Thursday, March 08, 2007

whats a soul?

We have all heard expressions like my mind said no but my heart said yes. I think we are all to the point where we accept that the thinking is in the brain, but sometimes its useful to illustrate a point by pretending that the brain is for rational thought and the heart is for emotions, and occasionally the stomach does some thinking about food, and for us guys we're often accused of thinking with something else. Again those are just terms we use to make a point. But where does a soul fit in? If you believe in the soul is it our knowledge, our personality, our experience? What is it that transcends death? The Buddhist belief (from my extremely limited knowledge, so please correct if I'm wrong) is that we are reincarnated, either for better or worse depending on how you lived your life. This obviously means that some part of you that we will call a soul must have passed on into that next life. But we have no knowledge of past lives so what is it that is actually passed on? Soul could just be another term for consciousness but it seems to carry a much heavier connotation than that, speaking of heavy there was one guy who tried to measure the weight of the soul, and he came up with an answer, but to call it suspect is an understatement. The other big problem is if the soul is what makes you who you are, and its non-physical. Oh wait better stop for a sec, I'm assuming that anyone who believes in a soul believes it is non-physical, otherwise we would notice when it leaves the body after death. Ok so back to where we were, soul is who you are, and non-physical, so why are physical things able to alter you? Why can chemicals affect how you respond to stimuli, these chemicals could be in the form of medication given to a schizophrenic, or it could be the mushrooms the hippie eats at a Phish concert. Either way those chemicals are temporarily altering that person. A happy easy going person can become violent bitter and angry under the influence of alcohol, or the exact opposite can happen (violent->happy), with other drugs like Paxil or marijuana. So chemicals can alter us but they don't change who we are, do they? First I need to point out that this is totally subjective and I don't claim otherwise. But I suppose there is no real measure for who a person is, and so its hard to prove that a chemical actually changed them as a person. But at the same time if you know someone well enough and their demeanor changes dramatically you may say that they are not the same person you knew before. They are of the same body, but that mind no longer acts the way you remember. So thats my basis for if chemicals (or physical damage) can change who some one is.

My example though is a friend from college, after the first summer he had changed, he was less violent, less aggressive and a bit more concerned about others but also not quite as sharp intellectually. this could be atributed simply to maturing, or it could be attributed to the obscene amount of drugs, particularly ecstasy he indulged in that summer. I personally attribute it to the latter. He was obviously the same body, but the personality had been somewhat altered by chemicals. To me this along with what happens to stroke victims, and other forms of physical harm to the brain seem to be sufficient to make me believe that who we are is determined by physical characteristics, so where does the soul fit in? What does it do, whats is purpose, is its inside us or watching over, I guess it doesn't really mater because its not physical anyway. So for anyone who believes in the soul, what the hell is a soul, cause I don't get it.

Oh and looking up Soul on Wikipedia didn't help much, actually it lead to another question when they said spirit and soul were different. Oh and the soul exists before the body, what? So theres just a bunch of souls floating around in space or somewhere waiting for a body to go occupy, then wouldn't we have life experience as soon as we're born. Ok weird, as I'm reading the wiki entry about the soul I find out that in the time of Jesus the term didn't exist. Wha? Its sort of an important piece of going to heaven and the idea wasn't around yet? Was the bible talking about physical ascension for everyone? And some religions do think the soul is physical, thats just silly.
Ok I can accept Aristotle's view of the soul, he was a smart dude, I guess thats why we still know who he was, but Socrates made it into Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure proving once and for all who was the best student of Plato.

2 comments:

BlackSun said...

The whole concept of a soul relies on the mind/body split. As we learn more about the physical correlates of consciousness (brain chemistry), this view becomes increasingly untenable.

The question is this: Has anyone ever come up with the slightest shred of evidence for human consciousness without the brain? The answer is no.

Aside from a few obscure (and suspect) studies about people with most of their brains missing who had limited consciousness, there is no such evidence. Without serious repeatable positive evidence, we must conclude that what we think of as the mind, 'heart,' and 'soul' are contained within the physical brain.

Kilgore Trout said...

The only thing I disagree on at all is that there have been people with fairly severe brain damage that have been able to make recoveries. I think this only shows how adaptable our brain is, and not that thought is located outside the brain, so yeah, agreed.