In complete seriousness, if you're an Atheist and also able to comprehend that as near as damn it everything is made of little charges of energy, how do you begin to comprehend you're own soul/mind, I mean, how is that constructed physically.

Answers please.

TL;DW (too long, didn't write)

I'm about to ask and learn what does TL;DW mean...

EDIT:

Too late don't worry!...?

How I comprehend that I am mind? The mind is me, it's as simple as that. Nothing to comprehend, really.

(Ask a grammatically incorrect question and you'll get a purposely misunderstood answer. )

I personally believe that our brains are just extremely complicated biological computers. I don't really believe in "souls", and consider our mind like a highly sophisticated operating system running our body. In short, I have no explanation^[1] for our "consciousness", but I don't really require one either. I think that, like God, "souls" are something that we came up with to explain something that we can't understand [yet]. I don't believe they exist in the literal sense, I don't believe there's anything particularly magical about "life", and I think that we're just an exponentially complex biological (AKA naturally occurring) machine.

"I think, therefore I am." I was working on an AI program a few years ago, but I had to give it up. Every time the computer failed to think, it bamphed out of existance.

Seriously, I think "consciousness" is just a weird artifact, much as we find flowers attractive, but they're meant for the bees.

"I think, therefore I am" is an implication, not an equivalence.

<insert joke about $OUTGROUP being proof that existence doesn't mean thinking here>

There is no soul. There is no mind. Everything is predetermined, and if you could understand all the variables, you would know exactly what I was going to eat for lunch tomorrow.

We know perfectly well you're going to eat kangaroo sandwiches just like you always do.

Let me tell you why you started this thread. You did it because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?

"how do you begin to comprehend you're own soul/mind, I mean, how is that constructed physically."

After the teaching of Yoga, the soul is a very small particle. To control the material body it has a spiritual body with the same form like the material, and this is congruent with the material body. Both, the spiritual particle and the spiritual body are immaterial. You can`t see or measure them with material senses. When the material body is damaged (dead) they still exist, and are free to take other forms.

Indigestion?

Sounds more like a TV preacher/huckster to me.

I generally agree with these two statements. My addition would be that, even though the soul is simply nothing more than an emergent property of a complex system, that doesn't mean it is something to be discarded as irrelevant or dismissible.

Though the whole concept can be somewhat stripped of its supernatural other-worldliness, it's a truly remarkable creation none the less and should be treated with the same indulgence.

My belief is that the body is what doesn't exist, only the soul is real.
There is no physical world, that's all just imagined.

But if I punch you in the nose, we can both agree it's bleeding, right? "Reality" is what's commonly agreed on between people (although it can be twisted with appeals to immature wishes).

When babies are born, the whole universe does revolve around them (getting diapers changed, getting fed upon demand etc.). As people grow more mature, as demanded by shared experience of "what is", it becomes more distant, not just me, my family, which gets extended to "the hood", then my town, my state, my country (most "patriotism" is stuck on this) and in creationist fashion, to my species. Maybe we'll get to the Star Trek stage and insist "my planet" is the epitome of existence simply because we want that.

Most of the arguments here seem to stem from that, IMAO.

There is no soul/mind. Only some complex brain functionality.
There are no computer games. Only some complex patterns of 1 and 0.
You can't actually see objects. You only receive light of various wavelenghts and intensity.
You can't actually hear anything. You only react to waves of varying air pressure.
There is no love. Only desire meant to assure procreation.
There are no smart ideas. Only smart guys.

I think about you, therefore you are to me. Should I think of you no more, than no more you shall be. Forward declaration, paradoxes a plenty, we are merely objects of relativity.

That's a possibility I don't dismiss, either. If it turned out that that was the case, I wouldn't be surprised.

@Johan - By that, I guess you could say that the soul/mind is something of a macro definition for a complex system. I wonder... if our minds had the capacity to comprehend the complexities involved in such a system "at once," would it seem as grandiose? Is the apparent greatness of a soul/mind merely an expression of the mind's limitation to comprehend it?

• Atheism, in either meaning ("absence of a belief in any God", or "belief that no Gods exist") has nothing to do with a concept of a soul - both beliefs are orthogonal, that is, you can believe in some deity, or in the existence of souls, or both, or neither.

• "Soul" is an ill-defined, highly connotated term. Everybody has their own idea what constitutes a soul, but those ideas vary wildly. If you want serious answers, you have to come up with a sound definition of "soul".

• "Energy" is well-defined, but in a spiritual context, people often use it to mean something entirely different. In the scientific definition, energy is the potential to perform work - a system that contains more energy can perform more work, e.g. a rock at the top of a tower contains more energy than one at the bottom, which can be shown by dropping both and measuring the impact they make on the ground. The fact that energy and matter are interchangeable, from a physicist's point of view, doesn't have a lot of consequences on people's daily lives, nor does it say anything about the other, spiritual, meaning of "energy".

• The "mind", another badly defined term. I assume you are talking about the 'software' that constitutes what we think and do. I'll go with what's the most likely scientific explanation: the mind is implemented as a function of the brain, there is nothing magical about it, and if you could read the complete state of a human brain and feed it to a simulator, you'd be able to fully replicate the mind. The results would probably still differ wildly from the real thing after that, because the copied mind would then be separated from the physical body, and that body influences the mind in incredible ways.

• Consequently, when we die and the brain ceases to function, the mind simply goes away, just like a computer program is gone from RAM when you turn off the computer. There is no evidence that suggests that the mind continues to exist, except evolutionary wishful thinking (that is, our mind is pre-programmed for eternal life, with a strong survival instinct, and those don't go together well with the discovery of one's own mortality - a belief in life after death, despite a lack of evidence, is a convenient way out). BTW, a belief in life after death is also orthogonal to Atheism / Theism: you can believe in God, or in life after death, or both, or neither.

The dissonance that breaks my darkness. The harmonies that break my dissonance. That's how I experience that >_> Could be sort of how you experience your brain's 'drive' to change. Slowly as you get older everything will seem more in place...

Same. The whole spiritual thinking might be sort of an emerging way of processing perceptions. I've heard (very much to my liking) that quantum physics and spirituality require the same kind of thinking. I thought I heard it in a fairly scientific context (hall talk at university?).
Johan has a good point. You shouldn't confuse the hardware and the software; the medium and the mediated. I think if there is a soul, its only physical measurable attributes are our actions. Like Mark said, I don't dismiss the existence of a soul. The mere thought that you are somehow connected to someone else, or even that your perceptions are exchangeable with someone else's, might lay at the basis of the concept(illusion?) of soul.
Just yesterday I was thinking of how a depressing thought I find it; to think there is some entity trapped in my body and miserable earthly life that will exist forever after I die.
That some cosmic entity enters my material form for the briefest of moments, makes what I remember as 'myself', and the next moment exists, maybe billions of miles away, as something entirely different, for each moment of my life; that I found a far less depressing thought

I was talking about The Matrix. Trezker is the only one in this thread who seems to know what The Matrix is, besides me, of course.

I'm not gonna adopt a philosophy just because some Hollywood fop wants to make money.

What is real? How do you define real?

Like I said above, whatever a majority of people can agree on. Anything else is hucksterism and it's time to grab your wallet and run.

Can you prove it scientifically?

It's self evident, e.g. axiomatic. Therefore scientific. Except to hucksters (or so they say).

[EDIT]

There are exceptions, revealed through hindsight. Einsteins theory of relativity wasn't accepted for quite a while, but now it is. It's the best we can do, deal with it.

We are animals with a slightly higher functioning brain than other animals. We are made up of atoms from distant stars the same as that chair you are sitting on. Nothing more.

What Tobias said.

I think this is an urban myth, whether you're talking about special or general relativity.

The Matrix in my case is not something physical in a higher layer of reality.
I'm saying there's only consciousness, there is no space, no metrics at all in the ultimate reality.
When this imagined life ends this consciousness just keeps on imagining things.

There's no way to prove there's even any continuity in this life. All my memories may just be something I imagined just now, I may have never imagined being at work, maybe I'm just imagining remembering being at work.

There's no reason to believe I actually experienced life from birth up to this moment. I could just as well have jumped in a week or a month ago and made all those memories up.

I used to argue with my sister about such silly things when we were about 10 years old, but I'm all better now. You can't possibly be serious about stuff like that or it'd mean learning to program games is a waste and you wouldn't be here on allegro.cc.

Nah, you'd just spend all your time in Off-Topic.

You mean like this?

I was much, much worse than that back in the day ...

Arthur, no offense, but you seem to be blinded by your senses.

Blinded by my senses? Oblivious to non-sense?

Are there any practical implications? Does this idea in any way affect your life?

I seem to recall like 23 posts a day or something It took me a couple years to catch up to your post count.

There are a number of posts here comparing the brain to a machine. We don't understand the brain. Physical phenomena tend to be taken advantage of by nature. To our greatest ability of detection, there is a truly random aspect to sub-atomic physics. If you are to really believe in science, you must accept that determinism is a belief. This is in the same vein as accepting that the earth is the center of the universe when all available (pre-telescopic) evidence suggests so with careful examination -actual historical recordings made to the limit of possible human eyesight suggested this as truth. Although it is perhaps not true, science is against you if you believe determinism.

Until we understand the mechanisms by which the brain determines what we call true (not just a few of its behaviors), I can't help but accept that the brain may not function by the rules we accepts machines to work by: deterministic principles. After all, relativity is the last thing I would call intuitive.

That said, I fully believe in the brain being an advanced machine. Marie Curie was a damned fool for believing that science alone should be examined almost in a depth-first manner. I am a fool too. The idea still resides in me that what "is" isn't physical atoms, but ideas. That's the meaning of "I think therefore I am". As for the soul, it's whatever compels me to believe that: probably a machine.

I've gone through the loop and back again on this subject, and what I've discovered is simply this:

Stop trying to sound deep, people. You're giving me horrible flashbacks to my high school philosophy class.

Why do threads about topics always remind me of when I was involved with those topics!?

I don't believe in god or other stuffs like that. I think we need to know more about us before trying to know what are we doing here or where we are going. Because all these questions are about those topics: "Why we are here?" "do we really exist?" "Why I'm alive?".

I think the most interesting and difficult question is: "Are we alive?".

Because even when we can obviously see a big difference between a rock and a human being, we can't actually say that that rock is lifeless just because is an inanimate object and we're alive because we're animated objects. My theory is that we're not more than a particle of dust flying in the air from one place to another. The only difference is that we have got so complex that we think we're actually "thinking" and making things because we want, an not because an external condition is telling us what to do. Think about it, there are many "things" that exist thanks to the evolution of time, and different conditions in which they have lived in.

We go to the desert and we see those tumbleweed going around as they were "alive" impulsed by the wind, and dispersing its seeds all over the place. Basically if you analyse all objects in earth are made and live thanks to certain conditions: light, water, air, earth, temperature, etc... If you take a plant and put it in the space such plant would die, the plant is alive in the earth but not because it's alive an that's it, but because thanks to basic conditions such plant is alive, but only in the earth. Well, I think we are the same but with a complexity millions of times higher than a plant. We're descendants of a kind of "movement" probably in this case originated mostly in the water, because we're biological creatures, and biological creatures are always made of a considerable portion of water.

And if you think about it, the water is always in movement, it almost never stop, it's a perfect environment to start a evolutionary chain of tiny particles that get together for some reasons an conditions and those conditions leads to another and so on, until it appears a little bacteria that we think is alive because when get in touch with another biological or non-biological object or entity we can see that it grows, and reproduce creating another bacteria but it's not more than certain conditions acting on such particles...

We're too advanced to be able to see it now, it's like when you show the source code of an operating system to someone that doesn't know anything about programming, he wouldn't be able to understand it, and if there is no books and no one to tell him how things work he probably will never be able to know what it's happening... Never...

This thread is worthless, so here's a picture of a dog.

Obviously, Arthur's soul is made of beans and franks...

And Pepsi(TM), dammit!

That's now the third time I've seen that dog picture. The internet is shrinking.

And...

Please tell the difference between actual thinking and just thinking one is thinking.

Real thinking is hard work.

Same difference. If there's nondeterminism at some level that the human brain is subject to, then those also apply to complex machines. You still haven't shown any fundamental difference between the human brain and a sufficiently complex machine. All scientific evidence suggests that the human brain is bound to the same laws and rules as any other information processing system; it is certainly more complex than any man-made computer, and it does not function like a binary von-Neumann computer, but there is no reason to attribute the brain with supernatural or otherwise inexplicable capabilities.

Another interesting thought is that a sufficiently complex deterministic system is, for all practical purposes, nondeterministic. Why? Because in order to predict the behavior of any system (in real time, or faster), one needs a system that is even more complex; my intuition says that the required extra complexity grows exponentially with the complexity of the system to be predicted. This means that a sufficiently complex system can only be predicted using a system more complex than the entire universe - which is practically impossible.

Actually, computers do suffer from flipped bits time to time, and the manufacturers go to considerable lengths to minimize it.

This whole thread is worthless as it does not contain any wisdom whatsoever which would help me becoming a decent Starcraft II player.

You need to realize that you are not just your body and mind, you are apart of everything as we once were when the big bang happened. Realizing this you'll improve your micromanagement considerably.

Please elaborate. My mind does not seem to see any obvious correlation between that realization and its' effect on my micro.

Save the next fingernail clipping from your left index finger, it has an atom from Betelgeuse within it. You might get a nickel for it.

Gladly. Through meditation (which noobs call practice) you need to learn that it is not about thinking about your units as external entities you need to control, but instead that the boundary between you and them is not that obvious. By focusing on not focusing, or rather, think less about what you need to do and more on what you don't need to do, cleanse your mind of objectives and realize that by seeing the whole the details will come to you without much effort. In this context meditation leads to action which comes naturally and without effort (reaction turns into proaction). I hope I have kept everything vague enough so that my advice seems wise.

What is awareness and is it possible for a machine to achieve awareness? I hope everyone agrees on that awareness is real and an existing "phenomenon" in the "real" world, whereas the existence of a soul is more dependent on a person's "religious" views of life.

Yup, I hereby hand you the "Wisdom Of Vagueness" achievement. Take good care of it and don't feed it after midnight.

Hahahahaha I had not seen that "dog" before!

I Ain't gonna to tell you anything buddy... It's just a theory... Damn I should stop playing Red Dead Redemption.

Here's something to think on: the brain is not a homogeneous entity. It's an interconnected system with different components that handle specific tasks. This includes processing sound, video, feeling. Storing and retrieving from memory and pattern recognistion.
That these are separate and largely independent subsystems is clear from well-documented patients who have suffered damage to some part of the brain (no connection between left/right hemispheres, so you can see something but not be able to name it, or see something and not realise it but still have an association based on what you saw but didn't notice; people who cannot form new memories but can still learn new tasks, people who do not remember their past but still have their skills). You can actually sometimes tell that this is so because when you go to sleep not all parts of your brain necessarily fall asleep (or wake up) at the same time: some functions shut down while others are still active.

So is there really such a thing as "you", or are there just lots of different "voices" in your head that may give you the illusion that there is really one (namely "you")?

{{citation needed}}

My belief tells me nothing is sacred. I'm free to do whatever I want, I have absolutely no responsibility for anything.

It seems I have created a world with very rigid rules for cause and effect though and time seems to flow rigidly in one direction.

I'm trying to figure out a meaning to life, so far I have been unsuccessful. But I will stick to this life as far as it'll take just to see what happens and while I'm here I may as well play the game as well as I can. Therefore I will try to do what I find gives me most joy.

Suppose the meaning of life would be discovered once and for all. Suppose it would be about achieving something. Suppose you'd achieve it at the age of 50. What the hell would you do after that?

I've heard of a soul and a mind but never a soul/mind nor an apple/cow.

There is no spoon.

The game of thrones you mean?

I like this quote: "He knows not where he's going for the ocean will decide. It's not the destination, it's the glory of the ride".

Find a new meaning? Must there only be one? Find a meaning in the meaningless?

“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” - Zen Proverb

There is no self.

There is no one.

What is?

Cartoon in a spoiler so it doesn't take so much room.

There is The One.

Well, maybe not necessarily more complex, but in any case at least equally complex. Practical considerations would suggest 'more complex' though, unless we find a way to make an exact instant copy of the system in question.

FYI my previous post was with a few beers in me. Quite rambly.

Anyway, it seems souls are quite frequently immortal supernatural entities we imbue ourselves with, essentially making ourselves gods.

The mind is largely devoted to generating informational representations of the universe and creating responses for us to take in it. The mind is the abstract object corresponding to the brain. I suppose I'd say it's only those parts which contribute to consciousness: the cerebellum seems more a mechanical brain part.

I honestly think that mind and soul are just antiquated notions that humans came up with out of self interest. I mean, when serial killers are caught you hear people say, "They have no soul." My personal favorite, "They are absent of mind." What is soul/mind? Self interest concepts.

The mind is a kind of fine material structure. And it is related to the function of brain, like evert mentioned.

Patanjali has written in his Yoga Sutra near the beginning:

"Yogas citta vritti nirodha"
(Sanskrit: "Yoga is the ending of the activity of the mind")

And when you then stop the influences of the senses, like in a "samadhi tank", where you hear, see, smell and feel nothing, then you can begin to experience the pure soul.

In the beginning it will appear to you like a black nothing. But if you go on some time with it, you will forget your material body more and more. You feel you are entering another world, which has a very good taste. You feel like in a dream, but full aware. It is a kind of ecstasy.

And later, after the vedic scriptures the spiritual world is organized similar like the material universe, you will discover this blackness is like the space between planets. Travelling through this space, you can arrive at spiritual planets, where beings living far superior to everything we could ever imagine...

Suppose you could create such a system. And suppose the soul/awareness/mind^[1] is nothing but brain activity, wouldn't the complex predicting system itself include a soul/awareness/mind, or actually billions of them? And if this "artificial" mind really could work as a Universe at an idea level, wouldn't that be a proof of that the materialistic "real world" doesn't have to exist? Sorry, guys, you really don't exist other than in my mind. Which actually is not mine.

And turning it on its head, I think it pretty remarkable that everything in our brain connects into a "me" that I can perceive. I can hear myself think and think of myself as an entity apart from the world. I would imagine a tree for example can't really tell itself apart from the earth it's rooted in (assuming it had some form of consciousness of course). Which I guess what zen is all about, turning into a tree. Realizing you're part of something bigger than yourself that is, not turning into some entityless blob like what happened to this woman.

If you could create a complex system capable of perfectly emulating a human brain, and you'd plant it inside a human body and let it work under the same conditions as the human brain, then it would at least behave exactly like a human brain, and you wouldn't be able to tell whether it was the real thing or a simulation without dissecting it. Whether you'd call this an actual mind / awareness / soul is kind of a void question - by all tangible definitions, you would have to admit that it does in fact have a consciousness, merely because there would be no way to tell otherwise (or else, you would have to admit that actual humans don't have a consciousness either). The only way you could argue that it does not have a consciousness (or at least not one of the kind we humans have) would be to define 'consciousness' as being an intrinsic property of human brains, but then you'd be arguing in circles. Douglas Hofstadter actually explains it much better than I do.

Well; to simulate the entire Universe, you'd need something at least as complex (and thus probably as big, or bigger) than the Universe itself - but such a system would not fit inside the Universe, by its very nature.

The actual existence of a real world is something you can't prove anyway (read up on solipsism).