Our 'minds', 'souls', 'spirit' and consciousness are all physical in nature. Thousands of years of research has shown that our brains comprise and produce our true selves. Souls and spirits do not exist. Our bodies run themselves. We know from cases of brain damage and the effects of psychoactive drugs, that our experiences are caused by physical chemistry acting on our physical neurones in our brains. Our innermost selves is our biochemical selves.
- The Basis of Qualia in Neurology: The Brain Is The Inner Us
- The Physics of the Soul
- Ghosts, Out of Body Experiences, Seeing The Dead and Demonic Attacks in the Night
The Brain Is The Inner Us
In Neuroscience, professors Bear, Connors and Paradiso (1996, p4) introduce the book with a little history of research into the brain. Several Greek scholars in the 4th century BCE, 2400 years ago, believed that the brain was the center of sensation. Hippocrates, the great pagan philosopher and physician (called the 'father of medicine'), correctly believed and taught that not only was the brain our sensing organ, but it was also the seat of our intelligence. But since then, a progression of religions and cultures have asserted that the heart is the source of mind - The Christian Bible is full of such references. Christians in history were even to be found repeating Aristotle's (394-322BCE) belief that the brain was a radiator.
Since then, biologists, neurologists, doctors and psychologists have amassed a wealth of evidence that tells us clearly and comprehensively that the physical brain is the center (and producer) of intelligence, creative thought, emotions, willpower and moral thinking.
Our brainstem controls the impulses that are sent to our body. Our muscles, glands, hormone secretions, skin sensitivity, organ action, heart rate and thousands of other actions are all controlled by our nervous system, which is managed by our brains. So, if we damage a part of our brain we can impair our ability to control our bodies. If we damage our medulla, our physical co-ordination can be lost, if we damage our frontal lobes, our personality can be changed. This is because the brain controls the body and emotions. The cause and effect is clear: physical damage to the brain damages our soul. If there is a soul it doesn't actually control anything.
Conversely, even if things happen to our bodies that we do not choose (such as the progression of Alzheimer's disease, which causes senility and dementia)1, we are forced to change our behaviour and feelings as a result of changes to the structure of our brain during medical procedures. Psychosurgey, including lobotomies or leucotomies, became used regularly from the 1930s for severely disrupted patients. Since then highly accurate and specific stereotactic tractotomies, stereotactic limbic leucotomies and the like have been developed, allowing the destruction of very small parts of the brain, normally locating particular pathways between one part and another in order to change specific aspects of behaviour and symptoms. For example, a cingulotomy is occasionally used against obsessive and compulsive patients by destroying 2-3cm of particular white matter. An amygdalotomy destroys the brain's neural connection between the amygdala and the hypothalamus and is normally used on patients who suffer from episodes of unstoppable violence and terror. [Gross (1996)2]
If the soul experiences some of the same things that our brain experiences, then, souls must have ways of 'measuring' what neurones are firing in our brains. If we can stimulate neurones with electrodes, which causes us to experience certain memories or feelings, then, if the soul has a "use" then it too must experience some of these things too. If our soul "sees" things, then, it must have eyes. No-one says that the soul sees over 360 degrees; so it must have forward-facing eyes like ours. How can a soul have all these observational tools? Why would the soul be restricted to feeling exactly the same as what we feel as a result of biochemistry? If our medulla is damaged, or our brainstem, why can't the soul control our body? If we have a serotonin imbalance as the result of disease, why does our soul suffer depression and mood disorders? It seems that the soul is highly physical.
“A small amount of damage [...] might even cause rather dramatic changes in your personality. Why? Because your brain is the seat of your self-awareness, the locus of your intelligence, your compassion, and your creativity. All of your mental activities - your thoughts, emotions and feelings - and all your bodily processes are affected by the functioning of your brain.”"Understanding Human Behavior" by James V. McConnel (1986)3
What is the point of calling our minds souls when we know that all our experiences derive from the physical actions of neurones, neurotransmitters and hormones? Not only that, but they very formation (and loss) of memory is purely physical in nature. Brain damage results in loss of memory; it must be that the soul either doesn't have any memories, or doesn't use them.
“Our memories and habits are bound up with the structure of the brain, in much the same way in which a river is connected with the river-bed. The water in the river is always changing, but it keeps to the same course because previous rains have worn a channel. In like manner, previous events have worn a channel in the brain, and our thoughts flow along this channel. This is the cause of memory and mental habits. But the brain, as a structure, is dissolved at death, and memory therefore may be expected to be also dissolved. There is no more reason to think otherwise than to expect a river to persist in its old course after an earthquake has raised a mountain where a valley used to be.”
"Why I am not a Christian" by Bertrand Russell (1957)4
Russell's watery metaphor highlights the fact that there is no apparent mechanism for a soul to influence the brain, or for the brain to influence a soul. It is as if they don't exist, and they apparently carry out no function. If the soul copies memories that are imprinted on to the brain, then, brain damage that effects memory will also effect the soul, and it appears that brain death itself would also remove the memories of the soul. The resolution of such philosophical problems lead to an immensely complex and improbably theory of how souls work. It is much more realistic to admit that the idea of a 'soul' makes no sense: Neurology and science has enabled us to understand the brain to such an extend that such an ethereal concept is no longer needed to explain anything.
If we suffer brain damage, take drugs, or if we are injected unknowingly with hormones by an experimenter, our feelings can be altered. This must mean that a soul is a reader of our experiences, but not a cause of them.
“If you take a couple of drinks, or smoke some pot, YOU become intoxicated. It is easy to understand how the chemicals in alcohol and cannabis can affect the ticking of your nerve cells. But how can physical reactions in your brain cause the psychological or spiritual YOU to get high? If your mind controls your body how does it do so? When you drive a car, you sit in the driver's seat, you push on the pedals with your feet, and you turn the wheel with your hands. If you consider your body to be a biological machine "driven" by your mind, where does the driver "sit"? And how does your purely spiritual or psychological "mind" pull the biological strings that make your neurones fire and your muscles move?”"Understanding Human Behavior" by James V. McConnel (1986)5
It seems that whatever role our 'soul' has, it is not directly linked to the control of our physical bodies, and it is not directly a cause of our experiences.
The Physics of the Soul
If the soul was able to interact physically with the body, or to view the world, it must have some physical structure and recording mechanism. Yet, despite attempts, no evidence for the 'mass' of soul has been found6. An object cannot be mass-free and physical, it cannot react with energy without having energy. In order to react with the brain it must have mass, but in order to be invisible it must be mass free. In order to see it requires photoreceptors and energy measuring devices which need to interact with the physical world; yet, blind people (and people whose eyes are physically blinded) do not see anything.
Another serious problem is death ... the soul in its highly resilient fashion would always survive body death and there would be a huge build up of these slightly-physical souls. With billions upon billions of them each using up slight amounts of energy each, we would experience a literal fog of souls covering the whole planet! We would have to say that the soul decays over time, that eventually it does break up: these contradictions are telling us that the whole idea of a 'soul' is misguided.
There is another major problem with the idea that a soul is required for some parts of the brain to function ... the fact that all the individual parts of the brain obey normal biological and chemical rules. Evolution is the next problem for the soul theory. The fact that animals and such evolve through complex statistics and simple biochemical change ... there is no part of evolution from one species to us that requires the addition of a soul along the way. The soul itself must have evolved with us, within us. Growing with us from birth. It is as if our 'soul' is our brains, and nothing more.
We may all have souls - but there would be no difference between a person with one and without one. The soul would be a sort of invisible observer, a-moral and ineffective. It is impossible to resolve these contradictions... if souls exist, they are not part of us. If they exist, they are not souls as we think of them. In short the only solution is: Souls do not exist.
Ghosts, Out of Body Experiences, Seeing The Dead and Demonic Attacks in the Night
Ghosts
Ghost stories have a tendancy to become true. The suggestibility of many people means that they actively seek out confirming experiences for even the most improbable stories that they've heard. Colin Wilson's television series in the 1970s, 'Leap in the Dark', traced the history of a haunting.
“A writer, Frank Smythe, deliberately put round an entirely fictitious story that a particular place was haunted by a particular ghost. No one, apart from Smythe and his team, knew that the story was fictitious. A while later the researchers were flooded with reports from people claiming to have sighted the ghost in question. In this case, then, we have sightings of a ghost which arose simply on the basis of the public suggestion that there was a ghost to be seen.”
"The Origins of Psychic Phenomena: Poltergeists, Incubi, Succubi, and the Unconscious Mind"
Stan Gooch (1984) p123
The Recently Dead
In many folk tales, Westerners tell of seeing the ghosts of the recently departed. Scientific investigation has always found that such cases are either explainable in terms of the subject actually knowing more than they knew they knew (or let on), or are mistaken. Experiments where people write down such predictions before finding out confirming evidence (such as receiving a phone call informing them a relative is dead), results in a very poor record of accuracy, with the only slight success rate attributable to the fact that people tend to predict the deaths of the elderly or unwell. The investigative psychologist Stan Gooch, who does believe that the human brain is capable of supernatural intelligence, argues that all such encounters with the dead are actually subjective methods of interpreting information, but which do not actually have a basis in physical reality:
“In all these cases we do not require the discarnate spirit hypothesis at all. It is totally irrelevant. [...] (As emphasized, the person is not always dead when the vision occurs). Is it not enough to say that in all cases of death that having received kind of telepathic impulse if events, the unconscious mind then generates some kind of symbolic fantasy - a vision, a dream, a premonition - by which means it presents the received information to consciousness? That view gains enormously also from the fact that Australian aborigines are very good at sensing the death of a distant companion. But they do not see a ghostly vision of that person, as westerners often do. Instead they see a vision of that person's totem animal running about the camp. Once again, 'we see what we expect to see' in terms of our cultural (and in this case religious) upbringing. The totem animal is the best choice, and the obvious choice, for the Aborigine unconscious mind to make in presenting its information to consciousness.”"The Origins of Psychic Phenomena: Poltergeists, Incubi, Succubi, and the Unconscious Mind"
Stan Gooch (1984) p127
Out of Body Experiences
Out-of-body experiences were once poorly studied scientifically because of their fleeting psychological nature, but recent experiments have allowed scientists to see - and recreate - situations in which out of body experiences occur in wide-awake individuals. During sleep when our imaginations are somewhat freer than whilst awake, who knows what tricks our minds can play on us!
“Two sets of studies published independently in the same issue of the journal Science demonstrate how the illusion of a bodily self outside one's own body can be stimulated in the laboratory. The studies forge ways to better understand both out-of-body and near-death experiences."The research provides a physical explanation for the phenomenon usually ascribed to otherworldly influences," Peter Bruger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich who was not involved in the experiment, told science journalist Sandra Blakesee in her report on these experiments in The New York Times (August 24).”
Kendrick Frazier in Skeptical Inquirer (2007)7
Night Terrors: Demonic Attacks
The following phenonmenon has its basis in the biochemistry of the brain, involving the limbic system, cerebellum and duodenum and the way that they are suppressed during sleep. An incorrect balance of neurone-controlling chemicals during sleep makes some people more susceptible to night terrors than others. They occur in the early night and "experiences of entrapment, of being choked or attacked, often with shrieking, sitting-up, or sleep-walking, and tremendous acceleration of the heart. [They become] more frequent when there is greater daytime anxiety; they are frequent among wartime battle evacuees and night terrors are commonly experienced by children aged 10-14"8. The human biologist McConnel describes a likely Night Terror:
“You begin to sense - deep down inside you - that something has gone very wrong. Slowly, almost dimly, you regain enough consciousness to realize that you are suffocating, that some heavy weight is lying on your chest and crushing your lungs. Suddenly you realize your breathing has almost stopped, and you are dying for air. Terrified, you scream! At once, you seem to awaken. There is this thing hovering over you, crushing the very life out of your lungs. You shout at the thing, but it won't leave you alone.Despite a strange feeling of paralysis, you start to resist. Your pulse begins to race, your breathing becomes rapid, and you push futilely at the thing that is choking you to death. Your legs tremble, then begin to thrash about under the covers. You sweep the bedclothes aside, stumble to your feet, and flee into the darkness. You run clumsily through the house, trying to get from the thing.
And then, all at once, you find yourself in your living room. The lights come on, the thing instantly retreats to the shadows of your mind, and you are awake. You are safe now, but you are intensely wrought up and disturbed. You shake your head, wondering what has happened to you. You can remember that you were fleeing from the thing that was crushing you. But you have forgotten your scream and talking in your sleep. The thing dream is a classic example of a night terror.”
"Understanding Human Behavior" by James V. McConnel, p67
It is clear to see how such physiological events can be interpreted supernaturally by its victims!
“Before the physiological causes of these experiences was known, night terrors were interpreted as being the attacks of evil spirits. Others have experienced it as an alien abduction, an attempted possession or as the evil magic of medieval witches, along with all manner of other supernatural and paranormal explanations that have arose historically.”