The Mythical Soul

[originalucifer]

As far as i've been able to discern, there is no proof of a soul. Or rather, there is as much proof of a soul as there is for any god. Many medical studies of the brain conclude that every aspect of our personality, emotional state, and awareness of the world around us is chemical based. Where would a soul fit in? How much control (or effect) would a soul have if we can modify almost every perceivable aspect of our brains via chemical or electrical influences? Is the idea of a soul just another argument that will boil down to "faith"?

[Dwevlo]

Many medical studies of the brain conclude that every aspect of our personality, emotional state, and awareness of the world around us is chemical based.

This has not been shown. What has been shown is that they are causally correlated.

Is the idea of a soul just another argument that will boil down to "faith"?

No.

1) There are some good arguments for belief in a non material component to the soul.
2) There is basically one good arguments for belief in materialism
3) Many non-dualist views are quite different from what one would normally think of as materialism.

Its important to note that arguments in favor of dualism are primarily based on the subjective character of our mental experiences. The causal connection between the mental and the physical is the primary argument for materialism.

It seems that the materialist position isn't really "everything is physical", but rather "physical facts determine all facts". (An important distinction) So here are two materialist positions on the soul, covering what seems opposite ends of the spectrum:

1) Supervenience: Mental properties supervene on physical facts. They aren't identical, but are intimately correlated. Supervenience is defined as "A set of properties or facts M supervenes on a set of properties or facts P if and only if there can be no changes or differences in M without there being changes or differences in P."

2) Eliminative materialism: All of our folk psychology is wrong. (Those subjective arguments from above) We don't have 'beliefs' or things like that at all.

If you would like I could give you some of the arguments for the soul normally given. I'm just not sure what you mean by 'proof'. If you mean some scientific experiment, then that begs the question. But if you mean a thought experiment, by which you see that materialism doesn't seem to work out, then yeah I can give you that. (Unfortunately this an issue I only have the lightest understanding of... the mind-body problem is huge)

[GhostontheNet]

As far as i've been able to discern, there is no proof of a soul. Or rather, there is as much proof of a soul as there is for any god. Many medical studies of the brain conclude that every aspect of our personality, emotional state, and awareness of the world around us is chemical based. Where would a soul fit in? How much control (or effect) would a soul have if we can modify almost every perceivable aspect of our brains via chemical or electrical influences? Is the idea of a soul just another argument that will boil down to "faith"?

I can think of two independent streams in arguments for the soul. One of which emerges from the studies Near-Death experiences - for while many varying flavors of the delusions hypothesis are out there, they just aren't producing the goods of the entire spectrum of the phenomenon (see for example, http://home.comcast.net/~neardeath/n..._pages/80.html and http://www.skepticalinvestigations.o.../vanLommel.htm ). To sum it up and not do argument from links I will note several unanswered questions.

1. In VanLommel's study, his subjects were all taken from patients who had Cardiac arrest, of which very few reported having any fear of death in the seconds before their cardiac arrest because they didn't know what was coming. By itself, this wipes out the "fear of death" hypothesis because roughly 20 percent of our patients had NDEs anyway. This also leads to the question, "How exactly did these people figure out they were dying in their NDEs "with all the "classical" elements" (i.e. tunnel of light, seeing dead relatives, etc.? The phenomenon of NDEs among very young children also wipes out the "fear" hypothesis because they have no real fear of death due to thinking it is easily reversible (as opposed to the more dramatic Christian belief in the resurrection of the dead). Notably, VanLommel could not find any correlation between any drugs and the instances of NDEs and the occurance or quality of the NDE. Furthermore, people whose drugs made them feel groggy found no such sensations in their NDE.

2. Conversely, VanLommel notes that if the very popular "brain anoxia" argument were true, than all of his patients should have had NDEs. While the Air Force centripital force tests (i.e. spinning their subjects around to the point that they point the blood in their brain moves in the wrong position, causing brain anoxia) has caused them to experience some aspects of the Near Death experiences (i.e. out of body experiences), none of them ever experienced the whole of the NDE phenomenon (i.e. no subject ever saw dead relatives or had a life review). From a dualist perspective, the Air Force data makes just as much sense as such a traumatic experience would be sufficient to wipe out the ability of the mind to interact with the brain for a certain duration without being sufficient to kill the body. Similarly, my first source notes that it is not common at all to find people having hallucinations to see dead people in their hallucinations.

3. There has not yet been an explanation for what I would call the "Reverse gears" aspect of Near-death experiences where a person is really bummed about not being able to die but being told they have to go back. My philosophy teacher comments one woman he knows who had an NDE now cannot wait to die as a result. Why is it that in their own hallucinations they cannot progress freely therein? I have certainly not been in this kind of situation in my dreams. I also certainly have never heard of an incomplete NDE in the mode of an unfinished dream, that is to say one where the person finds themselves revived in the hospital in the middle of God speaking or something. I'm also sad to say I've never seen God in my dreams, as much as that would make sweat dreams indeed.

4. There has not yet been adaquete explanation for the vertical vantage point of the descriptions of people in the middle of an out-of-body experience. To quote my first source, "When Michael Sabom, a cardiologist, published his first book on the subject in 1982, he described six cases in which patients reported NDEs and relayed considerable detail about the surgical scene, including settings on dials. He was skeptical of this, so he asked some of his other patients to imagine what it would have been like to have been watching from above. They could not come up with accurate details." Susan Blackmore attempts the cop-out of comparison with arrival at a beach, in which we obviously have memories of viewing the place from above. What she ignores however, is that a basic aspect of a beach's geography is that one starts out from a vantage point above the beach, and then descends to the level of the beach. As I look around my room from which I type this, no matter how hard I try, I cannot even concieve of making an accurate description of the things around me while laying down on my bean bag chair of the things around me from a top-down perspective of familiar objects - so why is this at all reasonable in hospital patients skirting the edges of death fixing to have a major hallucination lying on a bed pretty much unfamiliar with the equipment being used on them be able to do this?

5. There is an obvious discontinuity between the states of people in the middle of an OBE and their embodied states. For example, my first source recounts an individual who attempted suicide, changed his mind halfway through, but was paralyzed from dialing 911 by visions of little people but found they were gone in the middle of his OBE. More common are the experiences where a person is incredibly mangled and finds their OBE quite painless while their return finds them in serious pain.

6. While I've got to do more research on this one, Kenneth Ring has found Blind people, some of whom were blind from birth who were able to see in their NDEs or OBEs. This is particularly notable as a person blind from birth has dreams that consist of kinetics, moving from one place to another.

Having got that out of the way, in my next post I hope to clarify on the philosophical level why the details you mention are not in fact inconsistent with what even the Platonic dualists have always taught, and also make a brief independent case for why to believe dualism is true.

[originalucifer]

This has not been shown. What has been shown is that they are causally correlated.


No.

1) There are some good arguments for belief in a non material component to the soul.
2) There is basically one good arguments for belief in materialism
3) Many non-dualist views are quite different from what one would normally think of as materialism.

Its important to note that arguments in favor of dualism are primarily based on the subjective character of our mental experiences. The causal connection between the mental and the physical is the primary argument for materialism.

It seems that the materialist position isn't really "everything is physical", but rather "physical facts determine all facts". (An important distinction) So here are two materialist positions on the soul, covering what seems opposite ends of the spectrum:

1) Supervenience: Mental properties supervene on physical facts. They aren't identical, but are intimately correlated. Supervenience is defined as "A set of properties or facts M supervenes on a set of properties or facts P if and only if there can be no changes or differences in M without there being changes or differences in P."

2) Eliminative materialism: All of our folk psychology is wrong. (Those subjective arguments from above) We don't have 'beliefs' or things like that at all.

If you would like I could give you some of the arguments for the soul normally given. I'm just not sure what you mean by 'proof'. If you mean some scientific experiment, then that begs the question. But if you mean a thought experiment, by which you see that materialism doesn't seem to work out, then yeah I can give you that. (Unfortunately this an issue I only have the lightest understanding of... the mind-body problem is huge)

I guess I could be considered a materialist. Our brains are far from perfect, and have a whole range of issues especially with interpreting our environment (and awareness of our environment). So, how about a scientifically reproducible experiment that proves there is a soul.

As for the materialism thought experiment, I have trouble with experiments contained wholly in our own brains for we are incredibly fallible creatures, our brains far from perfect awareness, but let’s have it. We see what we want to see in our own minds. Maybe that's why I like the scientific method of replicating studies to prove their validity. I wouldn’t trust the observation of just my own brain on such things as near death experiences. I fail to see why anyone would.

I don’t believe that we as a species are all that special; we’re just most intelligent in our neck of the woods.

[Dwevlo]

So, how about a scientifically reproducible experiment that proves there is a soul.

As I already said, this begs the question. You won't find a physical non-physical thing.

But here are some arguments:

The Zombie argument

Zombies

Zombies are exactly like us in all physical respects but have no conscious experiences: by definition there is ‘nothing it is like’ to be a zombie. [...] It is argued that if zombies are so much as a bare possibility, then physicalism is false and some kind of dualism must be accepted.

© source where applicable

Maybe this is a subtle argument, but if Zombies are possible it follows pretty straightforwardly. Basically if the physical facts determine all facts, then a zombie can't exist because they are physically identical to us yet are not mentally identical to us.


Identity arguments like this one from Richard Swinburne

The Possibility of Life after Death

The brain, as you will know, consists of two hemispheres, and a brain-stem. There is good evidence that humans can survive and behave as conscious being if much of one hemisphere is destroyed. Now suppose my brain (hemisphere plus brain-stem) was divided into two, and each half brain taken out of my skull and transplanted into the empty skull of a body from which a brain has just been removed; and there to be added to each half-brain from some other brain (e.g. the brain of my identical twin) whatever other parts (e.g. more brain stem) are necessary in order for the transplant to take and for there to be two living persons with lives of conscious experiences. Which of these two resulting persons would be me? Probably both would to some extent behave like me and make my memory claims; for behaviour and speech depend, at any rate in very large part, on brain-states, and there is very considerable overlap between the _information_ carried by the two hemispheres which gives rise to behaviour and speech. But both persons would not be me. For if they were both identical with me they would be the same person as each other (if a is the same as b, and b is the same as c, then a is the same as c) and they are not. They now have different experiences and lead different lives. There remain three other possibilities - that the person with my right half-brain is me, or that the person with my left half-brain is me, or that neither is me. But we cannot be certain which holds. It follows that that mere knowledge of what happens to bodies does not tell you what happens to persons. [...] the split brain experiment brings out that 'I' and 'Swinburne' are not used to pick out a material object, such as the pineal gland. For if they were, knowledge of what happened to all the atoms of my body (plus the mental properties associated therewith) would entail a conclusion about what happened to me

© source where applicable

The Knowledge Argument (and similar arguments). Here is a classic by Frank Jackson:

Epiphenomenal Qualia

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. (It can hardly be denied that it is in principle possible to obtain all this physical information from black and white television, otherwise the Open University would of necessity need to use color television.)

What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.

© source where applicable

Keep in mind that physicalism is usually just a brute assertion, with little argument in its favor. From http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/#15.

Physicalism

The first thing to say when considering the truth of physicalism is that we live in an overwhelmingly physicalist or materialist intellectual culture. The result is that, as things currently stand, the standards of argumentation required to persuade someone of the truth of physicalism are much lower than the standards required to persuade someone of its negation. (The point here is a perfectly general one: if you already believe or want something to be true, you are likely to accept fairly low standards of argumentation for its truth.)

© source where applicable

Unfortunately there is no scientific experiment which can prove physicalism, or disprove dualism. All you've got to work with are the philisophical arguments.

[originalucifer]

I can think of two independent streams in arguments for the soul. One of which emerges from the studies Near-Death experiences - for while many varying flavors of the delusions hypothesis are out there, they just aren't producing the goods of the entire spectrum of the phenomenon (see for example, http://home.comcast.net/~neardeath/n..._pages/80.html and http://www.skepticalinvestigations.o.../vanLommel.htm ). To sum it up and not do argument from links I will note several unanswered questions.

1. In VanLommel's study, his subjects were all taken from patients who had Cardiac arrest, of which very few reported having any fear of death in the seconds before their cardiac arrest because they didn't know what was coming. By itself, this wipes out the "fear of death" hypothesis because roughly 20 percent of our patients had NDEs anyway. This also leads to the question, "How exactly did these people figure out they were dying in their NDEs "with all the "classical" elements" (i.e. tunnel of light, seeing dead relatives, etc.? The phenomenon of NDEs among very young children also wipes out the "fear" hypothesis because they have no real fear of death due to thinking it is easily reversible (as opposed to the more dramatic Christian belief in the resurrection of the dead). Notably, VanLommel could not find any correlation between any drugs and the instances of NDEs and the occurance or quality of the NDE. Furthermore, people whose drugs made them feel groggy found no such sensations in their NDE.

2. Conversely, VanLommel notes that if the very popular "brain anoxia" argument were true, than all of his patients should have had NDEs. While the Air Force centripital force tests (i.e. spinning their subjects around to the point that they point the blood in their brain moves in the wrong position, causing brain anoxia) has caused them to experience some aspects of the Near Death experiences (i.e. out of body experiences), none of them ever experienced the whole of the NDE phenomenon (i.e. no subject ever saw dead relatives or had a life review). From a dualist perspective, the Air Force data makes just as much sense as such a traumatic experience would be sufficient to wipe out the ability of the mind to interact with the brain for a certain duration without being sufficient to kill the body. Similarly, my first source notes that it is not common at all to find people having hallucinations to see dead people in their hallucinations.

3. There has not yet been an explanation for what I would call the "Reverse gears" aspect of Near-death experiences where a person is really bummed about not being able to die but being told they have to go back. My philosophy teacher comments one woman he knows who had an NDE now cannot wait to die as a result. Why is it that in their own hallucinations they cannot progress freely therein? I have certainly not been in this kind of situation in my dreams. I also certainly have never heard of an incomplete NDE in the mode of an unfinished dream, that is to say one where the person finds themselves revived in the hospital in the middle of God speaking or something. I'm also sad to say I've never seen God in my dreams, as much as that would make sweat dreams indeed.

4. There has not yet been adaquete explanation for the vertical vantage point of the descriptions of people in the middle of an out-of-body experience. To quote my first source, "When Michael Sabom, a cardiologist, published his first book on the subject in 1982, he described six cases in which patients reported NDEs and relayed considerable detail about the surgical scene, including settings on dials. He was skeptical of this, so he asked some of his other patients to imagine what it would have been like to have been watching from above. They could not come up with accurate details." Susan Blackmore attempts the cop-out of comparison with arrival at a beach, in which we obviously have memories of viewing the place from above. What she ignores however, is that a basic aspect of a beach's geography is that one starts out from a vantage point above the beach, and then descends to the level of the beach. As I look around my room from which I type this, no matter how hard I try, I cannot even concieve of making an accurate description of the things around me while laying down on my bean bag chair of the things around me from a top-down perspective of familiar objects - so why is this at all reasonable in hospital patients skirting the edges of death fixing to have a major hallucination lying on a bed pretty much unfamiliar with the equipment being used on them be able to do this?

5. There is an obvious discontinuity between the states of people in the middle of an OBE and their embodied states. For example, my first source recounts an individual who attempted suicide, changed his mind halfway through, but was paralyzed from dialing 911 by visions of little people but found they were gone in the middle of his OBE. More common are the experiences where a person is incredibly mangled and finds their OBE quite painless while their return finds them in serious pain.

6. While I've got to do more research on this one, Kenneth Ring has found Blind people, some of whom were blind from birth who were able to see in their NDEs or OBEs. This is particularly notable as a person blind from birth has dreams that consist of kinetics, moving from one place to another.

Having got that out of the way, in my next post I hope to clarify on the philosophical level why the details you mention are not in fact inconsistent with what even the Platonic dualists have always taught, and also make a brief independent case for why to believe dualism is true.

While there are varying degrees of NDE's, as you pointed out, there have been great strides in determining the cause of these experiences. I think that most of what you are referring to here can be explained in our own brains.

Wilder Penfield did some studies in the 50's with stimulating the human brain and was able to produce "out-of-body experiences, heavenly music, vivid hallucinations, and the kind of panoramic memories associated with the life review part of the near-death experience" using simple electric shocks to a precise area of the brain.

We might not have the exact mechanism down yet, but I believe we will find it. Every study I've read comes a little closer to an answer about these experiences, and makes much more sense than an afterlife. We are still researching how and why our brains do what they do.

Just because we can't consciously give a top-down description of a room doesn't mean we aren’t capable of doing so.

Our brains are phenomenally complex data processing engines. Our consciousness is obviously shielded from the bulk of these processes to simplify our interaction with our environment. Hypnosis and many diseases have brought to light the underlying processing capabilities of our brains (think autism), and I think that goes a long way to explaining how blind people can claim to have seen in an NDE.

As for dualism, I have yet to hear a decent argument on why, in every instance of brain damage, the mind is affected by the physical damage incurred. If the mind and body are separate why is the mind altered in every case. We can even reliably predict in what way the mind will be altered by the physical properties of the damage.

[originalucifer]

As I already said, this begs the question. You won't find a physical non-physical thing.

But here are some arguments:

The Zombie argument

Zombies

Zombies are exactly like us in all physical respects but have no conscious experiences: by definition there is ‘nothing it is like’ to be a zombie. [...] It is argued that if zombies are so much as a bare possibility, then physicalism is false and some kind of dualism must be accepted.

© source where applicable

Maybe this is a subtle argument, but if Zombies are possible it follows pretty straightforwardly. Basically if the physical facts determine all facts, then a zombie can't exist because they are physically identical to us yet are not mentally identical to us.


Identity arguments like this one from Richard Swinburne

The Possibility of Life after Death

The brain, as you will know, consists of two hemispheres, and a brain-stem. There is good evidence that humans can survive and behave as conscious being if much of one hemisphere is destroyed. Now suppose my brain (hemisphere plus brain-stem) was divided into two, and each half brain taken out of my skull and transplanted into the empty skull of a body from which a brain has just been removed; and there to be added to each half-brain from some other brain (e.g. the brain of my identical twin) whatever other parts (e.g. more brain stem) are necessary in order for the transplant to take and for there to be two living persons with lives of conscious experiences. Which of these two resulting persons would be me? Probably both would to some extent behave like me and make my memory claims; for behaviour and speech depend, at any rate in very large part, on brain-states, and there is very considerable overlap between the _information_ carried by the two hemispheres which gives rise to behaviour and speech. But both persons would not be me. For if they were both identical with me they would be the same person as each other (if a is the same as b, and b is the same as c, then a is the same as c) and they are not. They now have different experiences and lead different lives. There remain three other possibilities - that the person with my right half-brain is me, or that the person with my left half-brain is me, or that neither is me. But we cannot be certain which holds. It follows that that mere knowledge of what happens to bodies does not tell you what happens to persons. [...] the split brain experiment brings out that 'I' and 'Swinburne' are not used to pick out a material object, such as the pineal gland. For if they were, knowledge of what happened to all the atoms of my body (plus the mental properties associated therewith) would entail a conclusion about what happened to me

© source where applicable

The Knowledge Argument (and similar arguments). Here is a classic by Frank Jackson:

Epiphenomenal Qualia

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. (It can hardly be denied that it is in principle possible to obtain all this physical information from black and white television, otherwise the Open University would of necessity need to use color television.)

What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.

© source where applicable

Keep in mind that physicalism is usually just a brute assertion, with little argument in its favor. From http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/#15.

Physicalism

The first thing to say when considering the truth of physicalism is that we live in an overwhelmingly physicalist or materialist intellectual culture. The result is that, as things currently stand, the standards of argumentation required to persuade someone of the truth of physicalism are much lower than the standards required to persuade someone of its negation. (The point here is a perfectly general one: if you already believe or want something to be true, you are likely to accept fairly low standards of argumentation for its truth.)

© source where applicable

Unfortunately there is no scientific experiment which can prove physicalism, or disprove dualism. All you've got to work with are the philisophical arguments.

I'm probably a bit simple when it comes to some of these more philosophical arguments, maybe you can help. I've read the zombie argument, Jackson’s argument etc...

I don't appreciate the zombie theory because I don’t think the ease with which Chalmers conceives his zombies is justified. It's more complicated than he lets on.

"If anything, the survey of the contemporary issues and current debates surrounding consciousness points to a need for a careful reexamination of our pretheoretical intuitions and conceptual foundations on which to build better accounts of consciousness." - Güven Güzeldere

As for the knowledge argument, I never understood why qualia requires any special consideration. What is so difficult to understand about our brains storing and utilizing subjective experiences like our perception of color and pain? Maybe you can shed some light, perhaps I'm missing something.

I guess to me physicalism seems kind of obvious. We live in a physical world governed by the laws of physics. We might not know everything, but it's what's here. Any new or different assertion would require proof of this new theory. I have yet to be presented with something that could not be reduced to physical properties, although I've read many assertions about our own consciousness and mental abilities claiming non-physical origins. I just don't see why so many refuse to believe everything they think and feel is a series of chemical/electrical activity.

[Dwevlo]

As for the knowledge argument, I never understood why qualia requires any special consideration. What is so difficult to understand about our brains storing and utilizing subjective experiences like our perception of color and pain? Maybe you can shed some light, perhaps I'm missing something.

Remember physicalism says that physical facts determine all facts. In the qualia case we are led to imagine a person who knows all the physical facts, yet somehow learns something new. If physicalism is true, then the physical facts are it and this would be impossible.

I guess to me physicalism seems kind of obvious. We live in a physical world governed by the laws of physics. We might not know everything, but it's what's here. Any new or different assertion would require proof of this new theory.

Dualism is hardly new. It probably predates physicalism. When I think about mental stuff it doesn't seem to fit in the physical box. Physicalism seems entirely unintuitive to me, even if it is right. Which means I see the issue in the opposite light. Without a good argument, I'm not gonna believe physicalism.

I have yet to be presented with something that could not be reduced to physical properties, although I've read many assertions about our own consciousness and mental abilities claiming non-physical origins. I just don't see why so many refuse to believe everything they think and feel is a series of chemical/electrical activity.

Well for one, physicalism of the eliminativist variety simply denies the existence of a real mental life. The belief that humans don't have beliefs is at least counterintuitive. (If not completely self-contradictory)

I think your opening post was a good example of typical thinking on the issue. People write off the soul as some silly mythology from a long time ago, but if anything the mythology lies in this writing off. The quote you referenced was a good one. The mind is complicated and pretending like physicalism has answered all the problems is way overstating the case. Dualism (in at least one of its forms) was never defeated by some definitive scientific experiment, rather it was rendered obsolete by pure dogmatic assertion.

[GhostontheNet]

While there are varying degrees of NDE's, as you pointed out, there have been great strides in determining the cause of these experiences. I think that most of what you are referring to here can be explained in our own brains.

Would you be more specific, perhaps with actual explanations and not vague optimisms?

Wilder Penfield did some studies in the 50's with stimulating the human brain and was able to produce "out-of-body experiences, heavenly music, vivid hallucinations, and the kind of panoramic memories associated with the life review part of the near-death experience" using simple electric shocks to a precise area of the brain.

I don't know just what source you're using, but it just reeks of mythologization of what Penfield actually found. An internet search of "Wilder Penfield NDE" turned up no instances of Penfield finding any NDEs at all. The actual data in question is:

[CITE]"Patient G.A. suffered habitual epileptic attacks that never
evoked hallucinations. Yet upon electrical stimulation of
her right superior temporal gyrus at point 0 (see Fig 1b),
she spontaneously exclaimed: ‘I have a queer sensation as
if I am not here… As though I were half here and half not
here.’ She reported that she had never felt this way before.
Stimulation of point 1 elicited the response that she felt
queer again, as if she were floating away. http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:...9&client=opera [/CITE]

There is an enormous gulf between the equivalent of "Woah, I feel really weird, I'm like floating away now" and "Wow, its the gates of heaven!" I ran a search in the extensive online academic databases at my local library, and while Wilder Penfield showed up, not a single reference to any connection with NDEs appeared.

We might not have the exact mechanism down yet, but I believe we will find it. Every study I've read comes a little closer to an answer about these experiences, and makes much more sense than an afterlife. We are still researching how and why our brains do what they do.

And hence the burden of proof is in your court. Your report of your confidence makes no counterargument why the granddaddy of all hallucinations would appear in the dying whose consciousness is supposedly dying when no artificially designed experiment ever turns up the same results when exposing a person to the supposed trigger conditions.

Just because we can't consciously give a top-down description of a room doesn't mean we aren’t capable of doing so.

Our brains are phenomenally complex data processing engines. Our consciousness is obviously shielded from the bulk of these processes to simplify our interaction with our environment.

The question largely becomes how exactly non-conscious processes can actually shield anybody from anything when non-conscious processes would be definition have no knowledge that anyone was out there to be shielded. So too, the question arrives with things like Daniel Dennett's miniature humonculi/commitee of idiots raises their hands to achieve the truth of consciousness' nonexistence (i.e. alleged truthful reasoning) rather than the equivalent of "Bob's fish is a cardboard box." My computer, on the one hand knows everything there is to know about the substance of, say, Front Line Assembly's Maniacal [EP], yet, conversely my computer knows absolutely nothing of Front Line Assembly's Maniacal [EP] because it has absolutely no access to the subjective world of qualia, ideology, and conception which are the keys to understanding the song. The difficulty of the strictly objective and physical giving birth to the subjective is in fact the reason you have groups like the "Mental nihilists" (those who believe there is no mind, to use John Foster's terminology in The Immaterial Self: A Defense of the Cartesian Dualist Conception of the Mind) and analytical behaviorists channeling the whole of their imaginations on refuting the existence of imaginations, beliefs, etc. on the grounds that they could not have arisen in a strictly physical world.

Hypnosis and many diseases have brought to light the underlying processing capabilities of our brains (think autism),

It is my own suspicion that many of these phenomena do in fact occur in the sum total of the qualia of experience but are cancelled out of full realization of their full potential by focus on other elements of experience, much in the way my sight sensory input was still active when typing this sentence while focusing on my thoughts and Front Line Assembly.

and I think that goes a long way to explaining how blind people can claim to have seen in an NDE.

You're going to need a lot more direct evidence than vagueries and blind faith like that to refute the phenomenon, particularly when you have the direct counterexample of those born-blind being unable to see within their own dreams, which are an imagined subjective state, doubly so in the Near Death Experience which is often not even anticipated.

As for dualism, I have yet to hear a decent argument on why, in every instance of brain damage, the mind is affected by the physical damage incurred. If the mind and body are separate why is the mind altered in every case. We can even reliably predict in what way the mind will be altered by the physical properties of the damage.

I have yet to see a good argument why dualism wouldn't anticipate this, particularly when the claim of dualism from the earliest days has always been that the train runs both directions from body to mind and mind to body (seen, for example, in Plato's elaborate doctrine of waging the war against the flesh). In a conception of something interfacing with something else, it bears the necessary implication that if something happens directly to what is being interfaced with it will shout down the interfacer's efforts. For example, I have been dealing with a problem with my laptop where my mouse icon begins to drift on its own and I must fight to regain control. What this does not disprove however, is my work on and interface with the laptop. Similarly, if certain keys were removed, it would affect the content of my messages to you will most assuredly be effected. This conception is often represented in the allegory of the damaged radio. Both dualism and physicalism would anticipate this, so it doesn't really provide evidence for either one.

[jason]

As far as i've been able to discern, there is no proof of a soul. Or rather, there is as much proof of a soul as there is for any god. Many medical studies of the brain conclude that every aspect of our personality, emotional state, and awareness of the world around us is chemical based. Where would a soul fit in? How much control (or effect) would a soul have if we can modify almost every perceivable aspect of our brains via chemical or electrical influences? Is the idea of a soul just another argument that will boil down to "faith"?

Actually David Chalmers offered an interesting thought experiment about this critique of the soul that you have offered and why it is not any good.

Imagine a digital world that has inhabitants whose minds reside outside the world itself. They are "plugged into this world", something akin to the matrix.

These people could study their world down to the finest detail and reach the conclusion you suggest about the non-existence of a mind outside the world, and yet they would be wrong.

You might want to try reading up a bit on the philosophy of mind. TRy someone like [uel=http://consc.net/papers.html]David Chalmers[/url] he is not a christian or anything like that, yet he rejects your class A materialism.

Jason

[finnidi]

there has to be a soul how could there be soul music andfood without soul it seems obvios to me????!!!! lol!!!

[zorathruster]

As far as i've been able to discern, there is no proof of a soul. Or rather, there is as much proof of a soul as there is for any god. Many medical studies of the brain conclude that every aspect of our personality, emotional state, and awareness of the world around us is chemical based. Where would a soul fit in? How much control (or effect) would a soul have if we can modify almost every perceivable aspect of our brains via chemical or electrical influences? Is the idea of a soul just another argument that will boil down to "faith"?

The best validation for the NON-existence of the soul are damaged and diseased brains.



Let us assume there is a soul creating the impetuous for actions - good and evil. If a brain were to become damaged, there should be no change in the actions that the person conducts because the soul is left untouched, since it isn't physical.



All it takes is a quick tour of an old folks home where dementia is rampant to realize this is not the case. Pious old ladies who would never in their right mind swear or cuss (using the lords name in vain - one of the top 3). Yet there they are swearing up a storm.



If the proposed soul is the impetuous for action, how could it possibly be that a diseased brain (dementia) could create a situation where an "evil" action is initiated by that brain.

Some people (Andrea Yates comes to mind) are mentally damaged. They conduct evil acts such as killing their children. The courts recently have ruled that Ms Yates was unable to form intent to kill her children and was relegated to psychiatric treatment instead of prison. Either Ms Yates needs to be fried in the electric chair for her evil acts - motivated by her soul, OR the determination that a diseased brain (outside the control of Ms Yates) can cause those evil actions, in which case psychiatric treatment is appropriate.

Society recognizes that brains cause actions. The proposed "soul" is ruled out because of the affects of damaged brains.

Maybe someone can explain how a normal soul which directs the actions of a human can be overridden by a damaged brain?

[GhostontheNet]

The best validation for the NON-existence of the soul are damaged and diseased brains.



Let us assume there is a soul creating the impetuous for actions - good and evil. If a brain were to become damaged, there should be no change in the actions that the person conducts because the soul is left untouched, since it isn't physical.



All it takes is a quick tour of an old folks home where dementia is rampant to realize this is not the case. Pious old ladies who would never in their right mind swear or cuss (using the lords name in vain - one of the top 3). Yet there they are swearing up a storm.



If the proposed soul is the impetuous for action, how could it possibly be that a diseased brain (dementia) could create a situation where an "evil" action is initiated by that brain.

Some people (Andrea Yates comes to mind) are mentally damaged. They conduct evil acts such as killing their children. The courts recently have ruled that Ms Yates was unable to form intent to kill her children and was relegated to psychiatric treatment instead of prison. Either Ms Yates needs to be fried in the electric chair for her evil acts - motivated by her soul, OR the determination that a diseased brain (outside the control of Ms Yates) can cause those evil actions, in which case psychiatric treatment is appropriate.

Society recognizes that brains cause actions. The proposed "soul" is ruled out because of the affects of damaged brains.

Maybe someone can explain how a normal soul which directs the actions of a human can be overridden by a damaged brain?

I repeat, "I have yet to see a good argument why dualism wouldn't anticipate this, particularly when the claim of dualism from the earliest days has always been that the train runs both directions from body to mind and mind to body (seen, for example, in Plato's elaborate doctrine of waging the war against the flesh). In a conception of something interfacing with something else, it bears the necessary implication that if something happens directly to what is being interfaced with it will shout down the interfacer's efforts. For example, I have been dealing with a problem with my laptop where my mouse icon begins to drift on its own and I must fight to regain control. What this does not disprove however, is my work on and interface with the laptop. Similarly, if certain keys were removed, it would affect the content of my messages to you will most assuredly be effected. This conception is often represented in the allegory of the damaged radio. Both dualism and physicalism would anticipate this, so it doesn't really provide evidence for either one."

[Philosophickle]

The best validation for the NON-existence of the soul are damaged and diseased brains.

Not true. This is only evidence against the Cartesian flavors.

Let us assume there is a soul creating the impetuous for actions - good and evil. If a brain were to become damaged, there should be no change in the actions that the person conducts because the soul is left untouched, since it isn't physical.

You are assuming that the physical cannot effect the mental. Not a good assumption.

All it takes is a quick tour of an old folks home where dementia is rampant to realize this is not the case. Pious old ladies who would never in their right mind swear or cuss (using the lords name in vain - one of the top 3). Yet there they are swearing up a storm.

If the proposed soul is the impetuous for action, how could it possibly be that a diseased brain (dementia) could create a situation where an "evil" action is initiated by that brain?

Argumentum ad Sweetum Olde Ladydum?

Some people (Andrea Yates comes to mind) are mentally damaged. They conduct evil acts such as killing their children. The courts recently have ruled that Ms Yates was unable to form intent to kill her children and was relegated to psychiatric treatment instead of prison. Either Ms Yates needs to be fried in the electric chair for her evil acts - motivated by her soul, OR the determination that a diseased brain (outside the control of Ms Yates) can cause those evil actions, in which case psychiatric treatment is appropriate.

Society recognizes that brains cause actions. The proposed "soul" is ruled out because of the affects of damaged brains.

Maybe someone can explain how a normal soul which directs the actions of a human can be overridden by a damaged brain?

I'm afraid that you aren't arguing against much. You win- the one way interactionism of Cartesian Dualism is over with. You can even have the credit for it. Unfortunately, most non-physicalists would help you burn these straw men.

[djdavo]

As for dualism, I have yet to hear a decent argument on why, in every instance of brain damage, the mind is affected by the physical damage incurred. If the mind and body are separate why is the mind altered in every case. We can even reliably predict in what way the mind will be altered by the physical properties of the damage.

a quick thought: the brain damaged people just aren't phycially able to understand the physical stimuli they're given... this doesn't necessarily disprove a fully functioning non-physical soul underneath.