Edward O. Wilson, in his book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, has identified belief in the soul as one of the universal human elements and has suggested that biologists need to investigate how human genes predispose people to believe in a soul. The idea of the soul can be found in virtually all religions as well as the occult, theosophy and new age literature.
The word 'soul' has a variety of meanings, including: the seat of personality, the individual or person themselves, the immaterial component of a human being mystically occupying the body, etc. Beyond longstanding cultural tradition, is there any rational reason for presupposing the existence of the 'soul' as an entity distinct and separate from the biochemical impulses of the brain? Isn't belief in the just 'soul' another way of denying the inevitability of one's own death?
What is the Soul?
FROM: The Will to Doubt by Bertrand Russell
One of the most painful circumstances of recent advances in science is that each one of them makes us know less than we thought we did. When I was young we all knew, or thought we knew, that a man consists of a soul and a body; that the body is in time and space, but the soul is in time only. Whether the soul survives death was a matter as to which opinions might differ, but that there is a soul was thought to be indubitable. As for the body, the plain man of course considered its existence self-evident, and so did the man of science, but the philosopher was apt to analyze it away after one fashion or another, reducing it usually to ideas in the mind of the man who had the body and anybody else who happened to notice him. The philosopher, however, was not taken seriously, and science remained comfortably materialistic, even in the hands of quite orthodox scientists.
Nowadays these fine old simplicities are lost: physicists assure us that there is no such thing as matter, and psychologists assure us that there is no such thing as mind. This is an unprecedented occurrence. Who ever heard of a cobbler saying that there was no such thing as boots, or a tailor maintaining that all men are really naked? Yet that would have been no odder than what physicists and certain psychologists have been doing. To begin with the latter, some of them attempt to reduce everything that seems to be mental activity to an activity of the body. There are, however, various difficulties in the way of reducing mental activity to physical activity. I do not think we can yet say with any assurance whether these difficulties are or are not insuperable. What we can say, on the basis of physics itself, is that what we have hitherto called our body is really an elaborate scientific construction not corresponding to any physical reality. The modem would-be materialist thus finds himself in a curious position, for, while he may with a certain degree of success reduce the activities of the mind to those of the body, he cannot explain away the fact that the body itself is merely a convenient concept invented by the mind. We find ourselves thus going round and round in a circle: mind is an emanation of body, and body is an invention of mind. Evidently this cannot be quite right, and we have to look for something that is neither mind nor body, out of which both can spring.
Let us begin with the body. The plain man thinks that material objects must certainly exist, since they are evident to the senses. Whatever else may be doubted, it is certain that anything you can bump into must be real; this is the plain man's metaphysic. This is all very well, but the physicist comes along and shows that you never bump into anything: even when you run your head against a stone wall, you do not really touch it. When you think you touch a thing, there are certain electrons and protons, forming part of your body, which are attracted and repelled by certain electrons and protons in the thing you think you are touching, but there is no actual contact. The electrons and protons in your body, becoming agitated by nearness to the other electrons and protons, are disturbed, and transmit a disturbance along your nerves to the brain; the effect in the brain is what is necessary to your sensation of contact, and by suitable experiments this sensation can be made quite deceptive. The electrons and protons themselves, however, are only a crude first approximation, a way of collecting into a bundle either trains of waves or the statistical probabilities of serious different kinds of events. Thus matter has become altogether too ghostly to be used as an adequate stick with which to beat the mind. Matter in motion, which used to seem so unquestionable, turns out to be a concept quite inadequate for the needs of physics.
Nevertheless modern science gives no indication whatever of the existence of the soul or mind as an entity; indeed the reasons for disbelieving in it are of very much the same kind as the reasons for disbelieving in matter. Mind and matter were something like the lion and the unicorn fighting for the crown; the end of the battle is not the victory of one or the other, but the discovery that both are only heraldic inventions. The world consists of events, not of things that endure for a long time and have changing properties. Events can be collected into groups by their causal relations. If the causal relations are of one sort the resulting group of events may be called a physical object, and if the causal relations are of another sort, the resulting group may be called a mind. Any event that occurs inside a man's head will belong to groups of both kinds; considered as belonging to a group of one kind, it is a constituent of his brain, and considered as belonging to a group of the other kind, it is a constituent of his mind.
Thus both mind and matter are merely convenient ways of organizing events. There can be no reason for supposing that either a piece of mind or a piece of matter is immortal. The sun is supposed to be losing matter at the rate of millions of tons a minute. The most essential characteristic of mind is memory, and there is no reason whatever to suppose that the memory associated with a given person survive, that person's death. Indeed there is every reason to think the opposite, for memory is clearly connected with a certain kind of brain structure, and since this structure decays at death, there is every reason to suppose that memory also must cease. Although metaphysical materialism cannot be considered true, yet emotionally the world is pretty much the same as it would be if the materialists were in the right. I think the opponents of materialism have always been actuated by two main desires: the first to prove that the mind is immortal, and the second to prove that the ultimate power in the universe is mental rather than physical. In both these respects, I think the materialists were in the right. Our desires, it is true, have considerable power on the earth's surface; the greater part of the land on this planet has a quite different aspect from that which it would have if men had not utilized it to extract food and wealth. But our power is very strictly limited. We cannot at present do anything whatever to the sun or moon or even to the interior of the earth, and there is not the faintest reason to suppose that what happens in regions to which our power does not extend has any mental causes. That is to say, to put the matter in a nutshell, there is no reason to think that except on the earth's surface anything happens because somebody wishes it to happen. And since our power on the earth's surface is entirely dependent upon the supply of energy which the earth derives from the sun, we are necessarily dependent upon the sun, and could hardly realize any of our wishes if the sun grew cold. It is of course rash to dogmatize as to what science may achieve in the future. We may learn to prolong human existence longer than now seems possible, but if there is any truth in modem physics, more particularly in the second law of thermo-dynamics, we cannot hope that the human race will continue for ever. Some people may find this conclusion gloomy, but if we are honest with ourselves, we shall have to admit that what is going to happen many millions of years hence has no very great emotional interest for us here and now. And science, while it diminishes our cosmic pretensions, enormously increases our terrestrial comfort. That is why, in spite of the horror of the theologians, science has on the whole been tolerated.
Spirit, Soul, and Mind
By Frank R. Zindler
The Probing Mind, February 1985
Whenever I peruse a dictionary, I am struck by the amazing number of words which refer to nothing at all in the real world. Many of the words are obviously fabulous: leprechaun, unicorn, gremlin, Philosopher's Stone, Zeus, elf, Fountain of Youth, ghost, etc. Others, though referring equally to non-existent things, are less obviously fabulous: The Mean Sun, The Average Citizen, vital force, spirit, soul, and - in at least some of its accepted meanings - mind.
Why the human species has invented so many words which refer to nothing in reality is a most interesting question for scientific investigation, and probably would require a complete book to elucidate properly. In this article I shall only attempt to deal with a few such words, specifically, the words spirit, soul, and mind.
It is a striking fact that nearly all languages of the world, extinct as well as extant, have — or have had — words which could be rendered as 'spirit' or 'soul' in English, At first glance, it would seem that this is a good argument in favor of the real existence of souls and spirits. For, would it not be improbable that so many different peoples and languages could be mistaken? If many different unrelated languages have independently invented words for soul, is that not a good reason to believe they did so because there really is such a thing?
I think not. The first clue to the solution of this puzzle comes from etymology, the study of word origins.
While the origin of the English word soul is obscure, the word almost certainly had its origin in a word which meant 'breath' or 'wind' or 'air', or something like that. The word spirit — generally a synonym for soul — comes from the Latin spiritus, and clearly meant 'breath' originally. Spiritual and respiratory both derive from the same root!
Moreover, if we check in the Greek and Hebrew bibles to see which words are translated as 'soul', etc., in the King James Version, we will find many whose literal meaning is 'breath' or 'wind'. For example, the Hebrew word neshamah (literally meaning 'breath') is twice rendered as 'spirit', once as 'soul'. The Hebrew-Aramaic word ruach (lit., 'wind') is rendered 240 times as 'spirit', six times as 'mind.' The word nephesh (lit., 'breath') is rendered 'soul' 428 times) 'mind' 15 times, 'ghost' twice, and 'life' 119 times. Turning to the Greek Bible, we find pneuma (lit., 'breath') rendered as 'ghost' 91 times (including the rendering 'Holy Ghost'), 292 times as 'spirit'. The reader will recognize the same root in the word pneumonia, a word referring to a disease of the organs of breath. And finally, in this somewhat pedantic parade of words, we may note the important word psyche. As expected, its literal meaning is 'breath.' As we might have guessed, it is rendered as 'soul' 58 times, 'mind' three times, and life' 40 times.
The fact that nearly all words now meaning 'soul', 'spirit', 'life', etc., trace their origins to words meaning 'breath' or 'wind' leads me to conclude that the derived meanings were an outgrowth of the inability of primitive people to solve a basic biological puzzle, namely, what constitutes the difference between a live body and a dead one?
To the ancient authors of the Bible — men who still thought they were living on a flat earth beneath a solid sky (firmament) — the solution seemed deceptively simple: living things breathe, dead things do not. At first, only animals (from Latin anima, meaning 'breath' or 'breeze' originally) were considered fully alive. The case of plants was viewed with confusion for a long time. Some authorities considered them live, others did not. The ancients did not realize that 'souls' were really only a gaseous mixture of nitrogen and oxygen, contaminated with varying amounts of water vapor, carbon dioxide, noble gases, and — depending upon what one ate and whether or not one brushed after every meal — varying amounts of aromatic substances!
In the Genesis Creation Myth, the animating power of breath is clearly depicted. God, after having molded Adam from the dust, has to breathe into him the breath of life in order for him to become a living soul. Breath is life.
The manner in which breath became equated with life is not difficult to discern. A person newly dead, say, of a heart attack, anatomically is not much different from what he was like before he died. He still has five fingers per hand, a tongue in his mouth, a brain in his head, and a heart in his breast. The ancients, unconscious of the microcosmic fever of chemical marriages and divorces that we call metabolism, could see only one obvious difference: the lack of breath of the dead.
When a man expired (lit., 'breathed out'), his spirit (lit., 'breath') left his body, and he died. When a man sneezed, his spirit was forcefully ejected from his body, and one had to say "God bless you" or make a magical gesture, such as the sign of the cross, very quickly, before evil spirits could come to take over the momentarily spiritually vacant carcass. Demonic "possession" was the result, quite simply, of inhaling one or more of the evil breaths thought to hover in the air around us. For early Christians, the Devil's breath was everywhere.
Of course, not all possession was necessarily evil. People could become "inspired" - that is, the breath of a god could take over their bodies to deliver words of wisdom or apocalyptic admonitions. Indeed, the origin of the Christian church itself was thought to have originated in an act of mass possession by the Holy Ghost ("Holy Breath" in the Greek text!). In Acts 4:31 we read that when the Apostles and others "had ended their prayer, the building where they were assembled rocked, and all were filled with the Holy Spirit [breath] and spoke the word of God with boldness." (Given the close association of words with breath - thought to be life itself — is it any wonder that religions of all kinds have always focused on the magical significance of words?)
Lest anyone still think the link between breath and the foundations of Christianity be doubtful, attention is drawn to the tale running through John 20:22. Jesus has come back to visit the Disciples to tell them that he is sending them out to forgive or not forgive the sins of the world. "Then he [Jesus] breathed on them, saying, 'Receive the Holy Spirit!' " Right from the beginning, Christianity was based upon warm breath — which in time became hot air.
Modern biologists, unlike the ancient makers of myths, know that all the phenomena of living systems can be reduced to physical and chemical terms. They have no evidence of any 'vital force' or mystical spirit — and no need to seek for such. They recognize the fully alive body and the newly dead body to be but two arbitrary points along a continuum of decreasing organization.
So much for spirit, soul, and ghost. Originally denoting breath or wind, they are words which have acquired a host of mystical connotations as prescientific people attempted to account for the difference between life and death. But what of the word mind? Does it refer to anything real? Or is it, too, a fabulous entity?
Unlike the analysis of spirit and soul, the analysis of mind is not at all simple. This is so largely through the grammatical accident that in all the European languages, ancient as well as modern, the word mind is a noun.
We tend to think of nouns as substantive: table, chair, and plumb-bob are all nouns, and all are substantial. There are many words, however, which though grammatically nouns, are not at all substantial. Words like beauty, truth, and velocity would be examples. Unfortunately, our thinking tends to be hedged around by the grammar and hidden assumptions of the language with which we think. And so it happens again and again that abstract nouns come to be thought of as representing things just as substantial as those represented by common nouns. And thus we have the basic confusion necessary to found philosophical systems such as Plato's — whose perfect triangularity exists in triangle-heaven, and so on.
Because mind was a noun, it was conceived to be a thing. Because it was thought to be a thing, it was thought to have existence apart from the brain. Because it has independent existence, it was thought capable of survival after the death of the body. And millions thought that to be good reason to invest millions in that greatest of all businesses, religion
Neurobiological studies show all these ideas to be quite worthless. Mind is a process, a dynamic relation, and not a thing. If we change the processes of the brain, we change the mind. The psychedelic drugs have taught us that fact, if nothing else. The history of western philosophy and religion, as well as science, would have been quite different if the word mind had developed as a verb instead of as a noun.
To wonder where the mind goes after the brain decays is as silly as asking where the 70-miles-per-hour have gone after a speeding auto has crashed into a tree. Just as the relative motion of an auto can be altered only within certain limits and still represent the process called "speeding," so too we can alter the functioning of the brain only so much before the process called "mind" or "thinking" becomes altered out of existence.
Now that scientists recognize mind as a process rather than a thing, they are making rapid advances in understanding the specific brain dynamics that correspond to the various subjective states collectively known as mind. Certain drugs are known, for example, that affect certain neural paths and centers in the brain to produce the psychic state known as euphoria. Others affect other circuits and produce depression or sleep. We can implant electrodes in the brain and cause the subject to "hear" bells and symphonies that aren't "there" at all. We can be made to "see" figures and lights without using our eyes at all, by stimulating the visual cortex at the back of the brain. We can cause to appear the emotions of rage, sexuality, sorrow, religious awe, etc., by altering the dynamic functions of the brain in appropriate ways. We are beginning to understand how neural circuits compete with each other to give us the illusion of "free will." Indeed, we are on the verge of being able to write equations relating the physicochemical states of the nervous system with the subjective, mental states described by psychologists and other mystics. In short, we are learning to study subjective states objectively.
Whether or not we shall be any more responsible in the application of this new knowledge than we were in the application of fire, dynamite, and atomic energy remains to be seen. Even the un-average person plays ill the part of Prometheus. Unless we, collectively the new Prometheus, judge wisely what to do with our new psychobiological powers, like Prometheus we may find ourselves chained to rocks, our vitals torn by eagles. Or worse.
- Psychology and the Soul: A Study of the Origin, Conceptual Evolution, and Nature of the Soul by Otto Rank
- The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain by Paul M. Churchland
- Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson
- The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason by Mark Johnson
- The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Francisco J. Varela
- Imagining The Soul: A History by Rosalie Osmond
- Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett
- The Conscious Mind : In Search of a Fundamental Theory by David J. Chalmers
- The Mystery of Consciousness by John R. Searle
- The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates by Ned Block
- Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation by Jaegwon Kim
