This is no longer accepted as true since it is equally evident today that without a physical brain thought appears unlikely to occur. Plato thought that the only way to explain how people come to know things is that they are remembering the knowledge implanted in their souls when the souls were in the realm of pure thought and eternal forms before entering into the body after which they forgot as they became confused by physical emotions an feelings and limited experiences through the senses.
This is no longer accepted as the best explanation of how people come to have knowledge. None the less, Plato is credited with being the first human to attempt to set out any sort of a proof that humans had souls and that they survived the death of the body and that they were immortal. Descartes also believed that the soul existed prior to and separate from the body see Meditation II of Meditations on First Philosophy and so was immortal.
In his view all of reality consisted of two very different substances: matter or the physical and spirit or the non-physical. The physical was what would be extended in time and space and the non-physical would not be so characterized. For Descartes the soul of a human exists prior to and separate from the body. His proof consisted of argumentation that has been seriously criticized and rejected. In , one of the most famous metaphysical experiments of the 20th century was performed by a Massachusetts physician.
His name was Duncan MacDougall, and he believed that, if the soul were real, it should have measurable weight. He therefore attempted to compare the weights of patients before and after death. He therefore performed similar measurements in dogs and found no loss in weight as the animals expired. This he regarded as confirmation of his belief that souls are found only in living human beings, and that when a human being dies, the soul leaves the body.
When his results were first published, critics argued that the weight loss could be explained by physiologic factors, such as evaporation.
Moreover, his report failed to mention several patients in whom he found no weight loss. Finally, subsequent attempts to reproduce his results failed to find any weight loss. So exactly how do we make sense of the relationship between the mind and the brain?
We know it is one of dependence, but for example how exactly does the brain produce mental activity? How can something without mental properties like the brain produce something with mental properties like the mind? And to simply interject the soul as an explanation for something we have yet to explain like consciousness is to actually present no explanation at all. Keep in mind, however, that the fact that we have yet to answer this question does not add any legitimacy to the soul hypothesis.
So we still know the soul hypothesis is false. It is not philosophically acceptable or rational to simply stick in your favorite supernatural explanation for something that has yet to be explained, and claim that as evidence for it. A slight typo needs to be corrected, I believe. Damage to the brain damages the antenna, keeping the soul from successfully communicating its intentions to the body, and thus preventing it from being able to make the body behave as it wishes.
Again, this is a common objection, but it is not a very good one. On this view however, it could not have damaged his mind. The best explanation for why brain damage causes the behaviour it does is because of the neurological explanations explicated in the paper—because the mind is dependent upon the brain, and the damage to one damages the other.
Often we equate the mind with the brain because we know that the mind is directly dependent upon the brain for existence. What would the next option be? Zero substances? Three substances? How is that going to help? That will just make things more complicated.
For example, one version of materialism — probably the one that you had in mind initially — is called Identity Theory, which suggests that the mind and the brain are numerically identical. But this is only one of many materialist views. Others philosophers suggest that, while the mind is certainly dependent upon the brain for its existence, it is not identical to the brain.
After all, dependence does not entail identity—as I discussed above. Some suggest that the emergent mind has causal powers — that it can causally affect what happens in the brain. Others, called epiphenomenalists, suggest that the mind exists, but does not have any causal powers. So as you can see, although, in one sense, there really are only two options dualism soul talk and materialism — materialism comes in so many different varieties, that in a very important sense there are many more than just two options for giving an account of our minds e.
Our intuitions are just not that reliable. To my knowledge, there are no arguments to this specific conclusion. When you consider your everyday experience look out upon the horizon , it seems that the world is flat; In the same way that, when you consider your everyday experience, it might seem that the mind is not material and reaches out from beyond the physical world and causes your body to move. There is no essence and there is.
Self seems too bland to describe this mysterious, enduring, one-per-person essence. Suzie, my ex-wife, rehabilitated wild birds. People would bring her baby birds that had fallen out of their nests, or adults that had run into a window, been clawed by a cat or wounded by a hunter.
Suzie specialized in raptors, such as hawks and owls, but she also took care of sparrows, crows, geese, herons, goldfinches, starlings, you name it. Suzie raised the babies, and nursed the adults back to health. If all went well, she released them into the wild. We lived with some of these birds for months and got to know them pretty well. And the better we knew the birds, the more we could discern differences between them. Each species had its own personality, and so did each individual bird.
This teenage blue jay would be reserved, that one bold, this sparrow shy and that one aggressive. We lived one summer with a crow named George who definitely had a mischievous, sweet soul. Value, you might argue, is proportional to individuality. We should cherish what is unique, one of a kind. If each bird has her own personality, her own soul, how horrible is the genocide that we commit against them, directly and indirectly!
This problem might not bother you if you think souls are immortal and hence that all organisms live happily forever and ever in heaven. Our tendency is to think that the more unlike us creatures are, the less likely they are to be conscious and hence deserving of ethical consideration.
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