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.”
I feel your pain. Is empathy physical? 🙂
You have failed to show why inner experiences, feelings and consciousness should be classed as physical. Do you have any measurements or formulae for dealing with these things?
You have failed to provide me with a definition or at least an explanation of what physicalism is. To state that there is nothing but the physical involves supplying an account of what this means.
Analogies can be, and are quite often, taken too far.
There is a desire for the car to reach town, and desire is a soul force. So where does this desire originate? Its not in the car, it’s my desire.
I have some jump leads which are suitably connected, the engine starts, and the car eventually arrives in town. My desire to drive into town overcame the problem. Notwithstanding all the physics involved it was me who weighted up the options and took this specific course of action.
My brain does not have thoughts. I have no direct experience of neurons, nor my brain, nor synapses. I do have direct experience of my thoughts. Candace Pert was a neuroscientist whose research in this field brought her to the conclusion that the mind is much more than physical brain activity.
I can think about my thinking and its physical correlates. I can think about the physical process of food being digested in my stomach and intestines. It would be nonsense to say that I digest about my digesting. My stomach etc. does the digesting which allows my body to function, my brain processes sense data which allows my mind to function. I do the thinking and would not be able to do so without those bodily activities.
I’ll skip that statement for now.
I use my body for various activities and this involves the physical and chemical processes you mention above. Thinking and feeling are conscious mental activities, none of the above are.
Again this avoids any mental activity.
It takes mental activity to be creative. All these vehicular mechanisms have human thinking mental activity behind them. They are the result of applied thoughts.
I believe I consist of body, life, soul and spirit. My ‘I’ does not sit beyond my body as the first constituent here testifies. My ‘I’ is in the process of becoming under the influence of my physical and mental experiences.
Send me up in a rocket on a solo space mission and I can be alone with my thoughts. Do the same thing with my brain on its own and there won’t be much thinking going on in the capsule. A person as a conscious thinking agent is believable in a way that a brain as a conscious thinking agent just isn’t.
I love you too… I hope one day we meet for a beer an lough about this… What do you say? Isn’t this blog about uniting people? I don’t care what you feel like…
When you step into my house you are welcomed 🙂
J-Mac:
You, Corneel, Jock, and I can lough about it when we meet for beers to celebrate your inevitable Nobel Prize for your seminal work in virology.
CharlieM:
You didn’t answer the question, which was whether you agree with Steiner that the soul* survives our bodily death. I’ve read enough (while looking for entertaining Steiner quotes) to know that Steiner does believe that the soul survives death and continues to think. Do you agree? That is what I mean about the soul surviving “on its own”, and as I keep pointing out, the evidence shows that the soul, if it exists at all, is not capable of performing even simple cognitive tasks like telling the time. The brain does that.
Your soul* isn’t your desires, passions, and feelings. Your soul is what experiences your desires, passions, and feelings. Try to keep that straight.
If they are dependent on your body, are you conceding that the soul after death no longer experiences desires, passions, and feelings?
When you “control your appetitive desires”, it is your brain that is doing the controlling. Could you explain specifically why you think the brain cannot do this?
* Let me stress once again that for the purposes of this discussion, I am using the word ‘soul’ to refer to any nonphysical entity (or combination of entities) that is part of a person. I realize that you and Steiner subdivide the nonphysical part of us (into soul, spirit, etheric body, astral body, Manas, Buddhi, whatever) and that’s fine, but I’m trying to 1) eliminate unnecessary complications, and 2) make the discussion as relevant as possible to the majority of readers, most of whom (if they are believers) don’t subdivide the nonphysical part of a person in the way Steiner does. My arguments apply to your views as well as theirs.
CharlieM:
I haven’t needed to show that. I’m arguing that all of those are the result of brain activity, whether or not they themselves are physical. Indeed, there is a philosophical position called ‘property dualism’ which is very close to physicalism but holds that mental properties are nonphysical properties of the physical brain. The soul is no more viable under property dualism than it is under physicalism.
I am using ‘physical’ the way physicists (and pretty much everyone else) use the word. It refers to matter and energy and the phenomena tied to them. Note: By ‘energy’ I am referring to the kind of energy recognized by reputable physicists, not the various weird spiritual ‘energies’ of the wooniverse.
I’ve already explained why your focus on the definition of ‘physical’ can’t get you off the hook. Please reread this comment.
CharlieM:
Not in this case. The reasoning is an exact match: if brain damage destroys the ability to tell time, then the soul isn’t what tells the time. If battery damage destroys the ability of the car to start, then the ‘car soul’ isn’t what supplies the current to the starter. The human soul is no more plausible than the car soul.
Of course. And in my analogy, both you and the ‘car soul’ want to drive to town. It’s just that the car soul doesn’t exist, and the reasoning behind that conclusion is the same reasoning that shows that the human soul doesn’t exist.
CharlieM:
I’d be careful about saying that in public. 🙂
You’ve told us that the brain is the organ of thought (in those exact words). Now you’re telling us that the brain does not have thoughts. Which is it?
Or is this going to be some semantic dodge like “The brain does the thinking, but the thoughts don’t belong to it, they belong to me”? If so, give me a break. Thoughts carried out by the brain are the brain’s thoughts.
True, unless you open up your skull or have an MRI done. What is your point? Physicalism doesn’t require that you have direct experience of your neurons. Where did you get that strange idea?
So do I. What is your point, given that this is perfectly compatible with physicalism?
You’re welcome to quote her or paraphrase her arguments. I’d be interested in seeing them.
Remember, you were the one who drew an analogy between thinking and digestion:
You were trying to show that it was you who did the digesting and thinking, not your stomach, intestines, and brain. My examples show why your reasoning is specious. “My brain doesn’t think; I use my brain to think” makes no more sense than “My heart doesn’t pump blood; I use my heart to pump blood.”
“I think”, “I use my brain to think”, and “my brain thinks” are not contradictory.
keiths:
CharlieM:
True, for the rather obvious reason that a brain will die without a body to supply it with oxygen and glucose. If I deprive you of oxygen, you won’t be doing much thinking either.
Arguments from incredulity won’t fly. I find it incredible that anyone could be a devotee of Steiner, but there it is. I can’t deny the evidence.
Let’s set aside consciousness for the moment, since that is a separate argument. You’ve acknowledged that the brain is the organ of thought and (probably inadvertently) that thinking is a physical process. If the brain does our thinking, why exactly (and I want you to spell it out) can’t the brain be a thinking agent? What precisely does the soul (or the “I”, or whatever) do that the brain cannot, in terms of thinking?
Also, you’ve conceded that particles everywhere (including in the brain) follow the laws of physics, without exception. The laws of physics tell you what the brain’s particles are going to do. There is no leeway*. That means the soul has no role to play in anything the brain does, including thinking. If the soul actually existed, it could only watch helplessly as the brain did what it was going to do anyway, as dictated by the laws of physics. The soul would be nothing more than a spectator.
If the laws of physics are followed without exception, as you have acknowledged, then the soul is impotent.
* Except possibly for quantum indeterminacy, but as I’ve pointed out before, that wouldn’t help you.
I’m not sure you are getting what Steiner is saying here.
With the parallelogram of movement we are not dealing with any physical object. This is pure mathematics and doesn’t need any further proof. We can picture it in our minds. If line ‘ac’ moves down with the point at ‘a’ moving along ‘ad’ and we call the intersection of ‘ac’ and ‘ab’ ‘e’, then ‘e’ will end up at ‘b’
Moving on to the parallelogram of forces, we are dealing with a moving massive object. The mass is being pushed or pulled along the direction of ‘ac’, and there is a force being applied to it in the direction of ‘ad’. The object can be calculated to end up at ‘b’. You say you can calculate this outcome in your mind, but how do you prove this will be the actual outcome?
From Wikipedia:
Whereas the parallelogram of movement is pure mathematics.
Reposting the diagram so that readers can visualize what Charlie is describing:
Charlie,
OK, I see what you’re saying. A more charitable interpretation is possible. When Steiner wrote this…
…I thought he was saying that you could never calculate resultant forces, but he was probably just saying that it had to be established empirically that the results of such calculations will match what we observe in reality, which is correct. Mea culpa.
Unfortunately, Steiner still manages to get the physics wrong, as I’ll explain below.
You can apply it to a physical object in the same way that you can apply the parallelogram of forces to a physical object. Both calculations can be seen abstractly, as pure mathematics, or they can be seen as a prediction of what will occur in physical reality.
If Steiner is trying to say that the parallelogram of movement can be validated via pure thought, while the validity of the parallelogram of forces needs to be established empirically, then he is incorrect. Both need to be established empirically.
It’s mathematically possible for space to be non-Euclidean. We intuitively believe that space is Euclidean, but what actually justifies that intuition is observation and experience, not pure thought. (In truth, the space we live in actually isn’t Euclidean, because it is warped by the earth’s gravitational field as predicted by general relativity. It’s just that the effect is small enough to be negligible in our everyday lives.) So no, the validity of the parallelogram of movement cannot be established through pure thought. Like the parallelogram of force, it must be validated empirically.
The intersection of ac and ab is just a. I’m not sure why you’re renaming it ‘e’, and moving the line down will place it at d, not b. It is c that will end up at b following this operation.
Also, the visualization you are performing, in which you move the line ac, is unnecessary. The static diagram is all you need to illustrate the principle.
If you move from a to c and then from c to b, you end up at b, which is the same result you’d get by moving directly from a to b. It’s just vector addition. You add ac to cb and the result is ab.
Steiner messed up by putting the arrowhead on line ad in figure 1a, and I’m guessing this is what caused you to believe that it was necessary to move the line ac. The arrowhead should be on line cb in order to match his verbal description, and then it is obvious that the static diagram is sufficient to show what’s going on. In other words, figures 1a and 1b should not be identical. Figure 1a should have the arrowhead on line cb instead of ad.
Maybe it’s just your wording, but your description makes it sound like the mass is moving along ac but eventually ends up at b. For the record, the mass doesn’t move along ac, it moves along ab. There are two forces, one in the ac direction and one in the ad direction, and when added together they result in a force in the ab direction. The result is that the object accelerates in the ab direction.
The two forces must be applied simultaneously, not serially. In that respect the parallelogram of forces differs from the parallelogram of movement.
The object doesn’t end up at b. It accelerates in the ab direction, and if no other forces are applied to it, it will keep accelerating in that direction forever. Even if you remove the forces at some point, the object won’t stop at b. It will continue to travel in the ab direction forever, at a constant velocity. The only way to make the object stop at b is by applying an opposing force (or forces) of the appropriate magnitude and duration.
The same way you prove the displacement case. Empirically.
I thought I’d make a few short comments on some older post that I’ve had another look at.
Thinking is carried out by someone who consists of body, soul and spirit. It is the person and not the ‘immaterial soul’ who does the thinking.
***
Where did I attribute thinking to be the exclusive province of the soul? If I have given the impression that I implied this, I can only think it way through my failure to communicate effectively.
***
I asked Alan why he thinks it would be necessary for matter to have conscious experience.
What about idealists who believes that all is consciousness or a derivative thereof.
***
Okay. If a nerve in my tooth produces pain, it is me who feels the pain. It isn’t the nerve or tooth that experience the pain. So, for the sake of argument, if the nerves in my brain produce a thought, it is me who thinks the thought. It isn’t the nerves or brain that experience the thought. Do you agree with this?
Some of her ideas can be read here
From the article:
And in this article, from the idea of “bodymind”, she goes on to speculate about the ways that there can be a continuation of consciousness after the body falls away at death.
The article was accessed from http://candacepert.com where there is a lot more information.
Quick response:
1: There is no answer to “why” questions.
2: “Consciousness” is inadequately defined, resulting in endless talking past each other here and elsewhere.
3: One can’t ignore energy as part of the physical realm.
4: Ants on the sidewalk …
CharlieM:
You’ve been all over the map, actually. If it’s Tuesday, you might be claiming that the brain is only responsible for “sense-bound” thinking, and then on Saturday you’ll be saying that the brain is “the organ of thought” and that it’s responsible for all of the “dead thoughts of the intellect” that comprise your everyday thinking. Corneel and I find these continual changes to be extremely annoying. What’s worse is that you don’t admit that you’re changing your position and you don’t explain why you’re changing it. You are not arguing in good faith when you act this way, Charlie.
Our working definition of the soul in this thread includes all nonphysical components of a person, including any nonphysical Steinerian entities. In other words there’s a body (physical), a soul (nonphysical, if it exists at all), and nothing else. That’s the sum total of a person. The “I” refers at most to the combination of those two entities.
It follows that any cognitive function not carried out entirely by the brain requires the soul’s participation, and any cognitive function not carried out entirely by the soul requires the brain’s participation. Alzheimer’s, which damages the brain, can destroy a patient’s ability to tell time, and the cognitive part of that ability is not exempt. That means that the soul, on its own, does not have the ability to tell time. It relies on the brain, and if the brain dies, so does the ability to tell time.
Steiner believes that the soul survives death, and you haven’t indicated any disagreement with him on that point. After death, the soul no longer has access to the brain, so it follows that the soul after death is incapable of telling time. The same reasoning applies to a zillion other abilities that are disrupted by damage to the brain. The soul on its own is profoundly crippled.
I’m tired of endlessly having to restate this, so I’m just going to quote an earlier comment of mine instead of reinventing the wheel:
Please dispense with the endless dodging and evading and answer these questions: Is there anything the soul actually can do? If so, what is it, and what is your evidence that the brain cannot do it? And if you can’t identify a role for the soul, then why posit its existence in the first place?
CharlieM:
I’m not seeing how idealism, if it were true, would help your position. Could you elaborate?
keiths:
CharlieM:
The nerve and tooth don’t experience the pain, but the brain does. That’s why general anesthesia works. The brain initially experiences the pain, but after the general anesthesia takes effect, the pain is gone.
And again, there is no contradiction between a statement like “My brain experienced the pain, but after the anesthesia kicked in, it no longer did” and “I experienced the pain, but after the anesthesia kicked in, I no longer did”. You appear to believe that there is a contradiction, If so, make your case. Don’t just repeat a variation of “My brain doesn’t think; I do”. Make an actual argument.
No. I agree that you think the thought, but that in no way means that your brain doesn’t think it. You digest your food, but that in no way means that your stomach and intestines don’t digest it. You grasp the doorknob, but that in no way means that your hand doesn’t grasp it.
I should have said that I don’t think it would be necessary for matter to have conscious experience (it doesn’t make any sense) and I’m curious why Charlie attributes such to me. Is there a comment of mine that gave you that impression? Can you link to it?
Why would you say such a thing? 🙂
Because there aren’t. All “why” questions lead to infinite regress.
@ Charlie:
But I’m still curious about how you got the idea that:
In what way are these statements of mine contradictory?
I said our sense-bound thinking is dependent on brains, senses and other bodily systems, and that deterioration of the brain affects sense-bound thinking, feeling and willing. I was discussing this in relation to a person being able to recognize the relationship between clocks and time. I didn’t say these things were exclusive, I even agreed that brain damage can affect much more than sense-bound thinking.
So I didn’t say what you are claiming I said, whether on Tuesday or any other day.
You wrote
In my opinion these things clearly are sense-bound. How can you tell the time from a clock without looking at the hands to determine their spatial relationship? This thinking is clearly related to the senses.
Are you acting in good faith in trying to understand what I am actually saying?
The “I” is the linchpin. It is the reason we know we have a body and a mind in the first place. I have self-conscious awareness and I can think, that is how I know that it is me who senses, thinks, acts and feels. I not only feel pain but I also know that I am feeling pain. Neither body nor soul have an independent existence.
I agree that to recognize clock time, which is a human construct, will require the body and soul together. And as I’ve often repeated, there is no such thing as a “soul, on its own”. In my opinion, time, as we know it, becomes meaningless after death.
I agree.
To repeat yet again, my position is that there is no such thing as a “soul, on its own”.
The soul can retain memory pictures and, according to Steiner, on death it experiences them free from the filtering process of the brain. That is why some people often report that, on the point of death, their entire life appears before them in a sort of memory panorama. But this memory experience will soon be lost. Steiner claimed that people experience things differently depending on the changing relationship between the physical, etheric and astral ‘bodies’. Sometimes, on death, the person will lose consciousness as they do in dreamless sleep.
In order to criticize a position it’s a good idea to be familiar with the position that is being criticized.
Do you not think that idealistic monism is equally as justified as materialistic monism.
You say that there is no contradiction between, “my brain thinks” and, “I think”. Well that would mean, either I am my brain or there are two thinking agents. Clearly I am more than just a brain, and the other option is that two entities are thinking the same thought. Isn’t the former proposal more parsimonious than the latter.
I think the thought, but I don’t digest the digestion or grasp the grasping. Unless we are using ‘grasp’ in two different senses. one meaning to seize hold of physically, and the other as a metaphor for mental understanding.
Alan:
CharlieM:
Alan:
Alan,
Look at the first word of the question you just answered.
Why would they lead to infinite regress?
Have you had a conversation with a Toddler?
I recall my wife pointing me to an article that explained that your kids were not trolling you, or trying to be annoying; rather, they were beginning the learn how conversations work, and quickly hit on the recursive use of “Why?” as a simple way of continuing ANY conversation. So we hit on the following solution: at the third or fourth iteration of
>”Why?”
>”Because Ruddles [our Black Labrador] is green”
>giggles, “No, she’s not!”, and they’re off on a new conversation.
Far less wearing on the ‘soul’ than staying in the same loop.
Now that I think about it, there’s a parallel here… 😮
DNA_Jock,
Oops wrong video
Oops right video
CharlieM:
Corneel and I have not only been acting in good faith, we’ve been going above and beyond in our efforts to understand your position. That isn’t easy when you keep changing it without notice.
keiths, a while ago:
CharlieM:
Why are you pretending that we haven’t gone over this before? You know perfectly well what I’ve said about this. Determining the positions of the hands involves the senses, but determining the time from those positions does not. Blindfold me, plug my ears, put me in a sensory deprivation chamber, and I can still figure out that if the little hand on a hypothetical clock points to 2 and the big hand points to 8, it’s 2:40. It’s a cognitive process, not a sensory one.
Naming ten animals? Not a sensory process. Remembering your daughter’s name? Not a sensory process.
Don’t come back a week from now and pretend that I haven’t explained this to you. Ignoring my argument will not make it go away.
CharlieM:
Is that supposed to constitute an argument against physicalism? If so, please flesh it out. I, too, have self-conscious awareness. I, too, can think. It’s all perfectly compatible with physicalism.
OK, good. Steiner says that the soul continues to exist after the death of the body. You disagree. According to you, the soul cannot exist on its own, which means that after the body dies, the soul no longer exists. Both body and soul are gone. The person is no more. Steiner is wrong about life after death, in your opinion. Correct?
keiths:
CharlieM:
Good. And it’s not just that the soul is incapable of doing those things after death. According to you, the soul doesn’t even exist after death, because it can’t exist on its own. When the body goes, the soul goes. The person is gone. There is no life after death.
keiths:
CharlieM:
They don’t make distinct predictions, as far as I can tell, so in that sense I would say that neither is more justified than the other. But you haven’t answered my question. Let’s suppose idealism is true. How does that help your position? You presumably brought up idealism for a reason. What is that reason?
Let’s apply your logic to digestion: I digest my food, and my stomach and intestines digest my food. That means that either I am my stomach and intestines or there are two digesting agents, my stomach/intestines combo and me.
Let’s also apply it to grasping. I grasp the doorknob, and my hand grasps the doorknob. That means that either I am my hand, or there are two grasping agents, my hand and me.
Do you see the problem? Your logic is broken.
Alan:
You inadvertently refuted that claim when you answered Charlie’s “why” question.
You can keep asking “why?” forever, but that doesn’t mean that “why” questions are unanswerable. All of us ask and answer “why” questions routinely in our everyday lives:
“Why is your alarm going off?”
“Because I forgot to cancel it.”
“Why did Brenda’s team lose the match against Sturtevant?”
“Because their star player had to attend her grandmother’s funeral.”
“Why didn’t you wash the car this morning?”
“Because the dirt roads will just make it dirty again on the way to Evan’s place tomorrow.”
“Why did the chicken cross the road?”
“To get to the other side.”
All “why” questions, all answerable.
Well, you can claim you’ve answered.
“Why did the (which) chicken cross the road” is not answered by your response “to get to the other side”.
keiths:
Alan:
Alan: Why are my keys on the floor?
Wife: The cat pushed them off the counter.
Alan: You haven’t answered the question.
Wife: Not this again. [Begins rummaging through the desk drawer, looking for the business card of that divorce lawyer]
It was a joke, Alan. A joke about a joke, actually. Nevertheless, “to get to the other side” IS an answer. Just not a very useful one.
Was that your intent? Fair enough.
CharlieM:
What role does the soul play in telling time?
The crux of the problem here is that “sense-bound thinking” has a different meaning for each of us.
Even without direct sensory stimuli, in order to tell the time from the position of the hands of a hypothetical clock, you can only do so by bringing to mind the experiences you have had with physical clocks. Clocks are sensible objects.
It is no different when someone is asked to name ten animals. They will be able to name the animals that they had direct or representational experience of by means of the senses.
By my understanding of the meaning of sense-bound, all the examples you give are sense-bound, in that they all depend on either direct or past experiences of entities that have existed in the physical world of the senses.
No it’s an argument for idealism. I believe that pure thinking is a spiritual activity.
No. The soul is the intermediary between body and spirit. Just as the body can be understood as comprising the head/nervous system, the heart/lung/rhythmic system and the metabolic/limb system, so the soul can be conceived as sentient soul, mind soul and consciousness soul. The sentient soul is dependent on the body and so it is lost with the death of the body. But because we are spiritual beings the higher members of the soul are not lost when the body falls away.
The spirit, and that part of the soul which is attached to the spirit, survives death.
I remember you saying something about not being interested in Steiner’s terminology regarding these topics. In that case you are arguing from a position of ignorance on the subject.
There can be no sentient soul without the body, but that doesn’t mean the soul is lost entirely. Steiner’s book, Theosophy is a good source of information on this.
My belief that mind is primal and the physical world is a derivative of mind. This position is as compatible with any evidence given for materialism.
CharlieM: Do you not think that idealistic monism is equally as justified as materialistic monism.
They don’t make distinct predictions, as far as I can tell, so in that sense I would say that neither is more justified than the other. But you haven’t answered my question. Let’s suppose idealism is true. How does that help your position? You presumably brought up idealism for a reason. What is that reason?
I take my belief in the spirit to be an idealist position.
Good point. But it is me and not my stomach that decides what is taken in for digestion. It is me and not my hand that decides to grasp the doorknob. It is me and not my brain that decides on what to think about.
My stomach, brain and hands are not autonomous actors in the way that I am an autonomous actor. I have conscious thoughts in a way that the brain doesn’t. I am conscious of the fact that I am sitting here in my house, relaxing on the sofa, but the brain inside the skull isn’t thinking, “I am sitting here floating in cerebrospinal fluid, enclosed in a bony case getting signals from sensory nerves”. My stomach, brain and hands do not have a separate existence apart from me.
I believe that sentience is soul activity. Anything to do with being aware is the domain of the soul. My alarm clock receives a time signal from the radio and can produce a visual display to indicate the time. But it isn’t sentient and doesn’t need to be. My soul is the reason that I have an inner awareness which my clock lacks.
You probably believe that this is just an fortuitous effect of the complex activity of physical substances. I don’t share that belief. I believe that complex life could exist perfectly well without such inner awareness, and the fact that it is present calls for another explanation.
The very fact that physical substance has properties that allow for the appearance of nervous systems and sense organs indicates to me that earthly life was destined to achieve consciousness.
CharlieM:
I’ve explained more than once why I’m not interested in dealing with Steiner’s terminology. I will explain it again, but please listen.
I want this conversation to be relevant to as many readers and commenters as possible. Steiner’s thought is unlikely to be interesting to anyone other than you and perhaps Dr. Caarscac. I’ve been careful about keeping my arguments as general as possible so that they apply to an entire range of ideas regarding the soul, not just yours and Steiner’s. Here’s how I put it earlier:
I repeat: When I speak of the ‘soul’ in this thread, I am speaking of any purported nonphysical component or group of components that, together with the physical body, make up a person. Some people use the word ‘soul’ for this, some use ‘spirit’. Scientologists refer to ‘thetans’, others talk about ‘minds’ (by which they mean nonphysical minds). You and Steiner talk about a whole raft of nonphysical entities, many of which I mention in the quote above. For the purposes of this thread, please follow my example in using ‘soul’ as a collective term for all of these nonphysical entities.
I am asking you, as a courtesy to me and all of the readers, to use ‘soul’ in the way I am using it here and not in the way that Steiner uses it. If you do need to talk about the Steinerian soul, perhaps we can agree on a convention that will minimize the chance of confusion. Here’s a suggestion: let’s use ‘soul’ with my meaning, and ‘ssoul’ when referring to Steiner’s more limited conception of the soul.
Agreed?
CharlieM:
If you are conceding that the brain is responsible for all thinking regarding any knowledge or concepts acquired via the senses, then that is a HUGE concession, especially when you consider that the written and spoken word reach us through our senses. If the brain does all that, there’s not a hell of a lot left for the soul to do.
I have an idea for cutting to the chase. Rather than talking about all the things that the brain is responsible for, which is an enormous set, let’s talk instead about what the soul is responsible for, if anything. It seems like that will be a much shorter list, and thus easier to handle.
What does the soul actually do?
CharlieM:
keiths:
CharlieM:
Briefly, what is “pure thinking”? This is related to my question about what exactly the soul does.
OK. So you and Steiner believe that there’s part of us that survives death, and that this includes both the mind ssoul (using the spelling convention I suggested above) and the consciousness ssoul. The name of the ‘mind ssoul’ strongly suggests that Steiner believes it plays a major role in our thinking. Yet you acknowledge that the brain is responsible for all of our “sense-bound” thinking, which you defined extremely broadly a few comments ago. In fact, at one point you conceded that the brain is responsible for all of the “dead thoughts of the intellect”. Between that and sense-bound thinking, there isn’t much thinking left for the soul to do. Hence my questions about what the soul actually does, if anything.
CharlieM:
Yes to the first two, no to the third. Deciding is a form of thinking, and the brain is the organ of thought, as you’ve affirmed. Thus it is the brain that decides what it is going to think about. (To the extent that it can decide. We don’t actually control most of our thoughts, as any meditator can tell you.) There can’t be a separate, immaterial “I” telling the brain what to think, because that would require the laws of physics to be violated, as described earlier.
My brain actually does think that, but that’s because I’m familiar with modern science.
Ignoring scientific knowledge, the body doesn’t have sense organs to tell the brain that it is floating in cerebrospinal fluid and encased in the skull. The brain gets its sensory input from our sense organs, which are distributed all over the body (the skin is a sense organ), so it’s natural that the brain sees the body as part of the self instead of thinking of itself as its own entity. The brain isn’t even aware (in the absence of scientific knowledge) that it exists, so it can hardly be expected to know that it is a distinct entity responsible for a person’s thoughts.
keiths:
CharlieM:
That still wouldn’t support your position. Let’s suppose there is a vast mind underlying all of reality and that the physical world is just a product of that mind. That still doesn’t tell us that individual souls exist, because the vast underlying mind might be producing a reality in which souls do not exist. And even if they did exist, they would be unable to have any influence over our bodies (as I’ve previously explained) since the laws of physics are invariably followed, and any manipulation of the body by the soul would require that those laws be violated. I know you agree with me that the laws of physics are never violated, and I just don’t see a way for you to reconcile that with the idea that the soul has the ability to direct the body.
keiths:
CharlieM:
OK, so you are reserving subjective awareness/consciousness as part of the soul’s portfolio. That’s presumably what Steiner’s ‘consciousness ssoul’ does. There’s a problem, though. Consciousness can be ‘turned off’ by a blow to the head or a dose of a general anesthetic. If the soul (or the ssoul) is responsible for consciousness, then why doesn’t consciousness continue in both of these cases? At most, the “screen” should go dark since the soul is no longer receiving input from the brain, but there is no reason for consciousness to disappear altogether.
It makes perfect sense under physicalism. The brain produces consciousness, and blows to the head and general anesthesia affect the brain, so it’s no surprise that those events can temporarily suppress consciousness.
The soul doesn’t make sense, not even as an explanation of consciousness.
CharlieM:
I agree with you that consciousness calls for an explanation, and I’m glad that so many neuroscientists and philosophers are working on the problem. It does seem conceivable that complex life, including us, could exist without subjective awareness, and that is why philosophers talk about ‘zombies’ — philosophical zombies — which are hypothetical creatures in some possible world that are identical to us in every respect except that they lack our inner awareness. It isn’t like anything to be them. They seem perfectly conceivable, and their existence would seemingly be compatible with the same laws of physics that operate in our own world. So the question “Why aren’t we (philosophical) zombies?” is an important question that needs to be addressed.
Where we disagree is that I don’t see consciousness as a reason to affirm the existence of the soul, because to do so is to engage in “soul of the gaps” reasoning. It looks something like this: “Science hasn’t yet explained consciousness. There’s a gap in our knowledge. Let’s plug the gap by inventing an entity called ‘the soul’, asserting that it exists, and magically assigning consciousness to it. Tada! Problem solved.”
Of course that’s no solution at all. It reminds me of that play by Molière in which a doctor ‘explains’ why opium makes us sleepy by stating that it possesses a ‘dormitive potency’.
I’m open to the possibility that consciousness has a supernatural explanation (though I’ll be surprised if it does), but we are nowhere close to establishing that.
Note that even if consciousness were explained by a nonphysical soul, you’d still face the problem I mentioned in the previous comment, which is that the soul would be unable to control the body. It would be a mere spectator.
When I make any reference to ‘soul’, I try to make it clear whether it is ‘soul’ as I believe soul to be, or ‘soul’ as some other person might conceive or have conceived it to be. But I’m happy to go along with your suggestion.
Should we extend this proposal to others apart from Steiner? Perhaps you’d like to apply the term ‘asoul’ to Aristotle. 🙂
According to my thinking, the brain is the organ of thinking but it is not the originator of my thoughts. And in my opinion the heart is the organ of feeling but it is not the originator of my feelings. Brain and heart activities are outer physical processes while thinking and feeling are inner sentient processes.
Our lower nature reveals us to be psychosomatic creatures. I have an outer body and an inner sentience. Two sides to the same coin. You may wish to stress your belief that soma produces psyche, but it can no longer be doubted that psyche affects the developing soma in meaningful ways.
My body expresses itself in physical activity, my soul expresses itself in sentience. These are the outer and inner aspects of my nature. The laws of physics applies to the former only.