On The Soul – Mark Goldblatt
By Mark Goldblatt.
Source: http://levityhealth.com.au/
The soul, in other words, is not your consciousness – unless you are a materialist. If you are not a materialist, however, then the soul is what’s underneath your consciousness, the platform upon which your consciousness is constructed. The distinction is critical. Consciousness is the thing that emerges from sense data, the thing that comes to consist of memory and language. But sense data, memory and language have material components; they’re rooted in the workings of brain. The last half century of neuroscience has established that beyond a reasonable doubt. The stuff of consciousness is definitively brain-based. It relies on physical matter. So if the soul is indeed immaterial, it must be more basic than consciousness. The word ‘self’ gets closer to the point – though I think ‘me-ness’ gets still closer. It’s the gathering principle of sensation, memory and language; the immeasurable, imperceptible, inexplicable filament that draws them together into consciousness.
Thinking about the peculiarity of consciousness arising in a contraption of electronic circuitry and binary codes puts the problem in especially stark relief. But even if the system consists of flesh and blood, the problem remains unchanged. Sensations like sights and sounds are just electrochemical surges. There’s nothing mystical about them. They course through the body, carrying charges to and from the neuromagnetic cluster that operates in the brain, adding more and more data to the system. So you’ve got electrical signals. You’ve got magnetic fields. You’ve got living matter, organic cells in which the electrical signals and magnetic fields gather. Below that, you’ve got carbon atoms. You’ve got water molecules. In other words, you’ve got goop and soup, stimuli and response. That’s the totality of it, from the materialist perspective.
Read the entire article on Philosophy Now!
Related post: