The Christian religion thinks itself to be very clever when it says we
have immortal souls which are purely spiritual entities, entities without
parts. A soul is like a circle whose
centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. It is one substance which has no parts or
components but which is self-sufficient.
It is only beings that have bits and pieces that are not self-sufficient
for they depend on things to protect them and on forces to hold them
together.
If
a spirit is love then it is wholly love.
If a spirit is cruel then it is wholly cruel. The spirit is a power that is perfectly one
because it is partless. For it to be a
mixture of qualities would meant that it has some power to be bad and some to
be good or some to be clever and some to be stupid or whatever. That is impossible for it is one power. The ability of the spiritual soul is not
something that is distinct from its awareness but is its awareness. So, if you are a soul and think of a picture
at one moment and a dog in the next there is not one consciousness but
two. It follows that every moment and
every time you have a new thought you are becoming a new person. The person who thinks of the picture is not
the person who contemplates the dog.
You
are only conscious of the present moment and you don’t know for sure if you
were really conscious a second ago for you could just be tapping into a
reservoir of memory from the preceding consciousness if you think you can
remember being you. If you came into
existence a second ago complete with a memory you would not know. Thus, if you have a soul there is no proof
that you are not changing into another person every second.
The
doctrine of a spiritual soul leads to these shocking conclusions. The doctrine tells us that God cannot exist
because there is no point in him sending or permitting suffering when one
person is just replacing another inside each body. The person lives but a moment and is
annihilated. The substance is used to
create a new person.
The
person who falls asleep dies and somebody else rises up in the morning.
Religion teaches that life is absolutely valuable. They reason that this is so because it is stupid to say that happiness should be promoted if persons are not important. To say happiness should be worked for is to say that human life is more important than happiness. If that is true then though you are alive when you are asleep your consciousness is dead if you are not dreaming. Life is no good without consciousness. So it is conscious human life not just human life that is valuable. Falling asleep then is murder and denying the value of life. Its wrong to take a nap for you can do without a nap.
The
doctrine of a spiritual soul is deadly indeed and is as absurd as it is evil.
TEACH YOURSELF
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, Mel Thompson, Teach Yourself Books,
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It mentions Plato’s thought in Timaeus that
the psyche is self-moving. Plato saw the
psyche as the power to move things without being controlled by the
physical. When the psyche goes away from
the body only a corpse is left (page 7).
Plato then thought that the soul pre-dated the body. It was like it went into the body and
controlled it and when it left the body was just an object, a dead thing.
REPLY: Things move without being moved by anything conscious. The psyche could have hidden physical forces that make it move. To say that the consciousness gives life to the body and that something goes away from the body when it dies is as silly as saying that something goes away from a clockwork toy when it stops moving around.
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A surgeon replaces your entire body with new parts. You will still be the same person. The soul is the form. It makes you, you. The form is something that
doesn’t depend on what parts you have got.
Form is what makes you what you are.
It defines your essence (page 13).
REPLY: This might only
work if the surgeon doesn’t do it all at the one time. But consider this. There is John and there is Simon. If a surgeon puts Simon’s leg on John and
soon John is entirely replaced by Simon’s parts, the result will not be John
but Simon. All you will have done is
taken Simon apart and reassembled him in the operating theatre where John was.
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Most philosophers believe that mind and body are real and
that dualism is true but how the mind works the body is a matter of debate
(page 20). However it is possible to be
a dualist without holding that mind and body are totally separate (page 43).
REPLY: There is a link
between mind and matter in the sense that if your brain is damaged you can
become like a different person. This
makes it possible that mental states are ultimately physical forces caused by
the brain. We cannot explain matter for
there is so much we cannot understand. So
why should the mind and exactly what it is be clear to us?
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You can close your eyes and try to imagine that consciousness doesn’t
exist but you will fail. This is because
thinking or consciousness is an experienced process. The problems for mind body philosophies are
the questions of,
Does
this process have a physical origin?
Is it a substance?
How does it relate to the world of matter?
Can it do anything? (page 31).
REPLY: The last point is
concerned with the fact that consciousness in itself does nothing at all. It is like the idea that you have a body
equipped with the faculties of reasoning and free will and the consciousness
needs them to do stuff. By itself it can
do nothing. The body impulses force the
consciousness to look at the television for example. It does nothing but is just controlled by the
faculties and impulses of the body it is tied up with.
None of the questions
can be answered conclusively by saying that the consciousness is some kind of
non-physical thing.
The fact that an eye can
see does not prove to the eye that sight exists. There could be an eye that can’t see anything
for there is nothing but darkness but which would be able to see things if it
had light. This eye will not know that
sight exists. So the eye will not know what
it is. It will not know if it is spirit
or matter. The argument that the
consciousness is separate from the body because it is like an eye that can see
itself and so is supernatural is wrong.
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Consciousness or awareness is what responds to
information and processes it (page 80).
If this is so, then everything has some level of awareness. The thermometer for example is aware of
temperature (page 81). For something to
have a mind it must have the power to intend.
REPLY: But consciousness by itself may simply be
aware. It is things we are conscious of
that do the processing not the consciousness itself. For example, with brain damage a person may not
be able to reason anymore but they are still conscious. Their consciousness is intact. It has only lost some resources outside of itself.
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Plato taught that all true knowledge was a matter of memory or
remembering (page 84). Plato held that
there are things in the mind that we know and ideas that we have before we
experience them and based an argument for reincarnation on that (page 84). It has been argued against Plato that if
ideas are implanted in me, then how do I know they are real?
REPLY: The ideas could be implanted without
reincarnation. If I see a pink ball that
does not prove that there is a pink ball there.
Insane people think God is their poached egg with equal conviction.
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Sartre
argued that consciousness is always consciousness of something so it is not an
entity in itself (page 146).
Consciousness is total emptiness in the sense that it senses all things
but itself. Once you try to become aware
of your own consciousness, you are trying to see it as a thing and it isn’t a
thing. You are trying to make an entity,
an object and a thing out of what is subjectivity or non-thing which is
impossible. Consciousness is the same as
an eye that can see everything but itself.
REPLY: If you cut off all the senses, consciousness would
be aware of nothing except that it is aware.
Consciousness is awareness and sensation. It is a sense that the five senses feed data
to. It does sense itself.
Conclusion
There is no reason
to think that the mind is some kind of non-physical supernatural or spiritual
entity.
TEACH YOURSELF PHILOSOPHY OF
MIND, Mel Thompson, Teach Yourself Books,