Why I Don't Believe in the Soul

I spend a lot of my time in this blog arguing why I don't believe in God. Today I want to do something a little different. I want to talk, not about why I don't believe in God or gods, not about why some particular religion's belief in God is mistaken or contradictory... but about why I don't believe in the soul.

A lot of people who don't believe in God per se still believe in some sort of soul, some sort of metaphysical substance or animating spirit that inhabits people and other living things. And I think this is mistaken. I think it's every bit as mistaken an idea as God is.

And today, I want to talk about why. I want to talk about why everything that we think of as the soul -- consciousness, identity, character, free will -- is much more likely to be a product of our brains and our bodies and the physical world, than a metaphysical substance inhabiting our bodies but somehow separate and distinct from it.

Much, much, much more likely.

Here's the thing. I know that there are enormous unanswered questions about how the mind works, and indeed what it is. The questions of what consciousness is, how it's created, how it works... these are questions that we don't really have answers to yet. Ditto identity and selfhood. And we're not sure that free will even exists, much less how it works. The science of neuropsychology, and the scientific understanding of consciousness, are very much in their infancy. In fact, I would argue that "What is consciousness?" is one of the great scientific questions of our time.

But infant science or not, there are a few things we know about consciousness, identity, character, the ability to make decisions, etc.

And one of the things we know is that physical changes to the brain can and do result in changes to the consciousness, the identity, the character, the ability to make decisions. Changes caused by injury, illness, drugs and medicines, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, oxygen deprivation, etc., can and do result in changes to everything we think of as the "soul." Even some very small changes to the brain -- small doses of medicine or drugs, injuries or interventions to just a small area of the brain -- can result in some very drastic changes indeed.

In some cases, they can do so to the point of rendering a person's personality completely unrecognizable. Physical changes to the brain can make people unable to care about their own families. They can make people unable to make decisions. They can make smart people stupid, anxious people calm, happy people irritable, crazy people less crazy. They can render everything we know about a person, everything that makes that person who they are, totally null and void. Read Oliver Sacks, read V. S. Ramachandran, read any modern neurologist or neuropsychologist, and you'll see what I'm talking about. It's fucking freaky, actually, just how fragile are mind and self, consciousness and character.

And, of course, we have the rather drastic change to consciousness and character and coherent identity and the ability to make decisions, known as "death."

Simply cut off oxygen or blood flow to the brain for a relatively short time, and a person's consciousness and self and ability to take action in the world will not just change but vanish -- completely, and permanently. (Attempts to find solid evidence supporting life after death have been utterly unsuccessful: reports of it abound, but when carefully examined using good scientific methodology, they fall apart like a house of cards.)

Now.

Think about any other phenomenon in the world. When Physical Action A results in Effect B, we think of that as a physical phenomenon. Apply heat to water, and get steam; apply force to an object, and get motion; apply electricity to metals in certain ways, and get magnetism; apply vinegar to baking soda, and get gobs of rapidly expanding foam. These are physical events, every one. Only the most hard-line religious believers insist that God's hand is in every physical action that takes place everywhere in the universe. Most rational, reasonably- well- educated people understand that the physical world is governed by laws of physical cause and effect.

So.

We have a phenomenon, or a set of phenomena: consciousness, selfhood and identity, character and personality, the ability to make decisions. There's a lot we don't know about these phenomena yet, but one of the few things we do know is that physical changes to a person's brain will result in changes to the phenomena. Small changes or drastic ones, depending on the stimulus.

Doesn't that look like a biological process?

Doesn't that look like phenomena that are governed by physical cause and effect?

Even though we don't fully understand them, don't these phenomena have all the hallmarks of a physical event, or function, or relationship?

I mean, even when we didn't know what gravity was (which, if I understand the science correctly, we still don't fully grasp), once we got the idea of it we understood that it was a physical phenomenon. Once we got the idea and began studying and observing it, we didn't try to explain it by invisible spirit- demons living inside objects and pulling towards each other. We could see that it was physical objects having an effect on other physical objects, and we understood that it was a physical force.

In other words, we don't need to completely understand a phenomenon to recognize it as a physical event, governed by laws of physical cause and effect.

And when you start looking at the "soul," you realize that that's exactly what it looks like, too.

Everything that we call the "soul" is affected by physical events in our bodies, and those events alter it, shape it, and eventually destroy it. Apply opiates to the brain, and get euphoria; apply a stroke to the brain, and get impairment in the ability to understand language; apply vigorous physical exercise to the brain, and get stress reduction; apply repeated blows to the brain, and get loss of memory and intelligence. Apply anesthesia to the brain, and create the temporary obliteration of consciousness. Remove blood or oxygen to the brain, and create its permanent obliteration. It looks exactly like a physical, biological process: a poorly understood one as of yet, but a biological process nonetheless.

And there's no reason to believe otherwise. The theory that the soul is some sort of metaphysical entity or substance has no solid evidence to back it up. Just as with life after death, attempts to find evidence for a spirit or soul have consistently withered and died when exposed to the searing light and heat of the scientific method. And there's never been any good explanation of how, exactly, the metaphysical soul is supposed to influence and interact with the brain and the body.

Not to mention why it can be so drastically altered when the body alters.

Is there energy inhabiting our brain and our body? Yes, of course. There are electrical impulses running through our brains and up and down our nerves; there are chemical signals being transmitted through our muscles and guts; we consume food energy and radiate heat.

But is there some sort of non-physical energy inhabiting our brain and our body? Is there some sort of non-physical energy generating our consciousness, our personality, our coherent identity, our ability to make decisions?

There's no reason to think so.

We have an enormous amount yet to learn about self and will, consciousness and character. But everything we know about them points to them being physical phenomena. And the more we learn about them, the more true that becomes.

Other posts in this series:

"A Relationship Between Physical Things": Yet Another Rant On What Consciousness And Selfhood Might Be
A Lattice of Coincidence: Metaphysics, the Paranormal, and My Answer to Layne
How I Became an Atheist, Why I Became an Atheist: Part 3

Comments

[Frank DN]

I had a stroke 10 years ago that radically altered my personality. It left me in constant pain, it made me unable to care about anything. I had to be trained how to walk again because I could not remember how. And it killed the part of my mind that embraced faith and allowed me to be a believer. I was a gung ho Christian for 20 years but the stroke wiped that out like it was nothing. All of my priorities were either altered or eliminated. In fact, I changed so much I changed my name. All of that because of a few seconds of oxygen deprivation to a certain area of my brain. A soul? No. Haven't got one, never did, despite thinking to the contrary previously.

[Mike]

This post of yours reminds me of what I consider Ebon's best essay on his atheism pages:

http://ebonmusings.org/atheism/ghost.html

It goes into much greater detail and really develops a robust, thorough argument against the existence of the soul. So readers of this blog post might find Ebon's essay quite interesting. It was certainly the most compelling essay I read when I was struggling with faith. Fascinating and thought-provoking stuff.

[Valhar2000]

Frank DN: I'm sorry to hear that; it can't have been pleasant.

What sort of evidence have people proposed in favour of the idea of "a soul". The only thing I've ever seen is people's desire for there to be a soul, and there sharp annoyance when the vapidity of this idea is pointed out.

[Ebonmuse]

What I'm truly looking forward to is the day we have real, scientific explanations for exactly how the architecture of the brain produces the sensations of consciousness. It's a hard problem, probably the hardest one we'll ever tackle, but I don't think it will prove insoluble. As complex as the brain is, ultimately it's just an issue of engineering. And though it may seem incredible that we could ever understand how neural firing could produce, say, the sensation of red, I think our understanding is so rudimentary that we don't even know the right questions to ask.

Carl Sagan speaks of "the great demotions" - the Copernican realization that humanity was not the center of the universe, the Darwinian realization that we're not the miraculous pinnacle of creation. I think the scientific understanding of the mind is going to be the last and most conclusive of those, the one that shows the mind has a natural basis and that we are fundamentally physical creatures. The forces of religion haven't even felt this blow yet, but I don't think it will be much longer.

[Kagehi]

Sadly, when that day comes its going to be a "case study" or "one" consciousness, and the soul people will still be babbling about how it doesn't prove anything, because just because you can explain "one" result, doesn't mean you can explain all of them. Its not going to be something clear, cut and dried. Its going to be more like the fossil record, where you have the "end result" in clear, sharp and distinct detail, some prior forms in clear, but less distinct detail, and a lot of fuzziness the farther you go back into the past of a person to try to project how the specific pattern resulted. While the "artifacts" of all the data will be there, the causation of the artifacts and the entire data set that generated them, will, based on what I have seen, be only statistically definable, not concrete. Most of the data was either never recorded in early development/childhood, when pathways and function was getting layed down, but not clear memory, or will have been so severely distorted by a constant flux of fading or amplification, that, at best, the most we could ever say is how you could produce the same "mind", more or less, while never the less, skipping 10%-20% of everything that ever happened to them (at a guess), and instead introducing things that generate the same connections, from experiences that the original perhaps never had at all.

[Joreth]

There is a single celled organism who lives out its life in the bloodstream of rats. But it can only reproduce itself in the stomach of a cat. A cat eats an infected rat and the organism reproduces in the cat's stomach. Then the cat poops it out and a rat comes into contact with the cat feces and gets infected.

The problem is that rats are naturally afraid of cats and do their darnedest to not get eaten by them. This would seem like an evolutionary flaw on the part of the organism. But the organism has a solution for this.

The organism actually reprograms the rat's brain to make it not afraid of cats. This allows the rat to get near enough to a cat that the cat can eat it and continue the organism's life cycle.

Now here's the scary part. This organism affects human brains.

This organism is responsible for Crazy Cat Lady syndrom, or cat hoarders. It has long been established that there is some kind of mental instability in the "hoarders" - people who live in squalor and filth to collect cats. The people AND the cats' lives are in danger because of the filth they are forced to live in. We've known they were mentally unstable for years.

What we didn't know was that this mental disorder was artificially created by another organism.

A single-celled organism can actually reprogram a human brain.

And a human with this new programming will drastically alter her personality because of a tiny, microscopic, unthinking cell.

If our "souls" were somehow apart from our bodies, something metaphysical, something greater than biological, this would not be possible.

The very essense of who we are can be altered by the mere presence of a single cell.

[Greta Christina]

Joreth, that is fascinating. I'd heard of the organism that makes rats not afraid of cats -- it's fascinating, and it's important for people who are interested in evolution to remember, when considering questions of "What's the evolutionary value of X?" But I hadn't heard about its effect on people.

I'm curious -- where did you find this out? And how can they be sure of the causation? It seems to me (actually, Ingrid pointed this out) that a cat hoarder would be exposed to a lot of cat diseases, including this organism. So being a cat hoarder might be the cause and not the effect. Why do they think that it's the other way around?

[Kieran Bennett]

Dear Godless Scumbag, Carnival of the Godless has arrived, and you're in it. Burn in hell.
http://www.kieranbennett.com/2008/08/03/carnival-of-the-godless-97/

[William R. Bunge]

I don't believe in the soul because the soul is not an "object" that can be transported to heaven, hell, sheol ... what ever. The soul is a process and such, ceases upon death.

[terry d.]

A view of neutral monism seems more likely to me than materialism; matter can be reduced to energy, and some fun studies about quantum particles filling in all that mass in atoms and molecules from the energy they release as they move back and forth from elsewhere to thiswhere have come out in the past year. Granted I'm a laymen and the math is beyond me, but with that and relativity, raw energy, sometimes so much of it that it attains material form to store it, seems to be the basest element of all reality to me, so while everything you say makes a great deal of sense, I think the material interactions of neurons will one day be reduced by far better minds than mine to the energy that creates their physical mass in the first place. Because of this I think the term "materialist view of life" could end up limiting what is obviously a worldview you have spent a great deal of time and intellectual effort to cultivate, but I am just waxing ontologically here. Materialism also has a great deal of politically slanted ties to 20th century Soviet philosophy, as dialectic materialism was the underlying principle they tried to stretch across several scientific disciplines to tie more and more areas of inquiry into a supposedly overarching ideology, which seems to be to be the opposite of free thought. Thanks for writing