3 ms·

By your standards, a "soul" is also a "thing" which science struggles to explain, right?

• Nevermark 4y ago
  Informal reasoning doesn't mean subjective reasoning. Just because someone believes something, doesn't mean there is a compelling argument it exists. But if something can be studied by many independent people, with strong agreement not based on passed-on beliefs, then there is likely to be something there. I.e. I am unaware of a universal experience of souls, or informal arguments for souls that are compelling. I am aware of informal arguments for existence ("I am, therefore I exist") and consciousness ("I experience myself, my own thinking, even this thought itself, so I am conscious of myself"). In both cases, the vast (vast, vast) majority of humans conclude they do exist and are conscious. And the informal reasoning is very strong, even informally tautological. Soul's don't have that kind of support.
  • epgui 4y ago
    That's reassuring! However, I find bringing the concept of "soul" into the equation to be helpful, because many people intuitively believe in such things. If you ask them if souls are important, they'll say yes. If you ask them if something special happens to souls after death, they might say yes. But ask them to define what they mean when they say "soul", and you'll get a ton of hand-waving. People can believe very strongly in things they can't even describe or point to: this always puzzles me, because it shows that people don't even know what it is they believe in in the first place. Whether the concept of "consciousness" is as ridiculous as the concept of a "soul" or not, I have found that they both suffer from the same definition problem. There are many, many concepts which throughout History entire societies have shared a belief in, but which didn't map to real things that could be defined precisely. A "soul" is one of those, but other examples abound in the History of science and in the History of medicine.