In a recent post I alleged that there is a cla,ss of people whose souls are dead. Somebody replied wondering what I was doing talking about souls when I'm an atheist. There's a deep confusion of ideas here, and I intend to address it. In part because I think it hinders peoples' ability to think clearly about currently important topics like: what is the moral status of an artificial intelligence? Everything I can perceive and learn about the universe tells me it is a vast, intentionless machine and I am a meat robot. There is no supernatural, just natural law. Humans are apes that have learned to dream a little. Nothing cares about us but us. That's the outside view. And yet. From the inside, I can be moved almost to tears by a beautiful sunset, or a friendly kitten, or a particularly elegant theorem. I have the capacity to feel wonder and awe, and moments in which the entire universe seems luminous with meaning. The scientist part of me assures me there must be some reason for this that is a mechanism in the meat robot. We might speak of evolved capacity for compressive learning, and of response to superstimuli, and the brain rewarding itself for adaptive learning. I believe that, but having some grasp of the mechanisms does not make the beauty of a sunset go away. There's a weird neurosis afflicting a lot of allegedly thinking people that denies this. A pervasive belief that if everything reduces to mechanism in your thinking you must necessarily deny that the interior experience of being human has meaning or value. According to them, I'm expected to deny love and beauty and morality. This is nonsense. I know why my cat purrs at me and why I like to pet it. That knowledge doesn't make the experience any less pleasant and meaningful for either of us. The inside view matters, whatever the outside view is. When I speak of "soul", I mean the part of us - the mechanism in the meat robot, if you will - that is capable of feeling wonder and awe and love and aesthetic delight; all the emotions that call us to be better than we are. When I speak of people with dead souls, I mean people who have starved and crippled that part of themselves. Why people do this sad thing is a whole 'nother essay. It doesn't take any belief in supernatural vital essence poured into people by a sky daddy for "soul" to be a meaningful concept. All it takes is noticing what the inside experience of being human is actually like. One of the things I want out of life is not just to know more, but to refine and expand my soul. To feel more beauty and awe and love. To engage passionately with the universe. This is why, though I have vast respect for Buddhist discipline and Buddhist meditative systems and have dived into both, I will never be a Buddhist. Nothingness is the opposite of the direction I want to go in. The person who wondered what I'm doing talking about souls when I'm in atheist is probably religious. And this brings me to one of my major gripes about conventional religions. They hijack our natural wonder at what it's like to be human from the inside for their gain; they erect untestable pseudo-explanations for that wonder in order to suck us into believing absurd and crazy things. Which matters a lot, because as Voltaire famously pointed out, if you believe absurdities you will commit atrocities. Ultimately, the reason I wrote this essay is because I'm anti-atrocity. Which means I want to stop parasitic belief systems from making people crazy. Which means I want them to be able to reconcile the outside mechanistic truth of how the universe actually is with their inside experience of being human. I hope this helped. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go pet my cat.