Ontology thread

Do you believe in dualism or physicalism or something else considering ontology? Do you think all types of a philosophical zombie cannot exist? Do you think think soul/souls exist? Why? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

>>31033 >Do you think all types of a philosophical zombie cannot exist? I believe that everyone who is alive has to have a soul. >Do you think think soul/souls exist? Why? I think you can't reduce the miracle of being alive to just absurd acts of biochemistry. Someone also might say that since the body is not permanent (body is mortal), there has to be a counterpart that is permanent (a soul is immortal).

I am torn as to whether I should believe in such a thing as a "soul", but I'll say this: we humans interpret such things accordingto our experience. We experience our identity as being separate from that of others, sl we conceive that a soul ought to be adiscrete element independent from the rest, with it's own integrity and identity. Yet what evidence is there thzt thiswould be the case? If anything, the opposite is true fror most of life on earth. If we cut an earthworm in two: does the soul then divide as well, or does a brand new soul enter one of the resulting half-worms? What amount of our identity remains after we die? We identify ourselves with our experiences, the stuff we like, and many other circumstances which are bound to our finite life, if all of that is stripped, what then does remain? Even the awareness or consciousness which we believe means to be alive is completely different for "lower" life forms, plants and fungi for example. And for billions of years the planet was populated by nothing but bacteria and archaea, even today they're by orders of magnitude the most abundant formof life on earth. The concept of the soul seems very outdated.

Dualism is bunk. Souls may or may not exist, I consider all existing things to be defined by their relationships between things. Even a rock is defined by the fact it interacts with the world like a rock. In this way the consciousness is not necessarily located within the body, although I firmly believe that it is so intertwined with the body (which itself is a virtual object like all other objects) that it cannot be considered meaningfully distinctz at least while the body is alive.