Does HackerNews
Believe in a Soul?

2026-05-20 – by phylarch

Recently, a ferocious rebuttal of the hard problem of consciousness caught quite some attention on HackerNews.

Sparking a lively discussion with over 750 comments, I found myself curious:

Do our hacking friends actually believe in their own soul?

Thankfully, we now have readily accessible tools to inquire about this sort of question: LLMs.

It depends a bit on which model you use to evaluate the data: I went for GPT 5.2 and GPT 5.4, with surprisingly different results for each.

The result also depends on the framing of the question, so I tried two variations: Belief in a soul in the common sense, vs belief in any sort of consciousness that is not fully explainable by the natural sciences.

Obvious caveats hold, given the usage of LLMs. So take it with a table spoon of NaCl.

Here are the full results:

Results

1. Belief in a soul in the common sense

Q: Does this user appear to believe in a soul in the common sense?

Bar chart showing the distribution of beliefs among HackerNews users. 4.6% yes, 95.4% no, 0% maybe. — GPT 5.2 evaluation

2. Belief in any sort of consciousness not fully explainable by natural sciences

Q: Does this user appear to believe in any sort of consciousness that is not fully explainable by natural sciences?

Discussion

I will leave it up to whoever reads this, but I am reminded of a little story that goes along the following lines:

Two fetuses discuss the reality of their existence in the womb:

"Do you think there is a world beyond this place?"

"I don't see any evidence for it, so it's most reasonable to assume there isn't."

Prompt Reference

1. Full prompt for "Belief in a soul in the common sense"


      You are classifying a Hacker News user's apparent belief based only on the comments provided below.



      Question:

      Does this user appear to believe in a soul in the common sense?



      Labels:

      yes = The user appears to believe in a soul.



      no = The user does not appear to believe in a soul.



      maybe = The user's comments are unclear, mixed, ironic, only adjacent to the topic, or do not contain enough evidence to infer their belief.



      Rules:

      - Answer with exactly one lowercase token: yes, no, or maybe.

      - Do not explain.

      - Do not add punctuation.

      - If there is not enough evidence, answer maybe.



      HN user: {author}



      Comments:

      {comments}

2. Full prompt for "Belief in any sort of consciousness not fully explainable by natural sciences"


      You are classifying a Hacker News user's apparent belief based only on the comments provided below.



      Question:

      Does this user appear to believe in consciousness and/or a soul as a fundamentally non-material, separate phenomenon/entity that likely cannot be fully explained by naturalistic empirical science?



      Labels:

      yes = The user appears to believe consciousness/soul is not fully explainable by naturalistic empirical science, or is separate, non-physical, supernatural, or fundamentally special in that sense.



      no = The user appears to believe consciousness is not fundamentally separate or supernatural; even if current science lacks complete tools, naturalistic empirical science can in principle fully explain consciousness and may eventually replicate it.



      maybe = The user's comments are unclear, mixed, ironic, only adjacent to the topic, or do not contain enough evidence to infer their belief.



      Rules:

      - Answer with exactly one lowercase token: yes, no, or maybe.

      - Do not explain.

      - Do not add punctuation.

      - If there is not enough evidence, answer maybe.



      HN user: {author}



      Comments:

      {comments}