The soul
An example to get things started. I claim the soul, an eternal, non-physical entity, cannot possibly exist in the sense of being the essense of a person, because all the essential attributes of a person are known to be the result of the brain, a physical, finite system. I ask what else there is to a person that can be meaningfully described. The apologist says "That's a good question, I'm not sure what the answer is, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. We're dealing with something bigger than we can understand here." So, is that a good response? Where can we go from here? The answer is we have to take a step back.
Before an issue or claim can be debated in any useful fashion, we have to clearly specify what we are claiming. In the example, the claim is that people have a soul that lives on after death, a basic tenet of the Christian faith. This sounds nice, but what exactly does it mean? What is a soul? All that can be said is that it is something that is somehow associated with our physical body and brain and that somehow embodies some important aspect of who we are, what aspect we aren't sure. Is it our memory? No, that's in our brain. Our emotions? No, those are chemically based. Our intellect? Nope, that's a neural network. We're left with a nebulous concept. Here's a well defined concept: memory. It is a physical representation of abstract data that results from our brain processing raw input. Emotions: a physical state characterized by specific levels of certain chemicals in the brain and by patterns of electrical activity. The list goes on. When you take away the parts of yourself that are explained by your brain (which will be eaten by worms when you die), what do you have left? Nothing, which is exactly what you become when you die. Saying your soul lives on sounds nice, but doesn't really mean anything, and is therefore pointless.
Before an issue or claim can be debated in any useful fashion, we have to clearly specify what we are claiming. In the example, the claim is that people have a soul that lives on after death, a basic tenet of the Christian faith. This sounds nice, but what exactly does it mean? What is a soul? All that can be said is that it is something that is somehow associated with our physical body and brain and that somehow embodies some important aspect of who we are, what aspect we aren't sure. Is it our memory? No, that's in our brain. Our emotions? No, those are chemically based. Our intellect? Nope, that's a neural network. We're left with a nebulous concept. Here's a well defined concept: memory. It is a physical representation of abstract data that results from our brain processing raw input. Emotions: a physical state characterized by specific levels of certain chemicals in the brain and by patterns of electrical activity. The list goes on. When you take away the parts of yourself that are explained by your brain (which will be eaten by worms when you die), what do you have left? Nothing, which is exactly what you become when you die. Saying your soul lives on sounds nice, but doesn't really mean anything, and is therefore pointless.
posted by Robert at
8:41 PM
2 Comments:
about the apologist:
i would say that is an incredibly poor response, it is the right answer but a poor response. he should say something more to the order of, "have we stopped learning new things about the brain? have we halted researchers working with brains and said, 'we know everything about the brain and have no more need of your services.' No, we haven't. have we even figured out why we seem to only use 12% of our brain. no, we haven't. the brain may be what you say it is but i don't see how you can put limits on a thing that we don't know the extent of."
about you(robert):
why do you ask? most of this post is your opinions/interpretations of scientific data and you have it pretty well laid out: defination, data, analysis, and conclusion. what do you want? to be a better christian? to be a christian for social reasons? to just have discussion? i don't understand.
about me(phil): personally i have faith in neither God or science but i do enjoy discusssion. i have in the past want to be both "a better christian?" and "a christian for social reasons?" so if you would like to talk about that i would enjoy that too.
philblaetz@hotmail.com
By
Anonymous, at 12:54 AM
The fundamental problem I have with this post is that you assume quite clearly that everything can be explained by the physical. The difficulty with such an assumption is that it seems to leave out the first-personal experience. There seems to be some aspect to our lives that cannot be explained in terms of third-personal characteristics.
One very famous argument to this effect was given by a man named Frank Jackson. If we take a blind neurobiologist, who we'll call Mary, and we say that she knows all the physiological aspects to the experience of red, all the physical properties of the color; her third-person knowledge is complete. But she will not know what it is to see red. There is a first-personal experience, a what-its-like aspect to it that cannot be explained by the physiology. Insofar as that's true, the physicalist cannot in principle explain absolutely everything about the essential attributes of a person.
There's also a problem with the methodological explanations used. The current going theory is computational functionalism, which basically says that consciousness opperates like a computer program. The mind (or soul, if you prefer) is a piece of software running on the organic supercomputer we call the brain.
But this has some issues. Say you handed me a book written in Russian and gave me various phonetic rules by which to pronounce the words, and told me to begin reading aloud. With practice, I could speak aloud the Russian so well as to fool a native speaker into thinking I grew up speaking and reading Russian, but I will still attest that I cannot understand Russian any better than did I when I began. I won't be able to tell you what anything means.
The person who wrote the book clearly understood Russian, as did the person who gave me the book and rules, as does the person I’m fooling. But the Russian words in the book are only so many meaningless symbols on a page to me, which, though I can pronounce, I cannot give a referential aspect.
The materialist answer to this is that if I could only correlate the uses of the words to the uses of other words, I would understand the Russian language. On the contrary, you could give me a Russian dictionary, defining Russian words and uses with other Russian words and uses, and I still wouldn’t understand a single word of Russian. You’d have to give me a basis, a starting point, and we can’t do so for the computer. They have no qualitative capacity in which to build such a starting point.
But then let’s make it more complex. Let’s say that I am now also given copies of the same book we were earlier discussing, but in Swahili, Japanese, German, Mongolian, and how ever many other languages I don’t really understand, and do the same thing. Moreover, though, I correlate words, so that I can tell which words mean the same thing and can distinguish uses. I still don’t understand any of the languages I’m reading in. I still don’t know what anything means. I still can’t give any of it references to things in the real world that mean anything to me.
That’s what a computer does, however. If it makes correlative references, it does so by a pre-programmed set of rules or recursive algorithms or whatever else it may use, but it doesn’t understand the correlations or what they mean any more than I understood what Russian words meant just because I could correlate them to words in Swahili. Therefore, capable manipulation of the syntax is not a sufficient condition for semantics, for the meaning.
I should also point out that I could never have done even so much as I did in our scenario without the help of at least one person who does understand Russian, which leads me to my other point here: correlative or referential semantics requires the prior possession of a related semantic. If I knew what even a small fraction of those words meant, it’s likely that I could derive the meaning of the rest with good reliability, and from there, follow the correlations I established to other languages, and in the end come out understanding all the languages I’d been given.
No computer can have semantics programmed into it, not even just a tiny bit. It can be programmed according to the patterns of thinking of the programmers who do have semantics to simulate them remarkably accurately, but because it doesn’t start off with anything, we can’t put in more than the syntax.
Moreover, there is another objection. If the brain is a supercomputer and the mind software running on it, who wrote the program? The standard answer to this will likely be that it sort of evolved, but to say so seems to have a complete disregard for the laws of physics to which the proponents of this theory seem so eager to subscribe.
Any basic physics course dealing with heat will teach the Second Law of Thermodynamics, also known as the Law of Entropy. I have a host of other problems with the theory of evolution, but this one comes down to the fact that entropy dictates that in a cyclic process, the entropy of the system will either remain the same or increase. Entropy can be defined many ways, some more functional for some things than others, but the relevant definition for our purposes is that entropy is a measure of the system’s disorder. When applied to evolution, it becomes clear: the system cannot on its own become more complex and still comport with this law. No system can do so. Therefore, neither can the mind.
There are recent advances in quantum mechanics which demonstrate that entropy is not an absolute law, and in fact works backward for miniscule amounts of time, but by far, the law is functional for the vast majority of the time. The effect, on the macro level we’re concerned with here, is the same.
Nor will it be acceptable to doubt this law in whole. The box the computational functionalist, along with all materialists and physicalists, has built for himself dictates that he must accept in his system the laws of physics in accordance with the current understanding. This does not preclude him from attempting to advance our understanding of physics, but he cannot simply ignore it.
So we’re stuck with the question: who wrote the program? We could initiate an endless series of pre-programmed programmers, but that would get us nowhere. We would still have no end to the causal roll-call, no complete system, and thus the whole pursuit would be, in the words of Aristotle, “empty and futile”. Furthermore, according to the theory of evolution, the universe began with the Big Bang. This precludes an infinite regression, because such would take infinite time, meaning there is no beginning. So we’re left with that same, pesky question: who wrote the program? It can’t have originally been a pre-programmed programmer, because a computer cannot write its own program. To answer the question, the computational functionalist is forced to resort to something they’ve been trying to dodge the whole time: an uncaused causer, the Prime Mover of Aristotle and Aquinas. And that defeats the whole purpose of the system.
Furthermore, we can extend this argument to the cases of memory and knowledge. In the case of memory, we have qualitative memories associated with the quantitative memories of what happened. For instance, take the memory of a person who was shot, and the memory of the person who did the shooting. They will both remember the same incident, but they will remember it very differently. The quantitative aspects of the memory, though, are exactly the same. So how are they different? The only explanation one can give is that there are qualitative aspects to the memory which are not subsumed by the physical.
The same argument can be extended to knowledge. We can know the same thing quantitatively but with very different qualitative aspects. I can for instance know what the effects of smoking are, but without actually having done it, I cannot know the what-its-like aspect of it.
So to say that the physical subsums the mental/spiritual is, I think, mistaken. I'd say there's certianly a connection, but that's not the whole story.
I also think you've overestimated the ammount of methodological explanation that's been given about most of our mental lives. The physicalist says for the time being that we don't have a good methodological explanation of these things, but they're there, and it's only a matter of time. They actually appeal to ignorance as much if not more than most appologists.
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Anonymous, at 9:40 AM
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