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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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My OBE....
I had one of those freaky Out-of-Body experiences many years ago.
http://darkenchanter.net/silicona.htm#rcm
It has caused me to believe in souls and the possibility of life after death.
However the existence of souls *does not in any way* prove the existence of a God-in-the-Christian-Mode or validate any of their theology. (Even ancient Shamanistic religions had 'mind journeys.")
Also, of course, you can interpret my unsettling experience anyway you want - after all it did not happen to you.
Respectfully,
Michael.
Re: My OBE....
Date: 2008-09-10 01:05 pm (UTC)As it happens I've been reading a wonderful book on the psychology behind our surprising inability to know what will make us happy. The book is full of neat experimental results that show how remarkable our brain is at whittling data down to the absolute minimum needed to efficiently store memories, but also how that astonishing talent makes us prone to many common errors of judgement.
Oh, and the book is Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. I heartily recommend it.
Understanding these kinds of consciousness illusions teaches us how our brains work, the same way optical illusions explain visual processing. It is really valuable stuff.
Re: My OBE....
Date: 2008-09-11 05:59 am (UTC)I will check out Daniel Gilbert's book. (I occasionally buy self-help books, but always check that the author(s) are qualified psychiatrists, etc.) I've long been fascinated by how the mind works.
This link may interest you a tad:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080910090829.htm
Cheers, MFG.
Re: My OBE....
Date: 2008-09-11 12:28 pm (UTC)The thing about illusions is that they rarely ever feel wrong. They feel convincing even when you know they can't be. Unfortunately if we have thousands of years of mythology telling us that the illusion is real then it becomes even more difficult to disbelieve what feels like direct experience. Seeing is believing, right? Well, often it isn't.
The objective measurements of the AWARE project may help with medical diagnosis, but I can't see that its subjective survey will achieve much. Of course, it doesn't hurt to try to learn more. Unfortunately I suspect all they will learn from questioning those experiencing near death is how good the mind is at expanding dwindling activity into apparent meaningfulness, or how mental "pins and needles" can be misinterpreted.
I know it probably sounds like I'm denigrating out-of-body experience, but I'm not. I love the fact that we each have two blind spots, one in each eye, which can only be detected by careful experiment. It thrills me that we can uncover so much about the way our nervous system works by picking up on these sorts of illusions. Out-of-body experience is important because it tells us something about the way our minds work. Understanding such illusions helps us learn about ourselves and avoid errors. With surprising numbers of people angling to destroy us all in religiously inspired war we need all the help we can get. :)
In the end you have to look at thousands of years of people enthusiastically wanting to believe in out-of-body experience, telepathy, ESP, astrology, and water divining. And you have to wonder, after all that time and experience, why are they not used reliably, repeatably anywhere?