In the previous thread I examined (starting here) a couple of Richard Swinburne’s arguments for the soul, pointing out why I think they are flawed.
Because I find this stuff so interesting, I thought I would look for some more pro-soul arguments and open another thread to discuss them. This topic is important to a lot of people, particular those whose religious or spiritual beliefs invoke some concept of a soul or a soul-like entity.
For now I’ll just mention one argument, leaving others for the comments.
Alvin Plantinga presents a modal argument for the existence of the soul which he describes in the video above. It’s startlingly similar — if not identical — to Swinburne’s arguments, and it’s subject to the same refutation. (I actually did an OP on this years ago, but I didn’t remember the argument well enough to recognize the similarity when I encountered Swinburne’s arguments.)
I’ll paraphrase the argument and state my objections in the comments.
My summary of the argument:
1. If A and B are identical, then every property of A must also be a property of B.
2. Let A represent me, and let B represent my body.
3. It is logically possible that A could continue to exist after B is destroyed.
4. It is not logically possible that B could continue to exist after B is destroyed.
5. #3 is a property of A that is not shared by B.
6. Therefore, A is not identical to B. I am not my body.
7. By implication, there is more to me than just my body. I also possess something extra that we can call a ‘soul’.
As with Swinburne’s argument, Plantinga’s argument depends on identifying a property of “me” that is not a property of “my body” and drawing a conclusion from that. The error arises from #3:
That can be restated as
When #3 is decomposed this way, it becomes clear that you can’t simply conclude that A is not identical to B. You have to say instead:
Both #6a and #6b are obviously true, and together they show that the only way to get to “A is not identical to B” is to assume the conclusion, which is illegitimate. If you don’t assume the conclusion, then both possibilities remain: A might be identical to B, and it might not. Nothing in the argument favors one over the other.
ETA: To clarify the reasoning that leads to #6a and #6b, note that the property “could possibly continue to exist when B is destroyed” is true of A only if A is not identical to B. So it can only be used to prove that A is not identical to B when we already know that A is not identical to B. If A is identical to B, then neither A nor B has the property in question, and it therefore gives us no reason to conclude that A is not identical to B. The argument is a wash, and both options remain live.
Anyone with an hour or so to kill might find the earlier Plantinga discussion keiths links to in the OP entertaining.
Also it might avoid reinventing the wheel.
The disruption of bodily processes can only show at best that the soul requires the body to express itself in a physical medium. it does not provide evidence that the soul does not exist.
OOB experiences are sufficient to debunk the myth that existence stops with the death of the body.
keiths,
I like that analysis!
I wonder if the deeper problem with Plantinga and Swinburne is a confusion about modal properties.
They treat a modal property as the property of a thing: the existence or non-existence of that thing.
I wonder if it might make more sense to treat modal properties as descriptions of a possible world: the existence or non-existence of that thing in that possible world.
To say that it is logically possible that I can exist without my body is to say that there exists a possible world in which I exist without my body.
It doesn’t say anything about whether that possible world is the actual one, which is (presumably) what we care about.
That said, I do not think it is logically possible for the self to exist without the body — on the contrary, I think that is a deep logical confusion.
On diagnosing and dispelling that confusion, I highly recommend Losing Ourselves by Jay Garfield (which did however receive a negative but not unfair review NDPR.
Accidentally posted an incomplete comment. Will repost below.
Steve:
Have you been following the Alzheimer’s argument in the other thread? Take a look starting here. The symptoms of Alzheimer’s show that thinking is carried out by the brain, not by the imaginary soul.
You mentioned out-of-body experiences in another thread, and I responded, but I never heard anything more from you. This was my response:
The fourth item on your list is out-of-body experiences. Those can be vivid, to be sure, but that does not mean they are true. Indeed, the evidence suggests that they are simply brain phenomena. They can be induced via transcranial magnetic stimulation. Psychedelic drug users report them. I’ve even read that the Air Force was able to induce them by spinning pilots in centrifuges. If you think the soul leaves the body during OBEs, then all of the things I just mentioned must somehow be causing the soul to leave the body. That is implausible, to say the least.
Another thing that strikes me about OBEs is that the people who experience them report being able to see — not through their eyes, but independently. If our souls are able to see while outside the body, then why do we need eyes in the first place? Why don’t we just use our souls? Similar questions apply to any of the other senses that are claimed to operate during OBEs.
OBEs just don’t work as a justification for believing that we possess souls.
KN:
I think that’s what it boils down to.
They’re assigning modal properties to things, but not those particular properties. “Exists” and “doesn’t exist” aren’t actually modal. It isn’t modal to say “Robert De Niro exists” or “Batman doesn’t exist”; those are just statements of fact about the actual world. The modal properties that Plantinga and Swinburne are focused on are variations of “could possibly continue to exist after the body is destroyed.”
I think it’s OK to assign modal properties to things, but it has to be done carefully. In the old Plantinga thread, I diagnosed the problem as being the result of a misapplication of Leibniz’s Law to a de dicto reference. I’ve been trying to avoid philosophical jargon here, so I’ll try to convey those ideas using nontechnical language.
Let’s look at a variation of my red/blue marble example. I have a jar containing one red marble and one blue marble. I randomly pull a marble from the jar without looking at it.
1. The marble in my hand has the property “could possibly be red”, plus other “could possibly be” properties.
2. The marble in my hand has the property “could possibly be blue”, plus other “could possibly be” properties.
3. If we tentatively assume that the marble in my hand is red, then it cannot possibly be blue.
4. But that’s a contradiction, since we already stated in #2 that the marble in my hand could possibly be blue.
5. The assumption of a red marble in my hand has led to a contradiction, so we must reject the assumption.
6. The marble in my hand is therefore blue.
Something is clearly off here. Common sense tells us that the marble is just as likely to be red as blue, and common sense is correct. The problem is that the phrase “the marble in my hand” doesn’t retain the same meaning throughout the argument.
In steps 1 and 2, “the marble in my hand” means “whichever marble happens to be in my hand”, and that could be either the red one or the blue one. Let’s call that meaning sense 1. In step 3, “the marble in my hand” refers to a specific marble, namely the red one. Let’s call that meaning sense 2. Under sense 1, the “could be” properties of “the marble in my hand” include all of the red marble’s “could be” properties PLUS all of the blue marble’s “could be” properties. Under sense 2, the “could be” properties of “the marble in my hand” include ONLY the red marble’s “could be” properties. There is a property mismatch, and we used that mismatch to conclude that our “marble is red” assumption was incorrect. However, that’s a mistake, because we changed the meaning of “the marble in my hand” midstream. The mismatch therefore doesn’t signify what we thought it signified.
We can resolve the problem by changing the argument so that the phrase “the marble in my hand” always picks out one specific marble and never the other. The original premise was that the marble in my hand had the property “could possibly be red” and the property “could possibly be blue”. This can be restated as:
1. Either the red marble is in my hand, or the blue marble is in my hand.
2a. If the marble in my hand is the red one, then it has the property “could possibly be red”. (It’s not only possibly red, it’s certainly red.)
2b. If the marble in my hand is the red one, then it has the property “cannot possibly be blue”.
3a. If the marble in my hand is the blue one, then it has the property “could possibly be blue”.
3b. If the marble in my hand is the blue one, then it has the property “could not possibly be red”.
4. Let’s tentatively assume that the marble in my hand is red. In that case, it has the property “could possibly be red” and the property “could not possibly be blue”.
That’s the step that caused trouble in the original argument, because it led to an apparent contradiction. Now, however, we can see that there is no contradiction. #4 is compatible with all of the preceding steps. Since there’s no contradiction, the assumption we made isn’t disallowed.
We can also assume blueness instead of redness in #4:
4. Let’s tentatively assume that the marble in my hand is blue. In that case, it has the property “could possibly be blue” and the property “could not possibly be red”.
Again, there’s no problem. #4 is compatible with all of the preceding steps. Since there’s no contradiction, the assumption we made isn’t disallowed.
Neither assumption is disallowed, so both possibilities remain live: I might be holding the red marble, or I might be holding the blue one.
Steve,
I mentioned above that the Air Force was able to induce out-of-body experiences by spinning pilots in centrifuges. Tonight I ran across a Radiolab piece about the Air Force study. It makes for terrific listening:
Out of Body, Roger
The study induced out-of-body experiences in 40 of the volunteer pilots. In the piece, they interview three of the pilots, one of whom is the researcher who ran the study and used himself as a guinea pig. They also play audio of a couple of the centrifuge runs.
Great stuff, but not good news for believers in a soul.
In the case of Alzheimer’s, that is like saying the news program on the radio doesn’t exist because a resistor in the PC board is busted not allowing us to hear the news properly or at all.
For OOBs, whether induced by death or other means simply says a disruption or distortion in the interface between the soul and the body can be induced in more than one way. That does not negate the OOB experience. On the contrary, it would seem to bolster the observation that there is more to the body than meets the eye.
If you think about it, its pretty amazing that the idea of a soul and/or unseen God continues to persist regardless of technological advances. God actually gets more traction the better the technology gets since technology tries to mimic God. In fact, you (pl) need the idea of God swimming in your brain to advance the technology you believe will displace God.
Weird how that works!
Steve:
No, it’s not like that. CharlieM tried a similar argument, but it doesn’t work. The examples I gave in the other thread (did you bother reading them?) show that the problem isn’t with ‘transmission’ or ‘reception’, it’s with the thinking that happens in between.
Many Alzheimer’s patients have trouble reading the time off a clock face, as I described earlier:
Steve:
Haha. So you actually think that spinning pilots in centrifuges separates their souls from their bodies? And that it just so happens that transcranial magnetic stimulation and psychedelic drugs also separate souls from bodies?
When given a choice between a ridiculous explanation and a sensible one, why pick the ridiculous one?
Seems to me you aren’t looking at the evidence and asking what the best explanation is. You’re looking at the evidence and asking “How can I spin this so that I can retain my belief in a soul?”
True. The experiences are definitely real. The pilots really did have the feeling that they had left their bodies. It’s just that the impression was false. They hadn’t actually left their bodies. That was just an illusion created by their oxygen-starved brains.
Keep spinning, Steve. You’ll need to do a lot of it if you want to hang on to your soul. Just don’t do your spinning in a centrifuge.
Steve:
Belief in God in U.S. Dips to 81%, a New Low
So much for gaining traction.
Also, it’s not clear what you mean by “technology tries to mimic God”. Is my flat-screen TV a form of God-mimicry? I spent my entire career in high tech, and I can assure you that none of my projects were aimed at mimicking God. Are you just trying to suggest that as technology gets more powerful, it becomes more godlike?
I don’t believe that technology will displace God, because there is no God to be displaced. Nor would I want it to displace God if he actually existed. I really don’t know what you’re getting at here. Could you clarify?
So how do you know the pilot had not left his body? Right, because you didn’t ‘see’ it. See how that works? You need to see it to believe it.
Much of reality is not testable or can be ‘seen’ with current technology.
The best explanation in the case of the centrifuge is that it did in fact allow our intangible ‘self’ to project out from the confines of the body as would shrooms or cardiac arrest. Nothing ridiculous there; simply a confirmation that disruptions and distortions can give us a glimpse at a phenomenon we have long claimed exists.
Sufficiently advanced technology will end up confirming our suspicions not debunking them.
So not being able to read a clock face means the self as separate from the physical senses is false? Hmmm.
Is the Alzheimer’s patient not there because of memory loss or impaired cognitive function?
Or what about the comatose patient with the silent cry ‘I am here’. Is that person in fact dead because the body is unresponsive to stimula? Because Keith cannot ‘hear’ the cry? Because Keith cannot see a finger move?
Steve:
I have no idea what you’re on about, but it has nothing to do with anything I’ve written. Take a look at this comment I addressed to CharlieM about an hour ago, and if you’re still confused about what I’m arguing, let me know and I can walk you through it step by step.
Steve:
Wow. You actually are asserting, with a straight face, that centrifuges can separate souls from bodies. Well, that’s the kind of thing that makes TSZ entertaining, I guess.
You’re doing exactly what I described above. You aren’t examining the evidence and looking for the best explanation; you’ve already chosen an ‘explanation’ and you aren’t going to let a little thing like the evidence stop you from embracing it.
Let’s compare explanations. Centrifuges, cardiac arrest, psychedelic drugs, and transcranial magnetic stimulation all involve physical disruptions of the brain. We know that disrupted brains can produce all kinds of weird experiences. Have you heard people describe their LSD trips? Do you remember the guy in the Radiolab piece who thought he was fishing when he was really passed out and convulsing in the centrifuge? Or the other guy who thought he was in the grocery store searching for ice cream? The first guy wasn’t fishing, and the second guy wasn’t at the grocery store.* Those were just weird hallucinations caused by disruptions to the brain’s blood supply. All of these things — centrifuges, cardiac arrest, psychedelic drugs, and transcranial magnetic stimulation — involve disruptions of the brain, so unsurprisingly, they all can produce weird experiences. The out-of-body experiences are an example of that, along with the fishing trip and the grocery store visit.
* Or do you think their souls were actually fishing and buying groceries? That would be hilarious. And if you don’t think they were actually fishing and buying groceries, then why do you believe they were truly outside of their bodies during their OBEs? Why reject the former experiences as delusional but embrace the latter as true? (Besides the obvious reason of “Because I want the OBEs to be true.”)
Now let’s look at your ‘explanation’. You claim that the pilots’ souls left their bodies, and you assert that this is the best explanation of the evidence. But why is it the best? You haven’t given any reason that I can see. What is it about your explanation that actually makes it superior to the non-soul alternative?
We expect the brain to malfunction if it is sufficiently disrupted physically, but why should the soul malfunction if it’s the brain that is being disrupted? (The same question applies to the Alzheimer’s time-telling case.) Why should the nonphysical soul start having visions of fishing trips and grocery store visits simply because its owner is being spun in a centrifuge? Do nonphysical souls feel centrifugal force? Are body and soul held together by invisible straps that can tear under centrifugal force, leading to OBEs? Are these straps magnetic, so that they can be loosened by transcranial magnetic stimulation? Can they be dissolved by psychedelic drugs? Why should any of those things lead to the separation of body and soul?
The truth is, you can’t explain why. It’s not like any of those are necessary consequences of the soul hypothesis. “If we have souls, they will be affected by centrifugal force” is not a valid inference. The latter does not follow from the former. The only reason you’re saying that souls separate centrifugally from the body is because you already know that the pilots experienced OBEs under centrifugal force, and you’re trying to retrofit (or rather, retro-force-fit) the soul concept to pre-existing observations. It’s completely unscientific.
It’s no different from the following: If we discover tomorrow that OBEs occur whenever someone sings the words to The Star-Spangled Banner backwards, I predict that you’ll be saying something like “Of course. That’s how souls work. Those particular words, sung backwards, create a disruption in the force field that normally holds bodies and souls together.” No evidence for that, no reason to think that it’s true, and you certainly wouldn’t have made that claim before the observation. You’d do it because you need to retro-force-fit the soul to the evidence in order to have an excuse for continuing to believe in it.
There’s just no comparison. The soul-based explanation is ridiculous and has to be force-fitted to the evidence, while the non-soul explanation makes perfect sense and fits the evidence without requiring any ad hoc retrofitting.
That’s the thing: The soul doesn’t malfunction. The brain does. You seem to think that the soul’s function is the same as the function of the body/brain. It is not, never was.
Of course, troubles multiply as different people have quite different concepts of the soul, e.g. in Russian the soul is the focus of primarily feelings and emotions while elsewhere in Western thought it is more like signs of life, vitality. In Christianity it is the placeholder of the self-identity of those who are resurrected (and/or go to heaven and hell). In Eastern philosophy/theology, Hinduism argues that the individual/lower self (a.k.a. the soul) is that which reincarnates while Buddhism argues that there is no self, neither lower or higher, even though reincarnation is a given.
Despite these definitional difficulties, most people can grasp the explanatory power of the concept of the soul for many aspects of life that cannot be explained from materialist/naturalist perspective, probably the most obvious being the first-person experience. From the ordinary “scientific” third-person perspective, the first-person experience is completely invisible and undetectable, yet there is no way to deny it. You can deny the soul of Alzheimer patients and comatose bodies all you want, the evidence for such conclusion will never be there from third-person perspective. Never as in never.
First, you need to define what a soul is and then you need to define why God would give it to a human that didn’t need it in the first place… unless the soul was going to go to heaven for not particular reasons.. lol
Arn’t you retired??? What’s to kill?
J-Mac:
I’m using the word the way Christians typically do, to refer to a entity that is distinct from the body, nonphysical, the seat of consciousness and thoughts and emotions, in control of the body, separable from the body at death (and perhaps other times), and which can function independently of the body. My arguments aren’t limited to just that type of soul, however.
Why would I need to explain why a God that I don’t believe in would give souls which I don’t believe in to humans? I’m criticizing the concept of the soul, not arguing for it.
Erik:
What the soul’s function is depends on whose concept of the soul we are talking about. For purposes of this debate, I usually take the soul to be what most Christians (at least here in the US) regard it as being, as described in the previous comment. There’s a lot of overlap, however, and so arguments that apply to this sort of soul often apply to others.
It’s much more than that in both Orthodox and Western Christianity. Orthodox and Western Christians generally believe that not only is the soul the locus of identity, it is the seat of consciousness, feelings, intelligence, and decision-making. They believe it controls the body and that it is immortal. There are exceptions, of course. For instance, Jehovah’s Witnesses regard the soul as being physical and mortal, and there is a strain of Christian philosophy (“Christian physicalism”) that denies the existence of the soul altogether.
Science hasn’t yet explained consciousness in a way that is satisfactory to you, me, and a lot of other people, but that hardly justifies the conclusion that the soul exists. It’s a similar error to God-of-the-gaps reasoning. The fact that there are unanswered questions in science does not imply that God exists, nor does it imply that the soul exists.
My approach, actually, is to assume arguendo that the soul really does exist and to see where that leads. What happens is that as the evidence is examined, the soul cedes more and more of its purported function to the brain, becoming less and less significant as this happens. See this comment in the other thread. In it I discuss some of the functionality once reserved for the soul that is clearly carried out by the brain. I conclude:
The soul-of-the-gaps and the God-of-the-gaps are on their way out. Both appear to be quite mortal.
Swinburne says the damnedest things. I try to give him the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes it’s hard.
1. Regarding ‘testimonial beliefs’, which he defines as ‘beliefs that someone is telling us something’, he writes:
WTF? How does he come to believe I’m telling him it’s Tuesday if not by inferring this from my words? How else could he get that idea? He specifically mentions that he understands English, so it’s clear that he thinks his knowledge of the meaning of my words is relevant here. It is this knowledge that allows him to figure out that I’m telling him it is Tuesday, obviously. He infers my meaning from the meaning of the words I use.
If Sebastian says to me ‘it is Tuesday’, then yes, like Swinburne, I acquire the belief that Sebastian is telling me that it is Tuesday. However, I also acquire the belief that he means that it is Tuesday, and I infer from his words that this is what he means.
As is usual with Swinburne, context is of little help. My best attempt at resolving this charitably is that Swinburne might be saying that my actual meaning could be different from what I am telling him — if I am speaking in code, for instance. But if I’m speaking in code, I’m not actually telling him that it is Tuesday. It only looks like I’m telling him that. In reality, I’m telling him something else, which contradicts his earlier statement that I am telling him it is Tuesday.
Or maybe he’s acknowledging the possibility that I could be lying, and that I therefore might not actually believe it is Tuesday. But that doesn’t help either, because the question isn’t about what I believe while saying those words, it’s about what I mean. If I say to him ‘it is Tuesday’, then I mean that it is Tuesday. What I’m telling him is what I mean; it just so happens that what I’m telling him is not what I believe.
There are probably other possibilities, but screw it. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to pore over difficult writing, but the return on investment seems too low when the writing is Swinburne’s. I’ll come back to this if his later arguments depend on it.
2. He defines a ‘pure mental event’ as ‘one whose occurrence does not involve the occurrence of any physical event’, but later he says that ‘brain events often cause pure mental events’. When a pure mental event is caused by a brain event, the pure mental event certainly seems to involve a physical event, which contradicts his definition. Is he using the word ‘involve’ in some idiosyncratic way? I have no idea, and I doubt that it’s worth pondering. As with the ‘it is Tuesday’ stuff, I’ll come back to this if his later arguments depend on it.
I’ve taken a look at another argument from Swinburne’s 2019 book. He writes:
By way of illustration, suppose that a particular brain event is associated with that weird sensation you get when someone sticks a Covid test swab deep into your nose. There is no logical contradiction in supposing that somewhere, sometime, that brain event could have occurred without an accompanying swab-in-nose sensation. Therefore, according to Swinburne, mental events can’t be identical to, or supervene on, physical events. Ditto for properties.
That’s a pretty big leap, and it looks a lot like the leaps Swinburne makes in his two earlier arguments (and also like the leap that Plantinga makes in his). I think the mistake here is the same as in all three of those other arguments.
I would express the argument this way:
It’s the same error of modal logic as in the other three arguments, and it can be repaired in the same way by making the separate possibilities explicit and stating their respective implications (steps 2-5 below):
#6 is the step that caused the trouble in the original argument, leading to an apparent contradiction, but here we can see that it fits in just fine with all of the preceding steps. There is no contradiction. Thus, we are not required to reject the assumption that M and B are identical. By symmetry, we are not required to reject the assumption that they are distinct, either. The argument is a wash.
It’s interesting that all of the arguments so far have failed for the same reason. I’m hoping for a little more variety in future arguments.
Here’s another odd Swinburne argument. Swinburne is arguing against property dualism, which is very close to physicalism. For the purposes of this argument, you can ignore the difference. What’s important is that in both physicalism and property dualism, mental properties are inextricably tied to bodies. They are not separable.
In the diagram “I” refers to Swinburne, “Ms” refers to Swinburne’s mental properties, and “Bs” refers to Swinburne’s body. “You” refers to the reader, “My” refers to the reader’s mental properties, and “By” refers to the reader’s body. The left side of the diagram shows the “Actual situation”, in which Swinburne is linked to both Swinburne’s body and Swinburne’s mental properties, and you are linked to both your body and your mental properties. The right side shows an “Alternative situation” in which the linkage has been reversed: you are now linked to Swinburne’s body and Swinburne’s mental properties, and Swinburne is linked to your body and your mental properties.
Swinburne writes:
According to property dualism (and physicalism), Ms and Bs are tied together as a unit, and that’s it. There’s nothing extra. They constitute the “I”, and there is no additional external “I” that is linked to them. Ditto for My and By; they are tied together as a unit, and there is no additional “You” that is linked to them. This implies that under property dualism (and physicalism), there is really no difference between the left- and right-hand sides of the diagram. Swinburne objects that this is “manifestly false”, because we can clearly see that the two situations are different. Therefore property dualism (and physicalism) must be false.
It has me shaking my head. Swinburne is blatantly assuming his conclusion here. What makes the two sides of the diagram different is the presence of the separate “I” and “You” at the top. If you eliminate those, you get the diagram below in which there is no difference between the sides. The only legitimate reason to add the separate “I” and the “You” to the diagram is if you already know that substance dualism is true, and that there really is a separate soul above and beyond the body-plus-mental-properties combination. Swinburne is attempting to prove that; he isn’t entitled to assume it.
Swinburne is essentially saying “I can conceive of a situation in which I have your body, your memories, your personality, etc., and you have mine. That wouldn’t be conceivable if we were nothing but body-plus-mental-properties combinations, as the property dualists (and physicalists) assert. Therefore we must be something above and beyond the combinations. That is, we must be souls.”
If you think about it, it’s the same damn error in logic that tripped him up in the other three arguments.
This isn’t some professor at the Podunk Baptist Theological Seminary in Backwater, Alabama. Swinburne was the Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford, and he is commonly described (along with Plantinga) as being one of the most influential philosophers of religion in the last 50 years. If this is the height of contemporary Christian philosophy, then Christian philosophy is in trouble.
ETA: Edited to malign Alabama instead of Kentucky.
Time to take a break from Swinburne and look at someone else’s argument.
There are people who argue along these lines: “Thoughts can change the brain; therefore the mind is separate from the brain.” The folks making this argument cite studies such as the following:
A. The streets of London are such a labyrinthine mess that aspiring cab drivers have to go through a multi-year training program, memorizing 25,000 streets and the landmarks on them, before they earn their badges and are allowed to sit behind the wheel of a taxi. This arduous task is known as acquiring “the Knowledge”, with a capital K. (That detail should quicken Charlie’s pulse. Sounds kind of occult, doesn’t it?) A neuroscientist has studied the cabbies and found that the posterior hippocampus is larger in them than in the general public, and that it gets steadily larger as they progress through the training program.
The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS
B. Jeffrey Schwartz, a psychiatrist at UCLA, has developed a program that enables sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder to alleviate their symptoms using a combination of cognitive-behavorial therapy (CBT) and mindfulness training. Before-and-after brain scans show a dramatic reduction in activity in the brain areas associated with OCD.
C. Mario Beauregard, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, used fMRI to image the brains of a group of arachnophobes before and after a four-week CBT-based desensitization program. The scans showed a a marked reduction in the subjects’ fear in response to video footage of spiders.
These and similar findings fall perfectly in line with physicalism, but I’ve seen several people, including Schwartz and Beauregard themselves, interpret the results as somehow undermining physicalism and supporting the existence of an immaterial mind or soul. This is baffling to me. I’ve never seen the logic spelled out explicitly — they seem to regard it as self-evident. Apparently they believe that if thoughts are capable of altering the brain, then those thoughts themselves cannot be a product of the brain. If anyone reading this is aware of an explicit description of the reasoning behind the argument, or can provide one themselves, I’d be grateful if you would comment.
To me it makes perfect sense that thoughts, which are the brain’s activity, can cause brain changes. It’s all physical — physical causes and physical effects — so why should there be a problem? It’s the dualists who face the interaction problem, not the physicalists. Strength training is a case of muscle activity altering muscles; why shouldn’t brain activity be capable of altering the brain?
I just read another chapter in the Swinburne book, this one with the title We Know Who We Are. I perked up a few paragraphs into the chapter because it sounded like he was going to address an objection very similar to the one I had raised against his previous four arguments.
He had described the objection in the book’s introductory chapter as follows:
That didn’t make sense to me at the time, but in light of this new chapter, I think I understand what he was getting at. In both Descartes’ original argument and Swinburne’s amended version, the key premise is that “it’s logically possible that I can to continue to exist after my body has been destroyed.” I accepted that premise, but pointed out that it didn’t mean what Swinburne needed it to mean, because the “I” in that premise really refers to two possible entities: Swinburne as body and Swinburne as soul. Only for Swinburne-as-soul is it logically possible for him to continue to exist after his body is destroyed. You can split the premise in two, with one half referring to Swinburne-as-body and the other referring to Swinburne-as-soul, and when you do that, Swinburne’s argument falls apart. I described all of this in my earlier analysis.
The objection Swinburne describes is similar, but it takes for granted that the premise refers to only one possible Swinburne. It just argues that Swinburne doesn’t actually know the nature of the particular Swinburne that “I” refers to, and without knowing that he cannot judge whether continued existence after bodily destruction is logically possible. The argument fails without that premise, so Swinburne needs to establish what “I” refers to specifically enough that he can justifiably say “Yes, it is logically possible that I can continue to exist after my body is destroyed.”
Here’s where things get weird. As far as I can tell, Swinburne hasn’t fully understood the objection (and maddeningly, he doesn’t quote or cite any objectors, so I can’t get it from the horse’s mouth). He seems to think that as long as he can narrow down the referent of “I” to a single Swinburne, he has solved the problem and rescued his argument. Unfortunately, that’s not sufficient. He needs to also show that the single Swinburne to which “I” refers has the property “can continue to exist after Swinburne’s body is destroyed”. And the only way to do that is to demonstrate that the “I” is Swinburne-as-soul. So Swinburne is trying to prove that he is a soul, but his argument depends on having already established that he is a soul. Not a recipe for success.
I’ll think about this some more and do some rereading to ensure that I’m not shortchanging Swinburne, but right now that appears to be the mistake he’s making.
Correction to the above comment.
I wrote:
That should be:
Here’s an argument for the soul from J.P. Moreland, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Biola University (formerly the Bible Institute of Los Angeles). It’s an adaptation of an argument by Stewart Goetz. Here’s how Moreland presents it:
(1) I am essentially an indivisible, simple spiritual substance.
(2) Any physical body is essentially a divisible or complex entity (any physical body has spatial extension or separable parts).
(3) The law of identity pertains (if x is identical to y, then whatever is true of x is true of y, and vice versa).
(4) Therefore, I am not identical with my (or any) physical body.
(5) If I am not identical with a physical body, then I am a soul.
(6) Therefore, I am a soul.
He writes:
(1), needless to say, is an unsupported premise. It’s beyond me why Moreland thinks that its truth can be established by introspection alone. Also, note that he says that we are aware, through introspection, that we are “distinct from our bodies”. That means that introspection alone settles the question, so that the rest of the argument is unnecessary. He can just jump directly to the following rather unconvincing argument:
(1) Look within yourself.
(2) Therefore, you are a soul.
Having reread the chapter in question plus some related material elsewhere in the book, I still find myself reaching the same conclusion regarding Swinburne’s argument. He thinks that if he can pin down the referent of the word “I” (when uttered by him) to a single entity, that he has answered the objection and is therefore entitled to claim the property “could possibly continue to exist when Swinburne’s body is destroyed” for himself. He doesn’t seem to realize that even if “I” unambiguously refers to a single entity, it doesn’t settle the question of whether that single entity possesses the afroresaid property. Without that, his argument fails.
* It may seem odd that Swinburne has to lay out an argument in favor of his claim that he knows who “I” refers to when he speaks the word, and odder still that it takes him most of the chapter to make his case. This has to do with his belief that a person might possess every single one of his physical and mental properties, and have experienced an identical life in every single respect, but might nevertheless be someone else. It’s the same idea that lies behind this argument of his that I examined earlier.
keiths,
Dualism is true and souls* are real or dualism is false and souls are imaginary. Let’s devise a test.
*Depending what the word means.
Alan,
In this thread, I am explaining to CharlieM how we can be sure that the soul (as envisioned by him and by most dualists) does not exist.
keiths,
That link takes me to a comment where you say:
.
Interesting. I presume you can therefore tell me what consciousness means to you.
Alan:
I could, and I might even do so if I thought it would lead to a fruitful discussion. However, you are just definition trolling, and it would be unwise for me to waste too much time interacting with Definition Troll.
Instead, I will refer you to a very nice comment from BruceS that I quoted here.
BruceS’s comment in context.
My reply in context.
I could be wrong but I get the impression you are more interested in winning arguments than having fruitful discussions.
Wikipedia on consciousness:
Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence.[1] However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguists, and scientists. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of mind. In the past, it was one’s “inner life”, the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition.[2] Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, or self-awareness either continuously changing or not.[3][4] The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises a curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.[5]
Alan:
You are indeed wrong. I refer you to the Sandbox discussion on thinking styles. It’s a fruitful discussion, and no one is trying to “win” it.
Don’t misunderstand me. Like most people, I do enjoy winning arguments, and I prefer winning to losing. Debate can be a way of discussing substantive issues, but it is also a sport, and I very much enjoy the competitive aspects of it. It’s no different in that sense from playing tennis against someone and relishing your win. So yes, winning is fun, but no, it does not outweigh the desire for fruitful discussion. That is why I am declining to engage with you, Definition Troll. I would almost certainly win the ensuing debate, based on past experience, and if winning were my primary goal, it would make sense to jump right in. However, the discussion would likely be fruitless, so I will pass on it and pursue other discussions here at TSZ.
I will note that you are not somehow above the fray. You have shown a strong desire to win arguments and have expressed frustration at your relative inability to do so. One episode that has stuck in my mind from years ago was when you were convinced that I had misused a word and gleefully “corrected” me, only to find out that my usage was already correct. You weren’t trying to advance the discussion; my meaning was clear, and that would have been the case even if I had misused the word. You simply longed to catch me in an error.
That sort of thing isn’t unusual — you do it all the time. What made this particular instance unusual is that you candidly expressed your disappointment that I hadn’t been wrong. Normally, you don’t admit that.
I bring this up just to preempt any attempt on your part to portray yourself as some noble pursuer of fruitful discussion who has no desire to win arguments. That notion is comical.
On page 137 of The Soul, Moreland writes:
Earlier in that chapter, he began an argument (which I quoted above) with the following premise:
Evidently he’s an indivisible complicated simple thing with an intricate structure.