B. Philosophy of Mind: 1st Extract

Searching for the Soul

What is the point of these speculations? Simply to underline the fact that we are not in a position to investigate the soul if we ourselves, as philosophical investigators, do not feel gripped by the problems to which the idea of a soul is a response. Finding other individuals who are gripped by those problems does not make the soul problematic enough. That is perhaps putting things rather too crudely. The philosopher who thinks of themself as having got rid, through long practice, of the temptation to succumb to illusions about the soul would reject the suggestion that as a result of such efforts we have merely succeeded in increasing our ignorance! Yet in a way that is just what they have done. Our philosophical goal is surely not to desensitise ourselves to certain philosophical problems (perhaps there is a drug that does the trick). What matters is the route taken to enlightenment. If we no longer feel the temptation to believe certain things about 'the soul', that state of mind has value for the philosopher precisely because we still remember what it was like to be tempted.

Let us now investigate some of these 'temptations'. Many persons, when pressed, will assert that they know, with absolute certainty, that there is more to their existence than a clump of matter, even so highly organised a clump of matter as the human body, with its brain and nervous system. Mere physical stuff, they feel, however complex its form, would simply have nothing inside. It is surely a plain fact open to any person's introspection that one does indeed have something inside. Cut open a brain, and all you find is grey stuff. However deeply you probe, all you come across is more of the same. The deepest recesses of a person's brain still lie on the outside. Yet laid out before me now is the colourful, noisy, soft, prickly, odorous world of my conscious experience. Treasures such as these remain locked away from the probings of the tiniest scalpel or the most powerful microscope. If they belonged to the brain then surely there would be a way to bring them open to common view. But if they do not belong to the brain, then there must be something else to which they do 'belong'. And that something we call the soul.

We are still a long way from assembling the materials that will enable us to directly challenge this commonly held view of the nature of subjectivity. It is perhaps hard for the reader to imagine how it could be challenged. But let us content ourselves for now with considering some relatively trivial but still awkward questions. One speaks of consciousness being 'inside'. Where inside is it? Does the world of my conscious experience have a certain size and shape that enables it to fit inside a certain part of my body? My head perhaps? It is hard to see how that could be so, for the head seems pretty small in relation to the world of my conscious experience. Must I conclude, then, that my conscious world is smaller than it appears? How much smaller?

But why must consciousness be located in the head, anyway? The head is where the brain is, and we have been told by those researching in the field of neurology that the brain plays a major role in the production of consciousness. But not everyone knows that. Aristotle, one of the keenest minds who ever lived, believed, for reasons that made good sense at the then current state of knowledge, that the brain was merely a cooling system for the blood. (As everyone knows, one of the best ways to keep warm is to wear a hat.) Following Greek tradition, Aristotle thought that the heart was the organ that we think and feel with. Another reason why we think of consciousness being in the head is simply that that's where our eyes are. It follows that if our eyes were in our elbows, then that is where we would conceive our conscious selves to be. — What one finds when one begins to probe is a tangle of metaphors and pictures, that are not nearly as self-evident as appeared at first sight.

Another place where the temptation to appeal to the metaphor of a soul appears is in relation to the question of the identities of persons over time. The drunk lying under the bridge at the Embankment Underground Station in London was once a captain of industry. If you looked closely you might just spot the hint of a resemblance between his ruddy, grizzled features and the photograph of a certain Richard Bull in the July 1967 issue of Management Today. What makes these two individuals, the one existing in 1967 and the one existing in 1995, one and the same? 'Dirty Dickey' swears that he has been a drunk all his life. Every recollection of his former existence has been blacked out, the slate of conscious memory wiped clean. A recording angel, however, following the movements of Richard Bull over the intervening years, and his long decline through a failed marriage, alcoholism, and finally destitution, would be able to testify that the living body wrapped in rags is undoubtedly the same living body that once lounged behind a large, leather-topped desk. Yet we feel there must be more to the identity of Richard Bull than that tenuous fact. Some spark of an indestructible self hidden deep inside this rotting hulk of a body is the spark that once faced the camera lens back in 1967, and this spark we name 'the soul'.

Here we should note that there is already a glaring contradiction between the two pictures of the soul, as the seat of conscious experience and as the seat of the indestructible self. First we posited a soul to explain the presence of conscious experience 'inside' the self; now we are positing the soul in order to account for its absence! (In fact, the two notions correspond the very different conceptions of the soul as it appears in Western religious thought, and in the Buddhist notion of the 'atman', which can undergo indefinitely many incarnations.) If we look more closely at the idea of a 'spark of the self', however, we find that far from being a self-evident fact as the existence of consciousness inside the head was meant to be, it is merely a theory, a hypothesis — albeit one which we feel somehow to be necessary. No-one has ever seen, touched, tasted or smelled the spark of consciousness: it is to all intents and purposes completely invisible in every way. So why believe in it then? The indubitable fact of the matter is that we feel the standing temptation to believe in it, and it is that temptation which is the concern of the philosopher.

The third source of temptation arises for each person when they first become aware that they are going to die. In popular consciousness, death is acknowledged as something to be feared. Yet death itself, as opposed to the manner of one's dying, is a completely different kind of event from events that happen to one in one's life. It is the absolute closing off of possibilities of experience or action. It is harder than it might first seem to explain exactly why that is something that ought to inspire fear. Blindness, for example, would be the closing off of certain possibilities of experience. Imprisonment would be the closing off of certain possibilities of action. Extending those cases by analogy, one thinks of death as a the ultimate form of confinement, where the self, cut off from all experience, all action, (including thought) shrinks to nothing. That is, of course, just a picture. As soon as it is spelled out, one realizes that, while death deprives us of continued life and all the possibilities that might bring, it is not a deprivation that we suffer or that happens to us when we die. Yet stubbornly, the feeling persists in some persons that somehow one cannot die. There can never be a time, one feels, when there will cease to be this world, my world, in all its colour and glory.