Are souls real? And if so, do people with autism have them, or

>>2672713
I still don't get what the deal is with qualia.

>>2672713
>Are souls real?

YES.

>And if so, do people with autism have them, or are they more like robotic AI?

WHY WOULD AUTISM ENTAIL A LACK OF SOUL, ACCORDING TO YOU?

SOME INDIVIDUALS ARE SOULLESS, BUT AUTISM, OR THE LACK OF IT, ARE NOT FACTORS.

>>2672713
>Are souls real
depends on how you define a soul

Like with most Christian/Abrahamic theology, their concept of a soul is hard to argue for, since the claim is meaningless.

Unless you can verify that the fundamental basis of Christianity is true, and that the basis of millions of other religions are not true, any questions/assertions about Christian theology are meaningless.


>Did Jesus really walk on water?
Meaningless question, when you can't even verify that he is the incarnation/son of God.

Questions like that are thought experiments AT BEST.

>>2672721

Want to elaborate? I'm not sure if you mean you don't get what the deal is with people debating qualia, or if you mean you don't get what the deal is with how qualia themselves work, or if you don't get what the deal is with why people believe in qualia as literal things when they're really just abstract shortcuts for discussing physically explicable behavioral reactions to stimuli, etc.

>>2672726
>YES
>SOME INDIVIDUALS ARE SOULLESS
>BUT AUTISM, OR THE LACK OF IT, ARE NOT FACTORS
What is the basis for this claim?

>>2672729

"Soul" doesn't have to be a Christian thing. The ancient greeks had a concept of soul too. Basically everyone did throughout history.

>>2672731
>if you don't get what the deal is with why people believe in qualia as literal things when they're really just abstract shortcuts for discussing physically explicable behavioral reactions to stimuli, etc.
this. Just the argument itself seems empty. so the color red cannot be expressed in language to a blind person. I don't see the logic behind this argument at all and feel that there's something that I'm missing.

>>2672738
That's why I said, "depends on how you define a soul".

I was assuming that OP was talking about the soul in the Abrahamic religious sense, but also just challenging any Christians, Jews or Muslims lurking here.

>>2672737
Headcanon

>>2672743

I think you're right to not get why people do that. Most people are very mixed up and wrong when it comes to qualia and they mistakenly believe "what it's like to see red" or "what it's like to be in pain" are literal phenomena that haven't been explained by science yet when really they're not objects of that class at all. Waiting for them to be explained like biology or chemistry is like waiting for someone to find and explain numbers. There's nothing to be found or dissected, they're abstract fictions, not physical things in themselves. We react to stepping on a nail by maybe yelling, tensing up, trying to get the nail out, and no longer being able to focus on other things even though we might wish we could. All of this plus the language we use later to describe our memories of what happened then make use of the abstraction of "pain" so we can communicate (and reference to ourselves for later comparison / contrast with other events) what happened in an easier way than if we were stuck always speaking in terms of the literal physiological activity and behaviors "pain" abstracts for.

The problem is part of this process involves our believing these abstractions are these totally real and immediate things in themselves, and a lot of people are really insistent on taking this belief behavior as somehow evidence these abstractions literally are real and immediate things in themselves. These people usually don't bother much with the reasons behind how all this works because they're satisfied with the strength of their belief being evidence enough that the things they're compelled to believe in must be true.

It's a real problem because these same people are going to hold back AI by diverting a bunch of focus on solving a mystery that doesn't exist.

>>2672713
Seriously, why haven't governments weaponized autism yet?

>>2672801
What do you think cryptography is?