That’s the title of a new article at the Patheos website, which describes itself as “the world’s homepage for all religion”. The article is the first in a series by Ted Peters, emeritus professor of theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, who understands the threat that materialism (aka physicalism) poses to traditional religious views regarding the self.
There are quite a few misconceptions in the article (and in the others in the series), but I think it’s a good springboard for continuing the discussion we’ve been having in CharlieM’s Body, Soul, and Spirit thread.
A taste:
Did I lose my mind to science? Actually, it was stolen. Who are the thieves? The thieves are the scientific materialists who have eliminated from our cosmology everything that is mental, conscious, meaningful, spiritual, and ideal. You’ll recognize the thieves when you hear them mutter, “the mind is only the brain, ya know.”
Clearly, science has not deprived all of us of our delusions.
How do dualists explain how the non-physical mind interacts with the physical brain and body? How does the interface work? Would there not be a disruption to the natural laws? A physical effect without a physical cause?
I said I would be silent on Goethe’s colour theory so I will refrain from stomping down on your freshly concocted ad hoc rationalization. I will however remind you of some previous statement of yours:
* hollow laugh*
My advice is to re-read your response above and ponder how on earth claiming that “[b]lack and white are equivalent to blue/violet and yellow/red taken to the extreme” harmonizes with saying that what you are doing is “stimulate my thinking”. What rubbish! The way I see it, you do not take any criticism seriously.
You are asking me to imagine brain processes in my mind. Because I have been taught that my brain is active during consciousness, and I have no reason to doubt this, I can quite easily think about neurons being active as I contemplate your argument. My visual system is engaged in reading it for starters. My will is also involved in my decision to reply. But I am getting ahead of myself if I claim to know how the brain instigates this activity. Can you tell me how it does it? Maybe it is you that William would have liked to speak to if he were here.
So your ego is more than just a brain, it is at the very least an organism.
If seeing were to involve the visual system alone, then the famous gorilla suit and the basketball game demonstration would not produce the results that it does. How do people who have virtually the same visual experiences, via the optic nerves to the brain, report different findings?
I am not talking about any error on your part. You ‘see’ how error could arise for some people. I was talking about errors being made by those people who might believe that they are actually seeing a ship floating in the air.
Can you demonstrate how my brain decided that I was going to switch on my laptop to comtinue the activity of replying here? Why would a group of cells in my head suddenly get urges like this?
I drove to a concert last night. Most of the work was done by my car. But I’m sure my car wasn’t responsible for arranging the trip.
What thinking do I have that I have not known about?
No, I am merely answering your question.
And here you simply repeat your question. My answer remains the same as the last time I answered you : however (in your opinion) your thinking mind achieves these wondrous things, that’s how you should consider my brain to work. You will of course be quite wrong, but at least you should find the explanation satisfactory. To put it another way, any barriers to action that are problematic for my brain, your ‘thinking mind’ suffers from the same problems, and then some…
Cute tangent, but I was criticizing the use of the verb ‘see’ in its metaphorical sense when the topic of conversation was visual perception. You are doing it again. Equivocation.
Still utter rubbish. I observe an object where it is not. The moron observes an object where it is not. We are BOTH suffering from an error in perception — we are perceiving something that doesn’t exist. I know why, and adjust my worldview accordingly, but I STILL SEE THE MIRAGE. That is the error, and it is in perception, not ‘thinking’. The Marios aren’t moving. I know this. But I still perceive motion. This fact is fatal to your ‘thinking mind’ conceit. For the third time, please think this through.
Right back at you: what evidence can you muster to show that you, Charlie, are capable of making a decision? Hint: none. Now, I don’t believe we live in a clockwork universe, but (pay attention here) you cannot prove that we don’t.
You have suddenly switched to the thermodynamic meaning of the word ‘work’. We were discussing information processing. Your equivocation is rude.
Really? You have never heard of ‘unconscious’ thought processes? And your brain does a whole pile of stuff without checking in with your homunculus. I even mentioned heart rate and breathing above. A conversation this ain’t.
Jock, to CharlieM:
Dualists constantly fall into this trap. They’ll cite some phenomenon and triumphantly ask the physicalist “How do you explain that?” Then they’re surprised and befuddled when the physicalist simply turns the question around by asking “How do you explain that?”
It seems that the job of explaining falls to the physicalists. The dualists are entitled to simply assume.
Here’s an example from the Peters article:
He’s referring to the Hard Problem of consciousness, which is the problem of explaining how subjective experience arises from purely physical processes. He completely overlooks his own problem, which is to explain how subjective experience arises from the immaterial soul he claims to have.
Physicalists are required to explain. Dualists can simply assume.
CharlieM:
Why wouldn’t they? Tell us specifically why you think that what you describe is incompatible with physicalism.
ETA:
Hint: Don’t be tempted to say “because particles blindly following the laws of physics don’t get urges”. See my earlier comments about how the properties of a system can differ markedly from the properties of its components.
“Did I lose my mind to science?”
Nuh, but instead, it should be entitled: “Was my mind replaced with pseudo-science?”
Or, if you feel “you represent the science” (Fauci mobster) you have immunity of some sort…other then to dead viruses… lol
keiths, you can do better than this…
After the fake pandemic, stirred up by fake virus of supposed evolutionary origins and doubled downed by fake vaccines that were never designed to prevent infection or spread of an imaginary dead viruses… science has a lot of loonies to lose their mind to… I’m out and not sorry to say it publicly…
keiths, I beg you, stop the bleeding now… Don’t turn into DNA-schmuck. He injected himself with s..t to prove his point and after that he had a reaction he felt good…
BTW: You must have heard about mRNA alternative splicing? It is not my area but some people sitting in this field feel there is enough evidence to be concerned…
J-Mac,
Don’t ever change. You’re my go-to example when warning youngsters about the dangers of methamphetamine abuse.
Why would I change? This would mean a compromise… No can do…
BTW: I pray for you to come to your senses … one day …I hope it is okay…?
Why would people abuse some drugs in the first place? Not because they are content, no?
Charlie,
Allow me to point to a glaring asymmetry. You’ve been given reasons why the immaterial soul does not (and cannot) exist, with my Alzheimer’s comment being a recent example:
You haven’t been able to explain the mismatch between what your model predicts and what we actually observe. You also haven’t been able to name a single discrepancy between what physicalism predicts and what we actually observe.
Rhetorical question: Physicalism is compatible with the evidence and dualism is incompatible with it. Why, then, are you a dualist?
Non-rhetorical answer: Because you are attached, deeply and emotionally, to the idea of an immaterial soul. The thought that the soul might not exist is upsetting to you. You don’t want it to be true. To avoid the upset, you are fighting tooth and nail against the evidence. If truth collides with comforting belief, then truth is to be discarded and belief affirmed. I do not say this lightly or off the cuff. It is based on years of observing you here at TSZ.
As Corneel points out, you characterize yourself as being open to constructive criticism, and you cite your presence here at TSZ as evidence of that. To some extent, it’s true. You’re open to criticism in the sense that you actually read our comments and you don’t altogether ignore the points that we raise. You will sometimes engage with them, and I think you’ve gotten better at that over time. However, there always seems to be a point at which you abandon the back-and-forth and go back to simply asserting the same things as before, as if the discussion had never taken place. That is what we find objectionable.
If you were honest with yourself, you’d say “The evidence is against the soul, but I believe anyway for emotional reasons.” At the very least, you’d say “I believe the soul exists, and I think I’ll someday be able to make a rational argument for it, but for now the evidence points the other way and I am unable to refute the arguments of the physicalists.”
As a baby step, see if you can get yourself to say “I don’t know that the soul exists.”
I am not unsympathetic to your plight. My deconversion from Christianity was a wrenching process, and I’ll confess that I attempted to rationalize my beliefs beyond the point where they ceased to be tenable. Eventually I decided that truth was worth pursuing even if it meant abandoning some cherished beliefs. I reasoned that if my beliefs were true, they would withstand scrutiny, so there was no reason not to scrutinize them. I chose “to follow the evidence wherever it leads”, as the IDers like to say.
I’ll also acknowledge that the process is probably more difficult for you than it was for me. You will be relinquishing beliefs that you’ve held for decades. I was in my teens and didn’t have such a long history to overcome.
Painful though the transition may be, I think that in the long run you’ll find it to be a relief. It’s exhausting to maintain beliefs in the face of contrary evidence, and there’s always the nagging awareness that you aren’t being honest with yourself and others.
Yes, but what she is claimng is that these neuroscientists have got it wrong. What she is actually saying is that they misappropriate consciousness. They are claiming that it is an epiphenomenon, it is produced by the brain, whereas she proposes it to be “the essence of the universe”.
Why would matter experience inwardness in this way. What is it about matter that gives you the impression that it can contemplate itself? The brain is the focal point for sensory information. By acts of will, we control how the information is received into consciousness. If you believe that focusing the mind and focusing the brain mean the same thing, what is it that is doing the focusing.
Yes that is what I meant. And it demonstrates that correlation does not equal causation.
CharlieM:
You’re right about her position. I shouldn’t have implied that she actually holds the view conveyed by that quote. My point is that the view expressed therein is the dominant one among neuroscientists, and Peters has completely misrepresented it by writing “It is the material brain that determines the delusion of a conscious mind, allegedly.”
His jaws have clamped down on that straw man and he ain’t gonna let go.
CharlieM:
Why would the immaterial soul experience inwardness in this way?
When arguing against someone’s position, try to cultivate the habit of asking yourself whether the argument you’re making could be used against your own position.
What is it about matter that gives you the impression that it can’t contemplate itself? Keep in mind what I keep telling you about how the properties of a system can differ from the properties of its components.
CharlieM:
You keep mentioning this as if it were an argument against physicalism. We’re not stupid, Charlie. We know that correlation doesn’t equal causation, and our case rests on far more than the mere fact that brain activity accompanies thinking.
I’m looking forward to hearing your response to this (the Alzheimer’s part).
There’s a passage in the Peters article that strikes me as particularly odd. It begins:
He’s reifying cosmology as an entity guilty of reasoning fallaciously. Read on to see why that’s so funny.
I’ve already pointed out that he gets Searle wrong, but that’s not the weird part.
Peters continues:
“Mistaking the abstract for the concrete” is more commonly known as “reification”, and of course it was recognized as a fallacy long before Whitehead’s time.
OK, here’s the weird part:
Bizarrely, that statement implies that “meaningless physical particles” aren’t real. They’re an abstraction, and the scientific materialists are mistakenly reifying them. The irony is palpable: Peters (falsely) criticizes materialists for denying the reality of consciousness, yet he himself is denying the reality of physical particles!
I find it hard to believe that Peters actually intended to say what he said. If he didn’t, though, what was he trying to say? Is he denying the reality of “meaningless physical particles” while affirming the reality of “meaningful” ones? If so, what makes an electron meaningful, and how does that concretize it?
Perhaps additional context will clear things up. Let’s keep reading:
Is he an idealist? Does he regard “concrete daily experience” as real, while physical reality is just an abstraction? Is he confused about what an abstraction is? Who knows?
Setting aside his mischaracterization of the views of “scientific materialists and neuroscientists”, is he trying to say that a cosmology that includes matter and energy alone is somehow abstract and therefore erroneous, while a cosmology that includes matter, energy, and consciousness is concrete?
That passage is a head-scratcher.
You imply that there is a difference between consciousness and awareness. So what do you consider to be the difference?
If you don’t understand how it works, how do you know that the firing of neurons causes thinking?
Do you agree that there is a difference between understanding how minds work and understanding how brains work?
Gaining knowledge of something does not involve understanding every irrelevant detail. It has a great deal to do with knowing what to leave out. For example if I want to understand the full meaning of what you have written above, I do not need to know anything about the processes that produced the words on my screen. Knowledge is about understanding what is essential. The appearance of a person in a gorilla outfit is totally irrelevant when counting basketball passes accurately. It is totally irrelevant to the task in hand.
Making sense of observations, coming to conclusions and having beliefs are only possible through thinking.
Sense experiences stimulate our thinking just as incoming signals stimulate our receiving devices. Interference of the signal will affect the function of the receiver. Hypoxia will severely affect the way the brain receives sensory inputs. The brain will feel none of this but the person will begin to have various feelings, possibly confusion, tiredness, etc. Anyone suffering from this will not be inclined to say, “Oh! My brain is becoming confused”. They might say, “I feel a bit strange”, or something like that. It is the “I” not the “brain” that experiences these things.
From previous posts here we can all “see” how unfamiliar sensory stimuli can confuse us. Illusions like those are just a very mild form of what someone with hypoxia or Alzheimer’s disease experiences. Is it any wonder they become confused?
See my previous post.
With the advancement of scientific knowledge and understanding, words such as “immaterial” and “non-physical” are much harder to define than they used to be. Thoughts, feelings, dreams and many other concepts are not made of matter and so are immaterial. Does this mean they are totally unrelated to physical substance? Of course not.
Water vapour is not made of ice, but we know it is intimately related to ice. According to conventional theories of the evolution of the universe, which came first, water vapour or ice? “In the beginning was the Word”.
A single correlation does not entail causation, but that doesn’t mean it’s never legitimate to infer causation from correlation. It all depends on the kinds of correlations that we’re talking about. If there are multiple lines of evidence that are all pointing the same general direction, or if the correlations vary with how the phenomena are being manipulated, then yes it is completely legitimate to infer causation from correlation.
I don’t expect this will make any impact to you, since you are wholly ineducable and impervious to any correction at all.
Not entail, no, but it can be suggestive enough to direct more focused investigation. My reading is, occasions where single correlations turn out to be pure coincidence are in the minority.
Flint:
Right. Charlie’s error is in assuming that physicalists leap straight from correlation to causation without further investigation. We aren’t that naive.
I don’t think Charlie is claiming that the correlation between brain activity and thinking is pure coincidence. My impression is that he’s arguing against the causal inference while still allowing that the two might be related.
If A and B co-occur, it might be pure coincidence, or it might be that A causes B. It also might be that B causes A, or that A and B are both caused by C.
CharlieM:
You keep saying this, and you evidently believe that it somehow undermines physicalism, but I can’t understand why. When I ask, you don’t answer.
I’ll try again. Below is an outline of your presumed argument. Step 1 is the premise, and step N is the conclusion. What are steps 2 through N-1?
1. Thinking is required in order to come to conclusions.
<Steps 2 through N-1 go here>
N. Therefore, thinking cannot be a physical process.
What goes in the middle?
CharlieM:
Let’s work out the implications of your model. You believe that thinking is carried out by the soul, not the brain, and that the brain’s role in this is simply to supply the soul with sensory information.* Alzheimer’s damages the brain, the damaged brain produces garbled sensory input, the garbled sensory input confuses the soul, and the result is the widely-recognized symptoms of Alzheimer’s.
Let’s test that model. One symptom of Alzheimer’s is difficulty in telling the time by looking at a clock. That fits with your model, though, doesn’t it? The soul is getting garbled visual input from the damaged brain, so it misreads the clock and gets the time wrong. Makes perfect sense, right?
Wrong. These people don’t report vision problems. They pass vision tests. They don’t have trouble seeing the clockface. They can tell you without hesitation that the little hand points to the 2 and the big hand points to the 8. What they can’t tell you is that the time is 2:40. It’s a cognitive problem, not a sensory one.
This topic is significant to me personally. Though it wasn’t Alzheimer’s, my mother (who died last year at 99) suffered from advanced dementia. Conversations with her often consisted of answering the same set of questions over and over, sometimes four or five times in a row. Mom was highly intelligent, and she was keenly and painfully aware of her declining faculties. My siblings and I didn’t want to worsen the stress, so we would gamely answer her questions no matter how many times she repeated them.
According to your model, her memory loss was somehow due to confusing sensory input. Yet she had zero trouble seeing and recognizing our faces, and she had no trouble understanding our words as long as her hearing aid batteries were fresh. This was not a sensory problem. It was a memory deficit. Why did her soul keep forgetting the questions she had just asked, Charlie? Why did physical damage to her brain somehow impair her soul’s ability to remember?
Your model cannot be correct. The evidence disproves it.
* Yet you claim that the soul is “out there” in the world, sensing things directly through its “higher form of seeing”. If the soul has an ability to get its sensory input directly and reliably, why does it bother getting it from an unreliable physical brain that is subject to disturbances such as Alzheimer’s, and an unreliable perceptual system that is subject to illusions? Why do we have eyes and ears if the soul can bypass them and sense things directly? I’ve asked you this before, but true to form, you haven’t answered. Ignoring the problems won’t make them go away, Charlie.
Not exactly. Consciousness is often used in a binary way – as if “consciousness” were an entity rather than a descriptive property of a sentient organism. Awareness and self-awareness carry much less baggage.
Ooh, that’s a little harsh, KN. I doubt anyone’s core beliefs are easy to shift. There must be a huge emotional element to belief that defies logic and reason. One or two ex-believers here have mentioned the transition from belief to non-belief involves emotional conflict, loss of friends and community.
No. Again, the problem is words carry baggage. Minds get talked about as if they exist apart from brains, which is very obviously (to me) unsupported and unsupportable.
Sure.
Is it? Maybe if you are choosing (or maybe it’s innate and you can’t choose) what is or seems essential to you. That what folks find essential or important or self-evidently true varies among individuals has been regularly confirmed in discussions at TSZ.
Maybe I was a bit harsh. I’ll accept that.
I’m not really irritated by people who don’t (or can’t) change their basic beliefs about themselves or the world. Most people are like that, and some of the people I care about are like that.
But I do get irritated by people who profess to be open-minded and inquisitive, but fail to act on those professed values.
Just as I get irritated by people who opine on philosophical, theological, and scientific topics that they clearly know nothing about and refuse to acknowledge any correction when their manifest errors are pointed out to them. (Yes, I’ve been commenting at UD again, why do you ask?)
😉
Good. So for the sake of argument, let’s say we are beings of body, soul and spirit. Each of these is energetic in its own way. The body functions through physical energy and the spirit through spiritual energy. The soul exists between these two spheres, the physical and the spiritual. I consider body, soul and spirit to be associated with willing, feeling and thinking, in that order.
As in Aristotle, anthroposophical understanding considers the soul to have three components, although the two systems, Aristotelean and anthroposophical, are not identical. From an anthroposophical outlook there is the sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul. My sentient soul is my life of feeling with respect to the outer world. For instance, when I look at a sunset, my visual system gives me the impression of the view, which is physical, but it is my sentient soul which gives me the capacity to experience the feelings it engenders in me. I can reflect on past events and in so doing feelings well up within me. This comes about by means of the intellectual soul. My consciousness soul allows me to think eternal truths. My soul gets its experiences from two directions. The sentient soul via the physical senses and the consciousness soul via inner intuitions.
Yes I agree, it does affect more than just “sense-bound thinking”. The brain is the organ of thought. If there is disruption in how it receives sense data and intuitions and also disruption to channels by which we can communicate what is in our minds, that is going to frustrate us to say the least. Abstract thinking comes under the sphere of intuitions. And by ‘intuitions’ I do not mean instinctive, unconscious knowledge, I mean inner knowledge not accessible via the senses. Inner perceptions are achieved through intuitive thinking.
The connections are made by our feelings, thoughts, actions, habits and learning involving our lower members, including the soul and the ego.
Why is it impossible. If I have a will to communicate my thoughts but I cannot coordinate my bodily processes with my thoughts to achieve this end. That is one problem I can envision. Also if brain processes are involved in retrieving memories, which I’m sure they are, then that would be a big problem.
As I understood it, the argument over how many angels could dance on a pinhead revolved around whether angels do or do not have a physical presence. The notion that there are no angels wasn’t considered and if it were, this dispute wouldn’t make any sense.
The same argument seems to be about the “soul”, and whether or not it has a physical presence. The notion that the soul is an imaginary or otherwise meaningless construct doesn’t seem to be part of the discussion.
Flint:
By “the discussion” do you mean this discussion (ie this thread), or are you referring to discussions of the soul more generally? If you’re referring to the current thread, the notion that the soul is imaginary is very much a part of the discussion. That’s the position I hold and and it’s the one I am arguing for.
Regarding discussions outside of this thread, my experience has likewise been that the debate is almost always over whether the soul exists at all, not whether it has a physical presence.
CharlieM:
What?? That’s the very position you’ve been arguing against. What is going on here?
keiths:
CharlieM:
Just think about it. If you’re right, then when the doctor says “Name 10 animals”, the patient is silently screaming “Dog! Cat! Platypus! Alligator! WHY WON’T MY LIPS FORM THOSE WORDS??” One minute ago they were chatting casually with the doctor, and now they can’t control their lips, tongue, and vocal cords?
When the doctor asks “What is your daughter’s name?”, they are silently screaming “Gretchen!” but what comes out of their mouth is “Gosh, this is terrible, but I can’t remember right now”? It makes no sense, Charlie.
Consider the time-telling business. The patient sees that the the little hand points to the 2 and the big hand points to the 8. The patient reports that the little hand points to the 2 and the big hand points to the 8. There is no problem on the sensory side, and there is no problem on the motor control side. The problem is with cognition. They know the hand positions, but they can’t infer the time.
Alzheimer’s damages the brain and thereby disrupts cognition. The brain does the thinking, not the imaginary soul.
You have been lured into a game of whack-a-soul. Don’t worry. You will be presented with a new explanation shortly.
Perhaps it will still feel warm…
This sort of begs for a definition. I myself regard the soul as a term invented to describe a sort of combination of personality, preferences, memories, experiences, relationships and the like. An important component in what makes an individual unique. In this sense, a soul is quite real, and really DOES have a physical presence composed of a constellation of interconnections in the brain.
But I know some people regard the soul as an undying part, that carries on after our death independent of other peoples’ memories of us. That notion of a soul, I regard as pure wishful thinking. I wonder if it’s inherent in human nature that the knowledge of the certainty of death entails the concept of some sort of afterlife (which is populated by souls).
Corneel:
LOL.
Flint:
I’m sympathetic to that definition and wish I could use the term that way. It causes too much confusion, though, for exactly the reason you point out. The default interpretation of “the soul” is “the nonphysical soul”, so I’d have to say “the physical soul” all the time. And because of that default interpretation, “the physical soul” would sound oxymoronic to a lot of people: “the physical nonphysical soul”. In the end, it’s just too much trouble.
My guess is that death isn’t the motivation behind the concept. I think what’s really behind it is the compelling sense that we inhabit our bodies rather than being our bodies. If you’re just inhabiting your body, then there’s no particular reason to believe that you die when your body does. You just get evicted.
And in some faiths, you get inserted into a new body, not necessarily human. So I think you’re partly correct, since the inhabit idea is another way to deny death. I can’t say that reincarnation appeals to me any more than getting wings and flying around in the clouds.
Note: In all of the following, I am using “soul” as a blanket term to cover any nonphysical component of the self that can function apart from the body. Also, for simplicity’s sake, I am neglecting the case of a nonphysical component that cannot function apart from the body. The reasoning I present below works either way, but it’s easier to understand without the added complication of the nonphysical but dependent component.
If any of you spot an error in my reasoning, please mention it.
One of my favorite arguments for the soul comes from the noted Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne. He writes:
Converting Swinburne’s rather inelegant and elliptical prose into a step-by-step argument, we get something like this:
1. If A and B are the same thing, then what is logically possible for A must also be logically possible for B.
2. It is logically possible that I have a soul.
3. It is also logically possible that I am a purely physical being, possessing no soul.
4. If I am a purely physical being, then it isn’t logically possible that I have a soul.
5. But in #2 we affirmed that it is logically possible for me to have a soul.
6. The assumption that I am a purely physical being has led to a contradiction. The assumption cannot be correct.
7. Therefore I am not a purely physical being. Part of me is nonphysical. I have a soul.
It sounds plausible on a first read, but warning bells should go off when someone affirms the soul’s existence not on empirical grounds, but rather as a logical necessity. A closer look is required.
Here’s why I think Swinburne’s argument fails. Just flip it around:
1. If A and B are the same thing, then what is logically possible for A must also be logically possible for B.
2. It is logically possible that I am a purely physical being, possessing no soul.
3. It is also logically possible that I have a soul.
4. If I have a soul, then it isn’t logically possible for me to be a purely physical being possessing no soul.
5. But in #2 we affirmed that it is logically possible for me to be a purely physical being possessing no soul.
6. The assumption that I have a soul has led to a contradiction. The assumption cannot be correct.
7. Therefore I do not have a soul. I am a purely physical being.
If your logic can be used to “prove” both an assertion and its negation, then your logic is broken. Hence my earlier advice to Charlie:
It’s one thing to show that Swinburne’s argument is flawed, but where precisely does it go off the rails? That’s a trickier question.
Here’s where I think the problem lies. If you assert that
…the actual meaning is closer to this:
The two cases can be separated, and when you do that, logical possibility turns into logical certainty. To spell it out: if it’s true that I have a soul, then it’s logically certain that I have a soul and can therefore exist apart from my body. If it’s true that I don’t have a soul, then it’s logically certain that I do not have a soul and cannot therefore exist apart from my body.
If you substitute those back into the original argument, the argument falls apart:
1. If A and B are the same thing, then what is logically possible for A must also be logically possible for B.
2. It’s logically possible that I have a soul and that I therefore can exist apart from my body.
3. It’s logically possible that I don’t have a soul and that I therefore cannot exist apart from my body.
4. If it’s true that I have a soul, then it’s certain that I have a soul, and I can exist apart from my body.
5. If it’s true that I don’t have a soul, then it’s certain that I don’t have a soul, and I therefore cannot exist apart from my body.
6. If I am a purely physical being, then I don’t have a soul, and it isn’t logically possible for me to exist apart from my body.
In the original argument, that last step was the one that caused the trouble. It led to a contradiction, and it was that contradiction that forced us to reject the “purely physical being” hypothesis.This time around there is no contradiction. Step 6 fits perfectly with the other steps. There is therefore no reason to reject the “purely physical being” hypothesis. Swinburne’s argument fails.
By symmetric reasoning, the flipped-around form of the argument also fails, meaning that it gives us no reason to reject the “nonphysical soul” hypothesis.
Swinburne’s logic hasn’t eliminated either possibility. Both are still live options, and the question needs to be adjudicated by other means. We’re back where we started, and Swinburne’s argument has accomplished nothing.
keiths,
Interesting quote from Swinburne. I think it rests on a conflation between conceivability and possibility.
Swinburne’s basic idea is this:
1. It is logically possible for some aspect of my personal identity to persist after my body dies.
2. But if materialism were true, then it would not be logically possible for any aspect of my personal identity to persist after my body dies.
3. Therefore (by modus tollens) materialism is false. \
It seems that both (1) and (2) are false.
(1) is false because it relies on a hidden premise that is by no means obvious. The correct version would be:
0. I can conceive of some aspect of my personal identity persisting after the death of my body.
Hidden premise: what is conceivable is logically possible.
1*. Therefore, it is logically possible that some aspect of my personal identity will persist after the death of my body.
But even if Swinburne really can conceive of himself as persisting after the death of his body — which is actually quite open to all sorts of doubts! — it doesn’t follow that therefore it is logically possible that he will. That would require that conceivability entails logical possibility, which is not obvious and which has been hotly contested. (Chalmers, to motivate this premise, has to invent an entirely new semantic theory. Philosophy ain’t easy, folks.)
The first premise also doesn’t have the implications that Swinburne thinks it does. . If it is logically possible that I have a soul, that means only that there exists some possible world in which my counterpart has a soul. That doesn’t tell me anything at all about whether I have a soul. One would need some really demanding theory of the modality of personal identity, in which I have a soul in every world in which I exist. (I would guess that Swinburne is relying on Kripke here.)
The second premise is also false, because it completely misunderstands the basis for materialism. The reason to not believe in a soul is because it conflicts with our best empirical science. But our best empirical science only tells us what’s true about the actual world. It is fully consistent with materialism that I don’t have a soul in this world, but there’s some possible world in which I do.
For that matter, if souls are wholly undetectable by every kind of measurement, it’s possible that I really do have a soul even though all possible evidence indicates that I don’t. But that would not be a reason to therefore believe that I actually do have a soul; it would only mean that I cannot conclude that I don’t have a soul based on logic alone. At most it would mean that I ought to be agnostic about having a soul, though I may hope that I do (or hope that I don’t).