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Plotinus
Growing Lion
Joined: 15 May 2007
Posts: 894
Location: Canada
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 Posted: Wed Nov 14, 2007 10:46 am Post subject: |
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| Argenta wrote: | The main evidence against a soul comes from our increasing understanding of how the brain works. Although, the brain is understood only at a high level, we do understand what many different parts of the brain do. We can be quite sure that our senses (vision, hearing, tastes etc), personality, emotions, reasoning, memory, behaviours, locomotion, recognition of objects, words, people etc, even our facial expressions arise from different parts of the brain. We know that because when specific parts of the brain are damaged, say after an accident or stroke, then the corresponding function ceases to work.
If any of these things arose from a non-material soul that could survive death, we could expect those aspects also to survive brain damage. But nothing, so far as we currently know does. Indeed there is a huge amount of evidence from neurology and psychology showing that everything that is human about us is a result of a physical brain. So there seems to be no room left for an invulnerable soul.
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It would obviously be a mistake to think that people who believe in the soul are not aware of these scientific facts. They have known that the deterioration of brain tissues is related to deterioration of intellectual ability for centuries. The issues were thoroughly discussed by Thomas Aquinas in medieval times, although not to a complete resolution of the issues. Aristotle argued that the soul is the actualisation of an organised physical body, and Aquinas was well read in Aristotle.
It is worth considering the implicit assumptions in your argument. One of these assumptions is that the soul is no more than the faculties you have listed. It is also true that a piece of music is no more than the succession of notes. Nevertheless, a succession of notes is not generally a piece of music.
I think that you are effectively arguing that the soul -- if it existed -- would be an homunculus within the brain, and that science has not found an homunculus within the brain. Whatever the soul is, it is not an homunculus. The fallacy in it has been pointed out by Gilbert Ryle (click on this link). Ryle's regress is also known as the homunculus fallacy (also clickable here). But not every theory of soul is an homunculus theory.
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One would never discover the limits of soul, should one traverse every road -- so deep a measure does it possess.
Heraclitus, fragment 45, quoted in Diogenes Laertius 9.7. |
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