Neuroscience and the premature death of the soul

[C C]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016...-tom-wolfe

EXCERPT: Exactly 20 years ago, Tom Wolfe wrote one of the most influential articles in neuroscience. Titled Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died, the 1996 article explores how ideas from brain science were beginning to transform our understanding of human nature and extend the horizons of our scientific imagination. It was published in a mainstream magazine, written by an outsider, and seemed to throw open the doors to an exhilarating revolution in science and self-understanding. Looking at the state of neuroscience and society two decades later, Wolfe turned out to be an insightful but uneven prophet to the brain’s future. [...] Not all of his predictions hit the mark; some now seem quaint or even ridiculous. [...] Much of this continues despite something Wolfe didn’t predict: a period of soul-searching in the late 2000s after the realisation that much of the brain-scanning research that fuelled the hype was oversimplified and tainted by false positives. As a result, the last decade has seen a steady scientific focus on more trustworthy methods and less hubristic conclusions....

[Magical Realist]

The soul may not have been totally ousted. Maybe it was just relocated, nestled comfortably in the molecular interstices of matter itself illuminated from within by a vibrant phenomenality we have yet to fully understand. See psychonautical explorations of Leary and McKenna and the anthropological mysticism of Jungian theory.

[Yazata]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016...-tom-wolfe

EXCERPT: Exactly 20 years ago, Tom Wolfe wrote one of the most influential articles in neuroscience. Titled Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,

That reminds me of a talk by Ajahn Chah (a Thai Buddhist teacher) entitled (more or less) 'The Buddha Never Died!'. His point wasn't that the Buddha's body didn't keel over and conk out when he was roughly 80. It was that the Buddha never existed in the way people imagine that people exist. So the Buddha's 'self' or 'soul' was never annihilated on his death because it never existed in the first place.

Looking at the state of neuroscience and society two decades later, Wolfe turned out to be an insightful but uneven prophet to the brain’s future. [...] Not all of his predictions hit the mark; some now seem quaint or even ridiculous. [...] Much of this continues despite something Wolfe didn’t predict: a period of soul-searching in the late 2000s after the realisation that much of the brain-scanning research that fuelled the hype was oversimplified and tainted by false positives. As a result, the last decade has seen a steady scientific focus on more trustworthy methods and less hubristic conclusions....

We still see a lot of overheated rhetoric about people getting usb ports surgically implanted in their heads and the military working on secret projects to create brain-computer modems.

My own opinion is that's probably never going to happen. The brain is just too complicated, it doesn't operate like a digital computer and it stores memories in a totally different way.

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The soul may not have been totally ousted. Maybe it was just relocated, nestled comfortably in the molecular interstices of matter itself illuminated from within by a vibrant phenomenality we have yet to fully understand. See psychonautical explorations of Leary and McKenna and the anthropological mysticism of Jungian theory.

In my opinion the strongest remaining bastion of soul-theories is the philosophy of mind.

The idea of a 'spiritual' life-force that animates living things and constitutes their life kind of died out in the late 1800's, driven to extinction by the development of physiology and biochemistry.

But a century later, towards the end of the 20th century, similar ideas were resurrected in the philosophy of mind by those who argue that subjective experience can't be accounted for in physicalist terms, and hence that physicalism is false.