Soul

I've often wondered about that 'je ne sais quoi' aspect, commonly referred to as the 'soul'. And the synomyms: mind, heart, spirit, psyche...

A song I like has the lyric: '... rise and fix my BROKEN soul'. Another song I like features: '...your soul's UNBREAKABLE'. I relate to both of these, which confuses the frig out of me. So, can a soul be broken? Do you have to believe in God to believe in souls? What say you?

I think it's a term synonymous with 'heart', although 'soul' tends to be more spiritual and heart usually something more...personal? I'm not sure exactly how to describe it, but I don't think it has to be religious in significance since I am as much an unbeliever as one can be.

The fact is that we don't understand our own human condition and so soul is just one of the more popular terms, in my opinion, used in the english language to sort of wrap up generalities that we can relate to and share. Fix my BROKEN soul could mean depression, grief, longing, or any combination of those things. Most languages seem to have words for certain kinds of emotional maladies that don't directly translate into another. Maybe this whole Soul reference is one of the English language's? Does our resident linguist have any insight into that?

I'd say a soul can absolutely be broken. It happens when the pain is so deep and so profound that nothing else in the world can get around it. It's mentally crippling, but generally fixable.

I do not believe in the existence of a soul. I do believe that people can suffer hideous mental anguish, which they may or may not be able to recover from.

I took a class in "cognitive science" and the one thing that I think really can't be explained is what one of my texts termed "first person ontology" -- that is, the sense of me -- the person experiencing this. Only one person experiences what I do, and I feel it in a way that I can only imagine, with effort, when it's anyone else.

I don't have any spiritual beliefs. But the closest I come is the fact that there is no real way to understand or explain that sense of "me" that we all feel. I'm not saying this makes me believe in anything like a human soul, but insofar as anything like that exists, it's the explanation for this "first person ontology".

For reasons I can't explain, the discussion of the nature of consciousness makes me extremely uncomfortable.

Exy, except for that last sentence, that's exactly how I see it. You worded it much betterly.