Suspicion of a Soul
I have a sneaking suspicion I have a soul. This is not a belief or a fact, certainly not–I don’t believe it because there is no evidence to support this, and I’m not about to go believing something just because it’s comforting and I feel like it.
Rather, I suspect it–it’s just a feeling.
I wonder if a lot of atheists have similar thoughts. The difference between atheists and Christians is atheists will challenge their thoughts and beliefs, look for evidence, and be skeptical of their own want to believe. Christians, on the other hand, will often assume something is correct that can’t be proven simply because they think it.
For example, an old family friend of mine, a devout Christian, often spouts some odd beliefs, such as “at least three people need to pray before God will listen”. Overlooking of course the fact that the idea of prayer is a easily refutable, where did she get this idea? When asked, she happily told me that she just knew it.
What? Is this how most Christians get their ideas? They just ‘know it’ and assume it’s true?
We all have beliefs, like it or not. It’s up to us to critically examine those beliefs, and if we can’t come up with a good answer of whether they are true or false, at the very least we should make sure they are kept helpful and not harmful.
Is that what Christians do?
No.
And if you’re wondering why this post made very little sense and was very half hearted…my sweet little rabbit friend is missing and likely dead. Goodbye, Morty, aka Voldemort. You were a the best little gay rabbit ever. I’ll miss you. (Note the eyeliner.)His widow, Mr. Claire, is grieving and won’t come out of his favorite box. I’m comforted at least that by his death, he helped one of the local foxes live another day. RIP Morty.
In my tween time between xian and atheist, I had a suspicion.. feeling that the reason life was such a struggle for me was because a higher power kept knocking me off the ladder. Nothing has been easy for me. Each accomplishment has been absolute torture to achieve.. all I ever wanted was for things to come easy for me like they do for many others.. I always win in the end, but the difficulty is always oddly set at my limits. I concluded I must be like a “comedy tv show” for a higher power to watch for entertainment. Still today, I occasionally get the suspicion..
IF there is a higher power, it sure ain’t the god of the bible and we ain’t getting no afterlife at the end.
A sneaking suspicion, nice thought. Good to see that this leads you not into the devout irrefutable belief that you have a soul, but just to investigate whether it’s possible. I guess suspicions/intuitions of this kind can sometimes lead you in useful directions when you don’t have a systematic way of discovering new things (and a lot of the time we don’t). The crucial thing is that you’re not stopping there! :)
Sorry to hear about your rabbit.
Read Descartes. He asks himself what exactly he is- Is he a man? A machine? Is he awake or asleep? How can he tell if anything he knows is real or if he himself even exists? He narrows it down, eventually, to a “Thinking Thing”. He is something not physical- You can take apart a body, but you can’t take apart a mind. If he loses his arm, he is still himself. If he loses his consciousness, he is truly gone. Therefore, his consciousness is who he is.
He goes on to say that there is proof of this- Even if he is nothing but dreaming, or a brain in a jar, or being controlled by a demon who is tricking him, this only goes to prove his point- There must he a “him” to trick.
So, if you feel that you don’t truly exist, then you’ve just proven that you have- Because there must be a “you” to worry in the first place.
Of course, some say this is all physical, but I have seen some articles on autistic children who are able to read and write. They say that they have two parts- “A thinking part” and “an acting part” – This sounds like a disconnection between the soul and the brain, to me.
Wolf: Sorry, it appears I referred you to the wrong post. I’ll have to look for it, it was an argument on why the soul doesn’t exist. I thought it was this post. Apologies.
I’m afraid you’re reading things that simply aren’t there. Nowhere did I say we might not exist. What I did say is that just because I feel like I have a soul, doesn’t mean I do.
I’m not sure why you thought I was claiming we don’t exist, or why you believe that thinking and acting are separate from the brain.
And yes, you can pick apart someone’s mind, change it, physically, which has effects on how a person things. Chemicals, drugs, concussions, etc.
I’ll look for that post.
I’m saying that because you feel like you have a soul, you MUST. That itself, the awareness of yourself, is proof that you, or your soul, or your true self, exist. Soul, mind, consciousness- they’re all the same.
Changing one’s mental processes is physical- Everything on earth is physical. If God himself sent an autographed obelisk from space, through scientific process, we could find out what it was made of and where it came from. So, if you change one’s brain, you can change their mental abilities- The body is a receptacle of the mind. If you smash your satellite dish with a hammer, your TV will come in fuzzy. This doesn’t mean that the source of the TV’s information, the satellite in orbit, was harmed.
And what reasoning do you have that ‘awareness’ of a soul makes it true? If we think anything, does that make it true? No, you have a preconceived opinion that you do have a soul, therefor anything that confirms it must be true and anything that does not can’t deal with souls, right?
And again: if souls and consciousness are truly separate from the brain, and that is where our thinking, feeling, and personality are based, why is that simple chemicals and physical influences can easily change moods, personality, memory, thinking ability, thoughts, etc?
No, those are things that can be false. However, your consciousness can not be false, because you are the one affirming it in having it. If there is no “you”, how can it be that you are aware of this?
Again, smash your satellite dish and the signal will be fuzzy on the TV. This doesn’t change the signals coming from space, this only changes how they are shown through the TV.
Wolf: can’t you understand that consciousness and the soul simply aren’t the same? Of course we have consciousness, that doesn’t mean that affirming our consciousness is evidence of a soul.
I believe it does. It means that there is a “you” which is more than mechanical. It is the “thinking thing” which is not your body.
So let me get this straight: you think that because we can think (which is a product of our brain), that automatically means there is more to us than a brain?
Consciousness is far from being completely understood — or even defined, for that matter. Consciousness might be something “separate” from the brain, but we have zero evidence of anything other than mere biochemistry routinely altering the state of the brain at the smallest scale. More than likely, consciousness is an emergent property of neurons in the brain perceiving the activity of other neurons.
Being rooted in particle physics doesn’t make consciousness any less “real.” If the mind were “separate” from the brain, the soul would be composed of smaller parts too, however immaterial.
The difference is that it is the only thing aware of itself- This is something special that no amount of electrical signals and carbon chains can produce.
Wolf, you haven’t really made your case for why self-awareness and consciousness = evidence of a soul. Please do.
A flock of birds move together, is aware of itself, and appears to act with a single will. Why is it difficult to think of the brain the same way?
Ah, I wish I could edit comments. My compulsive editing habit always gets the best of me. That first sentence in my last comment doesn’t have proper subject-verb agreement. >.<
Precisely, Anti–all evidence points towards the physical brain producing and controlling thoughts, emotions, memories, moods, etc. There’s no evidence, however, of a soul: and there’s no reason consciousness (which we have shown is produced by the brain) is evidence of a soul.
Unless you were saying we have a soul, not the other way around Anti…your sentence was rather ambiguous, and your grammar was bad…F for you! :P
Not that I can talk about bad grammar…
Frankly, I don’t know. Like I said, consciousness is very difficult to pin down. But you are correct, the evidence is certainly not in favor of a spirit-like soul manipulating particles in the brain. The mind is almost certainly an emergent property of the incomprehensibly complex interconnection of neurons in the brain.
As a student of artificial intelligence, I find it interesting to estimate the kind of computing power necessary to simulate the brain. An emerging field called connectomics is working to map synapses in the brain. With current technology, we can only map the brains of microscopic worms. The human brain has an estimated 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses. To simply store an exhaustive unindexed list of human synapses would require at least a petibyte of storage.
It’s rather morbid, but I’m fascinated by personality changes that result from traumatic brain injuries. For example, cases of damage to the prefrontal cortex can result in a total loss of inhibitions. The subjects will say everything they think; they lose the ability to filter inappropriate thoughts.
Sorry, that should be pebibyte. >.<
I am a fan of Searle, and the chinese room argument- That binary programs cannot hold consciousness or understanding. They can process a lot of information and spew it back out, but that does not equate to an understanding of the material.
My point was only that a computer capable of simulating the human brain is still many years ahead of our current technology.
The flaw with Searle’s argument is that he never addresses the problem of other minds. Namely, it’s impossible to determine whether other people experience consciousness the same way you do. We determine whether someone has a mind by observing their behavior. It is therefore impossible for an observer to determine whether the Chinese room or the man inside it has a mind. If zombie people could convincingly speak Chinese because their neurons were following instructions, the zombies would be indistinguishable from the man in the room who consults a vast reference without understanding.
The man inside it is the crux of the argument- He, though presumably holding a mind, holds no understanding of the material. Even if he can show a passable understanding of the material, this does not mean that he understands it or comprehends what he is doing.
If we, going by Searle’s argument, set up a trillion trillion beer cans on strings, set up to mimic perfectly the actions between neurons in the brain, and bash them together in the same order a normal brain does when it thinks “I’m thirsty”, and even have a ticker at the end type out “I’m thirsty”, do you think the cans would actually hold an understanding of “thirst” or even their own existence or anything? A suitable imitation is not understanding, and matter can not hold understanding because it is just that- Matter.