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Trevor Blake: Souls and Minds [LINK-ZUM]

Some people claim that souls exist. Souls are said to be something like the pilot for the ship of our bodies, the true animating agent in what would otherwise be base physical matter. Many earlier cultures claimed that the soul was located inside our bodies. Perhaps it was in our chest, because when we were inflamed with passion or danger something moved in our chest. Thus the word 'heart' has come to mean central (the heart of an argument) even though our hearts are not physically in the center of our bodies. As time passed it was learned the moving organ inside us was the heart but that it functioned to circulate blood, not as an animating agent. The more we learned about our bodies, the more our souls changed from a physical object inside us to a wispy ghost-organ that wasn't really in us, just... around. The evidence suggests that our consciousness, our animating agent, occurs mostly in our brains and entirely as a physical process. There is no soul, and there never has been. But belief in souls continues.

A few questions about souls may convince the reader what some have claimed about souls breaks down in the face of real-life evidence. Look at any two people. How many souls do they have? How many souls, then, did Joseph and Luka Banda have at birth, and how many souls do they have now? How many souls do Abigail and Brittany Hensel have? Lori and George Schappell? And Manar Majed? Lydia Fairchild is a chimera. While she still in the womb, her body and the body of a twin merged into one. How many souls does Lydia have? Did the species we evolved from have souls? What about the species before that one?

How a believer in souls answers these questions usually reveals that they actually hold the soul to be the mind - the functioning of the human brain. The mind is a more secularized version of the soul, one that places its seat in the physical organ of the brain but is still exempt from any responsibility to show evidence of itself. The mind is a small step toward accuracy but doesn't go far enough. We can delight in our consciousness as a physical process just as we delight in any other physical process. We become 'one with nature' when we abandon the supernatural.

Labels: atheist, science

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