I've got some bad news and some good news for those who believe they have, or are, a soul. Bad news is, almost certainly the soul doesn't exist.
The good news is, no matter. Because we can never be dead.
However, the good news doesn't mean we're immortal, which is the promise of soul. It just means, as Stephen Cave says in his fascinating book, "Immortality," that it is impossible for us humans to imagine our own nonexistence -- because whenever we try to do this, we're still alive.
That's what I learned from a quote in the leadoff reader review of Cave's book on Amazon, which made me buy it.
We do not linger like uninvited guests at our own funeral, nor are we plunged into the lonely void. We stop. The conscious experiences we have had are the totality of our lives; death, like birth, is just a term that defines the bounds of those experiences...The second step along the path of wisdom is therefore this realization that we can never be dead, that fearing being dead is therefore a nonsense.
l'm enjoying "Immortality" a lot. It's going to be the book that I talk about next weekend at a meeting of a book discussion group, where the theme is History. That's because the subtitle of "Immortality" is the quest to live forever and how it drives civilization.
Cave convincingly argues that the only four possible approaches to immortality, Staying Alive, Resurrection, Soul, and Legacy, are at the root of almost everything humans do. Or at least, the important stuff.
So far I've read the Staying Alive, Resurrection, and Soul sections. At the end of each, Cave discusses why this scheme for achieving immortality doesn't work. Because so many people believe in soul (I did, for over thirty years), I was particularly interested in the reasons he cites for why souls don't exist.
Here's some excerpts from "The Lost Soul" chapter.
There is one big problem with the idea that your consciousness or "awareness" can in some form survive the death of your body. It is something with which we are all in fact very familiar, not least from countless Hollywood films: simply that if you get hit on the head with sufficient force, you will be knocked unconscious. Your awareness of the world ceases; your lights go out.
...Similarly, if you are injected with general anesthetic -- a syringe full of chemicals -- your awareness will be extinguished. For anyone who thinks consciousness can survive bodily death, this is an embarassment.
The reason is this: the soul, which even in its pared-down form is supposed to maintain some minimum degree of consciousness, is supposed to be an entirely nonmaterial thing independent of the body -- only thus can it survive the body's death.
Now it is natural to suppose that a hard blow to the head would stop your body from working -- we might expect you to collapse to the ground and even to seem, from the outside, unconscious. But if consciousness were being maintained by an entirely nonmaterial thing, we would expect your consciousness to continue regardless.
...The crux of the challenge is this: those who believe that the soul could preserve these abilities after the total destruction of the brain in death must explain why the soul cannot preserve these abilities when only a small portion of the brain is destroyed.
I think that belief in the soul and the afterlife are the result of out-of-body experiences that many people have had. You can hardly blame them for arriving at their belief, and if you've never had an OBE yourself (I never have), you can't just assume such people are deluded, though they may be.
All we really know is what we've gone through, and there's a world of difference between getting through a book and undergoing an experience in which you have no control.
If experienced believers were to just keep their beliefs to themselves and not try to convert others, we wouldn't feel compelled to debunk them.
Posted by: cc | April 15, 2012 at 10:35 AM
I'm reading "In Search of Schrodinger's Cat", a look at quantum physics. It gets me thinking about a lot...
Before the 20th century we didn't know for sure atoms existed, or what they were made of, how they were formed, much less how to split them and harness their energy. These were things we had no idea of. Things that existed all this time but we had no idea about.
I get that my brain isn't programmed to understand my death or be able to envision it. I get that. I'm programmed for life. But just because I can't envision my death doesn't mean I don't somehow survive it.
Now, do I believe I do? No. I don't. But my therapist has encouraged me, of late, to question more. So, I find myself doing that.
The Milky Way has between 200-400 billion stars in it. It's one of maybe 200 billion such galaxies in the universe. And here I am. Totally the accident of random happenings that have led to my brief meaningless (in the objective sense) existence. I come into being for a flicker of an instant in cosmological time and am blessed/cursed with this thing called 'awareness'. And I find myself wondering, what do I know?
Quantum physics may not lead to quantum 'mysticism' which gives us any hope (or basis) for something after. Lots of folks probably hope for that. But it raises questions for me. If all this stuff has always existed and we didn't know about it.....
I find myself increasingly liking the position of "I just don't know."
Posted by: Decaffnm | April 15, 2012 at 02:15 PM
The sensation of being alive is a process entirely dependent upon molecular configuration. That sensation is also intermittent, since complex molecular configurations such as human beings can also be entirely bereft of the sensation of aliveness.
However, since there is no entity that can be found that experiences sensations or the lack of sensations, that would, of necessity, imply that both awareness and the lack of awareness are intrinsic to reality itself.
Being alive is being alive. Being dead is being dead. Reality itself has absolutely no problem with this. Being alive entails a certain amount of anxiety about being dead. Being dead cannot involve any manner of concern, because there is actually no one to be concerned about anything.
Posted by: Willie R | April 15, 2012 at 02:23 PM
From what we know, I agree with Willie. From what we know. But what do we know for sure?
NDE's seem likely to be a biological event triggered by our brains shutting down at death. Not the trigger to some afterlife. But.... That's just the most likely hypothesis. We don't know that for sure.
I doubt ghost stories. I'm sure the other skeptical secularists who follow Brian's blog are of the same bent. But in questioning things...ghost stories have been around since the very beginning of humanity. They're not culturally specific. Do all of them have a rational explanation? Every single one that has ever happened?
Maybe. I like proof. I want proof. But I'm finding myself more comfortable just not knowing the answers anymore.
Posted by: Decaffnm | April 15, 2012 at 06:00 PM