Fillet Of Soul

Jeff Kuecker of Zeitgeist vs. Nomos is afraid of what the emerging possibility of teleportation would do to his immortal soul. You know, the part that makes us us, according to him. Jeff goes on to state the un-evidenced proposition that these "souls" actually exist, and he states it as if it were a fact - suggesting in his post that souls exist in the same way that a sidewalk outside your home exists, for example. It is implied to be a concrete, unquestionable fact. This is not surprising, really, coming from a Christian like Jeff, because the very definition of the theistic position is the acceptance of concepts like "souls", the supernatural, and a god without any evidence whatsoever. However, I have to take issue with this underlying assumption. He tells us that the human soul is immaterial, non-physical, invisible, and undetectable.

Hmnn.

[link] The problem is that we are not our bodies. We have bodies. But we, the things that make us us, our ego, self-consciousness, beliefs, memories, states of mind, all these things are not physical. They are part of our souls, the souls that animate our bodies.

Aside from the obvious question as to how, exactly, a "not physical" thing thing could perform the physical task of animating a physical body, how in the world do you determine that a non-physical, immaterial soul exists at all? Jeff informs us that it is a "process of elimination".

[link] Now granted we don't hear much about the nature of bodies and souls much in church, so how are we sure that we really have a soul, and that it is immaterial. We can start by a process of elimination. Ask yourself, how much does the memory of my childhood weigh? What is the electrical charge of my discarded belief in evolution? What is the chemical composition of my desire to change my desire about lustful things? These questions don't make sense. Desires, memories, emotions don't fit those categories. Its like asking whether blue is faster than Wednesday.

It seems to me that Jeff is making the same argument that many theistic apologists make when they say "Can you measure love?" This is thought to be a great way to stop the evil atheist in their metaphorical tracks with this undeniable truth. If you cannot quantify the human emotion that we call "love", and you cannot quantify or measure a "soul" or a god, then, obviously, a "soul" and a god could exist in this same fashion.

This is not a sound argument. Just because a is similar to b, this does not mean that a equals b. The emotion called love is experienced by every human being at some point in his or her life. It's existence is a self-evident and unquestioned one. It is an emotional state that we all can identify within ourselves. Emotions in a human being have been shown conclusively to be the output of a functioning brain. They depend on stimulation of various physical areas of the brain by way of different chemicals produced by our bodies and by the minute electrical charges that power our neurons and synapses.

Souls and gods, on the other hand, are described by theists as existing outside of and separate from (but connected to in some way) to our physical bodies. In other words they are said to be independent of our bodies.

Love, or any other human emotion, does not exist apart from our physical bodies. Emotions are purely an expression of our material bodily processes.

So, when Jeff asks the question "How much does the memory of my childhood weigh?", there is definitely an answer - even if at this point in time we lack the scientific and technical expertise to identify the exact mechanism by which out brains store and cache memories, or the ability to isolate specific memory stores in order to "weigh" or measure them.

So, what makes us us, as Jeff asks? Is it the exact arrangement of atoms in a human body that make up our unique identity, ourselves? I believe that it is. Specifically, I believe that it is the exact arrangement of atoms that make up our brains. If this arrangement were to be read, mapped, the pattern transfered to another physical location, then rebuilt in the exact same configuration from the atoms up, "we" would emerge knowing exactly who we were. There's nothing spooky about it. The basic concept is absolutely bone-simple and sound. We wouldn't die because we were separated from our, immaterial, invisible, non-physical, mythical, imaginary souls - because they never existed in the first place.

[link]Our experiences are not physical and cannot be explained in the language of science.

This is, to be brutally honest, complete horse shit. All of our experiences are physical. Every single one. They are physically experienced, and materially stored by the wonderful gray lump between our ears. To think otherwise is to descend into mysticism and self-deception. The mumbo-jumbo attribution of our self, our identity, to some supernatural "other" is a cop out - and ultimately much, much less wondrous than our physical, material bodies.