soulless

[miriam_e]

I have recounted this to people many times verbally, but never bothered to write it down. Well, here it is:

Easy dismissal of all religion

What do most people consider the soul? Many say that it is your essence -- this consciousness that sits behind these eyes, that feels emotions, understands the world, and is the final decision-maker, the pilot.

If that is what it is then the soul dies with your body, because it is fairly easy to show that those things are a function of that wonderfully complex organ, the brain. Alter the brain and you alter your consciousness.

• When you take various drugs your brain's function is altered and so is your consciousness.
• There is the case of the French businessman who woke up one morning to find that he could no longer read -- he could still write, and although he could remember what he had just written, he was unable to make sense of it. During the night a blood clot had jammed in a blood vessel feeding the part of his brain that understood writing, and starved of oxygen and food, it had died.
• The construction worker who was a pleasant guy, happily married, and liked by all others. One day, on checking the worksite, found that someone had carelessly left a crowbar in one of the holes packed with explosive. When he went to remove the crowbar the explosive went off and fired it through his head, under one cheekbone and out the top of his head. Amazingly, he survived, but it radically altered his personality. He was not the congenial person of before and was now given to fits of rage.
• Split-brain surgery, done many years ago in an attempt to control awful attacks of epilepsy, worked by cutting the corpus callosum which lets the two halves of the brain communicate with each other. It created two separate individuals inside the one skull.
• Every time you go to sleep at night your brain goes through cycles roughly every 20 minutes or so where consciousness actually disappears, then enters the weird, internally stimulated state of dreaming.
• If you sustain a bad blow on the head then you lose consciousness for a time. (I wish movies wouldn't show this as a common way to put someone out of action -- in actual fact a blow that causes such a blackout has almost certainly caused brain damage and is extremely dangerous.)
• Much surgery requires anaesthetic to cause the patient to lose consciousness.

So from the points above you can see that your consciousness is really the set of actions that your brain performs. Those actions can no more survive your death than a horse's gallop can continue when the horse comes to a halt. If consciousness is what the soul is then the soul dies with your body.

Wait, you say. The soul doesn't have to be consciousness. It could be something less tangible; something not related to our feelings or brain actions; something far more ethereal.

Yes, but that now becomes a waste of time. If I told you that I could keep one of your fingers alive after you died, you would wonder what was the point. Of what use is a finger without the consciousness to operate it? It is our mind that is important -- it is what we are. Such a soul, even if it did continue beyond our death is irrelevant.

Without a soul, all gods, all religions also become irrelevant. Their very reason for existing evaporates.

*poof*