The Soul: A Final Note

Near the end of his book Damasio notes that it’s not that we don’t have a soul “it is just that soul and spirit, with all their dignity and human scale, are now complex and unique states of an organism.” It is fine if we continue to refer to the human soul. For example one may still refer to one’s loved one as their “soul mate.” Perhaps what we really need to do is redefine the term soul. Regardless, given what we are learning from scientific study regarding human behavior and the complexities of how an immaterial soul would function, it is probable that man has no immaterial soul and that we are right to believe that man has no immaterial soul. What soul we do have is tied to the wonderful array of feelings and ideas and experiences grounded completely in our biology. There is nothing immaterial about us.

The Soul: Some Practical Problems

All this has led me to do some of my own thinking. It seems to me that there are some practical problems for the soul. In order for the human soul to function in practice, several complications need to be addressed.

First there is the question of the means by which the soul would initiate, prompt, instigate or influence action in the body. To my knowledge no one has identified a means for the soul to do this. One could speculate. For example, one’s soul might have a means to stimulate certain nerves in the brain that it knows would trigger certain intellectual responses or perhaps it could cause certain glands to secrete chemicals to evoke a desired emotion. This of course could happen but I don’t know that any one has ever demonstrated that it has happened or does happen.

Even if one could conceive of how the soul could affect the body, how would the soul know what to affect when? The soul must have a means by which it determines the condition of the body. So that the souls actions on the body would be relevant to the body. That is, it must know whether the body is energetic, tired, sleeping, in peril, remembering something happy or sad, etc. Otherwise your body might be at a funeral and if the soul can’t tell what’s going on it might try to influence you to be happy and laugh. This would appear to be rude at best and insane at worse. In order for the soul to know what the body is up to it might follow around the body and constantly monitor what the body sees and hears, what it thinks, and its various emotional states, and what information it processes at a given time. Certainly it would have to if it were to act with any relevance with the body. Is this probable? Verifiable? No.

In addition the soul would need a means to share the memory of the body. I can think of two ways this might happen. The soul could constantly poll neurons and regions of the brain responsible for memory. So, it would know all the past relevant experiences of the person and if need be prompt the body as indicated above. Or the soul could develop and maintain its own parallel memory. That is, every time an event occurs affecting the body the soul could “bank it” and the means of recalling it in the physical memory and then perhaps, as discussed above, anytime it perceived something happening with the body which something in the memory bared upon the soul could perhaps prompt the body to recall the same memory stored in the brain.

The previous difficulties involved how the soul affects the body in this soul body relationship. Now we turn to our attention to how the body affects or acts on the soul. I can’t think of a method or mechanism or apparatus by which the body could affect the immaterial soul. That is, I can’t think of how the body would engage the soul. Perhaps a body could think or feel soul thoughts or feelings. Perhaps the body/brain could sort of say “I’m not sure how to handle this issue of love…” (or morals or some other soul issue) “…I’m going to pass this off to the soul.” Some of the artistically oriented readers might be thinking that that is exactly how it happens. They might point to times when a good idea or feeling just came to them out of the blue or after they slept or while they were in an attitude of openness to their soul. However, the serendipity that happens to us occasionally when we take a break and just reflect on something can just as easily be explained by brain/body function. Even if it couldn’t be, how could you be sure it was your soul that caused the serendipity? How do you know it’s not some other force?

This leads us to the alternative of the body being merely passive in this relationship. If the body is a purely passive entity in it’s relation to its soul then it would seem that the soul would be nothing more than another of the myriad of external forces acting on the physical organism. It would stimulate various functions of the body not unlike the external physical world around us acting on our various senses and bodily functions. And taking this a step further, since the body has no way to actively engage the soul, unlike the physical world, then the actions this mysterious soul would take on the body would appear random to the body. (Although there may be certain trends or themes which might appear.)

Another option exists where the soul functions as a passive recorder of the body’s experiences. So, that it can carry that background and history into the afterlife. That is, so it could be us, after we die. This is possible but I’m not sure it is probable. And as far as the here and now is concerned, it concedes the point that the body functions essentially independently and does not need the soul.

As you can see, explaining how the soul would work is very challenging and complicated. In my estimation more complicated than explaining human behavior based completely on the physiology of the body. This leads us to call on an old tool for clear thinking called Occum’s Razor. Occum’s Razor is a principle that states that if there are multiple ways of explaining something, the simplest explanation is probably the best. I think that while you can’t prove we don’t have a soul tagging along with us it is simpler to explain life and human behavior without a soul.

The Soul: Another Book

The conversation mentioned in the previous post kicked me back into gear and my brother told me about another book on this subject called Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio. This is a relatively old book. He has newer ones out on the subject but this is the one that I could get my hands on. So that’s what I read. First I’d like to say that Dr. Damasio seems like a lot nicer guy than Dr. Crick, but not having meet either of them it is probably premature to pass judgment. Anyway he has a more pleasant writing style.

Damasio proposes that Renee Descartes made an error by holding that the intellectual rational part of man was completely separate from the physical part of man. He demonstrates that experimentation on the brain and body have all but proven that what we think of as the mind or soul is actually a phenomenon generated by the actions and interactions of the brain and body. That the body as a whole, with a large burden of the work falling to the brain, is responsible for all the behaviors and actions typically attributed to the soul. “To say that the mind comes from the body is indisputable…” he states and does a very convincing job of backing up his statement. I won’t be able to do him justice but I’ll try to give you a feel of Damsio’s book. He works with a lot of people with various types of brain damage and in his work they are able to identify the specific areas of the brain that are damaged. They put these folks through a variety of rather creative exercises which pinpoint various behaviors. Exercises involving ethical choices, tolerance for risk, etc. In so doing they are able to identify what parts of the brain have a significant influence on those behaviors. He also spends some time talking about how the body affects the brain and the brain affects the body through chemicals generated by the body in a sort of continuous feedback loop generating feelings and emotions. The basic gist boils down, in my opinion, to the fact that things that we normally think of as the domain of the soul like love, morals, feelings, courage, sense of duty, even religious beliefs can be explained by the brain, the body, and their interactions. And to take it a step further he says it gets kind of hard to distinguish between the brain and the body. After all the brain is part of the body.

The Soul: The Early Years and a Book.

I was not unlike most of the rest of Americans today of which, according to a recent Harris poll, about every 85 out of a hundred seem to believe there is some kind of soul that lives on after death. Now that’s not exactly the same as saying we have an immaterial soul but I think you will agree it certainly implies it. Anyway I went on believing this throughout my youth and early adult life until I hit seminary school. (I like that term. “seminary school.” Jim Morrison used it.) I was pretty okay with the idea until I got to thinking about one of the main teachings at this school regarding the nature of man which was that man (that is human beings or Homo Sapiens) was in essence intellect, emotion, and will. This got me to thinking about what distinguished man from animals because in my youth we had a few farm animals about the place and having worked with them some they seemed to have these three things also. That is farm animals had intellect (it wasn’t a particularly powerful one), emotion (the ewes seemed to suffer what in humans would pass as sorrow when separated from their lambs), and will (especially when we were trying to get them into a truck or pen or other confinement that did not appeal to them). When that little problem came up the only thing that was offered as an alternative was our soul, our immortal, immaterial soul. The animals don’t have one. We do.

I got out of school and went about my business believing, albeit conscious of some misgivings, I had an immaterial soul until I discovered a book called The Astonishing Hypothesis by Francis Crick. It’s been a while since I read it but he was basically arguing that all behavior traditionally attributed to the soul can be attributed to the brain. He was very convincing although he was kind of arrogant in his presentation which was off putting. Anyway, he more or less convinced me. Actually not really. He just made me think about it a lot more. And thinking about it a lot more I drew the conclusion that it didn’t really matter that much if we had a soul or not. Even if we didn’t have a soul people would still probably fall in love and try to do good things and believe in right and wrong and so forth. So what difference did it make? Besides I had kids to raise and a career to attend to soul or no soul. So, I kind of left off the question for a while pondering it only occasionally while waiting for kids to get out of soccer practice or dance class.

Recently things took a slight turn and my ponderings on the soul took on a more proactive nature. My wife and I were at a party and we were talking to a gentleman who had recently graduated with some kind of a Zoology degree. I asked him if he felt that there was something about humans that made them qualitatively different from other animals or if they were just another species essentially the same as other animals only with more complicated brains and other differing characteristics. (How about that for mixing.) He said he didn’t think there was any difference and that kicked off a little discussion with the group of people we were around. Some folks mention language, appreciation of beauty, etc. as things that distinguished us as humans. (Curiously no one mentioned the soul.) However, the group quickly reached consensus when my wife suggested that orgasms are what set humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom and we moved on to the next subject.

The Soul: Introduction to My Personal Odyssey of Not Discovering the Soul

I, like most people, grew up believing I had a soul. By which, and with out getting into a voluminous discussion on the subject, I mean the immaterial real me. The part of me that is not limited to my body or even the capabilities of my brain. The part of me that lives on after my dashing good looks and sleek physique have expired. The following posts outline my personal journey that has led me to believe that we humans do not have an immaterial soul. Please note that these posts only regard the idea of the human soul. I’m not trying to comment on whether other types of immaterial beings exist. That is “things” that are not part of the physical natural world. Things like God, gods, angels, demons, etc. That is for another discussion. In these posts I am only discussing whether individual humans have an immaterial part of them that is uniquely their own as a human.