Science

Delving into a bag of books and magazines yesterday, I pulled out a 2013 issue of Skeptic. Thumbing through it, I found a highlighted article that must have been the reason I saved the magazine.

Good title: "What Science Really Says About the Soul," by Stephen Cave. Being fairly short, I'll include the piece in its entirety at the end of this post, after sharing some selected quotes.

His arguments against the existence of some sort of non-material bubble of divine consciousness are pretty darn good. I've made most of them myself in my own highly-persusive blog posts during the past 10+ years. 

They're difficult to refute. 

One is what I like to call the Baseball Bat Argument. If an eternal non-physical conscious soul is our genuine essence, why doesn't some sign of it manifest when the brain is injured, like after the head is hit with a baseball bat?

Cave says:

The evidence of science, when brought together with an ancient argument, provides a very powerful case against the existence of a soul that can carry forward your essence once your body fails.

…every part of the mind can now be seen to fail when some part of the brain fails.

…But if we each have a soul that enables us to see, think and feel after the total destruction of the body, why, in the cases of dysfunction documented by neuroscientists, do these souls not enable us to see, think and feel when only a small portion of the brain is destroyed?

…But if the soul can see when the entire brain and body have stopped working, why, in the case of people with damaged optic nerves, can’t it see when only part of the brain and body have stopped working? In other words, if blind people have a soul that can see, why are they blind?

…In fact, evidence now shows that everything the soul is supposed to be able to do—think, remember, love—fails when some relevant part of the brain fails. Even consciousness itself—otherwise there would be no general anesthetics.

Cave goes on to present an oft-heard explanation for why damage to the brain results in malfunctioning consciousness: soul consciousness is like electromagnetic waves, and the brain is like a television. The waves are separate from the television, but can't be received/perceived without a TV as long as we are alive.

Not a good argument, as Cave demonstrates.

Most believers expect their soul to be able to carry forward their mental life with or without the body; this is like saying that the TV signal sometimes needs a TV set to transform it into the picture, but once the set is kaput, can make the picture all by itself. But if it can make the picture all by itself, why does it sometimes act through an unreliable set?

…Second, changes to our bodies impact on our minds in ways not at all analogous to how damage to a TV set changes its output, even if we take into account damage to the camera too. The TV analogy claims there is something that remains untouched by such damage, some independent broadcaster preserving the real program even if it is distorted by bad reception. But this is precisely what the evidence of neuroscience undermines.

…Which suggests we are nothing like a television; but much more like, for example, a music box: the music is not coming from elsewhere, but from the workings within the box itself. When the box is damaged, the music is impaired; and if the box is entirely destroyed, then the music stops for good.

Not good news. But reality isn't set up to deliver what humans prefer. Reality is what it is. Understanding that "it is" is the goal of science, whereas religion specializes in "what we'd like to be."

For many years, 35 or so, I managed to be semi-scientifically-minded while still holding to a belief in soul and spirit. Why? Because it felt good to do this.

I didn't like the idea of dying and being gone forever (still don't, for that matter).

So I embraced the feel-good stories told by a mystical Indian teaching and rejected the evidence of science in this regard. Now, though, I resonate with Cave's final paragraph.

There is much about consciousness that we still do not understand. We are only beginning to decipher its mysteries, and may never fully succeed. But all the evidence we have suggests that the wonders of the mind—even near-death and out of body experiences—are the effect of neurons firing. Contrary to the beliefs of the vast majority of people on Earth, from Hindus to New Age spiritualists, consciousness depends upon the brain and shares its fate to the end.

The full Cave article can be found in a continuation to this post.