I don’t believe in a non-corporeal soul. I don’t see why I need to. I do believe that, for whatever reason, I have an innermost self - something intensely personal and intensely felt, something… almost unutterable or inexpressible.
My question is simple, does the soul exist? How would we know either way? When is the word “soul” used, where the phrase “innermost self” cannot?
For those prone to quibble over whether I ought to define things in the OP… the soul is any non-corporeal soul construct throughout history.
I’d also like to ask if we can keep this debate a bit out of the clouds. While I can follow along with the conversation in threads, I think once it hits the rareified air of ontological distinctions… the discussion quickly excludes people of other mindsets and less schooled in the more minute distinctions of philosophy. Sometimes… philosophy confuses itself with words, imo.
By the evidence; or in this case, the total lack of evidence for a soul. If there’s a soul, how does brain damage destroy parts of people’s minds ? If there’s a soul, why do drugs work on people’s minds ? Where’s the evidence for some sort of non-material . . . stuff that a soul could be made of in the first place ? We have all sorts of evidence that our selves are generated by the brain, that we are just electrochemical and neurological patterns run by our brain.
All the evidence is that we are physical creatures, with a mind wholly built on a physical substrate. There’s simply no reason to believe otherwise, and it’s the logical burden of those who claim otherwise to come up with evidence. There’s no evidence that souls are even possible, much less real.
I too believe in an “innermost self,” the thing that I refer to when I use words like “I” or “me,” and I’m not specifically referring to my body. But I take great pains not to completely separate it from the totally physical. So I can only say that it is a constant energy, perhaps what we refer to as “personality,” that remains integral until my death, then no longer exists.
I also take great pains not to use the word “soul,” since it has so many religious connotations, with which I don’t believe.
If, say, our brains were receivers for a signal that remote-controlled us (i.e. our “soul” was somewhere playing with the joystick that made us “want to have an ice-cream”), then any physical damage to the receiver will very easily change the way the device works.
Same with drugs. They temporarily alter the receiver, so it temporarily behaves differently. This is similar to when you wave a huge magnet in front of the TV, and it starts to show weird colors not present in the actual TV transmission.
I’m not saying that this is indeed the case (i.e. that we are indeed receivers of a remote-control signal), but it is example that shows that “brain damage destroys parts of people’s minds” and “drugs work on people’s minds” do not necessarily imply that the “I” resides solely in the brain tissue.
You might rephrase the question to, “Is there an I, apart from only the brain?” Or even, “Is this intense feeling of self, a side-effect of a brain, or is the brain an interface between self and the body it happens to reside in?” And if the latter is the case, what would it be like to be yourself, without your brain or body?
Personally, I feel this is one of those questions that is outside the realm of science. Even philosophically, I keep ping-ponging back and forth. My logic says there’s no way my “self” is anything but a by-product of a highly evolved brain. Break it down far enough, and there’s no there there. But then there is this tug, deep in my ego, that says, I’m more than just these cells, chemical reactions, and molecules. There’s a sum here that’s greater than the individual parts. In that, I morn for the eventual loss of my “self”. But even still, the heart still hopes there’s more to it than that. I yearn for a soul, but still there is no evidence for it, and there probably never will be.
I’m afraid that it’s your idea that doesn’t work. Brain damage destroys mental functions, it doesn’t cut us off from some other . . . thing. Brain damage destroys parts of what we are, it doesn’t just make our bodies harder to control. We know what the kind of damage you postulate looks like, since that’s what damage to the spinal column is, and it doesn’t look like the effects of brain damage. It’s similar with drugs; they change us, they don’t make us act against our desires, they change those desires.
If you were right, drugs and brain damage would make it harder to control our bodies, but leave us clear minded. They don’t, and you aren’t.
And then there’s the fact that since drugs and brain damage affect our minds, what makes us who we are, that is evidence that our brains are our minds. There is NO evidence for souls at all, much less for your remote control theory.
I’ve heard this counterargument (from lekatt, I think) but I don’t quite understand it. If damage and drugs just affect the receiver, how is it the “I” has the experience of being the impaired receiver rather than remaining an unaffected transmitter?
I use the term spirit a lot more than soul but I think I understand the question. I don’t think we can know. I’ve had experiences that led me to believe in something more powerful than normal thoughts but I’m perfectly comfortable with innermost self.
I think it’s unfortunate that the use of preferred terminology can hinder or even halt communication and understanding. IMO the question of what if anything survives the death of our physical bodies can be left alone.
An issue that occurs to me in this. For me part an important part of our innermost selves is that feeling of connection with others. Lot’s of religious teaching is the hole " we are one" thing. In your personal view how does your concept of innermost self fit into this?
A friend of mine sent me this video link of a brain scientist talking about her own stroke. I think it relates. There’s also a text version available on the page.
I came in to post basically this. A person knocked unconscious is unconscious. It’s not that their mind is functioning, but merely receiving no sensory input from the (temporarily concussed) brain. The mind is out. That doesn’t make sense on the dualist view.
The existence of the soul is actually pretty easy to see, if we accept the dichotomoy that either we have a non-corporeal soul or else everything is physical. If everything were physical then it would be possible to describe every mental process in physical terms. With enough sophistication, it would be possible to control every mental process or create a new mental process.
So, for instance, I believe that Shakespeare was a better author than Dan Ronco. If my mental process is purely physical, then someone should be able to tell me the exact series of physical processes that constitute this mental process. In fact, no one can. Likewise, if my mental process is purely physical, then someone should be able to tweak my brain physically and make me believe that Dan Ronco is a better author than Shakespeare. No one can do that either.
Some say that drugs and brain damage prove the entire mental process is physical. In fact, they prove the opposite. Drugs and brain damage are blunt instruments that can only produce broad, imprecise changes in the mental process. The very fact that no physical change has precise changes on thoughts suggests that precise thoughts are not physically determined. The ‘drugs and brain damage’ argument is like saying that since you can destroy a computer with a baseball bat it follows that computer programs don’t exist.
You answered this yourself. No one can, yet. Who says that medical science is sophisticated enough? Do you know that medical science has reached it’s peak and we won’t find anything else out about the brain?
You sound awfully certain about the ‘broad, imprecise changes’ thing. You want produce a cite? You sure there are no procedures or drugs that that can do just one specific thing?
??? The brain is hugely complex, with hundreds of billions of connections. And ethical considerations make many types of research on the brain impossible. So our incomplete understanding of the brain proves nothing at all. I’m imagining a caveman encountering a supercomputer and figuring that because he can’t predict what it’s going to do next, it must have a spirit. That’s basically the argument you are giving.
First, the brain is a distributed processing network, so of course damage will not always change its function in predictable ways. But contrary to what you claim, damage to specific parts of brain correlated with specific mental disturbances
(i) damage to hippocampus results in profound difficulty in forming new memories
(ii) damage to left parietal lobe can result in left-right confusion
(iii) damage to right parietal lobe can cause left-sided neglect
(iv) damage to parietal lobe results in inability to understand metaphors
(v) damage to mammillary body can result in confabulation (i.e., confusing imagination with memory, or true memories with false ones)
(vi) fetal alcohol syndrome causes specific physical changes to brain which manifest the following mental symptoms:
• inability to tell fantasy from reality
• inability to feel remorse
• failure to understand the concept of time
• retardation and low intelligence
Why would there be many receivers in our brain then, unlike our TVs? Are there many channels of this “soul” one for pain, one for pleasure, one for anger? Please define an experiment that would distinguish the receiver hypothesis from the purely physical one. How could your hypothesis be falsified? If you just look at the results of scientific experiments on the brain, and can’t predict anything, and if your hypothesis can’t be falsified, it is unscientific rubbish, and the moral equivalent of creationism.
Actually, it’s an argument that the brain works just like a computer - the process is as much a result of ever-changing and difficult-to-photograph effects like electrical and chemical states as it is about the masses of static brain tissue/fixed circuit boards that these transient processess are occuring within. In my opinon, a computer program running on a computer is an excellent (though extremely simple and not similar in precise workings) analogy for the ‘sense of self’ occurring within our brain.
Oh, and we’re fairly computers don’t have external souls either. Though you could argue that some computers have an “innermost sense of self”, or something comparable.
It is my position to base my beliefs on the best data I have right now, as opposed to data that someone else assures me will exist in the future.
My outlook is actually quite simple. If the chemical in our brain actually constitute our mind and self, then they are doing things which no other collection of chemicals anywhere in the universe can do or come close to doing. This seems extremely unlikely to me.