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 regard pure thinking as a process that is not influenced by personal feeling and does not apply to any physical perceptions or phenomena. Mathematics is a fitting subject in which pure thinking can occur.
I have never said that the brain is exclusively responsible for any of the processes you mention. Through thinking I can grasp the concepts and laws which belong to the entities I apprehend through my senses. I receive information from two directions, externally from the senses via my brain and internally via intuitive reasoning.
CharlieM:
Good one! 😄
(For anyone who doesn’t get the joke, try pronouncing the ‘a’ in ‘asoul’ like the ‘a’ in ‘cat’.)
CharlieM:
If the soul originates your thoughts, then the brain’s physical behavior is being altered from what it otherwise would have been, as dictated by the laws of physics. You’ve agreed that the laws of physics are never violated, so that means that the soul cannot be intervening in the functioning of the brain. The brain originates the thoughts, and the soul (if it exists at all) is just a spectator.
Which is perfectly compatible with physicalism. The body and brain affect the body and the brain. There’s nothing magical about it, just as there’s nothing magical about this joke device…
The Useless Box
…and just as there’s nothing magical about the way the body regulates its own CO2 levels.
Plus an immaterial psyche runs straight into the problem I described above regarding the laws of physics.
keiths:
CharlieM:
Are you conceding that the role of the soul is limited to supporting sentience, and that it does not participate in any way in physical activity, including the activity of the brain? That would be a welcome development.
Alas, that has some implications you might find objectionable. If the soul is the seat of sentience, that means that the soul is what experiences, for instance, the sensation of your bathwater being too hot. You put one foot into the bathtub, the water feels too hot, and you step back out. But wait — the soul can’t affect the body, which means that it can’t be the soul that is causing you to step back out. Your soul is causally inert, which means that your sentience is also causally inert. The sensation of heat therefore cannot be the reason you pulled your foot out of the bath. The body did that on its own.
It’s a big problem for your view, but, needless to say, it isn’t a problem for physicalism.
Being an organ of thought is not the same thing as thinking. My mouth is my ‘organ’ of speech, but my mouth is not responsible for what I say.
I sometimes wonder if you are playing games, but I have to assume that you are being genuine.
So you familiarize yourself with modern science and then relay what you know to your blind, deaf, dumb brain?
So the brain is fooled into thinking that the rest of the body belongs to it it, but you know better?
I’m sure that prehistoric humans were fairly expert butchers and knew that brains existed. They may have been quite partial to them along with a bit of fruit and veg. 🙂 So these humans knew brains existed but their brains were not aware of themselves?
everyone dies
CharlieM:
The organ of thought doesn’t do the thinking? This is getting positively Orwellian.
CharlieM:
keiths:
CharlieM:
I’m sincere about that. I’m not saying I go around constantly thinking that, of course, but I do recognize that the brain is the locus of me, moreso than any other part of the body, and that it’s therefore legitimate for my brain to think “I am floating in cerebrospinal fluid inside a bony case.” Recall my brain transplant thought experiment in which Wanda and Miguel exchanged brains. The person who ended up with Wanda’s brain was Wanda, even though her body was Miguel’s, and vice-versa. The brain is what makes me me.
Don’t be fooled by the fluidity of the concept of “I” or of the associated language. Sometimes “I” includes the body, as in “I washed myself off”, and sometimes it doesn’t, as when a Christian believes they will continue to exist as a soul after their body dies. Same word, different meanings, both valid. I can identify with my brain, but I can also identify with my brain/body combination. When I ponder the truth of the statement “I am floating in cerebrospinal fluid…”, I am identifying with my brain (and in fact this means that my brain is identifying with itself). This is appropriate, because if you transplant my brain to another body, I will go with it.
There is no separate “I” to relay the knowledge. My brain acquires the knowledge, and my brain thus becomes aware that it is floating in cerebrospinal fluid.
The body “belongs” to the brain in the sense that the brain can control it, so the brain isn’t being fooled. You seem to be thinking that the body can belong to the “I”, but not to the brain. I don’t see why that should be true.
Agreed, though they didn’t know that brains were responsible for thought. Some of them may have suspected it, but even a figure as recent as Aristotle thought that the brain was merely a radiator.
Correct. There’s a big difference between knowing that brains exist, and even that your brain exists, versus knowing that your brain is the locus of you. Oedipus was aware of his mother and father, but he wasn’t aware that they were his mother and father.
CharlieM ascribes ‘pure thinking’ to the soul. I asked him what he meant by that.
CharlieM:
Mathematical ability is not exempt from the ravages of Alzheimer’s, and in fact it is one of the first things to go. The brain, not the soul, is responsible for mathematical thinking.
Well then, clearly Alzheimer’s is a disease of the soul.
I don’t need to speculate about the existence of souls because I experience my soul which is my feeling life. Any outward event that affects by my inner sentience is making an impression on my soul. I have direct knowledge of my feelings so I know that at the very least my soul exists.
And I do not go along with any argument which suggests that my inner feelings and outer processes such as neuronal activity are the same thing. They are not in the same category.
The classical laws of physics may be taken to be followed in their own domain, as the quantum laws of physics are taken to be followed in their domain, and inner laws of sentience and consciousness are taken to be followed in their domain, the laws of life in their domain.
My car doesn’t break any laws of physics but there are no laws of physics that can account for the creation of cars in the first place.
CharlieM:
You are once again confusing what the soul is with what the soul does. You’ve described the soul as being the seat of sentience, which means that the soul experiences your feelings, not that it is your feelings. It lives your “feeling life”, but that doesn’t mean that it is your feeling life. So when you experience feelings, you aren’t experiencing your soul. You’re just experiencing feelings.
You know that your feelings exist, but you don’t know that your soul exists. We agree that feelings exist. The dispute is over the entity responsible for them. I say it’s the brain. You say it’s the soul, but in doing so you rule out any causal role for your feelings, as I explained above. It would mean that the reason you pulled your foot out of the bath is not because it felt too hot to your soul, which ordered your body to pull it out. Your brain pulled your foot out of the bath and your soul just watched helplessly.
You’ve stated that the laws of physics are never violated, but you didn’t realize that in doing that, you were ruling out any causal role for your soul in determining your behavior.
The problem is that those domains interact. You want to believe that your soul can make decisions and direct your body to implement them, but that would require the laws of physics to be violated, and you’ve agreed that this never happens.
That’s an old argument that I’ve already addressed. There is no law of physics stating that cars must be created, but there doesn’t need to be. Assemble a bunch of particles in a certain way and you get an automotive engineer. Assemble them in a different way and you get someone who couldn’t design a car if their life depended on it. Same laws of physics, different results. It’s the arrangement of the particles (and their energies, etc.), along with the laws of physics, that produces the result. In one case you get an automobile design; in another case you get a poem, but in both cases the same laws of physics are operating.
Why do you choose to use the examples of head knocks and anesthetics for turning off consciousness when simply falling asleep would have sufficed? In fact we don’t need to go as far as invoking sleep. Consciousness is only one aspect of our waking lives. Unconsciousness is a much more influential part of my living, waking being than my conscious awareness.
In my opinion I am a living being as a result of the building up of physical form, and consciousness comes about by breaking up form. If sleep did not intervene in this breaking up of form I wouldn’t be able to stave off bodily destruction for as long as I have so far.
I experience a limited portion of the physical world thanks to my wakening consciousness. But consciousness is not either/or, it is a slowly evolving feature of life. I spent the first period of my pre and post-natal life with a lot less consciousness than I have now. And as my sentience reduces due to aging or the possibility of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, I envision a period of increasing confusion for me. I believe that the disruption of neural connections is the physical correlate of the changing relationship between the life ‘body’ and the sentient ‘body’. The cause can be found in either direction depending on circumstances.
Sentience is a quality of soul, it’s not just a matter of physical matter.
The difference between a zombie and myself is that I do have inner awareness. And that difference, I call my soul. I do not claim to know it apart from my experience. I cannot claim that it is of a particular substance, or that it is located in any specific place other than it presents itself to me as inner feelings which belong to me.
Through thinking, when thoughts come to me that are not dependent on me, I can transcend my life of feeling. For instance, I can think of prime numbers and these numbers exist whether or not I am present thinking about them. My thoughts are personal, but the content of my thoughts need not be. My feeling of the beauty of numerical relationships does, however, depend on me. The content of my feeling is very personal.
During life the soul and body are together as part of a whole. Each influences the other. I stub my toe and I feel pain. I think erotic thoughts and I get an erection. (A much rarer occurrence than it used to be). After death the soul has no effect on the body. The ssoul which in life affects the physical body through the life ‘body’ no longer has this connection as the life ‘body’ has separated from the physical body. The sentience of the physical world is lost as death takes effect and I no longer have the physical sense organs.
According to Steiner, in sleep or unconsciousness there is a different relationship between the three lower members than in waking life or in death. Unconsciousness is brought about by the separation of the astral ‘body’ from the life ‘body’. It is the loosening of the connection of the higher members from the physical and life bodies that brings about unconsciousness.
I need my body in order to develop consciousness. The body is the mirror in which I can experience the world. Just as I can hold myself upright because of the resistance of the solid ground beneath my feet, so I need the resistance of the body as a reflecting medium through which I become sentient.
CharlieM:
Because you could respond that the soul goes to sleep voluntarily, and that sleep therefore doesn’t count as evidence against the soul’s role as the seat of consciousness. A loss of consciousness due to head blows and anesthetics can’t be dismissed in that way. It shows that consciousness is a function of the brain, not of the soul.
Again, you are confusing what the soul is with what the soul does. You’ve told us that the soul is the seat of consciousness. That means that your soul isn’t your awareness, it’s the thing that is aware. The distinction is important, because you keep saying that you know that your soul exists because you experience it directly. You aren’t experiencing your soul; you’re just experiencing your feelings. The soul isn’t something you’ve observed directly, it’s just a hypothetical entity to which you’ve attributed your feelings. You need to defend that hypothesis rather than simply saying “I’ve observed my soul; therefore it exists”.
The rest of your comment seems to be just a recitation of Steinerian dogma. We already know that you can recite the dogma. The interesting question is whether you can defend the dogma against the arguments I have presented.
I’ve shown that if the laws of physics are never violated — and you and I agree that they aren’t — then the soul cannot play an active role in directing the body. It is at most a spectator. Do you have a counterargument?
I don’t believe that the laws of physics are violated within their own domain.
Let’s take Newton’s first law: Every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force. If a pigeon and a ball were thrown into the air do you think they would both follow a parabolic path in accordance with Newton’s law? Does the pigeon violate the laws of physics? No, because it is a living being and not a lifeless object which is what Newton was concerned with. Life has its own laws which sit above the laws of physics. Of course as the pigeon flies off in the direction it chooses it is obeying the laws of aerodynamics.
It’s a safe bet that the Useless Box was thought up in the human mind before it was realized physically. Laws of physics are even less applicable to conscious deliberations than they are to living motion. Life and growth, death and decay, hereditary descent, sentience, none of these are accounted for in the laws of physics
No magic, just wisdom. And there are many more wonderfully complex processes taking place within living organisms. My body has an inner intelligence behind many of its living processes. And I have no conscious, sentient experience of any of this happening. But I can grasp these processes in my thought life.
Psychosomatic effects testify to soul/body interactions.
No, it’s all linked. I’ve already mentioned psychosomatic effects. In my opinion these are not abnormal occurrences, they are natural processes.
I felt the pain through my soul. And I can decide to ignore the natural reaction to withdraw my foot if I deem the pain to be temporary and bearable. Or I could be a masochist who chooses to self-harm. These options do not align very well with the straight cause and effect we are accustomed to in classical physics. My mind can intervene in the course of events.
Plato deals with this topic in his allegory of the charioteer.
It’s not that difficult to understand. Only organisms with nervous systems display any signs of thinking ability, therefore brains and thinking are linked. I make use of my brain when I think and I make use of my legs when I want to go for a walk. I initiate both activities and my brain and legs are means to this end.
Is the brain that is thinking these thoughts, able to communicate what it is thinking to any being that would understand it? I have never experienced any entity telling me that it is a brain trapped inside a skull.
From ‘Theosophy’>
Man can only come to a true understanding of himself when he grasps clearly the significance of thinking within his being. The brain is the bodily instrument of thinking. A properly constructed eye serves us for seeing colors, and the suitably constructed brain serves us for thinking. The whole body of man is so formed that it receives its crown in the physical organ of the spirit, the brain. The construction of the human brain can only be understood by considering it in relation to its task — that of being the bodily basis for the thinking spirit…
…Organized with reference to the brain as its central point, this mineral structure (the human body) comes into existence by propagation and reaches its fully developed form through growth.
My brain is less than my body, it is part of my body. I am more than a body, my body is part of me.
You are speculating on something that is no more than a fantasy at the moment.
You are right, the I and brain are not separate. My brain is part of me, my blood is part of me, my body is part of me.
My brain is a part among parts. I am a unified whole.
Did the person we know as Aristotle think this or was it the brain in the head of the person we know as Aristotle that thought it?
Steiner would agree that your brain is the locus of your physical body. The myth of Oedipus was about people, not brains.
CharlieM:
It’s good to see you reaffirming that. While you’re at it, you might also want to reaffirm that the domain of physical law is the physical world, that brains are part of the physical world, and that the behavior of brains, and the particles therein, is therefore dictated by physical law. You’ve already affirmed that particles don’t “care” whether they’re in a living body or not, or whether they’re in a living brain or not, so I wouldn’t expect you to have any trouble with this.
First, you’re jumbling up your laws. Newton’s first law doesn’t predict that objects will follow parabolic paths; it predicts that they will travel in straight lines unless acted upon by a net force. It’s right there in the definition you quoted. The parabolic paths are due to Newton’s second law (F = ma), which describes how objects accelerate under the influence of a force (in this case the force of gravity).
Second, the pigeon is being acted upon by forces* which include the forces caused by its wings beating against the air. Newton’s first law therefore doesn’t apply. The second law applies, and the combination of forces accounts for the pigeon’s failure to follow a parabolic path.
There is absolutely nothing in the laws of physics — zero — that exempts living beings. Newton’s laws, and all of the other laws of physics, apply just as stringently to living beings as they do to dead bodies or inanimate objects. Remember, you yourself have acknowledged that particles follow the laws of physics whether or not they are part of a living body.
The pigeon obeys all of the laws of physics at all times. They’re never violated. That means that the life force you are envisioning has no influence on the pigeon’s behavior. There are no “laws of life” that can override the laws of physics, because to override the laws of physics is tantamount to violating them. We’ve agreed that that never happens. The particles within the pigeon’s body, including those within its brain, are going to follow the laws of physics no matter what. Their behavior is fully determined by those laws, and no nonphysical force or entity, including the life force or the soul, can change that behavior. Remove the life force, and nothing will change. The pigeon will continue on as before, just as alive as it ever was. The life force does nothing.
* Technically, the ball too is being acted upon by forces besides gravity — aerodynamic forces — and those will distort the ball’s otherwise parabolic path, but we can neglect that for the purposes of this discussion. Newton’s laws are still being followed, but the situation is more complicated than it would be in the absence of air resistance.
CharlieM:
They are all accounted for by the laws of physics because they are all physical phenomena. Take decay. Decay is a physical process, and the laws of physics are fully applicable. Decay isn’t caused by the removal of some nonphysical life force, and there are no higher laws that somehow override the laws of physics in the case of decay.
You can’t simultaneously maintain that the laws of physics are universally applicable, and never violated, while at the same time asserting that a physical body undergoing physical decay is somehow exempt from them.
keiths:
CharlieM:
I don’t understand why you keep mentioning them. They are deadly evidence against your view and strong evidence in favor of physicalism. Physicalism holds that brains are physical objects and that thoughts are physical processes taking place within those brains. It makes perfect sense that physical processes in a physical object could have physical effects that spill out onto an adjacent physical object — the body.
From your position, however, psychosomatic effects make no sense. A nonphysical psyche can’t interact with the body, since any intervention would violate the laws of physics. Therefore, if the psyche is a nonphysical entity, psychosomatic effects should never occur. That they do is strong evidence against your position and in favor of mine.
But since your soul is nonphysical, it cannot influence the body. That would violate the laws of physics. (To readers: Sorry for harping on this, but I don’t know how else to get it across to Charlie.) Therefore the pain that your soul experiences cannot be the reason that you pulled your foot from the bath. The hunger that your soul feels cannot be the reason that you eat. The sympathy you feel for someone can’t be the reason that you hug them. Are you sure you want to go there?
Your view renders our feelings causally impotent. Under physicalism, they retain their potency, and that comports with our experience. Physicalism is by far the better explanation of the evidence.
Which makes no sense under your view, since any intervention by your (nonphysical) mind would necessitate a violation of the laws of physics. It makes perfect sense under physicalism, where the pain and the accompanying urge to withdraw the foot are physical processes, and so is the thinking that leads you to override that urge and keep your foot in the bath. All physical, and none of it requiring the laws of physics to be violated.
CharlieM:
There can be no separate nonphysical “I” that initiates your thinking, because — you guessed it — that would require the laws of physics to be violated. Thoughts originate in your brain and their causes are physical. No nonphysical entities are involved, nor can they be.
That’s because brains don’t perceive themselves as being “trapped inside a skull”. If brains contained sense organs that could detect the surrounding cerebrospinal fluid and the cranial enclosure, then presumably brains would describe themselves that way. It’s just that such sense organs would never arise because there would be no point, evolutionarily speaking. How would such organs contribute to survival and reproduction?
keiths:
CharlieM:
The technical feasibility of such an operation, now or in the future, is entirely beside the point. Thought experiments don’t have to be realizable in order to serve their purpose. The brain transplant thought experiments are designed to stimulate your thinking about what constitutes personal identity. I’ve made the case that if my brain were transplanted into a new body, the resulting brain/body combination would still be Keith, because it would retain my memories, possess my personality, and exhibit my mental qualities and not those of the body’s previous possessor. Those are all properties of the brain, not of the rest of the body.
Given that my personhood is tied far more to my brain than to my body, it is entirely valid to see myself as a brain which just happens to be attached to this particular body. Believers do the same thing when they regard themselves as souls that just happen to be attached to their bodies for now, but no longer will be after death.
keiths:
CharlieM:
As I keep pointing out, there is no contradiction between “Aristotle thought this” and “Aristotle’s brain thought this”.
I don’t ascribe ‘pure thinking’ to the soul.
Pure thinking is a spiritual process.
Thinking is mediated through the brain and pure thinking requires focused attention and a high level of control over one’s feelings and mental faculties. It takes a lot of effort to prevent the mind from wandering. Any disruption to brain function, the likes of which Alzheimer’s might produce, is not conducive to pure thinking.
The activity of pure thinking requires a mind at full capacity with the instrument of the mind, the brain, to be in proper working order. To use Plato’s analogy, I am trying to control the wayward horse and it takes all the effort I can muster.
CharlieM:
What role does the nonphysical mind play in the process of “pure thinking”, and how can it direct the brain without violating the laws of physics?
Steiner claimed to be able to perceive the soul ‘body’, and others have made similar claims. I don’t claim to have such abilities. What I experience are effects. You say that these are just feelings, but the point is that there are no laws of physics that account for such inwardness.
It’s not that the laws of physics are broken. The fact is that they do not apply to the inwardness of thinking, feeling and willing. Consider a living donkey and a model donkey with the exact same weight, by the laws of physics if I pulled with enough force I would be able to move both of them equally. This might not happen with the living donkey as over and above the mechanical forces there is the will of the animal to contend with.
You have not solved the mystery of the inwardness of consciousness, you have just shifted it from the physical person to the physical brain. Why should either of these physical entities possess this inwardness? Certain music invokes feelings in me, and it will vary for other people. Such inwardness I attribute to my soul.
The domains of the physical, the living and the consciousness have their own sets of laws, but each domain influences the others.
Why would they not interact and in so doing why would this be a violation of activities within their own domain? Do you believe that the laws of quantum mechanics violate the laws of Newtonian physics?
Solids, liquids and gases obey their own laws. For instance liquids are virtually incompressible whereas gases can be compressed. They can interact in all sorts of ways without violating each others laws. It is no different regarding matter, life and consciousness.
But for the thinking and will of humans, cars as we know them would never have come about. Thinking and will involve consciousness, and so you are back to the problem of having to explain how physics gives rise to such inwardness. There is a similar problem with the origin of life. All sorts of clever speculations have gone into solving this problem, but it all begins with the assumption that it has to do with the interaction of material particles. Not many physicalists seem to consider the possibility of fields causing matter to form in a particular way.
.
Sleep is not always voluntary. I know from the experience of decades of driving home after working a twelve hour shift that through my will I can fight off the urge to sleep. If I am sitting watching the TV, the same physical and chemical processes will be taking place in my body but I do fall asleep. The difference being that I do not have the same amount of will power in this instance. And will lies within the domain of consciousness.
Okay then I experience soul forces. I can also observe myself experiencing these soul forces. When I have emotional experiences I know I am experiencing these and I can train myself to control these emotions. This sits above the cause and effect determinism of the interactions of physical substances.
I try to be careful in separating my own thoughts with anything Steiner has stated. I try to be clear when I am giving my beliefs, and that neither I nor anyone else should assume them to be facts.
Yes, see my previous post. They are not violated within their own domain.
I think you are being very picky with your criticism of my comments on Newton’s laws. It makes no difference to my arguments. You are completely ignoring the will of the pigeon which will be a determining factor. If there is an obstacle directly in front of the pigeon, it will make a decision on what avoiding action it should take. That will be over and above the physical forces of the manoeuvre.
When I am driving in the country and there is a flock of woodpigeons on the road in front of me, they tend to scatter in all directions. What is this, action at a distance producing indeterminate movement of matter? 🙂
Decay occurs when the life sustaining force is removed. The material that is decaying is then subject to the outer physical forces because there is nothing standing in the way of these forces.
Where did I maintain that the laws of physics are universally applicable, or that decay is exempt from these laws? They are applicable in the physical domain.
Psychosomatic is what it means, interaction of mind and body. Your belief that the mind is what the brain does is not shared with everyone.
As I mentioned earlier, there are laws of gases that do not apply to liquids but this does not mean that material in these different states cannot interact.
Because liquid is not solid it cannot influence solid. Really!? (To readers: Sorry for harping on this, but I don’t know how else to get it across to keiths) 🙂
Your view doesn’t explain why feelings should be causally impotent.
I am currently thinking of two parallel straight lines and how they cross at one point at infinity. This has no physical application and there is no physical reason why I have chosen that particular case as an example. If these thoughts of mine are instigated by physical brain processes, why should they take the course they did?
Let’s not agonize over the will of (wood)pidgeons. Let’s stick with the donkey — it’s funnier.
At least you avoided the first tank trap here and just gave your model donkey the same weight, and not the same atomic composition, heh.
It’s not the ‘will’ of the donkey that you have to contend with, it is the physical consequences of the activity in the donkey’s brain that you have to contend with. What if your donkey/faux-donkey pair are in cages? and the cages are mounted on free-moving trolleys? What if you administer a paralyzing dose of curare to the donkey?
Your examples are horrendous.
Well, I agree with the final sentence here, but only because the laws are the same for gases liquids and solids. They just manifest in different behaviors. What you resolutely fail to grasp is that if the “laws of physics” apply (they do), and if they are not somehow violated (you appear to concede this), then their extension into chemistry, biochemistry, etc also apply and there is no way for your various souls to affect outcomes.
Jock, to Charlie:
Emphasis on “resolutely”. Charlie is not a stupid man. Mistaken, yes, but not stupid. Commenters have explained the above to him, over and over, literally for years. He is clearly capable of grasping it, but he resolutely chooses not to.
I am not unsympathetic. Charlie has strong emotional reasons for not grasping this. To grasp it would be to acknowledge that beliefs he has held for decades, reverently and passionately, are false. It would require him to adopt a radically different worldview. He desperately wants to avoid that.
I’m sure that other readers who believe in a soul can relate to his predicament.
Charlie will no doubt choose to maintain his beliefs, based on those emotional needs, and it should go without saying that he has every right to do so. What he can’t evade, however, is the fact those beliefs are irrational.
The soul, as Charlie envisions it, simply cannot exist unless the laws of physics are violated. And even if he bites the bullet and asserts that the laws of physics can be violated, his conception of the soul fails for other reasons.
Belief in the soul just isn’t rationally tenable.
At Jerry Coyne’s site, he discusses a debate among theologians as to whether someone who suffers Alzheimers remains demented in the afterlife. Maybe Charlie can tell us if the soul is cured when the body dies. Who knows, maybe belief in either a soul or an afterlife is cured by death. My bet is yes.
Flint:
Optimistic physicalist: Death will cure all my false beliefs! 😀
Pessimistic physicalist: Death will wipe out all my true beliefs. ☹️
Charlie,
Let me put this as bluntly and explicitly as I can.
The following two statements cannot both be true:
1. The laws of physics are never violated.
2. The laws of physics are continually violated.
You have affirmed #1 explicitly. You have not affirmed #2, but it is a direct consequence of your beliefs about the soul as a causal agent. If you want to be consistent, you must therefore either a) reject #1, or b) reject your views about the soul as a causal agent. You cannot have it both ways.
You seem reluctant to abandon #1, and I applaud you for that. It’s the right move. But to make that move is to affirm that your views about the soul are incorrect, whether or not you realize that.
Suppose you are typing a comment when your arm starts itching. You can scratch it immediately, or you can wait until you’ve finished your comment and then scratch it. According to you, the decision of whether to scratch immediately or later (or not at all) is made by the soul, which then directs the body accordingly. At some time t1, prior to the decision, your body is in a particular physical state — that is, the particles making up your body are in a particular spatial configuration with particular energies, momenta, etc. The surroundings are also in a particular physical state.
In one scenario your soul decides to scratch your arm immediately, and so you scratch your arm immediately. Let’s call that scenario A. In another scenario your soul decides to wait and scratch your arm later, and so you wait and scratch your arm later. Let’s call that scenario B. Obviously, scenario A and scenario B are physically different. Your physical body acts in a physically different way in each of the two scenarios.
Prior to t1, the two scenarios are physically identical. At some point after t1, the two scenarios physically diverge. But the laws of physics don’t allow for multiple outcomes.* The laws of physics mandate a single outcome, which means that the laws of physics are being violated either in scenario A, or in scenario B, or in both. That is an inescapable fact. If the nonphysical soul (or any other nonphysical entity or force) is intervening in the physical world and changing the behavior of the body from what it otherwise would be, then the laws of physics are being violated.
You cannot have it both ways. Either a) the laws of physics are never violated, in which case the soul (if it exists at all) cannot affect the body’s behavior, or b) the soul can influence the body’s behavior, meaning that the laws of physics are necessarily violated.
Since we have no reason to believe that the laws of physics are ever violated, no evidence that they are ever violated, and no inkling of a mechanism by which they could be violated at the behest of the soul, we can reject (b). That leaves (a), meaning that the soul cannot affect the body’s behavior. It’s that simple.
The soul, as you envision it, cannot exist unless the laws of physics are continually violated. Since you affirm that the laws of physics are never violated, you are affirming that the soul, as a causal agent affecting the physical body, does not exist.
* The physical behavior of particles can be nondeterministic under quantum mechanics, but that doesn’t actually help your position. I can elaborate if necessary.
Why can’t non-physical entities be involved?
There is no such thing as a brain without sense organs, or indeed without an organism. Can you think of any organism that has evolved a brain independent of some form of sense organ. The nerve/sense system is a unit. You are treating the brain as some sort of autonomous entity. In keeping with the ghost in the machine, or genes in some sort of lumbering robot a la Dawkins, you propose a three pound blob in a machine-like body.
I contend that the type of transplant you are envisioning, to retain some semblance of personhood, would need to involve more than the brain alone. At the very least it would require the inclusion of the whole nervous system.
The material of my body is in a constant state of renewal so it is very fluid. My form is more enduring than the material that my body consists of, and my sense of ‘I’ is even more enduring.
And I point out that the thinking person is more than a brain.
Dr Sam Parnia who researches what he prefers to call “actual death experiences”, has done much work studying the relationship between the brain and death. Here he discusses the subject in a Youtube video entitled, “What Do Near Death Experiences Mean?”.
He believes there is plenty of evidence for consciousness to be present when the brain flat lines. Death is not a sudden event it is a more drawn out process and he refers to research which shows that neurons, although quiescent, can still be viable hours after a patient has been declared clinically dead.
He claims that around 40% of people who have been brought back from ‘death’ have reported conscious experiences, and it could be that everyone has some conscious awareness at the time but the medical procedures they receive to resuscitate them affects their memories of the event.
keiths:
CharlieM:
See this comment.
CharlieM:
keiths:
CharlieM:
You missed my point, which is that brains don’t go around feeling like they’re trapped in skulls because they can’t sense that. They don’t have sense organs that detect the presence of the cerebrospinal fluid or of the cranial walls surrounding them.
Imagine you are in a metal capsule with no windows.There is a camera outside monitoring the surroundings. It feeds a video signal into the capsule, where a screen displays what the camera sees. By watching the screen, you can ascertain what’s going on in the outside world.
The twist is that the capsule is actually inside an underground concrete bunker, and the camera is on the surface. You have no idea that you’re inside a bunker, because there are no cameras or other instruments to tell you that. All you see is what the camera on the surface sees. You don’t tell people that you are in a bunker, because you don’t know that you are in a bunker and you don’t feel like you are in a bunker.
Likewise, your brain is in a bunker we call ‘the skull’, and it is receiving a ‘video feed’ from a couple of instruments we call ‘the eyes’. Ditto for the other senses. There are no ‘cameras’ or other ‘instruments’ inside the skull — no sense organs, in other words — that can detect the presence of the surrounding cerebrospinal fluid or view the inside walls of the skull. Your brain is receiving no information indicating that it is inside a skull, so it naturally does not think of itself as being inside a skull, just as you didn’t think of yourself as being inside a bunker.
That is why you don’t encounter people telling you that they are brains trapped inside of skulls.
CharlieM:
The brain isn’t autonomous, because it depends on the body for sustenance and on the sense organs for navigating the world. It is the locus of our thoughts, feelings, and memories, however. Your memories are stored in your brain, not in your feet. That’s why a crushed foot won’t cause you to forget your daughter’s name, but Alzheimer’s will.
Remembering your daughter’s name is something that the brain does, not your foot or any other part of your body. If your brain were transplanted into another body, or hooked up to a machine that could keep it alive and supply it with sensory input, it would still remember your daughter’s name. It would also remember that trip you and your wife took on your honeymoon, and what your last job was. It would refer to itself as ‘Charlie’. It would be a devoted follower of Rudolf Steiner, assuming that the transplant experience didn’t cause it (you) to rethink its worldview. It would have all of your personality quirks. And so on. It would be you, but with a different body.
Remember Wanda and Miguel? The person with Wanda’s brain and Miguel’s body is Wanda, and the person with Miguel’s brain and Wanda’s body is Miguel. Personhood goes where the brain goes.
The “ghost in the machine” is the antithesis of my position. There is no ghost. We are bodies.
Your “three pound blob” and “machine-like body” language is prejudicial. You are implicitly asking something like “Do you really believe that some blob inside a machine could account for all of our wondrous behavior?” But the thing that you dismiss as a “three pound blob” is probably the most intricate and complicated object that you and I will ever encounter. “Blob” is not the appropriate choice of word. Ditto for “machine-like body”. The body is vastly more intricate and complicated than any existing machine. It is “machine-like” only in the sense that it is a purely physical object that is put together in such a way that it can carry out certain functions.
And your reasoning is?
There is nothing magical about the fact that your body maintains a roughly similar form over time, despite the fact that matter is flowing into and out of it. A waterfall maintains a roughly similar form too, but water is constantly entering and leaving.
keiths:
CharlieM:
Yes, you like to say things like “the brain is the organ of thought, but it doesn’t originate thoughts”. You think that some nonphysical entity does the originating. That cannot be the case. If it were, then the nonphysical entity would be changing what the brain was otherwise going to do, as dictated by the laws of physics. In other words, it would be causing the brain to violate the laws of physics. You’ve agreed that the laws of physics are never violated, which means that this purported nonphysical entity cannot be originating your thoughts.
First, an EEG flatline does not indicate that all brain activity has ceased. Second, even supposing it did, you would need to establish that consciousness continued during the actual time of the flatline. A patient’s report isn’t sufficient to establish that, because the consciousness they report might have happened while the brain was still active or after it became active again. Third, and perhaps most significantly, a patient’s report of being conscious depends on the memory of being conscious, and memories are stored in the brain. That would mean that a memory was being physically formed at a time of no brain activity, which makes no sense. Fourth, the notion of a soul that survives death runs straight into the problem I keep reiterating regarding the laws of physics.
I’ll watch the Parnia video to see if he manages to address those problems effectively. Based on past experience with the arguments of near-death advocates, including Parnia himself, I will be very surprised if he does.
You speak about the “laws of physics” as if they are completely understood and consistent. And you have not yet given me an adequate explanation as to what you mean by physics. Does quantum physics conform to Newtonian physics? The history of human understanding keeps adding to the known laws of physics. The laws of electromagnetism, quantum physics, the energy of a vacuum, Einstein’s field equations, all attest to how we are continually adding to and adjusting what we understand to be the known ‘laws of physics’. So how can you claim that conscious beings capable of manipulating matter by means of the spiritual activity of thinking is breaking any physical laws? The term ‘laws of physics’ is a fluidic ever changing concept.
Your questions make it clear that the consciousness of the donkey has an effects on the outcome.
They are awful in that these topics fill me with awe. 🙂
The combined gas law does not apply to liquids and solids. This does not mean that solids, liquids and gases do not interact. Laws are limited to their own domain. Interactions can transcend the domains without interfering with these limited laws.
Do you agree that the laws of physics are limited? There are also laws of life and laws of consciousness. And there are interactions between all of these domains, the domains of physics, life and consciousness.
I believe that most of us who are inadequately prepared for death will experience severe confusion during the death process.
I interact with the physical world with its laws through my will. I can do this without violating any laws within the domain of physics.
My soul doesn’t decide anything. I decide whether or not to scratch my arm. My soul is the means by which I have an inner sensation of the itch. My will is the deciding factor in how I respond.
Because I am a conscious living being, and will falls within the laws of consciousness, I am able to move my body through acts of will. The physical movements of my body are governed by physical laws, but the will which instigates them is not. Some people may claim by the force of will to move external bodies at a distance, but I do not claim to have such powers.
I’m sure if Newton had witnessed someone operating a drone he would have believed that either his laws of motion were being violated or that the drone was in some way alive. It is obvious that this would have been a false belief.
In my opinion a limited knowledge of reality and an inflated opinion of how close to reality current human knowledge has come, leads to false beliefs.
Everything hinges on the concept of the will. I don’t believe physical processes govern the will, and I think you do believe this. As with consciousness, the nature of the will has been argued over since philosophizing began. We are just continuing in that tradition and I don’t think the debate is going to be settled in this exchange.
But this doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the debate.
So brains don’t understand that they are trapped inside the skull, but you do understand this and are trying to convince me of this situation. In so doing you are making a distinction between two knowing agents, you and your brain.
CharlieM:
My arguments don’t depend on the laws of physics being completely understood and fully consistent.
I’ve already told you that what I mean by physics is what physicists mean by physics. It’s the study of matter, energy, fields, etc., and the way they interact. You haven’t hesitated to classify bodies as physical and the soul as nonphysical in the past, so it’s clear that you already have an idea of what counts as physical and what doesn’t.
“Adjusting” is the key word. General relativity is a better description of reality than Newtonian physics, but the discovery of general relativity didn’t require Newtonian physics to be discarded wholesale. Newtonian physics still works, and it works beautifully under everyday conditions, but we now know that it is approximate, not exact, and that its predictions can diverge significantly from observation under certain circumstances, as when super high velocities are involved. But no one is suddenly going to discover that Newton’s F = ma is completely wrong under everyday conditions and that it needs to be replaced with F = ma^2.
For the same reason that I can say that F=ma isn’t going to be replaced by F=ma^2 tomorrow. For souls to have the massive influence on the brain that your position stipulates, major changes to the laws of physics would be required. And those huge differences would have to have gone completely unnoticed by science for all these years.
It isn’t plausible.
CharlieM:
Jock has already explained to you that the combined gas law is not a fundamental law of physics. It is derived from fundamental laws that apply equally well to gases, liquids and solids. These are all physical substances whose behavior is explained by the same laws of physics. The combined gas law is not something above and beyond those fundamental laws.
And:
It’s the interactions that are the problem. Read on.
That’s actually true, because your will is a physical phenomenon. It’s produced by the physical brain operating according to physical law. And because it’s a physical phenomenon, it is no surprise that it can influence the physical body. It all makes sense under physicalism.
The problem is that you think the will is a function of the nonphysical soul, and that the soul is somehow able to reach in and influence the operation of the brain. That is what violates the laws of physics.
Please, no semantic dodges. We’ve already agreed that for the purposes of this thread, ‘soul’ encompasses any nonphysical entity, force, principle, or whatever that forms part of a person or is associated with a person. Whatever word(s) you choose, you are still claiming that the behavior of the physical body can be altered through nonphysical means. That cannot happen unless the laws of physics are violated.
You continually say that the laws of physics apply in the physical domain, that the laws of consciousness apply in the domain of consciousness (which includes the will), and that everything is therefore hunky-dory. That’s incorrect. Remember, in your view, these domains interact. Think about what that means. The laws of physics dictate what your body is going to do. There isn’t any leeway. The laws of physics aren’t saying that the body might do A, or it might do B. They are saying that given its current state, it will do A. You are asserting that the nonphysical will can step into the physical domain and cause the body to do B instead of A. If the laws of physics say that the body is going to do A, and only A, and the will steps in and causes the body to do B instead, then the laws of physics are being violated. There is no way around it.
Your position is therefore tantamount to asserting that a) the laws of physics are never violated, and b) the laws of physics are continually being violated. There is no way to reconcile those two statements. Your position is untenable.
CharlieM:
I think I see where the confusion is coming from. Let me explain again in terms of the prehistoric people.
We agree that prehistoric people knew that our skulls contained brains. When Og bashed Thag’s head in and observed Thag’s brain oozing out, the conclusion that there was a brain in there was pretty much inescapable. And Og probably figured out by analogy that his own skull contained a brain, too. What Og didn’t know was that the brain is the seat of thoughts. In other words, Og’s brain, which was doing all of this thinking, didn’t know that the brain was the seat of thoughts. Though it knew that it was a thinking entity, it didn’t realize that it was a brain. Og’s brain didn’t know that it was a brain.
Enter modern knowledge. We now know that the brain is what thinks. So I, as a modern person, can put two and two together. My skull contains a brain, and my brain is what thinks, so I — the entity thinking my thoughts — am a brain inside a skull. My brain knows this, which is the same thing as saying that I know it. There aren’t two “knowing agents”, just one. My brain knows that it is a brain trapped inside a skull, which is just another way of saying that I know that I am a brain trapped inside a skull.
Well put. Although Charlie still thinks that the heart is the organ of feeling, so Og still has some work to do.
I wonder how much of the nervous system, in addition to just the brain, is involved in what a person is. My understanding is that a brain deprived of sensory input goes crazy in a little while.
Flint:
That’s my understanding, too. Long-term sensory deprivation apparently causes all sorts of mental problems. That makes sense because if you think about it, sensory deprivation is worse than solitary confinement, and we already know that solitary confinement messes people up pretty badly. In solitary confinement you’re deprived of the sensory input associated with human contact; in sensory deprivation you’re deprived of that plus all other sensory input. That’s way worse.
Short-term sensory deprivation is a different story. It doesn’t cause any lasting harm, and in fact it is something people pay good money for at flotation centers. I’ve done that a couple of times myself. It can cause hallucinations, and I remember reading Richard Feynman’s account of the hallucinations he experienced in sensory deprivation tanks. Alas, I didn’t experience any hallucinations, but then again I only floated twice. I might have experienced some had I continued. I did experience a different sort of consciousness at times in the tank, distinct from what I experience in everyday life, but akin to what I experience occasionally during meditation.
I use brain transplants in my thought experiments because I want to eliminate sensory deprivation as a confounding factor. After a brain transplant, there is no sensory deprivation. The brain is just getting its sensory input from a different set of sense organs and nerves.
Jock:
Charlie and his buddy Rudolf are a little behind the times. Still, the Mesopotamians thought the liver was the seat of the soul, so I guess Charlie and Rudy have made some progress by moving feelings from the liver to the heart.
None of this has been empirically demonstrated. You are treating your speculations as if they are facts.
Yes, we are more than brains. I am at least a body with a brain, a heart, eyes, arms legs and all the other physical forms that are part of me. I am also a thinking, feeling willing person.
We are close to agreement here. But rather than calling it a “purely physical object” my view is that it is a dynamic process within which physical substances are precisely controlled.
Like you, I am engaging in pure speculation.
Of course this has nothing to do with magic. It is the natural order of things. Regarding organisms such as we humans, form is more enduring than material substance and the sense of self is more enduring than form.
It not that that the laws of physics are never violated. We have no need to violate the laws of physics. In my opinion, etheric forces are dynamic and energetic in nature so if you where to consider them to be real, you would probably say they are physical in nature.
There is a polarity in the universe. There is material substance and there is the space not occupied by this substance. This space throughout the universe is understood to consist of energy which is calculated to be infinite. Material substance concentrated within a encompassing energetic field is a good description of physical substance occupying focal points within the etheric field.
Vastly more sense data enters the brain than we retain or consciously retrieve. I believe the brain can be more accurately described as a filter rather than as a storage device. We can only function as human beings because we are limited as to what we are conscious of. We can focus on specifics and forget the rest.
CharlieM, regarding my brain transplant thought experiments:
My thought experiments are based on our scientific knowledge about the brain. You believe that the heart is the seat of feelings, based on the false belief of a turn-of-the-last-century Austrian crackpot. I think my approach is better.
We’ve been over this before. “I” has multiple meanings. It is not contradictory for a Christian to say “After playing in the mud, I washed myself off” and “I am a soul, and I will survive the death of my body”. In one case they are using “I” to refer to the combination of body and soul, and in the other case it refers to the soul alone. It’s the same with me: “I” can refer to my entire body (ie my brain plus the rest of my body), or it can refer to my brain.
None of which conflicts with the fact that you are a purely physical being.
You are speaking as if the “dynamic process” were some separate nonphysical thing that is controlling the “physical substances”. The body carries out a lot of processes, but that doesn’t mean that the processes are separate nonphysical things that push the particles around. The particles do just fine on their own by following the laws of physics.
keiths:
Charlie:
The sense of self depends on the brain, and so if the “form” of the brain is drastically altered, as when Og clubs Thag, the sense of self is obliterated. And it isn’t just death. Physical damage to the brain can significantly alter your sense of yourself.
There’s a problem: if you were right about that, then brains would appear to violate the laws of physics as we currently conceive of them. No one has observed this. And if you’re tempted to argue that the violations are subtle, thus evading observation, then you are shooting yourself in the foot. If the violations are subtle, then they aren’t nearly large enough to give the soul the kind of control over the body that you envision.
The soul doesn’t exist, Charlie.
There’s no question that the brain filters out an enormous amount of information before it reaches the parts of the brain that produce conscious awareness. I’m not seeing how that supports your position, though. And the brain not only filters information before it reaches consciousness, it also stores memories, so it is a storage device. If memories were stored in your soul, dementia wouldn’t cause you to forget your daughter’s name.
By the way, I watched the Parnia video and he doesn’t address the problems that I mentioned earlier.
Where have I classified the soul as being nonphysical? We have discussed an immaterial soul, but I don’t remember making the claim that the soul is nonphysical. The term ‘physical’ is quite straight forward when we are dealing with matter, but regarding energy it gets more intangible.
I’m not claiming that Newton’s laws of motion are wrong. I’m saying that they only apply in a limited sphere. Does photosynthesis obey Newton’s laws? And as it affects the material of plants, is it necessary for it to conform to Newton’s laws?
We also have E = mc^2. In my opinion material reality a condensed form of energy. So physical reality is fundamentally energy based.
It is entirely plausible that energy and matter interact. I regard the nervous system as a combination of matter and energy. This forms a unity with the bodily constitution as the material aspect and the soul/spiritual as the energetic aspect. I do not think of these as separate entities influencing each other. In my opinion they are of the same ‘substance’ but in their own states. Hence my reference to solids, liquids and gases. These are just different energy states of this unified ‘substance’.
Why should it not be possible for beings to exist in higher energy states?
The higher the energy state the more subtle it would appear to be. But this subtlety is only with respect to our gross senses. It is far from subtle when it comes to effects. For instance I do not perceive any of the vast networks of radio waves and transmissions in my environment even though I am in the midst of them constantly.
CharlieM:
I have explained several times that ‘immaterial soul’ is a standard term that is taken to mean ‘nonphysical soul.’
Also, I have said more than once that
I explained the rationale behind that usage, which is that I want the discussion to be relevant to as many readers as possible, and I therefore don’t want it to sink into the morass of Steinerian terminology. I requested that you use the word ‘soul’ in the same way as I, and that you use ‘ssoul’ when referring to your and Steiner’s idiosyncratic meaning. You agreed to this. Please honor that agreement.
By that agreement, you have said that the soul is nonphysical. If there are any particular entities that you want to propose as physical, that’s fine. Just say so, and don’t use the term ‘soul’ to refer to them.
The problem has been that you tend to confuse ‘energy’ as used by physicists with ‘energy’ as used by the denizens of the wooniverse. Stick to the meaning the physicists use. If you want to refer to ‘energy’ as defined by the wooniversians, allow me to suggest the term ‘woonergy’.
The laws of physics include far more than just Newton’s laws. Photosynthesis obeys the laws of physics, and so do plants as a whole. As does everything in the universe. Plants strictly obey Newton’s laws, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t aspects of their behavior that are governed by other physical laws.
Yes, matter and energy are fundamentally the same thing. That’s ‘energy’, not ‘woonergy’.
It isn’t just plausible. It actually happens. But again, this is energy we are talking about, not woonergy.
It is possible. When I am traveling down the freeway in my car, I am in a higher energy state than when I am walking down the street. Specifically, my kinetic energy is higher. But yet again, we are talking about energy, not woonergy.
We can detect radio waves, Charlie. No one has detected any subtle woonergies.
And as I’ve already explained, it would require large violations of the known laws of physics for the soul to somehow direct the physical behavior of the brain and body. No one has observed anything of the kind, and it’s unrealistic to think that we could have missed an effect that large. You are pinning your hopes on a discovery that ain’t gonna happen.
Look, it’s clear that you really, really, really want to believe in the soul, and that arguments and evidence against the soul bother you. You don’t want them to be correct, and you’re looking for a way — any way — to demonstrate that they are false. That’s the wrong approach if you are truly interested in pursuing the truth. Are you? Which is more important to you, pursuing truth or pursuing Steinerism? You really need to choose. Will you be able to accept the truth if you find that it doesn’t match Steiner’s views (and believe me, it doesn’t)?
The soul doesn’t exist, and that’s a hard fact to accept. It was a gut punch for me, and I only believed in the soul for a brief time as a kid and adolescent. You’ve believed in it for decades, and that is going to make it far more difficult for you to give it up than it was for me. I’m sympathetic.
But you really do need to decide if you are serious about pursuing the truth, or only serious about accepting truths that fit into your pre-existing Steinerian worldview.
I haven’t claimed that the combined gas laws are fundamental. All laws of physics are limited, it’s just that some have narrower limits than others. Newton’s 2nd laws applies to physical bodies but there are exceptions when those physical bodies are living or intelligently programmed.
I think you are conflating ‘physical bodies’ with ‘material bodies’. I believe it is much more accurate to think of ourselves as living processes as opposed to material objects. The brain as an object that has the attributes which you claim is a fictitious caricature created in your imagination. A product of your reductive naturalism.
I am not a collection of parts put together, I am a unity, and have been a unity since I was conceived.
You speak as though the laws of physics are unified. They aren’t.
Living systems have brought forth creativity and forethought. What laws of physics govern these processes? A matador, as a living organism, can forestall the occurrence of the force of the bull impressing itself on him/her by jumping to the side. This is a demonstration of a ‘body’ expressing itself to prevent what would otherwise be an impression by an external force.
So are you saying that the brain is different from all of your other organs in that you have a heart, a liver, a spleen, but you don’t have a brain, you are a brain?