As I noted in my previous post about how belief in a human "essence" is almost certainly wrong, Julian Baggini goes on a search for such an entity in his book The Ego Trick: What Does It Mean To Be You?
Everywhere he looks, using a blend of neuroscience and philosophy, the search comes up empty. He persuasively argues that an unchanging essence can't be found in the body and it can't be found in the mind -- since both body and mind are changeable with no sign of an essence.
Then Baggini expands the search to include the religious sphere, where soul is considered by both Western and Eastern religions to be an unchanging, even eternal, essence that survives the demise of body and mind.
Sorry to break this news to those who are staking their life, as well as their afterlife, on the notion of soul, but this is his final paragraph in the book's "Soul searching" chapter.
There are other arguments for the existence of souls, of course. But if you're looking for gold, there has to come a point where you stop digging fruitlessly in one spot and move on to another. To switch metaphors, if the soil is not proving to be fertile, it is better to plant elsewhere than to continue on in the hope that persistence will bear fruit.
In all my years of reading and thinking about soul and self, I've yet to come across a single argument that is left standing after even a little serious scrutiny. As an idea, the immaterial soul is dead, and it's time we buried it, along with any other dreams we might have had about finding the pearl at the heart of our identity.
What preceded Baggini's mention of "other arguments for the existence of souls" is a discussion of how the idea of the traditional soul has been defended by Richard Swinburne, who used to be a Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford.
Baggini says that while Swinburne is a Christian, his arguments in favor of soul are claimed to be purely rational and don't rest on his faith.
One of Swinburne's arguments is that a physical account of a person's life fails to explain everything about them. This does indeed seem like something most of us would agree with, that there appears to be something extra that makes each of us who we are aside from the physical goings-on in our body and mind.
The conclusion is that a physical account of the world is not a complete account of the world. Therefore, there must be more to the world than the physical.
However, Baggini has a convincing response.
So it is true, as Swinburne says, that a physical account of the world is not a complete account of the world. But it does not follow that the world is comprised of more stuff than physical stuff. Rather, it simply follows that a complete account of the world is more than just an account of physical descriptions of the movements of stuff.
This should not be a difficult thought. In the same way, a proper account of a game of football is not an account of the changing co-ordinates of the twenty-two players and the ball. If you knew enough about the game, such a description might enable you to infer what was going on, but nothing in it would entail that this was a sport with certain rules and a certain result.
...It is true that wholes are greater than the sum of their parts, but that is not because wholes are additional, different kinds of parts. Persons are no exceptions. We are greater than the sum of our parts, but not because there is some further part left out of the sum. We are nothing but our parts, but we are more than just our parts.
Baggini also dissects another argument from Swinburne that won't appeal to most believers in soul, but is creative. So I'll give Swinburne an "A" for effort on this argument, even though it makes as little sense as his other arguments for soul. I'll quote Baggini at length on this point, because it's an interesting argument and counter-argument.
Swinburne's commitment to the truth seems to be genuine, whatever his ability to arrive at it. So it is that, having argued that souls must exist, he thinks through the implications for this in rigorous detail, accepting them, no matter how bizarre they might seem.
For instance, Swinburne insists that it is essential to start from the facts, and it has not escaped his notice that one cast-iron fact is that functioning brains and bodies are necessary for consciousness, at least in this life.
It may be a logical possibility that there could be forms of consciousness in other worlds that do not depend on organic matter, but that doesn't seem to be the case in this one.
In this we need to add another compelling fact: if you have a sufficiently complex brain and body, you will be conscious. Combined with the first fact, most people would conclude that brains and bodies are both necessary and sufficient for human consciousness: you can't think or feel without them; and with them, as long as they're working properly, you can't but think and feel.
Having committed himself to belief in souls, however, Swinburne can't accept this position. On his view, the non-material part of us is as essential as the material. No matter how complete our nervous systems are, without souls they couldn't think. But he also accepts that such bodies and brains are necessary for thought, so souls could not think without bodies either -- at least not in this life.
What God in his goodness might decide to make possible in the next life is anyone's guess. 'What I have argued,' he writes, '... is that without a functioning brain, the soul will not function (i.e. have conscious episodes) -- not that it will not exist.'
Swinburne uses the analogy of a light bulb to explain this. 'The soul is like a light bulb and the brain is like an electric light socket. If you plug the bulb into the socket and turn the current on, the light will shine. If the socket is damaged or the current turned off, the light will not shine. So, too, the soul will function (have a mental life) if it is plugged into a functioning brain.'
But, like a magician, it is always possible that God could cause an unplugged bulb to light up if he so wanted: 'maybe there are other ways of getting souls to function than plugging them into brains'.
This analogy shows how far materialist conceptions have come, since it is the mirror image of a much older view: that it is the body which requires animating by an immaterial soul... That even a dualist today accepts that bodies power souls and not vice versa is indicative of widespread belief in the materialist basis of the world.
...Swinburne's view is a prime example of the limits of the virtue of consistency. He does work very hard to make sure that all its bits fit together. But so many of those bits are just wildly implausible. There is no good reason to think that functioning brains and bodies need souls plugged into them if they are to give rise to thoughts.
There is no good reason to believe that our inability to provide a simple answer to the question of who the results of a split-brain operation are means that there must be some non-physical fact that would answer it.
And there is no good reason to suppose that the facts about the world that cannot be fully described in the language of physics means that there are substances in the world that are not physical.
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