this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
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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 😅