Your brain on reason and the afterlife

Mr. Darcy

Acererak asked "How do you reconcile the fact that the brain (a temporal thing) seems to produce most of our conscious experiences with the concept of an immortal soul that is an intrinsic part of us?"

That's a great question. First, that "seems" is non-obvious. I only know that because I've taken it on faith from scientists. What is the difference between the brain state of a practicing neuroscientist thinking "My brain is giving rise to my thought?", a university-educated layman thinking "My brain is giving rise to my thought?", and an ancient Egyptian thinking "My heart is giving rise to my thought?" And are these different brain states really the whole story, or are all three participating in some universal, which we might call "intellection about the source of thoughts"?

With that in mind, the most scientific systematic philosophy, comes from, unsurprisingly, a philosopher who was also a biologist, Aristotle. In On the Soul (De Anima) iii.5, he discusses the "active intellect", which distinguishes human souls from the sensual (sight/hearing/smell/taste/touch) and emotional souls of animals, which are in turn a more complex order of being than plants with their merely appetitive souls. Because the intellect interacts with abstract/formal rather than material things (as for example the visual cortex interacts with light), it is not a material thing that dissipates when the body loses its form at death*, as he reasoned that plant and animal souls do.

I had better elaborate on "losing its form". Aristotle's answer to the question "What exists? Matter or mind?" is called hylemorphic dualism: "both, thoroughly mixed". This seems to have held up better than the much later substance dualism of Descartes, explaining things like why a rational animal has a big brain. An anima ("soul") is the form of an animate thing. An inanimate thing, like for example quartz, has form or structure (otherwise you'd have a chaotic gloop of electrons and quarks, not regular tetrahedal molecules), but not soul.

Of course Aristotle is really ancient. I would suggest looking up David Chalmers on the current state of the "explanatory gap" between brain states and phenomena like intellect and qualia.

*The Greek in De Anima iii.5 is obscure, and some moderns will dispute Aristotle's belief in the immortal intellect, but native Attic Greek speaking intellectuals like Plutarch thought he did and therefore found his philosophy acceptable to combine with Platonism, unlike the materialist Epicurus. Likewise the Neoplatonists, Avicenna, Maimonides, the Scholastics, etc. all found him an ally of religion and the immortal soul.

Odradek

Bitch what you say?