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miriam_eSorry it has taken me a while to post this. I spent the last few days mostly sleeping. I didn't realise how tired I'd let myself become. What follows is a slightly improved version of my old "Soulless" post. Hopefully it is easier to read and understand.
What do people think of when the soul is mentioned? Most would say that it is your essence -- this consciousness, this feeling of "I", that feels emotions, understands the world, the one who makes moral decisions and accumulates or loses karma.
If that is what the soul 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, your emotions, your understanding, your moral sense. Stop the brain's action that is consciousness and naturally your conscious self disappears.
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 what was on the page. 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. A central part of his understanding of the world had vanished from his conscious reality.
The construction worker who was a pleasant guy, happily married, and liked by all others. One day, at the worksite, he was standing over a crowbar in a hole packed with explosive. The explosive went off and fired the crowbar 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. His morality and personality had been altered by changing the architecture of the brain.
Split-brain surgery, done many years ago in an attempt to control awful attacks of epilepsy, worked by cutting the corpus callosum, a bundle of nerves that let the two halves of the brain communicate with each other. It resulted in two separate consciousnesses inside the one skull -- where there was one, there were now two. If the soul is something insubstantial, then how does a knife create two souls from one?
Every time you go to sleep at night your brain goes through cycles roughly every 20 minutes or so where consciousness actually disappears for a while, then reappears in the weird, internally stimulated state of dreaming. On waking, normal consciousness restarts, the memories stored from the previous day providing the illusion of continuous existence. If the soul is this feeling of personal existence then this stops every night as the brain alters its own operation.
A bad blow to the head stuns the nerves which make up the brain, causing consciousness to stop till they recover. (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.) Consciousness is incredibly fragile.
Anesthetic chemicals administered during surgery alter a patient's brain function causing their consciousness to cease for a while. The person administering the anesthetic has to be very careful because it brings you close to death.
When you take various psychoactive drugs your brain's function is altered which changes your consciousness and quite often your personality and your ability to make moral judgements. Morality is not only affected directly by drugs, but also indirectly through lack of them. Withdrawal from some drugs can cause shortness of temper, vindictiveness, and depression.
Clearly your conscious, moral, emotional self is really an action that your brain performs. It can no more survive your death than a horse's gallop can continue after the horse dies. If consciousness, understanding, morality, and this "I" are the soul is, then it dies with your brain and 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 this feeling that is important -- it is what we are. Such an unconscious soul, even if it did continue beyond our death is irrelevant.
Without a soul, all gods and all religions become unnecessary. Their very reason for existing evaporates.
*poof*
What do people think of when the soul is mentioned? Most would say that it is your essence -- this consciousness, this feeling of "I", that feels emotions, understands the world, the one who makes moral decisions and accumulates or loses karma.
If that is what the soul 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, your emotions, your understanding, your moral sense. Stop the brain's action that is consciousness and naturally your conscious self disappears.
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 what was on the page. 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. A central part of his understanding of the world had vanished from his conscious reality.
The construction worker who was a pleasant guy, happily married, and liked by all others. One day, at the worksite, he was standing over a crowbar in a hole packed with explosive. The explosive went off and fired the crowbar 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. His morality and personality had been altered by changing the architecture of the brain.
Split-brain surgery, done many years ago in an attempt to control awful attacks of epilepsy, worked by cutting the corpus callosum, a bundle of nerves that let the two halves of the brain communicate with each other. It resulted in two separate consciousnesses inside the one skull -- where there was one, there were now two. If the soul is something insubstantial, then how does a knife create two souls from one?
Every time you go to sleep at night your brain goes through cycles roughly every 20 minutes or so where consciousness actually disappears for a while, then reappears in the weird, internally stimulated state of dreaming. On waking, normal consciousness restarts, the memories stored from the previous day providing the illusion of continuous existence. If the soul is this feeling of personal existence then this stops every night as the brain alters its own operation.
A bad blow to the head stuns the nerves which make up the brain, causing consciousness to stop till they recover. (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.) Consciousness is incredibly fragile.
Anesthetic chemicals administered during surgery alter a patient's brain function causing their consciousness to cease for a while. The person administering the anesthetic has to be very careful because it brings you close to death.
When you take various psychoactive drugs your brain's function is altered which changes your consciousness and quite often your personality and your ability to make moral judgements. Morality is not only affected directly by drugs, but also indirectly through lack of them. Withdrawal from some drugs can cause shortness of temper, vindictiveness, and depression.
Clearly your conscious, moral, emotional self is really an action that your brain performs. It can no more survive your death than a horse's gallop can continue after the horse dies. If consciousness, understanding, morality, and this "I" are the soul is, then it dies with your brain and 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 this feeling that is important -- it is what we are. Such an unconscious soul, even if it did continue beyond our death is irrelevant.
Without a soul, all gods and all religions become unnecessary. Their very reason for existing evaporates.
*poof*
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Re: I love this stuff.
Date: 2008-09-09 11:18 pm (UTC)I tend to use all those words (brain, mind, soul, and spirit) too. In my use, brain is the physical structure that performs the actions that are described by the other three. For me, mind is the set of all actions performed by the brain, and includes soul and spirit, as well as consciousness. My own definition for soul is almost the same as consciousness, but in everyday conversation I tend to use it to denote emotional experience. Spirit, for me, is fairly fuzzy but centers on desire.
All those mean different things for different people of course, because of the way we have avoided good definitions in those areas. I hold mysticism as the main cause of that. Too often it depends upon confounding clear thought instead of illuminating it. I don't think these terms will be properly defined until neuroscience in partnership with artificial intelligence research has gone quite a bit further in its investigations into how the brain works.
I'd more or less agree with your point about two aspects to consciousness -- that which experiences and that which observes the self experiencing -- but I don't see them as distinct. It seems to me that the mind that watches itself is really the same as the thing it is watching, which sounds paradoxical until you think of it as feedback. Once through the system is immediate experience; what an athlete or musician calls "being in the moment". The second time through the system is the output from that immediate experience fed through the system again. This can be taken to more and more abstract levels, but I remember hearing of some experiments that showed a fairly low limit to the number levels of recursion people could perform. I can't remember what that number is. I'll have to chase it up.
The Dual System of Memory etc
Date: 2008-09-11 03:54 pm (UTC)OTOH it could be the persecutory superego... or the phenomena is both. Meh whatever. The point is that we watch ourselves and others like security guards in a prison these days. (Foucault wrote whopping big books on it I'm told.)
At any rate, there does seem to be two different and separate memory systems. One is our everyday time coded memory, and the other memory system, when activated, brings memories forward without a sense of time having passed. It is more vivid and sometimes overwhelming. It is not subject to rational thought. It's probably this memory system that produces some of the most upsetting symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, grief, and schitzophrenia. This memory system can be accessed through drugs, trance, and ritual. It is not a lesser part of the mind but an older one which does not produce the favoured mind skills of our time and culture - rationality and language.
On the subject of definitions for psychological experiences, it is worth remembering that both Hindu and Buddhism religions have been debating such matters for a couple of thousand years longer than psychology or psychiatry have been around. They both have well developed definitions of different states of mind and spirit.
Spirit, for me, is fairly fuzzy but centers on desire.
Me too! :)
For me (based only on personal and highly subjective experience) I think of the heart's desires as the gateway to the spirit. The spirit speaks through the heart.
I hope this rambling made sense. It's 1.51am and I need sleep.
Re: The Dual System of Memory etc
Date: 2008-09-11 10:54 pm (UTC)I should learn more about the definitions of mind states Buddhism and Hindu use, though my suspicion is that purely subjective exploration of the mind quickly leads one to get lost in a hall of mirrors. Freud was a perfect example of how lost one becomes using subjective methods alone. Psychology, on the other hand, uses objective methods to describe subjective experience, which is why psychology has learned more about thought and emotion in the last several decades than all the purely subjective approaches have in thousands of years.
What you said about different memory systems has an important and familiar ring to it. I need to think more on that.
Thanks for the very cool thoughts.