“For the living know they will die; but the dead do not know anything, nor have they any longer a reward, for their memory is forgotten. Indeed their love, their hate and their zeal have already perished, and they will no longer have a share in all that is done under the sun.”
— Ecclesiastes 9:5-6 (NASB)
Recently Ian Wardell has posted several comments at Is There Life after Death. Wardell has a significant Internet presence, including three blogs where he argues for psi and an afterlife. Wardell claims we have a soul that has psychological states that he calls mind. He sees that both the soul and the mind are far more than just the product of the brain. Wardell refers to himself as an idealist, a view that all reality is a mental construct, but his views also seem to have a lot in common with mind-body dualism. When it comes to the mind, he is interested in what might be there that is not accounted for by the material in the brain.
He loves to use the analogy of the brain as a pair of glasses or a TV set. The diagram below is based on my interpretation of what his words say. This model, which I will call the soul/glasses/TV (SGTV) model, illustrates how many see the soul. The brain acts as a pair of glasses that receives information from the world and transmits it to the soul. Here the soul experiences life and transmits commands down to the portion of the brain that he compares to a TV receiver. This TV then drives the body.
Wardell agrees that injury to the brain can affect the mind (which he defines as the state of the soul). If an immaterial soul is driving mental functions, it is unclear why injury to the brain would affect that mind’s state. Is it sabotage? If the brain affects an otherwise healthy soul, why does the effect get stronger when the brain gets weaker? Wouldn’t a weaker brain be worse at sabotage?
If we were to redraw the picture above such that the soul was inside the brain as part of the brain and give it a generic name such as mental processes, we would have a simplified model of how scientists understand the brain works. I support this view, in which the brain itself is the seat of all mental activity.
The mind, as I understand it, is just a name we give for the set of mental functions that the brain performs. Likewise, consciousness is just a name for the act of being conscious. Just like a conversation or an exercise routine are not physical objects but are simply names that we give to a set of actions, so the mind and consciousness are not physical objects. They are names for the things brains do. These actions of the brain are often personified, as if they are a separate entity. But they are not. The words mind and consciousness are just names for sets of things that the brain does.
I find no need for a soul that is distinct from the brain. Some people tell me that they still believe in a soul, so can’t we just go ahead and guess that an immaterial soul might be a part of mental life that can continue on without the body? Sure, let’s suppose that there is some part of us called a soul that survives without our brain. If we survived death in this soul, but lost our brain functions, what would we be missing?
1. We need brains to interface with the world.
According to the SGTV (soul-glasses-television) model pictured above, inputs come to our thinker though our metaphorical glasses. And, just as glasses can get fogged up, so conditions in the brain can fog up the signals to the mind. Conditions like blindness and hearing loss can block the transmission of information to the mind. And paralysis or Parkinson’s disease can limit the ability for the mind to control the body. There is no dispute here. Damage to the nervous system block the thinker from perceiving the world properly and communicating with it.
Death must be the ultimate in damage to the brain, so that must permanently destroy any sense of the world though the “glasses” or transmission to the world through the “TV”. At death, the metaphorical glasses become solid black. Wardell contends that one could simply remove those painted glasses. Uh, no, removing one’s brain doesn’t improve one’s vision!
But could it be that the soul somehow bypasses the dead brain, and gets input from the world through some other path? I show these proposed paths as two light lines that bypass the brain in the diagram above. But we have no good evidence that such paths exist. Some suggest things like near-death experiences show such paths are possible, but scientific investigations consistently show there is no convincing evidence of this possibility. (Augustine, 2015, pp 529-570) In this life, when we try to peek around the blindfold, when we try to observe the world without using our bodily senses, we find it hopeless. We are limited to the information we get through our bodies and our brains.
Yes, we could guess that we might bypass the brain after death. That seems to me to be similar to the Heaven’s Gate group, that guessed that a spacecraft was coming with the Comet Hale-Bopp and was going to whisk them away. 39 members of the group committed suicide so their souls could join up with that spaceship. They were mistaken. So yes, we can guess what might be available to souls, such as an awaiting spacecraft or miraculous perception abilities that are distinct from our bodily senses, but these are only guesses.
For the sake of argument, let’s suppose you had some new means of sensing the world after death. That doesn’t even begin to give the soul an existence that would continue to be our selves. For science shows that we would lose so much more if we survived death without a brain.
2. We need brains to use words
When a person has an injury in the Broca’s area of the brain, he can lose the ability to form words into grammatical sentences. The mouth still works. The connection from the brain to the mouth works fine. The person can still speak words. But the person loses the ability to arrange the words into sentences. The brain is damaged, and speech is affected. This is exactly the type of thing that the scientific view of the brain would anticipate.
But what if a soul was in charge and writing our speeches per the SGTV model? One would wonder why damage to the brain would prevent the soul from using language to communicate. Wardell suggests that the soul might have difficulties with language because, “an appropriately dysfunctional brain might serve to merely inhibit language ability”. That’s sabotage. The “glasses” of the brain are still transmitting clear messages to the soul about the world. The soul is still directing the mouth to speak words. And those words can get through to the brain and mouth. But somehow, the brain decides to specifically sabotage a function of the soul, preventing the soul from doing the linguistical task of forming grammatical sentences.
If damage to the brain causes the brain to sabotage the mind, why is it that more intense damage causes more extreme distortions? One would think that the severely damaged brain would lose the effectiveness in its sabotage efforts. And besides, why would the brain be doing this sabotage?
Wardell, seems to realize the problem with the brain inhibiting the soul, so he quickly suggests another solution:
I assume souls would communicate via telepathy rather than language, so it is not entirely clear to me why souls should have a language ability in the first place. This being so, it does not seem problematic for those who subscribe to survival to grant that the brain might well enable our language ability.
A Response to The Myth of an Afterlife
Wardell just gave away the farm! For “enabling our language ability” must surely mean producing sentences. So here he concedes that the brain might be the thing that constructs our verbal communication. The soul might be too busy being the president of our lives, so it subordinates the speech-writing task to the brain, which acts as the press secretary. Using a little telepathy, or something like it, the soul somehow transmits its state nonverbally to the brain. The brain writes the speech.
But this is quite odd. For Wardell has also said that, “*in a most immediate sense* I am experiencing my consciousness affecting my body right now in the form of the words I type out!” (Emphasis his). That was what he had presented as his strong evidence for a conscious non-material soul directing his body: In an immediate sense he could experience the soul forming the words. But now we find that this speechwriting that he thought was obviously his soul’s handiwork might well be nothing more than portions of the brain putting that speech together. So maybe the speechwriter that Wardell claims to know “in a most immediate sense” is nothing more than his brain. Wardell claims to experience this as the consciousness writing the speech, but now his words seem to admit that an unconscious brain might be doing it.
Which is very close to what I say–the brain constructs our speech and our consciousness, almost simultaneously, such that it appears that an independent consciousness is writing the speech. But it is the molecules in the brain that are doing the heavy lifting.
There is another region of the brain known as Wernicke’s area that also affects speech Damage here leaves grammar intact, but causes a person to lose meaning in the words he speaks. One patient, for instance, when asked how he was feeling today, replied, “I’m feeling fine to the extent but not to the mind directly” (Hines, 2014, p 188). That’s gibberish. Patients with damage in this region have trouble speaking sentences that express anything meaningful, even though the sentences may be grammatical. Damage here also gives the victim trouble comprehending the words they hear.
How can you explain this from the SGTV model? Do we find the brain with damage in one region decides to sabotage the soul’s ability to put meaning into its words, but the brain with damage in another region sabotages grammar while leaving words intact? Why does the area of the damage change the way the brain affects the soul?
The mainstream science view, in which the physical brain does the speechwriting, is easily compatible with the idea that damage in different places result in loss of different functions. But if one tries to say the soul is doing the speech, one would need some explanation why damage over here does one sabotage of the soul, but damage over there does some other damage to the soul. Can one simply invent a reason why this might happen? Sure. A creative mind could certainly invent a reason why this soul lost grammar and that soul lost meaning of words. But all of that is like drawing a target on the wall after the arrow was shot. It’s easy to draw a bullseye around the arrow after the shot and claim good marksmanship. That is not a valid claim.
We need no after-the-fact equivocation from the brain dependency model. We understand that the mind comes from brain activity in different regions, and thus we can predict damage in some regions would affect the mind differently from damage in other regions. That is exactly what happens.
The obvious conclusion is that the brain is the speech writer and the interpreter of speech. The same applies to written words or any communication through linguistic means. Such communication is a vital part of what it means to be alive.
Could the soul simply live on after the body dies without the benefits of language? Imagine a world without words. Even in our private thoughts, much of our thought life consists of strings of words passing through our minds. Imagine having a mind that could not come up with meaningful words to string together even in its private thoughts. What would life be like without words? Helen Keller can give us insight here. She lost her eyesight and hearing at 19 months of age. She then had to go through six years of childhood with no means of communicating through words. She tells us what that was like:
Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequatly that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness…Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another.
(Keller, 1908)
Fortunately for Keller, she had a teacher who taught her sign language using the sense of touch on her hands. One day it dawned on her that the word “water” when spelled in her hand meant the wet substance she was feeling on her other hand. More importantly, she realized that everything had a name. Later, by stringing those names together, she learned that one could portray complex thought. Words opened a whole new world to her. Without words, telepathy just didn’t hack it. But once she had words, her entire consciousness changed.
Without the brain, we apparently lose words. If my soul lives on without my brain, then it would not be able to use words or grammar, not even in its private thoughts. And that must surely be a dismal state.
If only surviving souls had a brain, they could use words. But alas, the brain is gone.
3. We need brains to learn new things.
At Is There Life after Death I discussed the loss of ability to form new memories that sometimes happens after a stroke. Wardell responded but switched the subject to arguments against brain-dependency. But his rabbit trail of the inadequacy of a brain gets him nowhere. Brains think.
Wardell claims that “memories cannot and are not stored. We have to be in touch with them directly.” Which is simply wrong. We know that memories are stored.
If brains cannot store memories, then the soul must somehow be retaining access to things that the soul remembers. If so, how does Wardell address the question that the brain was damaged, and the soul lost the ability to be in touch with memories of events after the damage?
For instance, after my grandmother had a stroke, she was thrilled that I came to visit her. But an hour later she had no memory of the visit. She could remember things from her childhood, but that visit, which meant so much in the moment, was forgotten a day later. How can you explain this?
Science would say the brain was damaged in the stroke. In particular, the hippocampus region was probably affected, causing a condition known as anterograde amnesia. The brain still had short term memory. It could keep the current sentence in memory but had trouble making that memory accessible later. The part of the brain that makes the memories accessible long term was no longer functioning properly. So my grandmother forgot that I came to visit her.
If people have souls that are separate from the body, and if souls are the part of us that remembers things, then her soul lost this important function. How can a damaged brain cause the soul to lose this function? That damaged brain successfully told my grandmother’s soul that I was there. My grandmother knew I was there. If her soul knew this, and her soul was totally healthy, why could it not remember?
The hippocampus area and other portions of the brain are critical to retaining memories. If a soul survived without a hippocampus, how could it remember anything that happened after that?
Brains learn new things. If only souls after death had a brain, they too could learn new things. But alas, they have no brain.
4. We need brains to recall the past.
Brain damage can also prevent us from recalling things we once knew. This is known as retrograde amnesia. Retrograde amnesia can be caused by traumatic brain injuries, nutritional deficiencies, or infections.
How can damage to the brain cause us to lose memories? Simple. Memories are stored in the brain. When specific areas of the brain are damaged, such as the temporal lobes, we can lose access to these memories. Such memory losses are the type of thing that is totally expected if the brain is the thing that memorizes. But if a soul separate from the brain is remembering these things, then it is totally unexpected that a traumatic brain injury would cause the soul to forget.
Death will destroy my temporal lobes, as well as the rest of my brain. If even minor damage to these parts can cause drastic memory loss, how would a soul without a brain have access to any of my memories?
What good is eternal existence that never remembers who we were on Earth, or even the basics of existence, morality, or language?
If only my soul after death had a brain, it could remember who I was, what I enjoyed, and what I did with my life. But alas, it will have no brain.
5. We need brains for coherent thoughts
One night I dreamed that I was dead. I was lying in a coffin, and people were standing around looking at me. Then, much to the surprise of everybody in the room, I walked in and saw them looking at my dead body. I dreamed that this Merle, the living one, had an explanation for this. The other Merle, the dead one, was just my identical twin. Then I woke up. In reality I have no twin brother, so the whole scene I had dreamed was simply imaginary. But somehow, while in my dream state, I believed it. I woke up believing it was true, only to quickly realize it was only a dream.
Why had my mind fallen for such obvious nonsense? While the brain slept, one would think a separate soul would be fully alert and able to maintain it normal rationality. But when the brain dreams, the soul loses its sense of discernment, and believes utter nonsense.
We need healthy brains to have coherent thoughts. Damage and injury to the brain can lead to confused thinking patterns, such as in dementia. This can lead to confused understanding of the world. If the soul functions distinctly from the brain, why would the soul become so confused when the brain gets injured?
Is the problem simply that the brain blocks inputs? No. We would never say that the person suffering from Alzheimer’s has a mind that is totally normal, but some of the inputs were blocked. Even the victim of Alzheimer’s knows the problem is the confused mind, not the lack of input.
If only souls had a brain, they could view the world in a coherent manner. But brain deterioration can affect our abilities to think coherently. What good is eternal incoherence?
6. We need brains to have personality
Dobermann dogs were once bred to have an aggressive nature. Something in their DNA gave them aggressive tendencies. Other dogs were bred to be gentle, active, passive, or intelligent. It’s all in the DNA. Somehow the DNA affects who they are.
Similarly, human DNA affects our basic personality (Augustine and Fishman, 2015, p 242). DNA has a direct effect on the brain, not on the soul. Therefore, the brain must be the thing that controls our personality. Without the brain, how would we retain our personality?
If only souls had a brain, they could retain our personality after death. But alas, surviving souls will not have access to our brains, which will be gone.
7. We need brains to have emotions
If you have damage in one area of your brain, you can lose the ability to feel fear or sadness. If you have damage in another area, you can lose the ability to feel happy. When the brain is not functioning correctly, we cannot experience normal human emotions. (Alvarez, 2015, p 180)
If only souls had a brain, they could feel human emotions after death.
8. We need brains for consciousness
If only souls had a brain, they could be conscious. But anesthesia shows us that certain effects on the brain bring consciousness to a halt. After waking from anesthesia, one finds that he was totally unaware of anything that happened during that time. One does not even have a feeling that time had passed while under anesthesia. One simply goes to sleep and then wakes up as though no time had passed in the meantime.
Many patients in their dying days gradually lose all consciousness of this world. The explanation is simple. We need brains for consciousness. If the brain can no longer function fully, consciousness ceases. What good is eternal existence that is never conscious of existing?
The SGTV model in no way explains this. If the brain is just a pair of glasses feeding data to the soul, and a TV receiving signals from the soul, then all should still be well with the soul if the glasses and TV fail. It would be like losing a zoom call or trying to talk to someone on a cellphone with a bad connection. You would still be fully alert but have diminished communication to the world. That is not what happens. When the brain fails, the person loses consciousness. This is certainly not expected on the SGTV model.
If only surviving souls after death had a brain, they could be conscious.
Conclusion
Is it possible that some day we will discover something akin to dark energy or dark matter, or something even more unexpected, something not made of ordinary matter that is part of our minds and contributes to thoughts? Perhaps. And could that essence continue after death? Perhaps. And could we call that our soul? If you like, sure, go ahead, call it your soul. But such surviving souls would be limited by the lack of a brain. It would hardly be proper to refer to that surviving soul as being me, any more than one could refer to a molecule of water in my brain that survives my death as being me.
Without my body, my soul will have no brain. What good is that survival? Without my brain, and thus without my memories, my cognition, my emotions, my consciousness, or my personality, how would that soul truly be me?
Will it get another brain? I don’t think so. But even if a soul of mine survives and finds itself in another brain, I don’t see how that can be referred to as me, any more than a water molecule in my brain that finds itself in some future brain will be me.
Speaking of a soul without a brain reminds me of this guy:
Indeed. If only souls [1] had a brain, their thoughts could be busy hatching. They could while away the hours, conferring with the flowers, consulting with the rain. If only souls had a brain.
Notes
- The scarecrow actually sings, “If I only had a brain”. I find that to be an odd word order. To me, if only I had a brain seems more natural and clearer in meaning. It turns out that, when The Wizard of Oz was written, the phrase “if I only had a“ was more commonly used than “if only I had a.” In modern times, that has changed. Purists may tell me that, if I wanted to play off the scarecrow’s phrase, I should have kept the word order intact. After much debate, my Broca’s area chose to reverse the order. See discussion at https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/605617/in-the-wizard-of-oz-the-scarecrow-sings-if-i-only-had-a-brain-doesnt-he-re .
references
Alvarez, Carlos (2015). Brain, Language and Survival after Death in The Myth of an Afterlife
Augustine, Keith (2015). Near-Death Experiences are Hallucinations in The Myth of an Afterlife
Augustine, Keith and Fishman, Yonatan (2015). The Dualists’ Dilemma in The Myth of an Afterlife
Dennett, Daniel C. (1991). Consciousness Explained
Keller, Helen (1908). The World I Live In
Recently I have been debating the content of this page at https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-is-the-filter-theory-committing-the-ad-hoc-fallacy-and-is-it-unfalsifiable .
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