Ask Lemmy

No

Sort of, not in a religious way.

Like I don't think there will be anything special that you get to keep with you, the "soul" is just a vessel to experience things, nothing special about it. As in: There aren't any hero stories, no "dragon reborn"s, no Karma. Just randomness. This moment, you are a human, when you die, your next moments could be a bug crawling next to you when you died, or newborn kitten to a pregnant cat in your backyard, or a cockroach about to get stepped on. Then some time again, you will be another human. Or perhaps proximity doesn't matter and you could be born on some alien planet far away. There is no concious god, its just pure randomness.

As if you are an immortal camera and your body is the microSD card adaptor, your memories are the microSD card, your experiences are just what the camera sees.

Sorry if my beliefs are silly, but I think there is some part of living beings that current level of technology cant quite measure yet. I think it has something to do with mass energy equivalence, maybe when we die, we become some energy that just bounces around until we become something else.

Its like people used to think the Earth orbited the sun. People used to not be able to see germs, or atoms, then we went from seeing atoms, to protons, electrons, then we say those even smaller parts.

Perhaps there is something that can't be measured yet. Perhaps it may never be able to be measured.

The way I see it:

It's either:

[1] Nonexistence --> I exist --> Nonexistence (and never exist again)

Or

[2] Nonexistence --> I exist --> Nonexistence --> I exist again (repeat for a long time, possibly forever)

Option one breaks my brain, so I just choose to go with option 2 to keep my sanity.

Maybe is just my monkey brain being silly, idk, but our minds have to invent these little stories to keep ourself sane. We as non-omniscient beings cannot objectively observe the universe, is all just biased subjective interpretations that are unique to us.

But regardless, this is the only chance I get to experience "this" life, "next" time I might be the bug the gets crushed by a neighbor that "this" life used to live with. So um... yea, thanks for coming to my ted talk

Take it sleezy 🤷‍♂️

🌌 (Your next life will be on a planet in a solar system with 3 suns, good luck with the chaotic eras lol)

(I must sound so stupid right? Given that this is Lemmy and eveyone here is an Atheist. Its fine, just leave my monkey brain believe its weird theories 😅)

Nope. When I die, there is no longer a me of any sort; just any media and memory that captures some moment of when I still was until those too fade.

Eh... No, but its nice to think about it.

As stated by many others, evidence is required to prove something. However, the stories we tell ourselves are comforting, so I wont fault anyone who does. Up until the point where people start going "My sky-dad could totally beat up your sky-dad", that can Belgium right off...

I'm going to make a guess that majority of people looking at this question have grown up in countries with Christian cultural background. Meaning even if they aren't religious, their more or less subconscious believes about the nature of reality may involve some vague ideas about souls, absolute good and evil and so on. Separate entities in a hierarchical world. From that perspective, reincarnation is never going to sound anything but magical.

But if you drop your belief in you as a separate entity, literally everything is a "reincarnation" of you, if you want to use that word. But it's not the "you" that you think you are. Reality is prior to your thought about it, as thoughts are just imperfect reflections of reality.

You get a disconnect when you try to take a concept like reincarnation from a thought-framework such as Buddhism, without being REALLY FUCKING INTIMATELY STEEPED IN IT, and then try to fit it into whatever dualistic worldview you're likely holding in this largely Chisto-capitalistic world that is hell bent on making sure you always feel separate, alone and not enough.

It really is like taking a power plug from the EU and then being surprised it doesn't fit in the socket in the USA. And then going off about what a stupid design EU has while not ever even considering if the socket is even meant to receive that kind of a plug (because in YOUR opinion, your socket must be perfect in every way and could never ever be questioned).

Get Waking Up by Sam Harris... Or read Adyashanti, Rupert Spira, Loch Kelly, Jayasara, Kiran Trace, Christopher Wallis, Bernardo Kastrup, many more. It's all available out there but unfortunately a lot gets dismissed because "nooo muh materialistic worldview that is required for the current capitalistic hellscape that's slowly destroying our world can't possibly be wrong". So many people are pushing the collective cart towards doom, complain about the doom and the cart but never question what they so deeply believe that they won't just stop pushing.

It's hard to say exactly. I wouldn't put it past the dev(s) to have potentially put something like "The Egg" in, so potentially yes, though we'd have no way of testing for it.

Story by Andy Weir here: https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI

We live in an infinite universe. As such, it seems hubristic to me to believe that we have, more or less, nature figured out.

I don't feel compelled to believe in the soul as some strange sort of object that is continuously reincarnated towards a great purpose. But if we consider consciousness as an energy of its own kind, then it should hold true that it cannot be created or destroyed, only change form. This could mean that the consciousness that resides in the body could move between different life forms like a fluid, freely mixing and melding with others, filling a new vessel as necessary.

I see it (or at least some form of it) as a realistic possibility. Let's say that consciousness is a completely physical thing, a certain set of chemicals, cells and molecules in my brain that define what is "me". That would mean that given infinite time, something that possesses "my" consciousness would eventually appear again.

I don’t believe in reincarnation, but one thing that isn’t mentioned enough is that there aren’t enough “souls” for everyone to have a reincarnation. If you rewind the clock back, once the original (for the sake of this exercise) 100 people died, the next generation would have 200-300 people already alive due to multiple children, which means they would halve mostly new souls. Fast forward to today, I’d imagine a lot of people would have baby souls.

You say forgetting memories is proof or indicative that memory depends on the physical body. But isn't that true for conscious as well?

Our conscious is inherently bound to our physical being. We see, we feel, we taste, we identify with our body. Our brain allows us to think, and experience, to conceptualize our body, our being, us as an entity.

We cut off fingernails and discard them as no longer part of ourselves. We drive a car and internalize movement as if it were us moving, while not seeing the vehicle as part of ourselves.

Without experiencing and without a body to conceptualize, what would our consciousness be? Without a body and mind where consciousness can arise from experience and thoughts, how could consciousness arise?

I want to believe

No, that's silly and easily disproven. I merely believe I'm a facet of a benevolent fierce deity that supervenes on behalf of humanity

I say that consciousness is independent of memory because we forget, clearly dependent on our physical body

Some parts remain even after you forget. That is the outcome of your own free decisions, that has formed part of your personality. For example, you like cornflowers because you have decided to like it. So when you forget how cornflowers look, you will still like them when you see them, even without really remembering them. A good part of your personality is formed in that way: you have decided to be that way.

I believe that (most of ?) our personality remains when the current body goes to compost and we enter the next world, either up or down :)