossible thing happens, then it was not in fact impossible. We just didn't understand the rules.
  - ithinkso 5y ago
    That's how maths works. Hashes are trivially reversible, all it takes is time, no miracle needed. Oracles in complexity theory are a bread and butter concept
    - pjbeam 5y ago
      If two different x can produce the same y information is lost on the hash transformation. Finding _an x_ for your y is not the same as finding _the x_. That said, Laplace's Demon is, well, a demon. Presumably the devil can get the demon to unspool time to see what the input was and the math doesn't matter, collisions or not.
      - ithinkso 5y ago
        In cryptography either you only need 'an x', in cases that the original x does not matter, or if it does, then you can just as easily find all x of size less than large enough N and find 'the x', it is still solely restricted by time. Laplace's demon, information loss, Landauer's principle etc. are at most tangentially related to the problem discussed

prpl 5y ago

I tried to buy a soul ~2004 but got the auction cancelled when I saw there was a duplicate auction

hansvm 5y ago
So long as they were transparent about the soul having been split I'm not sure I see the issue.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  Didn't you read the ending of Harry Potter? Split souls are not something most people would want around!

abecedarius 5y ago

About a dozen people sold their souls on Twitter a while back, so there's another venue. E.g. https://twitter.com/liminal_warmth/status/1421350119023136770 https://twitter.com/liminal_warmth/status/142135011902313677... Terms: https://liminalwarmth.com/contract-for-sale-of-soul/ https://liminalwarmth.com/contract-for-sale-of-soul/ Discussion: https://liminalwarmth.com/the-questionable-ethics-of-buying-and-selling-souls/ https://liminalwarmth.com/the-questionable-ethics-of-buying-... As a total atheist I'd still say don't do it. It's not farfetched to interpret the word 'soul' as a future high-res brain scan runnable in emulation on future hardware. There may be other pitfalls.

samatman 5y ago
My argument against this is as follows: would you sell your dignity for $10? Now, my dignity doesn't exist in any sense which makes selling it meaningful. So it's kind of like free money. But really it isn't. There's someone out there who can say "I own samatman's dignity, and I got it for cheap". I'm a guy who sold his dignity, and everyone knows it. I feel like people would judge me for that. There are definitely people out there who will judge you for selling your soul. It doesn't have to exist for that to be real. Is it actually worth ten bucks? I expect there aren't many people who would see that and say "oh cool, you sold your soul for less than a sandwich in SF! You must be an interesting person, I think better of you now that I heard that".
- diegoperini 5y ago
  Humans usually put their dignity on rent.
  - tuckfrump666 5y ago
    Nobody has come up with a SaaS for renting your dignity
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Instagram and YouTube are two known sites for doing just that. You loan out your dignity when you become an influencer, and have it come back when everyone forgot about that chapter of your life.

Adverblessly 5y ago

They brought up Death Note, but not Jigoku Shoujo ("Hell Girl"), presumably because one is vastly more popular and well-known than the other. Going by Jigoku Shoujo you can actually sell your soul online, though it is a bit closer to a "contact me" form, you only really get to buy "revenge" and only on one person. Definitely a far cry from what you'd expect of modern online commerce.

swayvil 5y ago

As I understand it, "soul" is synonymous with "attention". That is : you direct it and concentrate it. And it is prone to distraction (temptation?). Given that, we are all well familiar with our soul. And its manipulation is a common everyday occurrence.

mbfg 5y ago
I think many religious people would disagree with your definition. That's the problem with any discussions of the "soul". It is poorly defined.
- swayvil 5y ago
  Better to refer to an observation than a definition, when discussing real stuff. It's the more solid reference. We can observe attention. Can we observe this alternative to which you refer?
  - mbfg 5y ago
    No of course not. However, changing a definition away from what billions of people believe doesn't seem productive. If you want to talk about attention, cool, but call it attention. Most religious people don't consider the soul to be a synonym for attention. It's similar to how some people want to redefine god as the universe. Ok, then just call it the universe, doing otherwise drags all kinds of assumptions and presuppositions that muddy the waters.
    - swayvil 5y ago
      Then you refer to a fantasy. Billions are immersed in fantasy. One might call that a classically religious debacle.
      - mbfg 5y ago
        I'm not saying that's what i believe. I don't believe a soul exists, or could exist. But I'm saying that's what billions of people believe. It doesn't help to redefine away a problem.

varelse 5y ago

Sell your soul: not OK Sell your best years to the man(tm): 100% OK

vinceguidry 5y ago

You're really better off selling it to a demon anyway. If you get nothing out of it then when you get to the afterlife you can convincingly claim that the demon reneged on the deal.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]