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WillowOne's Positions

Souls

My Positions

  1. There is no evidence that human beings possess an immaterial soul, and I do not hold that they do.
  2. Everything the soul was invented to explain (thought, memory, personality, moral sense, the feeling of being someone) is better explained as what the brain does.
  3. The claim stands or falls with mind-body dualism. I reject dualism, so I reject the soul.

Notes

  1. The soul is supposed to carry who you are. In most religious accounts it is the seat of personality, memory and moral character, and it is what survives death. But personality, memory and character are demonstrably brain-dependent. Phineas Gage became a different man when an iron rod went through his frontal lobe in 1848. Dementia dismantles a person piece by piece while they are still alive. Strokes remove language, recognition of faces, or the left half of the world. Anaesthesia switches the person off and on again. If the soul held who you are, brain damage should leave it untouched; it does not. If the soul does not hold who you are, then whatever survives death is not you, and the consolation on offer is for someone else.
  2. The interaction problem. An immaterial substance that moves matter would be detectable precisely where it did so, as an unexplained input into the physics of the brain. None has ever been found, and no mechanism has ever been proposed that does not simply restate the claim. Descartes nominated the pineal gland; we now know what the pineal gland does, and it is melatonin.
  3. When does it arrive? If at conception, then identical twins, who split after conception, share one soul or acquire a second from nowhere, and human chimeras, who are two fertilised eggs fused into one body, have two. If at some later point, the believer must name it. And since humans evolved by small steps from ancestors who are not supposed to have souls, there must have been a first child with a soul born to parents without one, which no one is willing to say out loud. See Evolution.
  4. Twenty-one grams. The claim that the soul weighs 21 grams comes from a single 1907 study by Duncan MacDougall of six dying patients on a bed-scale. One showed the loss; the rest were discarded for "technical difficulties". It is a data point, not a finding, and it is still quoted because it is the only measurement anyone has ever attempted.
  5. Why the belief is so natural. Children are intuitive dualists: they readily attribute thoughts and wishes to a dead mouse while agreeing that its brain has stopped working. The brain models the self as something that has a body rather than something that is one, and the soul is that model mistaken for an inventory. This is the same move I describe in The human need for religion: a real feature of the mind, misidentified as a feature of the world.
  6. Nothing of value depends on it. The moral standing of a person does not require an immaterial passenger; it rests on the fact that they have interests, can suffer, and can flourish (see Morality). Removing the soul from the account removes nothing except the afterlife, and I have dealt with that under Life After Death.

Sources

  • Harlow, J. M., "Recovery from the passage of an iron bar through the head", Publications of the Massachusetts Medical Society 2 (1868)
  • MacDougall, D., "Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of the Existence of Such Substance", American Medicine (April 1907)
  • Bloom, P., Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human (2004)

Also see