Does Christian faith require belief in brainless minds?

[Luminous]

The Zeitgeist videos are so convinzing.

 

[rocketman]

If souls are to be associated with right and wrong decisions, then they surely must have some ability to process information.

We might be in agreement if by 'processing' you mean weighing situations in terms of sheer blind concepts with no specific detail. The brain/mind can weigh issues itself, but down to what level? No doubt 'we' use our 'mind' when deliberately making considered decisions, and we also know with some precision how it is that many involuntary aspects of the brain/mind work, but there is a mysterious fog so far when it comes to many higher order voluntary matters. I don't think it is unreasonable to attribute such things to emergent properties, but then I would also expect a soul to perform some similar functions. (They are very close concepts in some ways). One could also argue that a sleeping soul does not 'emerge' to be interactive in this world until the right physical pieces are in place. What falsifiable predictions could we test to sort the two concepts apart?

I am not the strict reductionist that you accuse me of being, by the way.

Quite right, my apologies. Some of your reasoning is classically reductionist though, which is more what I had in mind to say. I fear that some of the more abstract concepts I am trying to relate to you are being lost at the first sign of orthodox definition presented by the limited choice of words I have at my disposal.

What the corpus callosum operation proves is that two independent cognitive beings with different experiences can by created by cutting off communication between the two halves of the brain.

It would be very hard to pick most split-brain patients under normal circumstances without special tests if you didn't know. They generally report they don't feel as though they have two minds at any one time. What they have is two available states of perception in special circumstances. It is now known that some communication between the two halves can still take place through the base brain, although the efficiency is variable. Some point to the fact that both sides can hold different emotions and memories, but this just proves my point that there is something deeper down which accesses these elements. One thing these and other operations show us is that our brain makes it's own 'mind' up about many things, and thus we are very much observers, even of our own mind. But what is doing the observing?

That is just one piece of evidence that the mind is somehow grounded in physical reality.

And that I have agreed with all along. But what does it say about the probability of a soul? You seem want to assign soul-functions to the mind as a way of showing that christian beliefs are probably false, and I have been saying that we cannot rule out that there are different roles for the mind and soul to play, whatever they may be. You say mind functions change with changes in a brain, I agree but add that a soul has no choice but to recieve from the mind inputs of all types and qualities, even if that means misleading ones. Because we both expect to see exactly the same things happening in the physical, I don't see what makes your view any more valid than mine.

Perhaps, but we have no good reason to think so.

I think we do. Our deepest sense of self is one. I'm not talking about our identity built out of specific physical experience, but rather the part of us that can imagine being in another body, or perhaps some other existence altogether. There is an 'I' buried deep within. My view is that there is but ultimately one person per brain beneath and despite all complications and imperfections. The 'I' seems to have some seperation from the physically-aware aspects of the mind, perhaps for now depending on a conscious mind for it's own awakening. I note that the mind can influence the brain, and I have no trouble entertaining the thought that the 'I' in you and I is more than meets the microscope. I think belief in a soul is reasonable.

It is all well and good to imagine that we are reincarnated as a sort of 'optimal' self, but what is really optimal in any of us? Can such a thing even be calculated?

You say optimal, I said 'appropriate'.

There are so many questions that one might ask oneself about just what it means to say we are reincarnated in an afterlife, and I sense that most Christians are very reluctant to ask themselves those questions lest the extra scrutiny damage the credibility of the entire belief system. Too much is at stake to examine it too closely.

Remember that they believe in miracles over science in this area. I think the example of Jesus after his bodily resurrection would give them cause for comfort. The ressurection is after all about as central to Christianity as you can get.

That would be true for Christians as well, wouldn't it? Especially if the "true" miracle or spiritual event were in support of an alternative religious doctrine.

Indeed.

 

[rocketman]

So I think that we ought to have good positive evidence for belief in gods and/or souls. Religious belief is not harmless. It is serious business.

Well, now we swing into much larger issues. There is a bloke named Joshua Greene from Harvard who has similar concerns about the idea of souls being potentialy hazardous for society. You may enjoy this appeal of his:

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-Last-Stand.pdf

But I think he is missing the point, as are you. I think it's ultimately a fear of nothing. Billions believe in a soul, yet only a tiny fraction seriously disrupt society as a direct or indirect result of such beliefs. Few issues in this area cannot be solved with common sense and people of good example. Greene, as you may already be aware, is attempting to 'scientifically disprove' the soul, so far unsuccessfully. If doing that were so essential for societies good, as he the self-appointed rescuer insists, then I would have thought legions of scientists would be rallying to the cause.

 

[darkendless]

Well, now we swing into much larger issues. There is a bloke named Joshua Greene from Harvard who has similar concerns about the idea of souls being potentialy hazardous for society. You may enjoy this appeal of his:

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-Last-Stand.pdf

But I think he is missing the point, as are you. I think it's ultimately a fear of nothing. Billions believe in a soul, yet only a tiny fraction seriously disrupt society as a direct or indirect result of such beliefs. Few issues in this area cannot be solved with common sense and people of good example. Greene, as you may already be aware, is attempting to 'scientifically disprove' the soul, so far unsuccessfully. If doing that were so essential for societies good, as he the self-appointed rescuer insists, then I would have thought legions of scientists would be rallying to the cause.

Billions are programmed to believe they have a soul much like billions are programmed to believe in god.

 

[Japaholic]

The ability of the mind to survive death seems fundamental to Christian doctrine, as it is to so many non-Christian doctrines.

Minds must be able to survive death in order for Christian doctrine to make sense. Do you agree? If not, then what is meant by "everlasting life"?

Depends on the condition of the mind at the moment of death, the manner of death and the preparation the individual has made for their death.

To use an analogy I refer to data on a computer. If you save your work it will be there after the computer is switched off. If you dont save and simply switch off the works gone. A freeze/crash and you might retain some of it.

If you havn't written anything (seen or done anything in life) then there is nothing to save.

 

[kai]

I have often wondered what kind of place an afterlife could be to difuse the agony of not being with your loved ones

 

[Copernicus]

We might be in agreement if by 'processing' you mean weighing situations in terms of sheer blind concepts with no specific detail. The brain/mind can weigh issues itself, but down to what level? No doubt 'we' use our 'mind' when deliberately making considered decisions, and we also know with some precision how it is that many involuntary aspects of the brain/mind work, but there is a mysterious fog so far when it comes to many higher order voluntary matters. I don't think it is unreasonable to attribute such things to emergent properties, but then I would also expect a soul to perform some similar functions. (They are very close concepts in some ways). One could also argue that a sleeping soul does not 'emerge' to be interactive in this world until the right physical pieces are in place. What falsifiable predictions could we test to sort the two concepts apart?

I think that your last question is the critical one. If a soul is non-physical, then one would expect it to operate independently of a physical brain, yet the operational details of any decision we make are grounded in physical situations, which can only be known through the embodied mind. You keep wanting to distill and abstract away from the physical, but I just don't see how you do it. Science has been able to ground too many mental dysfunctions in damage to specific areas of the brain. The most reasonable test would be to identify a mental function that is not tied to any brain-based behavioral disorder, perhaps.

...Some of your reasoning is classically reductionist though, which is more what I had in mind to say. I fear that some of the more abstract concepts I am trying to relate to you are being lost at the first sign of orthodox definition presented by the limited choice of words I have at my disposal.

There is a lot to be said for reductionism, as it seems necessary to really understand any concept. I just think that in recent years the observation of emergence in deterministic chaotic systems seems to have become a very important factor in explaining complex phenomena in nature. That order should emerge from chaos in a natural way seems to pose a serious challenge to arguments from design, which are strong underwriters of theistic beliefs. How do we explain order from chaos? Well, it could be God. Or maybe order just tends to emerge naturally from natural chaotic interactions, and we humans are just very strange attractors in the chaotic soup of reality.

It would be very hard to pick most split-brain patients under normal circumstances without special tests if you didn't know. They generally report they don't feel as though they have two minds at any one time...

But what, exactly, would that feel like? The very definition of two distinct minds is that they each only perceive their own subjective existences, so which mind is supposed to feel different in the split-brained patient? Which one is talking to us? Indeed, what makes you think that our own minds aren't really more like a resolution of competing personas, and that multiple personality disorders represent a case of the resolution being fragmented? We seem not to be conscious of most of the many simultaneous mental calculations that underly our conscious awareness. Maybe there is more than one focus of consciousness in every brain or hierarchical foci of consciousness. There are really many ways to think about how a physical brain might produce the illusion of a single identity.

...What they have is two available states of perception in special circumstances. It is now known that some communication between the two halves can still take place through the base brain, although the efficiency is variable. Some point to the fact that both sides can hold different emotions and memories, but this just proves my point that there is something deeper down which accesses these elements. One thing these and other operations show us is that our brain makes it's own 'mind' up about many things, and thus we are very much observers, even of our own mind. But what is doing the observing?

I suspect that a mind is more like a marketplace of competing and cooperating interests. Markets make decisions. They judge and react. We are all painfully aware of that in these times when the markets are reeling from having discovered that they have been infected with bad debt. Does a market have an immaterial soul? Almost certainly not. Does a brain need one to make decisions? Probably not.

...You seem want to assign soul-functions to the mind as a way of showing that christian beliefs are probably false, and I have been saying that we cannot rule out that there are different roles for the mind and soul to play, whatever they may be. You say mind functions change with changes in a brain, I agree but add that a soul has no choice but to recieve from the mind inputs of all types and qualities, even if that means misleading ones. Because we both expect to see exactly the same things happening in the physical, I don't see what makes your view any more valid than mine.

I would say Ockham's Razor. And I see things a little differently than you. I see you as trying to assign mind-functions to the soul as a way of showing that Christian beliefs are reasonable enough to contradict the notion that minds are fully grounded in material interactions. I see you as making an unnecessary hypothesis. You are conceding the physical grounding of many mental functions, but you are also assuming that there must be some non-physical component that makes it all work. I just don't see the necessity of jumping to that conclusion until we have found some way to test it. Of course, we can believe anything we can imagine about minds, souls, and gods. It just isn't a good idea to believe such things non-provisionally (purely on faith). Otherwise, we run the huge risk of overly complicating our models of reality.

There are so many questions that one might ask oneself about just what it means to say we are reincarnated in an afterlife, and I sense that most Christians are very reluctant to ask themselves those questions lest the extra scrutiny damage the credibility of the entire belief system. Too much is at stake to examine it too closely.

Remember that they believe in miracles over science in this area. I think the example of Jesus after his bodily resurrection would give them cause for comfort. The ressurection is after all about as central to Christianity as you can get.

I am well aware of that. It is not a story that makes as much sense in modern times as it did when scapegoating rituals for cleansing sins were common to a wide variety of religions in the region, but people tend not to question why God would pick that particular method to cleanse humanity of its sins.

Belief in miracles, of course, contradicts our common sense materialism, and modern folks are not as prone to using miracles for explanations of natural phenomena as they used to be. It is problematic for us, because, if events can be caused by undetectable supernatural forces, then there is no reason at all why science ought to work the way it does, with its underpinnings of philosophical naturalism. I take the success of science as evidence in the general failure of religion to provide us with satisfactory answers to our curiosity about how reality works.

So I think that we ought to have good positive evidence for belief in gods and/or souls. Religious belief is not harmless. It is serious business.

Well, now we swing into much larger issues. There is a bloke named Joshua Greene from Harvard who has similar concerns about the idea of souls being potentialy hazardous for society. You may enjoy this appeal of his:

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/...Last-Stand.pdf

Thanks. Haven't had time to read the whole thing, but it looks interesting.

But I think he is missing the point, as are you. I think it's ultimately a fear of nothing. Billions believe in a soul, yet only a tiny fraction seriously disrupt society as a direct or indirect result of such beliefs. Few issues in this area cannot be solved with common sense and people of good example. Greene, as you may already be aware, is attempting to 'scientifically disprove' the soul, so far unsuccessfully. If doing that were so essential for societies good, as he the self-appointed rescuer insists, then I would have thought legions of scientists would be rallying to the cause.

Even if the concept of soul were less vaguely defined--and it is the vagueness of definition that has interested me here--I doubt that it could be disproved. When it comes to empirical arguments about spiritual things, we always seem to need to fall back on Ockham's Razor, which is not ultimately a logical argument. However, I think that the more interesting question is not what can possibly exist, but what we can reasonably assume to exist.

 

[rocketman]

Copernicus, I think my situation, on the one hand having to deal with my rational and technical work which is deeply grounded in scientific method, maximizing precision and eliminating guesswork, and on the other hand, having been through events which, suffice it to say, were clearly (to me) on and/or from a different plane (lol), combine together to see me taking the general view of both not having a problem with anything that has been observed, but at the same time accepting that there is more going on than we can measure and count. So naturally I'm looking for ways to address both aspects.

If there were a watertight case for not having a soul I would happily accept that, but as Green says: "Officially, we scientists already know (or think we know) that dualism is false and that we are simply complex biological machines. But insofar as we know this, we know this in a thin, intellectual way. We haven’t seen the absence of the soul. Rather, we have inferred its absence ... " But even then I would still have to account for those other events in my life, and even knowing what I do about how the brain can fool itself, I still think I'd have a mighty hard time. I only wish I were better able to articulate what I see as good reasons, but I do not want to try any further as it usually only serves to dilute what little I may have been able to get across; as dear Mr Spock remarked to the good Dr McCoy: "It is impossible to discuss without a common frame of reference". Well, not impossible for you and I, but only beneficial up to a point.

Thanks for the interesting discussion Copernicus, good to have someone like you about, and I'm enjoying your blog too.

 

[Copernicus]

Thanks to you, too, RM. It is these kinds of discussions that make me try harder to tighten my thinking on these interesting subjects. I still haven't read Greene, but I have a quibble about dualism. I am an unapologetic dualist. The mind is not a material entity. The brain is. The issue isn't really over dualism, IMO, but over whether the immaterial mind is purely an emergent effect of physical interactions, much as a weather system is an emergent effect of atmospheric interactions. Can the mind be said to belong to a spiritual or supernatural plane of reality in any meaningful sense? A consequence of grounding it in the natural world, unfortunately, is that we must accept a pessimistic outlook on human mortality. When the brain dies, so does our existence. But there is a sense in which we are probably in the process of continual death and rebirth as we progress through time, and fear of death is as much a trick of the mind as one's sense of identity is.

 

[Runewolf1973]

Copernicus, I have much respect for your knowledge and understanding on the matter. I'll have to admit I don't have the greatest education on these matters, but it is interesting hearing the perspective of someone who does. That said, I have my own ways of understanding things, if not entirely scientific. Thank you for sharing your views.

 

[crystalonyx]

I have often wondered what kind of place an afterlife could be to difuse the agony of not being with your loved ones

Quite so, an argument I have thought of many times. Also, what or who are you in the afterlife, the person you were when you died (with all the experience and outlook then, or the person from some other time in your life).

Let's face it, a supposed afterlife is no panacea.

 

[Japaholic]

Also, what or who are you in the afterlife, the person you were when you died (with all the experience and outlook then, or the person from some other time in your life).

You are, put quite simply, the sum of all the parts. You can't know who you were before or it would mess up who you are now. When you die, what you learned in this life is added to the sum of all you are and if...

if you have learned enough you'll go up to the next level of consciousness. There being 7 layers to come to God and our reality is level 3. Each layer is incomprehensibly better (or inversely, worse) than the last.

Lots of spirits are arriving in this reality, but unfortunately not many are leaving for the next. Thats one explanation for the decline in animal numbers and the explosion in human numbers.

Anyway, you are the sum of all your parts. This reality is just one part.

 

[Copernicus]

Lots of spirits are arriving in this reality, but unfortunately not many are leaving for the next. Thats one explanation for the decline in animal numbers and the explosion in human numbers.

Japaholic, I would offer the alternative hypothesis that the explosion in human numbers is what is causing the decline in animal (and plant) numbers. It has nothing to do with spirits arriving and leaving, but with humans polluting the planet and making it uninhabitable for many life forms, their own included.

 

[logician]

You are, put quite simply, the sum of all the parts. You can't know who you were before or it would mess up who you are now. When you die, what you learned in this life is added to the sum of all you are and if...

if you have learned enough you'll go up to the next level of consciousness. There being 7 layers to come to God and our reality is level 3. Each layer is incomprehensibly better (or inversely, worse) than the last.

Lots of spirits are arriving in this reality, but unfortunately not many are leaving for the next. Thats one explanation for the decline in animal numbers and the explosion in human numbers.

Anyway, you are the sum of all your parts. This reality is just one part.

This makes no sense, I think you're making it up as you go along. How can one think w/o a brain? What is the dividing line between parts? What if you don't want some of the parts? HOw can one survive the terrible lonliness of the loss of one's family?

 

[DallasApple]

Well...I have a brain...And I dont believe there are "7 layers" of anything..There can be no layers..or infinity layers..

Love

Dallas

 

[Luminous]

Well, i believe anything is possible. but all "christian faith" requires is believe in jesus of Nazareth born of Mary (some say not of line of David).

 

[challupa]

Well, i believe anything is possible. but all "christian faith" requires is believe in jesus of Nazareth born of Mary (some say not of line of David).

And... the problem with belief being your salvation is that you will never go any deeper than that. You will miss out on your own divinity which is something that must be experienced not just believed. That imo is a sad substitute for spiritual gnosis.