Why does the soul need the brain seems like a logical question especially in the context of the belief held by the leading ID proponent of the Discovery Institute Michael Egnor. He has written extensively on the theme of the immaterial soul that, in his view, is an independent entity, separate of the human body. What Dr. Egnor consistently fails to acknowledge is the obvious connection or interdependence between a functioning brain and self-awareness or consciousness. I wrote about it here.
If certain parts of human brain are damaged or disabled, just like in case of general anesthesia, the human brain loses the sense of consciousness or self-awareness either permanently or temporarily. The immaterial soul fails to make up for the damaged or disabled brain…
Dr. Egnor’s personal experiences (and he has many) as a neurosurgeon convinced him that many people, including many of his patients, with the great majority of their brains missing have developed and function normally. Egnor is convinced that an immaterial soul makes up for the loss of brain mass that is responsible for normal brain function in people with normal brain size or no damage to any of the brain parts.
It appears Dr. Egnor believes that unlike a computer software that can’t function without the computer hardware, human brain has an ability to make up for the loss of the hardware with the computer software – the immaterial soul.
Is Dr. Egnor’s view consistent with the readily available facts?
I personally see Dr. Egnor building and supporting a strawman by his selective choice of facts…Hey! That’s my opinion and that’s why we have this blog full of experts to disagree with me or Dr. Egnor…(I kinda like the guy though).
Let’s see…First off, not all cases of patients with missing parts of their brains experience the supposed miraculous saving powers of the immaterial soul. It appears that the amount of the missing part of the brain mass doesn’t seem to matter… What seems to matter more is which part (s) of the brain is missing and not how much of the brain mass is actually missing. Some parts of the brain seem essential for consciousness and self-awareness and others do not.
However, the main point of this OP is:
<strong> Why does the soul need the brain? Or why would human body need a brain at all, if the immaterial soul has an ability to compensate for the brain losses?
If the software (the soul) can operate without the hardware (the brain) why do we even need the brain in the first place?</strong>
It seems like a faulty or at least a wasteful design to me…
Why would He need to constrain the impossible from happening?
Is that a presupposition?
His existence is what defines what is possible and what is impossible in the first place.
peace
I’d say it’s an observation.
peace
fifth:
No, he is subservient to logic, just like everyone else.
And if you try to argue that God can supersede logic, then you defeat your own claim, which was that God cannot make a rock too heavy for him to lift.
Another FMM foot-shot.
Based on your presupposition that everyone knows God exists?
And what is logically possible.
Actually Black is quite right and you are the one who is confused. There need be no relational property to discern two objects. You need to read more and blather less.
And blibbidy blibbidy blue. Don’t forget that!
ETA: Wait, I think it’s actually bloop. {I blame KN}
Sounds like a cool paper. One of the big regrets of mine is that I never met Putnam, who (I found out too late) was almost a neighbor. And since noting that I said this on FB, a parent of a kid who went to school with one of our daughters told my wife that Putnam went to her temple and she would have been happy to introduce us.
{heavy sigh}
He’s not begging the question, you are. And it’s not a good thing that you’re stumped by grade school objections. I don’t think I’d mention that if I were you.
Quite right, too. All misspellings and grammatical errors of all posts at TSZ are my responsibility. It’s too bad none of you can see how lucid and clear the posts are before I get to work on them.
Yeah, I should go back and re-read it at some point. I think it would compare nicely with Rorty’s use of Ryle in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In both cases there’s an argument that the distinctions we take for granted as being so obvious as to hardly worth defending are in fact the local and contingent sedimentation of parochial conceptual frameworks.
In Rorty’s case this idea is rather deeply affected by the lessons he draws from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Dewey, and Foucault. Putnam occasionally mentions Nietzsche and he has a deep respect for Dewey but I don’t think he internalizes the importance of contingency as deeply as Rorty does.
I think that once you really see where this line of thought goes, it becomes impossible to reject the suspicion that the categories of Western philosophy that are “obvious” to us — substance/property, subject/object, inner/outer, intrinsic/relational, etc — are just features of a very specific cultural group and not at all ‘human universals.’ (Derrida has an essay called “White Mythology” where he argues that “Western metaphysics” is just the mythology of White people — the people who colonized and conquered the world. I think there’s something really important to that.)
Several of my friends who work in philosophy of mind from a Sellars/Dennett point of view have been urging me to take a stronger interest in Buddhist philosophy of mind.
I think there’s something deeply important about the idea that we need to systematically compare very different conceptual frameworks in order to make any real philosophical progress, to the extent that any progress can be made in philosophy at all.
Truth be told I am almost at the point where I think that philosophy that doesn’t make use of non-Western perspectives does not really deserve to be called philosophy at all, but rather just White mythology.
I KNEW IT!!
And it’s actually blibbidy BLABbidy bloop, right?
here is a good primer as to the relationship between God and logic.
http://www.trinityfoundation.org/journal.php?id=16
The take home message is that the Greek word Logos can be paraphrased as Logic……
In the beginning was the Logos (Logic) and the Logos (logic) was God. John 1:1
peace
And my point is that for inner study we don’t need to consider the relationship between the soul and the brain. Those who can make an objective study of their inner desires, pains and sufferings are studying the soul directly. Investigation about how this connects to the brain is outwith the field of this inner soul study.
Surely even the most hardened physicalist does not believe that the soul is identical to the brain. Directly connected yes, but identical, I wouldn’t have thought so.
Well everyone would have known who I was talking about as his name is spelt correctly in the quote I gave. But thanks for bringing it to my attention.
fifthmonarchyman,
That’s def where I go to understand logic! I mean, what could be more appropriate than a Bible site? You can learn about quantifying in between learning about cubits and learning about why rape is OK sometimes. It’s like killing three birds with one stone!
Really? Hunh.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-identity/
It’s probably the single most popular theory of mind since the middle of the 20th Century.
As I keep telling you guys, read more, blather less.
God’s existence is not in question here.
Who said anything about being stumped.
The simple obvious answer is that there can be no immovable objects just as there can be no indiscernible ones.
peace
If you want to know about things that are possible in my worldview a Bible site would be a very good place to start.
That certainly is not a secret
Peace
I brought it up to try to get KN to admit what he’s been up to around here. And he did. So yay me!
Probably the worst place imaginable if you have a rational worldview.
To each his/her own!
As you well know, because you’ve been through this before with lots of people, either way you’re putting limitations on God’s power. You like to limit it one way, others may like to limit it in another.
That is your opinion.
The problem is that you have no basis for coming to that conclusion but your own contradictory anti-Christian presuppositions.
peace
Not that I’m not enjoying your (clearly NON-grade school!) banter, but this is too to stupid continue. Carry on with Newton or something.
And by the way, I’m not just anti-Christian, and I resent the suggestion. I’m anti-nonsense generally. I make no petty distinctions between one silly religion and another.
God’s power is certainly limited by his own nature. If it was not so limited absurdity would be the inevitable necessary result.
That much is obvious and perfectly consistent with the christian worldview.
peace
Blibbidy!
You define nonsense as anything that conflicts with your own presuppositions.
The problem is that those presuppositions are clearly contradictory as witnessed by your acceptance of the goofy idea that indiscernible objects are possible in a logical universe.
peace
A typical response when you have nothing.
Have a nice day…… I mean it.
peace
Blabbidy!
Bloop! (It’s a trinity. They’re kinda the same, but kinda not too.)
True, mind-brain identity has been the most popular position in philosophy of mind for a long time. But it does have rather glaring deficiencies, and in my estimation it is not defensible.
For one thing, there are the Kripkean worries about the semantics and metaphysics of identity. I object to the entire enterprise of deriving metaphysical conclusions from semantic considerations but it’s hard to deny that there’s something to the idea that the mind-brain relationship, whatever that is, cannot be an analytic truth. (For those of us who still uphold anything like the analytic/synthetic distinction. I do, actually. I was never convinced by Quine’s arguments.)
Apart from the Kripke worries, there’s the functionalist challenge to mind-brain identity, the Chalmers objections to functionalism, and on top of all that, the development of “4E cognitive science” (that cognition is embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted).
A closely related problem and one that I find particularly interesting is what Ray Jackendorff called “the mind-mind problem”. I wouldn’t put it exactly as Jackendorff does and I think that Chalmers’s treatment of the problem turns it into a mystery rather than a problem. But there’s something in the vicinity that I think it is important.
Roughly, the mind-mind problem is this: it’s one thing to consider the cognitive and affective neurosciences as showing us how neuronal assemblies are causally linked up with the larger causal economy of the brain-body-environment system so that they can support states with semantic content or affective valence. But it’s much harder to see how the computational mind is related to the phenomenological mind — how the mind conceived of as neuronal computations is related to mental states as we experience them.
Well, that’s easily solved. Just stop thinking of the mind as neuronal computations.
I don’t think we can or should. We have a lot of empirically confirmed research on cognitive neuroscience — we have a lot of work showing that specific cognitive states are realized by specific neurophysiological states that are causally entangled with states of the rest of the brain, the body, and the environment.
Here’s how Sellars puts the relevant point, in considering a hypothetical robot that can emit radiation, detect the causal structure of its environment based on how the radiation is reflected back at it, record the information it receives, and move accordingly:
“In other words, the robot comes to contain an increasingly adequate and detailed picture of its environment in a sense of ‘picture’ which is to explicated in terms of the logic of relations. This picturing cannot be abstracted from the mechanical and electronic processes in which the tape is caught up. The patterns on the tape do not picture the robot’s environment merely by virtue of being patterns on the tape. In Wittgenstein’s phrase, the ‘method of projection’ of the ‘map’ involves the manner in which the patterns on the tape are added to, scanned, and responded to by the other components of the robot. It is a map only by virtue of the physical habitus of the robot, i.e. by virtue of mechanical and electronic propensities which are rooted, ultimately, in its wiring diagram. A distant analogy to this picturing is the way in which the waxy groove of a phonograph record pictures the music which it can reproduce. This picturing also cannot be abstracted from the procedures involved in making and playing the record.” (“Being and Being Known”).
In other words, a neuronal assembly in the hippocampus considered in abstraction is not a memory, no more than a waxy groove on a record, considered in abstraction, is a musical note. But a groove on a record, considered in its complex causal relations with the machinery that recorded the sound, the machinery that created that groove based on causal relations with the recording, and the machinery that transforms the shape of the waxy groove into a sound — that is a very different story. And so with a neuronal assembly in the hippocampus considered in its fantastically complex relations with the structure, function, and history of the rest of the brain, the body, and the environment.
But however detailed and complicated we make the story of the relevant brain-body-environment interactions as disclosing the empirically basis of mental states, there is something to the intuition that the phenomenological mind is (somehow) different. And while this difference may be one of sense rather than reference, it is a difference nevertheless.
This is not quite the same as Chalmer’s qualms about qualia, because he concedes too much to a rather simplistic functionalism as giving us the whole story about cognition as objectively considered. What I can’t quite accept is that a more a neurologically, biologically, and ecologically sophisticated of cognition as objectively considered will entirely close the gap between the objective sciences of cognition and the phenomenology of subjective experience.
Very interesting KN!
Any references???
Haha. It’s ‘Jakendoff’! (Keiths! He’s doing it again!!)
PS: I only know this because I quoted him in a paper about ‘musical languages’ recently.
No, based on the observation that folks often get mad and begin hurling insults and even start spouting gibberish and disengage when the contradictory nature of their presuppositions is calmly and respectfully pointed out to them.
😉
peace
we need a thread on that stuff!
Yes, that seem about right. But why assume there is computation?
Take the case where the robot is a bar code scanner.
You could record all of the light signals reflected back, yet not be able to read the bar code. Much of what is important to read the bar code comes from the local clock rather than from the reflected light. You need both the reflected light and the knowledge of the action that the light is responding to.
Yes, with the bar code reader, there is computation. It was, after all, designed by computer engineers. But cognitive systems were designed by evolution, so why would we expect computation there?
I’m not sure of the point there. A neuronal assembly considered in abstraction is only a neuronal assembly considered in abstraction. Thinking about neuronal assemblies in abstraction is likely to be misleading.
That part seems okay. But where does computation come in?
This is where the entire approach goes wrong. Talk of “the empirically basis of mental states” is mostly misguided. What we really need to study, is the neuronal basis for being able to have empirical states.
Your way of looking at it is presupposing that we start with empirical states and go from there to mental states. But the world in itself has no empirical states. Any empirical state that we can identify was defined by humans. Empirical states are not natural kinds. They are artifacts. The starting point needs to be in the construction or crafting of those artifacts. And computation is not involved there. Computation cannot even begin until after we have constructed an adequate collection of empirical states.
walto,
Um, it’s ‘Jackendoff’, not ‘Jakendoff’.
You are once again my new favorite
peace
God said it, he believes it, and that settles it.
If God said it then by definition it’s settled whether I believe it or not.
In this case he “said it” by making the contrary logically incoherent.
That sort of revelation is accessible to even those who don’t have ears to hear.
😉
peace
You might want to rethink that.
If computation cannot even begin, then logic cannot even begin. And there goes your “Logos”.
Computation can’t even begin without something to contemplate that is obvious.
God is Triune.
Therefore even before creation each person of the Godhead has something to contemplate namely the other persons.
I realize that you have not thought this idea through to that extent…….baby steps
peace
Neil, to KN:
We’ve been over this already, Neil. In an April thread, you made the silly claims that
a) our brains don’t process information, and
b) our perceptual systems don’t receive information from the environment.
I explained why your claims are false, and you were unable to defend either of them.
Not relevant, actually.
Whether God can use logic is not relevant to whether humans can use logic.
That you see them as silly, does not make them silly.
That’s what I typed! KN changed it!