Best arguments against the existence and/or immortality of an immaterial soul

You know... this guy is a real enigma. He got his PhD from Marquette so he has this thing with religion, especially Catholics. Apparently there is this thing between Theologians and Philosophers there too.

His exact assignment: Pick a topic of philosophical debate and take a side. Support this position with evidence and scholarship. 6-10 pages*.


*If you write just 6 pages you WILL NOT receive an A, forget it.

He stopped lecturing about a month ago, he says lecture is dead. Now he just looks at us all day and talks about how all this time he thought Descartes was wrong, but now... NOW he thinks there may be some truth to a demon tormenting him.

Well, hopefully I'll get some more ideas out of this forum.

You cannot show me consciousness absent a brain.

Noe suggests that rather than being something that happens inside us, consciousness is something we do. Debunking an outmoded philosophy that holds the scientific study of consciousness captive, "Out of Our Heads" is a fresh attempt at understanding our minds and how we interact with the world around us. "To be conscious, Alva Noe claims, is to be 'awake, aroused, alert, ' and neuroscientists are wrong to imagine that they can reproduce consciousness in a petri dish. A philosopher-scientist, Noe aims to replace neuroscience's reductionism. He compares the development of consciousness to a trickle of water that carves a tiny path in the land; with time, the path draws more water to it, eventually making it impossible for other water not to flow down that path. Similarly, cognitive habits grow in response to our needs and interests.. . . One comes away from the book agreeing that an 'explanatory gap' separates conscious experience from the simple firing of neurons, that reductionism is indeed dead, yet wondering what accounts for our conscious engagement with the world. Noe's partial answer is summarized in the book's preface: 'Only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious . . . has emerged unchallenged: we don't have a clue.'"--Ruth Levy Guyer, "The Washington Post"

Oh dear. Well, I suppose Descartes, and Hume, Kant, and Sartre, and a wealth of other people were just wasting their time to look for something which is so clearly evident.

First you have to know what it is you are trying to show. It think the reason consciousness is so hard to talk about it is because it is not any kind of thing. You can surely demonstrate that without the brain, no consciousness exists, so it seems to have empirical support. Whack somebody on the head, no consciousness. Do a split-brain operation, observe a patient with damage to this or that part of the brain, and correlate the effect on their consciousness. It is quite simple.

But then, with a TV turned off, there is no television show, either. Yet TV shows are not produced by the television, they are only transmitted by it. Take out the blue gun, for example, and the colours will not display properly. This is directly analogous to the effect of a lesion on the brain. Our brains are thought to represent the universe, but whether 'the representation' is one thing, and 'the universe' another, is still a very vexed question.

Regardless, while it is certainly the case that for this or that person, if the brain is non-functional, then there is no consciousness, why therefore assume that consciousness is something that occurs only within the individual brain? It might be considered that consciousness is actually a collective phenomena or structure and that in some sense it is also external to the brain (and the individual mind). Logically, this is supported by the fact that the structures which determine intellectual ability, such as language, spatial reasoning, and number, not to mention the many years of extra-somatic conditioning that occurs with humans after they are born (or culture), and which shapes their consciousness, are not the product of this or that individual brain.

Indeed they provide the structures by which consciousness is able to recognise and operate within the world and society. And without these structures - or forms - consciousness could not exist. Bring a child up with wolves, they will run around on all fours and bark. Deprive them of all sensory simulation, they will not even develop consciousness. Yet the brain might be functionally quite intact (albeit atrophied). The brain is working, but consciousness has not developed normally, or is absent, for reasons that have nothing to do with brain function.

From a review on Out of our Heads: Why You Are Not your Brain, by Alva Noe Source

Conciousness could be described as a form of energy, displaying many facets.



A television collects energy that has been structured, and expresses that energy through it's physical properties.





My computer collects energy that is structured in binary code, expressing that energy in controllable ways.



My mind and my body do basically the same thing, the energy has always existed, my mind just expresses it. It seems the energy must be structured in some way prior to my mind processing it. There appears no reason for my mind to remember the energy prior to processing, yet this structured energy must have existed without my physical mind. Damage to my mind does not affect the energy ,only my ability to express it.

Haven't tried to describe this before so it's kinda convoluted.