this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
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What even is a soul, when you get right down to it? Convince me that humans have a soul.
The definition of a soul will entirely depend on your personal religious beliefs. I'm pretty sure in the case of Anthropic trying to convince people that Claude has a soul, they were using the Judeo-Christian version that is the part of you that is you and that will continue on after your death into the afterlife.
Claude certainly does not have that.
I think it's safe to say any talk of LLMs having 'souls' is basically smuggling Descartes in through the back door. To be honest I think this of all claims intelligence is substrate-independent.
It’s the thing that grants you consciousness. You do have consciousness, don’t you?
I don't think I've ever heard of a soul being referred to as the thing that grants consciousness. If anything, that is a much lower bar for AI to achieve than the functionally impossible-to-achieve "immaterial and immortal part of the body that will live on in heaven, gifted to you by god".
It might be interesting to explore views of the soul outside of Western religion. I would agree that the soul is immaterial, though the immortal part I obviously can’t be sure about.
The thing is, science is still puzzled as to what consciousness even is or why we have it. Philosophically speaking, you can even argue that science is fundamentally unable to answer those questions, because science relies on observation and we cannot observe the consciousness of other humans, only ourselves. From what we know, it seems to be immaterial with an ability to influence the physical world that defies explanation (see how the observer in quantum physics is responsible for collapsing the wave function, but nobody can identify what constitutes observation beyond whatever information can reach us—whoever “us” is in that equation).
So yeah, I’ll grant you it’s easier to achieve than a religious definition, but I would be very curious to see AI replicate that :)
It's an interesting conflation but I don't really see them as the same.
We can measure brain activity and see what responses there are to what stimuli. Similarly we can query a neural network for the same.
I would say a dog is conscious. I would say a tree or a coral is probably not conscious, so to speak. Depending on your view of life, it could be possible to say they all have a soul, or none of them have a soul because only humans do.
We can probably make a computer that is conscious, and it is probably not that far away. There isn't really anything that is truly special about human consciousness, in my view.
From a purely mechanical point of view, if you believe in souls, there is some threshold that must be overcome. If you simulate a human brain 1:1, does it have a soul? If you grow a human brain without a body, does it have a soul?
For the sake of argument, how would you even determine a tree is conscious or not?
Take an oak tree, there's an oak in Berkshire that's probably around 1,500 years old. From its perspective of time, it'd be this moving, writhing thing as it grows its branches and roots in all directions and we'd be moving so fast we'd be beneath its notice; basically what fruit flies are to us. The thing operates on a totally different timescale to us, and while we might not consider a single tree relevant here a forest does form a chemical network where nutrients may be shared with neighbours; while neither is likely to possess any kind of consciousness we would understand as such, I would sooner look for it in trees or mycelium than I would in great piles of linear algebra.
Yeah, I would consider dogs conscious too, and I suspect all life is, including plants and fungi. I don’t see us making computers with conscious abilities though. Just the fact that there is activity doesn’t define consciousness, it also requires awareness, the experience of being alive.
Does fungi have that? I dunno, and if it does it would have vastly different experiences from us, but I’m pretty sure a computer does not. Maybe it’s because we understand computers too well, or maybe it really is something special to organic matter. What about a computer that has organic parts for entropy as input to its algorithms… I also don’t know 😅
Consciousness =/= a soul, and is nevertheless an equally nebulous concept. Unconvinced.
I didn’t mean to imply they’re the same thing. I responded with some more depths to the other replies.
I though that was the brain
The brain is our thinking device, but ultimately it’s “just” a clever piece of meat. But consciousness is something that exists outside the dimensions of space and time, yet is able to influence those dimensions. A higher-order dimension, if you will. That’s maybe a bit of a spiritually elusive way to frame it, but that’s because science cannot explain it either.
Science knows there are other dimensions. Quantum physics proves this with entanglement and the particle-wave duality. Within quantum physics there is also the “magical” notion of the observer, where nobody knows exactly how to define what an observer. It seems linked to consciousness, but some people get very angry if you suggest that, because we cannot prove it and it breaks their illusion that physical reality is all there is.
Anyway, if you are in the camp that thinks there is nothing beyond physical, then sure, it’s the brain. But if you’re a bit more open minded, then it’s also more than just the brain.
That's absolutely, demonstrably incorrect. It, like all the other processes, is something that exists in observable space-time dimensions that we can observe. It's a state of matter observable over time. There is no way and no reason to add some more shit on top of that.
It's only magic if you don't know what probability is. If we have two marbles, black and white, and blindly take one each and go on our merry ways, and then you need to do the full math about it for some reason, it's very useful to you to describe a marble in my hand as a 50% black/ 50% white marble. Then later if you look at the one you have, and discover that it's a white one, the one I have magically, instantly, inexplicably becomes 100% black marble. That's what, simplifying a lot, a quantum effect is (this specific one is quantum entanglement). And if you forget that nothing actually changed, and it's just you scribbling some math on a paper, you can start thinking about it in terms of reality bending multidimensional paradoxes. But it's not, it's just humans being unable to easily comprehend insanely complex mathematical abstractions.
Do you have some source for that? Would love to see how you measure that?
You’re also entirely ignoring the part where matter stops behaving as matter and starts interacting with itself as if you had the white and black marble in your hands at the same time, despite you only having one. This is the “magical” part, because it depends on the presence of the observer whether this effect happens or not.
That's the thing. You are the one adding an additional entity on top the reality, so you should be the one providing sources for it. We know what a brain is, we roughly know how it operates, we know that if we measure electrical activity we have perfectly working predicting theory, we can stick a person into an FMRA machine, prod a specific part of the brain and make them see purple, flail hands, or hear voices. Now, if you want to reintroduce old discarded theory of a soul into all that, it's your job to find where it fits and find any way that it will work.
My sources for it is the last century or so of the brain science.
Because this part doesn't exist. It's hard to overstate how much all of this is just math.
The whole observer effect stems from the fact that we can't measure quantum particles directly on account of it being too small, so we don't have a way to know anything about them until we or something else interacts with them, usually in quite destructive ways. So in order for our math to exist, we abstract it away and talk about shit like 0.5 spin like it's something that can make any sense in real life, just because nobody needs to explain every time that we're talking about probability of an abstract particle in specific conditions. Because, again, we can only measure its, for example, speed by the fact that it smashed into something else with a specific force, and as you can imagine, its speed after that is quite different.
If we return to the marble example, if my only way to tell a colour of it was to smash it to bits, we can say that the marble is in the state of black-white, but when I measure it, it changes the state to was-black-now-smashed-into-bits, thus demonstrating the observer effect. We can say that because we did a bunch of math and now we need a special black-white state of matter to make our probabilistic equations make sense. But without that, we stop at the black-white state and don't go any further, because it's not a thing that actually real.
Regarding the quantum physics part, I was referring to the double slit experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment
Matter can interfere with itself in wave patterns that behave as if the matter no longer exists in a single position, but in all possible positions at once. This shows the matter doesn’t even exist in its physical form anymore while it is part of the wave function. “Quantum particles” are not even a thing, because this effect can be reproduced with large molecules too, and there is no apparent upper limit to this: https://science-atlas.com/strange-news/largest-molecules-yet-become-waves-in-quantum-double-slit-experiment/
This effect is real, and waving it away because it’s supposedly “too small” isn’t making it less so. It’s not too small to measure. The article mentions these molecules were fitting slits that were 50nm in size.
As for the brain waves, it seems we’re talking about different things. Of course we can mess with the brain and alter sensory experiences. But experience and awareness are a bigger thing than merely input/output. That’s something I know to be true about myself, but I suppose you can reason that away. I merely pity those who do.
Yeah, there is no good reason to believe that, and it doesn't even make mathematical sense. Those kinds of popsci articles are entirely misleading as to what is actually measured.
If a photon in the double-slit experiment really spreads out as a wave to "propagate through both slits at once," then you would describe the particle mathematically as a field in physical space, assigning M sets of numbers to each possible place in physical space to represent the properties of the wave at that location. If you have N particles, you'd need N fields, and since each field would need M numbers, you would need NM total numbers.
For 1 particle, the wavefunction in its position basis is also of size M, so you can assign each element of the wavefunction to a position in physical space, and then show a fancy visualization of the particle spreading out as a wave, taking all possible paths, going through both slits at once.
But the number of elements in the wavefunction scales by N^M, not NM. So this visualization quickly stops making mathematical sense as you add more and more particles to the system. Given 3 particles and 2 locations they can be in, that's NM=6 and N^M=8, so there is no consistent way to break apart the wavefunction into assignments of waves in physical space.
Mathematically, the idea of waves propagating through space like this makes no sense. If you actually look at what is measured in the studies of the papers cited, they always just measure particles, but then, over very large samples, the particles form wave-like patterns.
That would be like saying because a collection of H2O molecules can form waves on the ocean, then therefore a single H2O water molecule is a wave... it's nonsense. The wave is a property of the ensemble statistics, it is not a property of the individual system. The individual particle is just a particle. The wave is only observed over its ensemble statistics.
The only "wave-like" thing about particles is that, as far as we know, their behavior has a fundamental element of randomness to them, and so we have to describe them using ensemble statistics, and their ensemble statistics have certain wave-like properties. But that does not prove a single particle is a wave, that it spreads out and takes "all possible paths at once." There is no evidence of that. No experiment has ever caught a particle in two places at once. They always find it in a specific place, and the only thing that is in more than one place at a time is the ensemble statistics!
You aren't properly grasping the idea. The reason we are using very complicated probabilistic math to describe extremely small things, is because we don't have ways to directly measure the extremely small shit. If we had one, we would be doing direct math to it. However, it doesn't stop us from doing probabilistic math to directly observable stuff, it's just usually isn't needed. This what separates "quantum particles" from the regular ones, quantum world needs more complicated math because we can't do regular one.
So when we, let's say, apply "wave-related math" we get wave-related answers, and in this framework a particle doesn't exist, there is only probabilistic distribution. It's confusing, because we have to switch from normal thinking "your marble might be here or might be here" to "it's equally probably to be here or here", and when we write it in quantum math terms, we get particles being everywhere all at once. Because those aren't real particles, and we only care about emerging properties.
Yes, experience and awareness are emergent phenomenon that occurs out of a very complicated electrochemical activity of a very complicated wetware. It's one of the coolest and weirdest phenomena we observe. But it's not something fundamentally different from any other emergent phenomena just because it can argue about itself on the internet.
But I think we very quickly degraded down the usual path of "soul is magic" -> "soul is quantum" -> "soul is unexplainable and you're idiot if you don't believe me", bit by bit like this conversations usually go.
Other dimensions are just speculation, just like all the rest.
But do you have an alternative explanation? Because without one, I have no alternative but to admit there must be something more, regardless of whether you wish to call it a dimension or something else.
What we do know however, is that entanglement is not constrained to the dimensions of time and space. So the existence of additional dimensions seems a rather logical leap, even if indeed technically speculation, because we don’t know how they work.
We dont know any of that, this is more sales pitch than science.
Sorry, but simply saying no doesn’t make it so. Entanglement directly contradicts the laws of general relativity when it comes to time and space, so either general relativity (and with that, everything we know about time and space) goes out the window, or there is more than just time and space. You can’t have it both ways.
Those aren't the only choices, and those are made up by people. The world doesnt change just because humans have obscure thoughts or fantastical explanations for things. Nothing is new now compared to a thousand years ago, and people didnt have souls back then either.
Of course choices are made up by people. Science is made up by people. But if you use science to convince yourself that we have no soul, you better make sure there are no gaps in your reasoning. So long as science’s own experiments contradict each other with regards to the nature of our reality, I’m not going along with such denialism.
It's weird that you don't extend this formula to your position, and very outwardly advocating for an existance of inobservable substance solely on reasoning of "it's dimensions or quantum or whatever"
Well, yeah, I’m not the one claiming to have all the answers. I merely am a witness of my consciousness, so I know that’s a real thing. I describe that whole of consciousness and awareness and “me-ness” as my soul, but I have no hard definition for it, I merely know there’s something there.
Science however is a man-made construct and can only operate on the observable and the independently verifiable. I’m not saying that to diminish its worth, because science is mighty cool, but I simply refuse to take it to the extreme position that anything that cannot be scientifically proven should be assumed not to exist.
I’ve experienced enough weird shit in my life that makes no scientific sense. They still happened though. So rather than denying these things, the sane thing to do is to shrug them off as “it’s dimensions or quantum or whatever” :)
You do, literally, actually, specifically, that's why this conversation is happening. It's just you're basing your answers on your vague feelings without even attempt to ground your fantasies. You specifically, like a man-made construct you are, man-made a theory, and now is trying to convince everyone and yourself, that your position is the one that doesn't need any basis to stand on.
The thing is, it does. And that one time you saw a tall person with the corner of your eyes, and when you turned there was nobody there doesn't deny the whole science, just because you don't feel like investigating this shit more.
That's not enough reason to behave as if souls are real, unfortunately.
Do you mean brain matter? Electrochemical reactions? The concept of emerging phenomena? I don't think there is the thing that gives me consciousness, I don't believe it can exist even.