My Pet Pieve: The soul

Obligatory Ebon Musings essay: http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/ghost.html

There's no reason for a soul to exist. If a soul is required for life, then all living things must have souls. But, where do they come from?

It's Occam's Razor, plain and simple. There's no real purpose for it, and it's more complicated than the explanation that there is not a soul. Whereas Occam's Razor is not, in itself, evidence, it is a good rule for choosing default positions.

Peeve?

Anyway, a great book on this is "The Blank Slate" by Pinker.

I know that on my journey to the dark side, the soul was the last warm and fuzzy comforting belief to go.

I think that the concept's pervasiveness is all tied up with the idea of "consciousness" Cartesian theories and the like have imbued society with the notion that thinking and self-awareness set humanity apart from the rest of biology, somehow exempt from the rules. I know this idea predates Descartes' famous statement, but he gave it academic credence in a big way.

When you combine this with the idea, embraced by pretty much every religion ever, and hence almost immutable in society, of everlasting life for some aspect of your character, it's pretty easy to posit, however fallaciously, that the soul is an inherent part of humanity. In retrospect, it's obviously muddy, wishful thinking, but it's an awfully nice idea, and everyone likes those.

the soul concept is a method to divide and conquer. it splits a person in 2 parts and gives control over one part to authority. the soul is diminishment of the individual

I can completely understand why so many people cling to the idea of a soul. Having been raised catholic and slowly but surely moving first into agnosticism and then atheism, the soul was the one thing that I wanted to keep thinking of as real.

Eventually I had to give up the idea because as you say, there is no evidence. I think the idea of the soul is based in the fact that humans are greater than the sum of their parts. We have extremely complex social interations and world wide social memes, emotion is a strong factor in making many of our decisions, we have incredibly strong bonds to our children as well as other loved ones.

I think that the term soul is useful and could be meaningful if it was used to describe the idea that the complexity of humans makes us remarkable, rather than to describe the part that god apparently takes to heaven. Also, a soul by any definition should not be thought of as continuing to exist after the physical death of an individual.

Personally, I feel that a lot of people use the term "soul" to refer to things which they don't quite understand but are key to human interactions. (For example, the sensation of being in love due to endorphins and oxytocin and chemical signals in tears.) These experiences can be life changing and if the person in question does not seek a scientific explanation, they can come off as "supernatural."

I do use the term "soul" but I do not believe that it is any sort of entity. I just use it as a word to refer to the collective experiences and thoughts that make me who I am and which drive my actions and choices. It is not a separate part of me and it will not persist after my consciousness ceases to be.

Sam Harris has a lot of interesting things to say about the soul and the brain in "The End of Faith." You should read it if you haven't.

Well, yeah, I've had bunch of dumbfounding conversations about it.

I suspect it's an illusion brought on by a side effect of the fact that we have a model of mind - we think about what others are thinking from what we observe - we construct a "story" about their likely mental processes and hence infer their future actions, and for which the evolutionary advantages in a highly social animal are fairly obvious.

As a result, I suspect that intelligent social animals - for example, the ones that are able to recognize themselves in a mirror - probably have something of the same sense of self that we do, though perhaps without the ability to have the extended and complex internal narratives we are able to constuct via language.

(I think this model of mind facility is also a source of our tendency to anthropomorphize other things that act or appear to act, which is why I think our ancestors tended to infer that animals and natural objects - rocks, trees, rivers etc had spirits)

But then we infer our own thinking from our actions, we tell ourselves a story about ourselves - we have an internal narrative (a good deal of which, we now learn, is contructed after the fact). For some reason, many people seem to become convinced there's an "I* that's separate from our physical self.

Actual observations of myself and others under various conditions have convinced me there's not the slightest evidence for such a thing as a sould or spirit separate from our physical self. Indeed, having been under general anaesthetic a fairly large number of times, and having experienced the results of various illnesses (some affecting my brain) and of various medical drugs, it's pretty clear that the thing producing the particular sensation of I resides entirely in the physical - the brain and the senses. Indeed, observations of people with alzheimers, injuries to particular parts of the brain and so on also makes this pretty clear.

On the few occasions when I can get someone who is convinced there really is a soul to actually think about their own experiences and observations (which are generally quite close to my own), I can usually get them to agree their observations would not appear to be really consistent with the details of their belief (at least for the ones who can articulate what they mean at all!). But that's as far as it goes - the belief, even in otherwise rational skeptical people, generally remains utterly unaltered by getting them to think about what is going on.

While the notion is partly cultural, I don't think it's a belief entirely without a basis - it's partly based on an interpretation of an internal experience, which is something - but it's a conclusion based on a flawed premise (that the internal interpretation of what's going on is somehow more reliable than reasoning and dispassionate observation).

[edit: oh and that word is spelled "peeve"]