Do humans have souls? | Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder

Do you think souls are real?

I wouldn't want to trap my consciousness in a computer. We are much more than our bodies, and that's something ancient Indians had a much better understanding of.

Based on what we currently know emmergence is probably the best stop gap hypothesis for consciousness. However, Roger Penrose is not satisfied with this and explores the possibility of a role for quantum mechanics in the understanding part of consciousness. Classical mechanics of neural firings is apparently an inadequate description of the understanding aspect of consciousness. A quantum connection frees the system from determinism and embraces the probabalistic realm. Just an hypothesis at the moment, but quantum effects have been found in photosynthesis and bird navigation, so we shouldn't rule it out of court just yet. It may be that our consciouness may exist in an all pervasive quantum field to which our brains resonate as server and client respectively.

There are things, that are real, that are NOT made up of particles.
Thoughts and emotions for instance. Very, VERY real. But you can not weigh them, nor hold them in your hands. And YES, they do intertwine with the particles of this universe. Thoughts can physically change your body...you can literally "worry yourself sick".
This study has a long way to go.

An interesting question... with a very simple answer. And that answer is No.
Nothing that we are has been proven to survive death.

I don't see how reductionism explains, how it feels to be a bat. I'd like Frau Hossenfelder to debate this infamous question of Thomas Nagel. Also I'd like her to explain the feeling of seeing the colour red through the eyes of reductionism. As much as a feel sympathy for physicalism, I really do have troubles including this kind of problems into the reductionist approach. I have no problem of using physicalism to explain the way how emotions work, or the thought process of the brain. But the upper questions elude that system.

What's a "soul"? Has never been defined so it's pure nonsense in the first place.

The question "do we have souls, or are we just particles?" already has a flaw built into it, because it assumes that particles do not have souls

Very good book by a neuropsychologist named Nicholas Humphrey "A History of the Mind". Explores a possible evolutionary path for conciousness. Along the way there are many fascinating sidelights. Nicholas Humphrey, "based in Cambridge...studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda; was the first to demonstrate the existence of "blindsight" after brain damage in monkeys; and proposed the theory of the "social function of intellect". He is the only scientist to have edited the literary journal Granta." Definitely worth a read.

I love Sabine

Subjectivity, intentionality, self-awareness and will are major components of consciousness in human beings.

I believe that this is the soul. Not necessarily the memories, etc. I mean that's the experiences of the soul but not the soul.

And no. Multiple researches prove that consciousness can not simply be reduced to neural activity alone.

Subjectivity, intentionality, self-awareness and will are major components of consciousness in human beings.

I believe that this is the soul. Not necessarily the memories, etc. I mean that's the experiences of the soul but not the soul.

And no. Multiple researches prove that consciousness can not simply be reduced to neural activity alone.

So, is she saying we do or we don't? I'm too dumb to understand her explanation

Consciousness is the self-constructing momentum waveform in an otherwise scale-uniform hyper-fluid medium (SUM) that Einstein identified as "spacetime".

Therefore, fellow citizens of our species-wide Human Societal Network (HSN) superorganism, the universe is your brain. Stop behaving like bacteria, and treat it that way.

👍👍👍😃👍👍👍😁✌️✌️✌️

Big Think, please use another chair, even Sabine looks ridiculous sitting in there.

way way WAY out there far above my grasping abilities. - So a Soul is basically a spirit.

"You can have your soul and be happy with it, just leave my perfect science out of it please!" Science will forever come short of explaining everything as long as it refuses to accept metaphysical theories and to try to explain them.

The world cannot be described through a purely materialistic lens. An easy way of demonstrating this is Mary's room. This is a very famous thought experiment that says "Imagine a scientist called Mary. She is in a black and white room, she only eats white foods, and has never experienced the colour red. Suppose Mary studies all the material properties of red, to the point that she learns everything there is to know about the colour red. Now, if one day after she has completed her knowledge, someone opens the door, let's her out, and shows her the colour red, even though she knew all the material properties of the colour, she nevertheless learnt something new." This thought experiment demonstrates that our experience is not reducible to material interactions. This doesn't mean souls exist, but it does mean that the materialistic approach she opens up with is not suitable for this kind of conversation.

I had the 👽 dream one week before Fukushima Diachi that the aliens were posting the event to come while I was pinned to the earth gazing up at a grey who had apparently hooked himself up to, or had been by Alien 👽 custom hooked up to silicon based life extension, mobility and such. I found myself accepting the lucid dream access thinking at least this was more exciting than a daily trip to the inner city convenience 🏪 for a peanut 🧈🥜 cup. My apparently assigned alien 👽 communicated the warning: do not hook up your neural soul to INSTEM due to the butchery as they contrived the behavioral mental as psychiatric doped the world with mental which I would assume is some cogent mind divider like a Hilbert property subject to Minkosky limits in closing

I thought the good Doctor of the last of what I once believed was the one salvageable corner of science: discovery, would divulge why she utube contacted me, blogged whatever. Did her technology not see the bloodied face and face with vomit pasted on my name 😭 for seven years Perrianne Simkhovitch: a turd on a 🥩 posted, as a dunce under banner bum no skills now my arm professionally nearly severed and I am forced to pay for re-attachment. Because Police, Providence city ambulance and Carlisle and Byers all work smoothly to make sure I am murdered by a machine by vehicular televised surveillance on sidewalk homicide while homeless they blocked my credit 💳 extortion while I tried to beg for housing and gave up and paid by money order which drained me down to qualify for Medicaid but they will make sure I understand my card reads mentally ill because I went into theaters or porn 1970"'🎉s you ask about the ghostly encounter of the soul I have a Nicoli Tesla experience and I stripped for Richard Feynman at the Coronet Theater on La Cienica Blvd when I was young 🌱 and I probably resembled Arlene who passed away from Tuberculosis: his Jewish love? His legitimate coverup of his bongo boogie has been desecrated destroyed by Google. Alan Alda. Hal Holbrook the legitimate coverup of his patronage. Had I not dropped out of Fairfax High School, this strange supersymmetry would not have occurred?

I remember flunking long division ➗ at age ten. The teacher was Mrs Open. It was a bungalow and that class aided my addiction to the lead ✏️ of 1965

I was thrown off Arxiv I drank myself to my that day. A committee at Cornell University met and threw me out

I was once invited to analyze a Russian Nuclear facility. The database sent to me by email invite had a identity wall which this data professional a woman in her twenties named Emily got me clearance because my son's best friend worked for NASA. What was sent to me was a 🎻 simple multiple choice concerning the merit of an experiment for the facility. Response had an actual deadline. The synopsis or paper I wrote attempting to expand their purpose in utility was crap. Students should be digging into the thesis of analysis from an amateur living in the wilderness. The physicist had spelled Luminescence wrong a crucial chiral Pilar of facility experience in femto units of thy Maxwell Planckian communication. Signed, look what they did to my face Ma, and my arm and re smashed my face into the sidewalk legally slaughtered by a machine mind Zalaphos who? I have a Spellchecker avatar

I am not going to make it through the Providence health butchery that was done to me on May Twentieth 2023: on top of what now is a seven year INSTEM butchery where in I was raped with a drill in a special mutilation ceremony for me but the mental illness of science.

Yes, human beings have souls. Without a soul, your body is just a corpse.

But a more interestjng question in my opinion is can we create a soul? By that I mean can we create a way to keep a humans consciousness alive or stored in some place even after they die?

“We have never observed anything that can’t be explained (by reductionism)”

I beg to differ

Science can’t even explain what consciousness is, let alone individuated consciousness.

There is so much science can’t even measure starting from dark matter to quantum entanglement etc. So it’s reductive to say there are only particles. That is all that science can measure for the time being. The universe is not even locally real as it has been recently démonstrated, materialists will have a hard time to stomach this. That consciousness may be fundamental to the universe

Yes, the soul obviously exists. It's the part of you that has experiences. Without it, you're just a computer that processes data, instead of a being that experiences the data you process.

It's not consciousness, that's a different phenomena that deals with your brain's processes. And it's not personality, that's also a different phenomena that deals with your brain's processes. Same with thoughts, though that probably has just as much to do with your brain's structure as its processes.

The part of reality that deals with states of being, which is a part of reality that is pure made up of experience, is the part of reality that has nothing to do with particle physics. Because it's made of being, not particles.

We should be happy that our particles lead to consciousness. No need to add a soul to the equation. Fine to speculate but let’s stick to the facts that we know, not what we want things to be.

What's the point in uploading one's entire body to simulate? Just extract the mind and upload that along with your favorite avatar.

Always check initial assumptions even if you think they are obviously correct. First ''soul'' usually is unconsciously assumed to be an '' inner'' soul but the universe is an ''outer'' place so what about an outer '' soul''. We have a space for instance we generate our own gravitational field although it is scientifically said always to be ''negligible'' given we are standing or sitting on the earth. What subatomic particles are in our '' space'' not just our body that also has '' spaces'' in it. ''inner'' soul assumptions may be the product of our natural narcissism necessary for us to choose most of the time life over death and also sloth as our brains usually like to analyze what is smaller than itself and are the mind and brain the same thing anyway and if not how are they related? . We might be able to have a child smarter than ourselves but that does mean that we can make a machine smarter than ourselves and whose says intelligence is acquired and actually chosen rather than determined? Do brains prevail over brawn because the dinosaurs were here much longer than us to date. I think you overrate how clever we are and there may be or is a large difference between our capacity to be clever and our implementation of that capacity. You may over-estimate how scientifically knowledgeable we really are as part of a natural narcissism taking advantage of the absence of a yardstick for actually making or measuring this. Despite our advancements scientifically especially quantum mechanics we are still fixated on causation as a test for virtually anything scientific where causation is only one type of meaning when there are others and when scientific experiment eliminates externalities look for a specific scientific cause and effect and real events thrown up without our conscious meddling to produce outcomes with specific yes or no answers when thinking probabilistic outcomes are '' incomplete''. How does your determinism explain stupidity, for instance, or that liberty and choice are not chance? There is always the tendency even subtly to leave something out because it may spoil the outcome or '' story'' we prefer to be true. What the universe is is always a ''something'' not a ''nothing'' and nothingness, meaninglessness and randomness are more likely concepts of social reality rather actual reality. How do you know you are you to begin with rather than actually everything that has gone before you? What have you done that is not in some sourced in your genetic past and the behavior and interactions of your ancestors making you your own rhyme. We may be genetically connected to our deep dark ancestors but are we contextually connected to the people they ate?

Everyone corrupts their own soul, so, no we don't.

That is exactly the problem, our soul or immaterial intelligence exists and interacts with the world, to be aware of it requires paying attention, you cannot be aware of something that you are not observing.

she doesnt know except she has theories
thats fine no problem

Its all about litle quantum particles coliding and interacting. If you have the correct balls and a "big computer" here you have Shakespeare. Well, theres defenetly lots of kinds of bs and phisics to understand.

Yes ,human has a soul. And high-level of consciousness. Every creations have certain level consciousness. including animals, plants, Angels, Satan, Jinns, Soil, rock ,atoms ,etc..
God has highest level conscious mind.
Depends on the conscious mind level all of creations responsibility.
Human is highest level conscious creation on the world..
Humans are responsible, plants ,soil or water not!!.
Here is an simple explanation:
Computer has hardware ( harddisk, keyboard, grafik card, memory etc.) all made from particuls , elements.
We also make software ,
And the electric power.
Particals

Everything is soul only. What we consider as non living are also living only and react and responses to surroundings. Because it was Indian philosophy and knowledge it was discarded and rejected. Even energies and forces are living. So everything is soul /consciousness /him only. Depending on amounts and manifestations we perceive different.

Do we have souls or spirits ? It all boils down to how you define them, do you mean the ghosts we see in Harry Potter? Then probably no

However in ancient religious and in etymological terms the way they are defined is different, the term SOUL in semitic languages for example is (Napsha in Syriac and other Aramaics and Nafs in Arabic) and SPIRIT is (Ruha in Syriac and other Aramaics, and Ruh in Arabic) all mean (breath) and something close to (essence), I believe this is similar to the latin word for spirit, this word doesn't describe (something) but it describes the state of it, when you have a Ruha then you're alive, when you breathe your last breath then by definition you don't have it anymore, different religions described the departure from this state differently but they all shared something in common and that it continues to live somehow, somewhere in some way

You may load into a computer all the data about human structure and processes taking place in the body, and maybe at most you will find chemical analog processes, a one to one of what happen in the brain when we feel our being/conciousness(spiritual feelings etc.), but how can one explain by those analogs the subjective feelings of existing, awareness and being a self. You will still remain with a cold mathematical, biophysical complicated analog system on the board.

If you mean the Life Energy, yes.
If you are thinking religiously, no.

I don't know about souls but humans have goals 😊😊😊

This is an arrogant person. I dislike her immensely because she has no doubt about her ideas. Sad that nothing can break through her ego centered 'scientific' approach. It you have a golf ball sized consciousness, you get a golf ball sized image of reality. Just let her play through.

“Alexa, please upload my soul to Google drive. Thank you.”

Done.

I want her to explain: Why we have to die If energy can't be destroyed? What happens with us after we die? Thank You😇😁

Revelation 20:15 KJV
And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.

"not found" means no soul.
The "book of life" has the souls used during this Judgement cycle. Not all have a soul, they are given it by the Lord.

Enoch (Watchman)

Revelation 20:15 KJV
And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.

"not found" means no soul.
The "book of life" has the souls used during this Judgement cycle. Not all have a soul, they are given it by the Lord.

Enoch (Watchman)

Already G.F.Hegel formulated the « law of the transition of quantity to quality», my dear Reductionist.

Not everything can be described by physics, for instance language only really exists within the conscious mind. You couldn’t derive a language from first principles, it is a function of lived experience. So then you have to define lived experience, and nothing in physics explains what lived experience is. Physics doesn’t explain the qualia of the colour blue that we actually experience, it sees only an electromagnetic wave length. Physics can’t explain the experience of a memory, it can’t explain joy or love, yes it can explain associated physiological changes, but not the lived experience. Physics is to physical reality what words are to the soul, what wave lengths are to music, it is an understanding, but not the reality. The word energy will never fully describe actual energy!