Outside of religion, there are numerous philosophical arguments for the existence and survival of the soul.
Most are pretty complex, but a few quick ones :
A) Berkeley argues that the soul is one, simple, immaterial spirit, and, therefore, immortal. Body is compound, divisible, and therefore corruptible or perishable. The soul is incorporeal and under compostable, and therefore, immortal.
You see, the soul, or spirit, is that it does not have quantifiable, countable parts as matter does. You can cut a body in half but not a soul; you can't have half a soul. It is not extended in space. You don't cut an inch off your soul when you get a haircut.
Since soul has no parts, it cannot be decomposed, as a body can. Whatever is composed (of parts) can be decomposed: a molecule into atoms, a cell into molecules, an organ into cells, a body into organs, a person into body and soul. But soul is not composed, therefore not decomposable.
B) Martmeau gives the following metaphysical argument for immortality of the soul. Death, in its physiological aspect, is simply a case of transformation of energy. On death, the body is decomposed into its elements, and the vital forces of the organism are dissipated. But these forces, according to the law of Conservation of Energy, are not totally lost.
Now, the law of Conservation of Energy either includes mental energy or excludes it. If it applies to physical energy only, then the mind or soul is independent of matter, and therefore may continue after death. The soul is not affected by the dissolution of the body.
If, on the other hand, the law applies to physical as well as mental energy, then mental energy is not absolutely lost after death, but continues to exist in some form or other, just as physical energy is not lost. Thus immortality of the soul is not inconsistent with the law of Conservation of Energy.
C) There’s the argument from consciousness :
The mind and brain are two separate things.
Mental things share nothing — nothing — in common with matter.
Thoughts are intentional (refer to other things), private, dimensionless, massless, not composite, etc. Matter is non-intentional (doesn’t inherently refer to anything else), public, has dimensions and mass, is composite, etc
You cannot weigh a thought, a memory does not have height, it is not extended into space.
Consciousness cannot be an emergent property of the brain because consciousness is a subjective experience and that is fundamentally different from any physical process. No description of a physical process however detailed can ever tell a color blind person what the color blue looks like.
The immaterial cannot arise from material. So,
(1) Consciousness exists.
C) There’s the argument from consciousness :
The mind and brain are two separate things.
Mental things share nothing — nothing — in common with matter.
Thoughts are intentional (refer to other things), private, dimensionless, massless, not composite, etc. Matter is non-intentional (doesn’t inherently refer to anything else), public, has dimensions and mass, is composite, etc
You cannot weigh a thought, a memory does not have height, it is not extended into space.
Consciousness cannot be an emergent property of the brain because consciousness is a subjective experience and that is fundamentally different from any physical process. No description of a physical process however detailed can ever tell a color blind person what the color blue looks like.
The immaterial cannot arise from material. So,
(1) Consciousness exists.
(2) No theory exists for how consciousness can arise from the physical.
--> (3) Therefore, there must be more to the world than the physical.
And so it seems plausible that
(4) A non-physical object (e.g. soul) might imbue certain materials (e.g. brains) with consciousness.
D) One last argument comes from Plato, I quote him from the Republic :
- Evil is all that which destroys and corrupts. . .
- Each thing has its evil . . . for instance, ophthalmia for the eye, and disease for the whole body, mildew for corn and for wood, rust for iron . . .
- The natural evil of each thing . . . destroys it, and if this does not destroy it, nothing else can . . .
- (a) for I don't suppose good can ever destroy anything,
- (b) nor can what is neither good nor evil,
- (c) and it is certainly unreasonable . . . that the evil of something else would destroy anything when its own evil does not.
- Then if we find something in existence which has its own evil but which can only do it harm yet cannot dissolve or destroy it, we shall know at once that there is no destruction for such a nature. . . .
- the soul has something which makes it evil . . . injustice, intemperance, cowardice, ignorance. Now does any one of these dissolve and destroy it? . . .
- Then, since it is not destroyed by any evil at all, neither its own evil nor foreign evil, it is clear that the soul must of necessity be . . . immortal.
There are also scientific reasons, famous neuroscientists like Penfield, or Noble winner Eccles thought they proved the mind uses the brain like an instrument.
One of the pioneers in the field of neuroscience was Wilder Penfield. In his fascinating book The Mystery of the Mind, he writes the following:
One of the pioneers in the field of neuroscience was Wilder Penfield. In his fascinating book The Mystery of the Mind, he writes the following:
“When I have caused a conscious patient to move his hand by applying an electrode to the motor cortex of one hemisphere, I have often asked him about it. Invariably his response was: ‘I didn’t do that. You did.’
When I caused him to vocalize, he said: ‘I didn’t make that sound. You pulled it out of me.’ When I caused the record of the stream of consciousness to run again and so presented to him the record of his past experience, he marveled that he should be conscious of the past as well as of the present.
He was astonished that it should come back to him so completely, with more detail than he could possibly recall voluntarily. He assumed at once that, somehow, the surgeon was responsible for the phenomenon, but he recognized the details as those of his own past experience.”
When I caused him to vocalize, he said: ‘I didn’t make that sound. You pulled it out of me.’ When I caused the record of the stream of consciousness to run again and so presented to him the record of his past experience, he marveled that he should be conscious of the past as well as of the present.
He was astonished that it should come back to him so completely, with more detail than he could possibly recall voluntarily. He assumed at once that, somehow, the surgeon was responsible for the phenomenon, but he recognized the details as those of his own past experience.”
Penfield goes on to note that “There is no place in the cerebral cortex where electrical stimulation will cause a patient . . . to decide” .
In light of his work as a neuroscientist, Penfield concludes the following: “For my own part, after years of striving to explain the mind on the basis of brain-action alone, I have come to the conclusion that it is simpler (and far easier and logical) if one adopts the hypothesis that our being does consist of two fundamental elements”
After years of experiments Noble prize winning neuroscientist Dr. Eccles came to a similar conclusion :
In light of his work as a neuroscientist, Penfield concludes the following: “For my own part, after years of striving to explain the mind on the basis of brain-action alone, I have come to the conclusion that it is simpler (and far easier and logical) if one adopts the hypothesis that our being does consist of two fundamental elements”
After years of experiments Noble prize winning neuroscientist Dr. Eccles came to a similar conclusion :
“I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition. . . . we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.”
Or Near Death Experiments, these people have had extroidinary, life changing experiences….with ZERO brain activity !
There've been hundreds of NDE studies, like the Lancelot studies HERE, which have been gone over endlessly,
“I So we have to conclude that NDE in our study was experienced during a transient functional loss of all functions of the cortex and of the brainstem.
It is important to mention that there is a well documented report of a patient…with all blood drained from her head, with a flat line EEG, with clicking devices in both ears, with eyes taped shut, and this patient experienced an NDE with an out-of-body experience, and all details she perceived and heard could later be verified."
Is the brain necessary ? That’s the question Dr Lorber wants answered, HERE is a math genius….with no brain !
And THIS man has NO neuronal structure, yet live an entirely normal life !
Or look at Quantum Physics, sure, there’s alot of new age woo when it comes to it, but many of the greatest have privileged mind above matter :
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as a derivative of consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing postulates consciousness.”
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as a derivative of consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing postulates consciousness.”
– Max Planck the originator of quantum theory.
“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”
- Schroedinger
He goes on to say, “I venture to call [mind] indestructible since it has a peculiar timetable, namely mind is always now.”
In other words, Mind is an indivisible unity, it cannot be destroyed, and it is timeless.
He goes on to say, “I venture to call [mind] indestructible since it has a peculiar timetable, namely mind is always now.”
In other words, Mind is an indivisible unity, it cannot be destroyed, and it is timeless.
Some of the most prestigious physicists working today agree, physicist Richard Conn Henry of Johns Hopkins University states unequivocally that the universe is entirely mental (only consciousness is real) and proceeds to resolve the paradoxes of quantum mechanics and cosmology in this way.
“Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the illusion of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism.”
- The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual.
Richard Conn Henry
The simple fact is that quantum mechanics needs consciousness to explain physics. Need proof ? Here’s four peer reviewed articles proving it :
- Kim, Y.-H. et al. (2000). A Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser. Physical Review Letters 84, pp. 1–5. The authors show that observation not only determines the reality observed at present, but also retroactively changes the history of what is observed accordingly. This is entirely consistent with the notion that reality is fundamentally a story playing itself out in mind.
- Gröblacher , S. et al. (2007). An experimental test of non-local realism. Nature 446, pp. 871-875. The authors show that reality is either entirely in consciousness or we must abandon our strongest intuitions about what objectivity means. Physicsworld.com, in a related article, went as far as to claim that ‘quantum physics says goodbye to reality.’
- Lapkiewicz, R. et al. (2011). Experimental non-classicality of an indivisible quantum system. Nature 474, pp. 490–493. The authors show that, unlike what one would expect if reality were independent of mind, the properties of a quantum system do not exist prior to observation. Renowned physicist Anton Zeilinger, in a related New Scientist article suitably titled “Quantum magic trick shows reality is what you make it,” is quoted as saying that “there is no sense in assuming that what we do not measure about a system has [an independent] reality.”
- Xiao-song Ma et al. (2013). Quantum erasure with causally disconnected choice. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 110, pp. 1221-1226. Again, the authors show that no naively objective view of reality can be true, which is consistent with the notion that reality is fundamentally subjective. A less-technical explanation of the experiment in this paper, as well as its results, can be found here.
Finally, simple intuition. What else is the meaning of love, but an acknowledgment that the other will live forever.....
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