Does it make sense to believe in a soul?

Introduced by Alan Taylor

Notes on the 19/6/02 meeting of HKPC's Kowloon Branch

Reported by Steve Palmquist (moderator)

Alan began his introduction by explaining that his main interest is to determine whether the concept of a soul is useful in helping us explain the concept of personal identity. Our physical nature alone does not seem to explain personal identity adequately. If we gradually change all the parts of a car, for example, it doesn’t seem to matter very much whether there is some point when it ceases to be the "same" car; as long as there is significant physical continuity, we tend to treat it as the same car in spite of any physical changes. But with human beings, the issue of personal identity is more important: we normally assume a person remains the "same" person throughout his or her entire life, even though the entire body may change many times over the years. Alan continued by arguing that, if we assume there is a soul that persists throughout all these changes and that it makes us who we are, then we can deduce the following points: it must be the only criterion (i.e., if the soul exists, nothing else, such as DNA, is required to secure our personal identity); it must be unchanging (otherwise it could not guarantee we remain the same); it cannot be physical or energy-based (since these are constantly changing); it must be related somehow to the brain; it must be unique; and there must be many different souls (i.e., at least one for each different person). Finally, in response to the question whether a concept of this type actually makes sense, Alan suggested three possible positions:

(1) The religious view: yes, the soul exists; God makes it work. This option limits our ability to reason about the soul.

(2) The scientific view: yes, the soul exists; but it is just part of the material world. This option allows for the possibility that science can investigate souls, at least in principle.

(3) The skeptical view: no, human beings have no soul; there is simply nothing that holds us together as individuals and makes us who we are. This option has radical implications for how we view what it means to be a person.

A quick succession of lively questions from the group of about 25 participants prompted Alan to offer the following clarifications: the introduction does not attempt to define "soul", but merely hones in on one of its features, that it must be something that secures personal identity; the soul probably enters a person at birth, since before that we are not personal individuals; the existence of a particular soul could have a starting and/or an ending point, as long as it never changes in between; how a soul could interact with the brain (which is constantly changing) without itself changing is a mystery; the soul is part of our spiritual nature, and should not be identified too closely with our mind (thinking consciousness); conscious animals do seem to have souls, where "conscious" refers to the subjective feeling of having an inner world of experiences; having multiple criteria for identity could lead to contradictory situations, if one criterion were to change while the other did not; if we do not assume the existence of a soul, then it becomes very difficult to respond to the kind of thought experiments posed by Austin in his introduction to the April meeting of the Kowloon Branch; the assumption should be distinguished from intuitive ideas of the self that are based primarily on memory; we do have an intuitive feeling that the soul exists, but this cannot be used as the basis for reasoning about the soul, because such a feeling is not knowledge and therefore could be misleading; while it is possible that more than one soul could exist in the same body (as in cases of multiple personalities), it seems difficult if not impossible to know this to be the case; the main point here is not to prove that a soul exists but rather to demonstrate that it makes sense to believe in a soul; believing in a soul makes a huge difference to our self-understanding, even though we cannot know for certain that it exists.

During this question time one thought occurred to me that I did not have time to share. Alan's position seems to imply that the soul is, more than anything else, an assumption we place onto our experience in order to explain certain features that would otherwise remain mysterious. Near the beginning of his introduction he suggested that this assumption "doesn't matter" when applied to merely physical objects, such as a car, but does matter when applied to human beings. While I agree that the latter is much more likely to "matter", I disagree that this distinction is as neat as Alan presented it to be. For example, a person who loves and cares for a particular car over a long period of time does seem to be "giving it a soul", in a sense not essentially different from the one Alan promoted. The key, as Alan admitted near the end of the question time, seems to be with our belief, rather than with some underlying ontological structure.

The main focus of the small group I participated in was to compare Alan's position with that assumed by Chinese philosophy (or any system that believes in reincarnation). The latter requires two distinct criteria to make up personal identity: the soul is not enough on its own, because different "people" (bodies) are conceived as sharing one and the same "soul" over time. Personal identity is therefore determined by the overlap between a particular body and a particular soul. Moreover, the soul must be immortal (otherwise it couldn't be shared between different mortal persons) and must change and develop (the latter being the main purpose of the soul attaching itself to different bodies at different stages in its development). One member also suggested that Pascal's Wager could be modified to produce a good reason for believing in a soul: there's nothing to lose if you're wrong and much to be gained if you're right! I was asked how Kant would respond to this whole issue, so I explained that Alan's approach is broadly Kantian: Kant agreed that the soul's existence by definition cannot be proved (and therefore remains unknowable), yet we can have good reasons for believing it exists; and once we believe, there are certain things we can say with a high degree of rational certainty about what the soul's nature must be.

When the small groups reconvened, the first issue raised was how closely related this issue is to the question of the existence and nature of God. Two groups had made this connection, while the other two groups had not. One person referred to Kant's famous "Antinomies", a section of the Critique of Pure Reason in which Kant places "pro" and "con" arguments side by side on the same page in order to show that reason can be made to "prove" both the positive and the negative side of such issues. Like belief in God, belief in a soul seems to be a human "need", one person pointed out. Another person suggested that, in both cases, the thing (God or the soul) can be said to "exist" even if it is merely an idea that we human beings have created. But someone else objected, claiming that these ideas must be grounded in something outside our heads in order to be genuinely meaningful.

If we cannot tell the difference between having a soul and not having one, then does belief in a soul make any difference? Do we really need it after all? In response to this line of questioning, one participant noted that some religions, such as Buddhism, do not believe in the soul (or God) at all. What people call the soul is actually just an illusion, based on our "stream of consciousness" and has nothing to do with our personal identity. After all, asked another participant, "How can dust know God?" Several participants claimed, though, that the soul (and/or God) is something that can be "sensed".

Prompted by Alan's reference to the limits of human reasoning, I gave a brief summary of Kant's theory of knowledge: the process of knowing something always involves combining a sensation (or some kind of sensory input) with a concept (i.e., a thought process) in order to make what Kant called a "judgment"; as such, anything that cannot be processed by our five senses lies beyond the limits of scientific knowledge. This is why our ideas of the soul and God are so difficult to reason about: when reason is cut off from its natural basis in the five senses, it tends to go two directions at once, contradicting itself. In response, one person suggested that tonight's issue is primarily a methodological one: just as you cannot weigh a chicken with a yardstick, you cannot prove scientifically whether the soul exists.

There followed a brief discussion of the nature of scientific method and how it might (or might not) relate to this issue. The role of hypotheses in science, for example, suggests that we only see evidence if we first set our minds to look for it. To that extent at least, it would seem to make sense to believe in a soul, if we ever hope to gather any evidence for its existence. Or, as one person put it, "If souls do not exist, why is the Devil willing to buy them?"

++++

After announcing July's meeting topic (with Stephen Peplow arguing that private property is public theft), I asked for suggestions of other future topics. The following responses were given:

Why are advanced ideas/individuals a threat?

Is prayer just wishful thinking?

Does it make sense to speak of cause without effect?

Return to the home page of HKPC’s Kowloon Branch.

Return to the main map of Steve Palmquist's web site.

This page was uploaded on 31 July 2002.