Keraleeyan

I am trying to write a rebuttal to a popular book on spirituality. The argument that I am now dealing-in essence- is this: "Brain is just an instrument of soul".(Afterall, our body is just matter.It is the soul, which is beyond matter and beyond death, that makes human or any other organism, live...)

I know this is plain nonsense.But how can the bubble be burst effectively?

A few things that I thought out -doesn't seem really good enough:
1-We can use the "plurality should not be posited without necessity" argument - that there simply is no need to drag in a supernatural explanation here.However I doubt whether the general reader with little habit of critical thinking will be much moved.(So, this fellow is not saying that instrument of soul theory is WRONG-just that it is not necessary for his purpose!)
2-May be, we can explain that this particular statement is non falsifiable, and any other claim-like some green martian is the real entity that runs our brains-have equal probability of being true.This again, may be inadequate.(You are comparing an idea described in the holy books of so many religions and believed by countless generation of great men to some figament of your own imagination!!)

Any bright idea for bursting the bubble with some good sound effect?

Corona688

Ask to have explained what the soul IS, in actual, scientific, terms. They can't do it.

Undercurrent

1) If the brain is just an instrument of the soul, why is the mind affected so harshly by injuring or applying chemicals to the brain?

2) Pretend you're a soul. Why would you ever bother playing puppeteer to a body? Especially when you're so far "beyond matter and beyond death". Does the book's author really expect us to believe in this great, luminous being with super powers, who has nothing better to do than slap around some slab of meat all day?

m.

ps418

By mentioning the huge body of empirical evidence against it. For instance, if my brain is simply an instrument of my soul, then why am I able to change my subjective perceptions and emotions simply by altering my brain? Why would changes in the instrument produce changes in the 'soul'? Keith Augustine's article on <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/immortality.html" target="_blank">The Case Against Immortality</a> says of the instrument theory:

crocodile deathroll

However, when you die you will totally forget that you had ever been born in the first place and as such would be subjectively identical to never been born in the first place.

crocodile deathroll

The soul is "sentient time" in as much as when you are in slow wave deep sleep you have no perception of time therefore no soul.
You had no sense of time for what is estimated on current reckoning to be around 14 billion years, and as such no "soul" for 14 billion years and unless informed by a modern day cosmologist then it might as well of been a attosecond as far as you were concerned. And if you did not have a soul for an eternity then it would be subjectively no different to an attosecond. So any length of insentient time is infinitely overshadowed by the most slightly perceptible sentient time. Even a 100 milliseconds of sentient time would be perceived as being infinitely longer than an insentient 10^10^10^100 years. So any length of time means nothing to us unless one is consciously aware of it.

It is as though the universe necessary stumbled on a way to become aware of itself.

[ November 19, 2002: Message edited by: crocodile deathroll ]</p>

Sakpo

ps418:

I really enjoyed the article you linked to. Thanks. I need to read articles from the main site more often.

DigitalDruid

I think it would be legitimate for you to trace the verious popular meanings of soul thus driving
home the point that it is a nebulous ever-changing concept.

Off hand, I can think of the following to support this thesis:

Most cultural anthropologists believe that the soul or spirit had its origin in the primitive man’s effort to explain death and natural phenomena. The concept seems to have originated independently in diverse societies and cultures adding credence to such a view.

Naturally, soul was found to have such great "explanatory power" that not only religion but even ancient philosophy adopted it in some form.

For example, Plato held that a person has a body, as well as, a soul. Your soul determines your psychological traits. Plato even divided a soul into three parts:
The rational element: enables you to reason.
The spirited element: gives you strength of will.
The appetitive element: your desires and passions.
Plato argued that a person is psychologically healthy if the three parts of one’s soul functions harmoniously. So there was nothing religious in Plato’s conception of soul; it was just a device to help explain a person’s psychological life.

Soul was important for Aristotle too. He in fact defined happiness as an activity of the soul in accord with perfect virtue. Basically he is saying happiness is not a destination but a by-product of doing your activities the right way.

So soul was a darling of Greek philosophy.

Plato and Aristotle were such powerful influences that no religion or sect of the time dared to deviate from their views too much. Consequently, when Christians theologians synthesized neo-Platonism and later Aristotelianism into Christian theology, aspects of the Greek philosophical conceptions about soul became incorporated into Christianity. But the theologians added a religious twist to soul. Consequently the concept of the soul changed from the time of Origen, who regarded it as being the same in all human beings, to the time of St. Thomas Aquinas, who considered every soul to be unique! This had important consequences for the Christian doctrine of immortality. So what Christians now believe whatever a "soul" is - is the result of a long historical process of refinement and revision. It is not "in the Bible".

As an aside, Islamic theology borrowed freely from the same Platonic idea of a soul and further refined it. So they talk of "animal soul" and "human soul".

Here’s another example of the church’s ever-changing view of the soul and its consequences:

Directly borrowing Aristotle’s idea, influential Catholic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas declared that male fetuses are ensouled (get soul) at 40 days after conception, and female fetuses after 80 days. Accordingly those days the church did allow abortions in these early stages of a fetus. A point which many pro-life Catholics either are unaware of or ignore.

But now I think the official Catholic line is that the soul enters a zygote right at conception. Now this leads to some amusing scenarios as well. Medical science tells us that a zygote after say 15 days of conception can split into two identical twins. So what happens to the soul of the original zygote? Does it split too? Or does it die off? Probably, not since Christian soul is supposed to be immortal! But splitting of soul is not biblical either. Not only that, since the original ensouled zygote is deemed to be a full-fledged ’person’, should we grieve her demise and at the same time celebrate the arrival of two new tiny ensouled beings (the twins)?

This is just to show that the concept of Christian soul do run into various difficulties.

Of course you should critique soul from other perspectives too (we know from science that the brain subsumes some of the classical function of the soul; Plato’s soul - for example - etc.). But I think adding a historical perspective on the development of the concept of soul would add depth and solidify your argument. Good luck!

Keraleeyan

To corona688
"Ask to have explained what the soul IS, in actual, scientific, terms. They can't do it"

True.Certainly they won't be able to do it. However, neither the author nor the average believer seems to require any precise scientific definition. The author I am dealing with defines soul as "the one who does,experiences and knows" (my translation-the original language is Malayalam, the language of my place.This is closely related to the ancient language,sanskrit).This kind of description again, seems to 'touch a chord' with the 'man in the street' who WANTS TO BELIEVE that he/she is something superior to 'mere matter' and even 'mere beast'.

crocodile deathroll

I do not think I am more superior to mere matter when you consider the mind boggling mechanics of mere matter. Sure mere matter is just mere matter when we reduce to down the mere quarks and leptons
The quarks in my body are totally indistinguishable to the quarks in your's. Same mass same spin. So matter being so homogeneous at that level leads me to think we are more than just matter but we are in fact the configuration of matter. We are an emergent property of complex matter as the universe enters a critical level of complexity.
The same analogy could be used for iron atoms as stars explode out into supernovas. Iron is the final finishing touch on stellar evolution. But all that extra iron emerging in the universe did not make it any heavier, only more complex. It is only the configuration of matter as an emergent property as the universe. In the early universe there was not only no trace of consciousness but no trace of iron.
But matter as the right degree of complexity and conditions did consciousness emerge with an brand new property of its own, Something which quarks, hydrogen, carbon, iron and microbes failed to deliver a sensation of space and time.