Does the Eternal Soul Exist? Options

[tangawizi]

Does the Eternal Soul Exist?

Neuroscientists understand, at least in general, how the biological machinery of the brain can compute information. But how does a brain become aware of information? What is sentience itself? When a specific part of the brain is damaged, does the patient lose only a specific category of knowledge, such as vision or language, or can the patient ever lose some of the essence of awareness?

A clinical syndrome called hemispatial neglect may help to answer the question. It is one of the most fascinating, and horrible, syndromes in the medical literature. Neglect was first described early in the 20th century, and over the years much has been learned about it.

Imagine waking up in the hospital after a stroke to find that half your world is gone. The left side of space and everything in it has been erased from your consciousness. You can talk to the people who stand to the right side of your hospital bed, but when they walk to the left side they disappear from your mind. You dress the right side of your body but forget to dress the left. You think you've eaten everything on your plate, but have eaten only the food on the right side. You can't even conceive of a left side of the plate. When someone rotates the plate, food that you didn't acknowledge before suddenly appears. When you draw a clock, you crush all 12 numbers into the right side of the drawing and don't notice that anything is wrong. You have no insight into your own condition because, lacking any awareness of a left side of space, you can't realize what is missing.

This bizarre and crippling syndrome is not simple blindness. After all, blind people and sighted people who close their eyes know about the objects around them. Instead it is a mental blindness. It covers vision, touch, hearing, memory and concept.

Over the years, different varieties of neglect have been described and associated with damage to different brain regions. But the most dense, profound loss of awareness is associated with a region of the cerebral cortex roughly just above the ear on the right side of the brain. Much more rarely, neglect of the right side of space is caused by damage to the same general area on the left side of the brain.

Neglect is a peculiar syndrome. It suggests that awareness is not a unified item, but like many constructs of the brain it can be knocked apart into a right and a left half. It suggests that awareness is constructed at least partially by a specific region of the brain. It suggests a close relationship between awareness and attention.

The findings are controversial. That same general region of the brain has been found to play a role in social thinking -- in understanding the minds of other people. Why would a brain area involved in social intelligence also participate in one's own basic awareness? Which of the rival accounts is correct? I have argued in my scientific writing that the two functions are not rivals, and instead are closely related. Awareness, sentience itself, may be part of the toolkit we use to understand ourselves and each other. It may be a function of our social brain.

In my view, there really is such a thing as a spirit, a soul, but it is not as people have imagined it in the past. The soul is information of a special kind, wrapped up into a complex structure, instantiated in the circuitry of the brain. It is quirky and individual to each of us, and is precious because it is not eternal.


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Do you like his conclusion about the Soul from a neuroscientific pov???

[tangawizi]

A follow up to the above post..



The Spirit Ends When The Brain Dies
Michael Graziano
Professor of Neuroscience and Novelist, Princeton University

In my last post I commented about the link between the brain and the mind. That post received so much interest and so many comments from all perspectives that I thought it would be useful to explore the topic more systematically. Nobody should be mistaken about the cultural importance of the topic. The link between the mind and the brain is not merely a medical story. Its implications reach into almost all aspects of religion and spirituality including the belief in God, ghosts, angels, devils, and life after death.

When most of us think about the key conflicts between science and religion, we tend to think about Darwin's theory of evolution published in 1859, or Galileo's persecution by the Catholic Church in the 17th century. These famous clashes between science and religion are resolvable. Every sensible modern religion accepts the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun. Liberal religions are gradually accepting the scientific fact of biological evolution.

One disconnect between religion and science, however, is much older, much more profound, and may be much harder to bridge. It dates back at least to Hippocrates in the fifth century BC. At that time there was no formal science as it is recognized today. Hippocrates was nonetheless an acute medical observer and noticed that people with brain damage tended to lose some of their mental abilities. A passage attributed to him summarizes his view elegantly:

"Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant..."

Hippocrates evidently understood the central conflict between observation and most spiritual beliefs. The belief in a spirit world, a world of consciousness that exists independently of physical substance, that survives the death of the body, that comprises ghosts and angels and deities, is incompatible with the observation that damage to the physical brain systematically takes away chunks of the mind. The medical facts suggest that mind, though it definitely exists, is something created by the brain and that it dies piece-by-piece as the brain dies.

About a century later Aristotle famously disagreed with Hippocrates, placing the mind in the human heart. Aristotle listed his reasons, many of which sound vaguely plausible given the analogical and somewhat mystical thinking of the time. How did Aristotle go so wrong in his medical analysis? He was a theoretician. Hippocrates, who worked in a hospital, saw the effects of brain damage every day and grounded his theory in observation. Nobody who spends appreciable time with brain-damaged patients can avoid the obvious conclusion. The brain is the source of the mind.

Another famous view of the brain/mind problem was outlined by Descartes two thousand years later, in the 17th century. In Descartes' view the mind was an ethereal substance, a fluid, that was stored in a receptacle in the brain. When he dissected the human brain he noticed that almost every structure came in pairs, one on each side. The human soul was obviously a single entity and therefore it could not be stored in a double structure. In the end he found a small single object at the center of the brain, the pineal body, and deduced that it was the house of the soul. The pineal body is now known to be a gland that produces melatonin and has nothing whatever to do with a soul.

Descartes' idea, aside from being wrong in the particulars, has a deeper problem. There is no part of the brain that, when damaged, takes away the Cartesian soul. Instead damage to different structures takes away different chunks of the mind. The ability to formulate a sentence? Lost in damage to Broca's area. The ability to understand language? Lost in damage to Wernicke's area. The ability to see, imagine, or comprehend color? Lost in damage to specific regions of the visual system. The ability to think about the space around the body? Lost in damage to another set of brain areas. The ability to intuit the feelings and intentions of others? Impaired after a stroke to a specific network of brain regions. And so on. The mind is a collective and bits of it die when parts of the machinery are mucked up. Even awareness itself, as I wrote about last time, can be splintered apart and compromised by brain damage.

The effect of brain damage is certainly not the only pertinent evidence. Some of the more interesting evidence comes from the direct electrical stimulation of the brain. A little more than a century ago scientists tried applying minute sparks of electricity to surface of the brain, stimulating the circuitry. The technique was improved and elaborated and is now one of the main methods for probing the brain's circuitry. For example, before removing a tumor from a person's brain, a surgeon will expose the brain while the person is awake and under local anesthetic. The surgeon will then study the effect of electrical stimulation, mapping out the function of this and that brain area, to avoid surgically removing any area necessary for language. Some of the most colorful and memorable experiments of this type were done by Penfield in the early 20th century. He found, as have many others since, that electrically tickling a specific spot in the circuitry has a specific and predictable effect on the mind. Whether seeing, hearing, feeling hunger, feeling rage, remembering a scene from childhood, making a coordinated gesture, even feeling as though you've intentionally chosen to make the gesture, these many bits and components of mind can be turned on and off by altering the activity of neurons.

The evidence is now overwhelming that every aspect of the mind is produced by the brain.

The realization that the brain produces the mind is similar in some ways to the theory of evolution before Charles Darwin got to it. Prior to Darwin, the theory of evolution was much discussed and the fossil record certainly supported it, but nobody could point to a plausible mechanism. How exactly did one species evolve over time into many new species? Darwin proposed a mechanism that fit the evidence: natural selection. Survival of the fittest. With the discovery of this simple mechanism, the science of biology was revolutionized.

The idea that the mind depends on the action of the brain is amply supported by the scientific evidence. But nobody knows how a brain produces the inner experience -- the feeling of consciousness. What is the mechanism? That is the question of our time. Many theories have been proposed, including one of my own, and only time and data will tell who is right.

I draw two personal lessons from the neuroscience of mind.

First, far from dismissing mind, or spirit, or soul as nonsense, I see these quantities as far more precious precisely because they are vulnerable and finite. In a sense I've become more spiritual as my scientific understanding deepens and I realize that spirit is a passing conjunction of information.

Second, the neuroscience of the mind gives me a wonderful opportunity to work on a scientific problem that is truly meaningful. About 25 years ago Francis Crick, famous for his role in understanding DNA, posed a question. Is it possible for brain science to address consciousness, a topic traditionally studied by philosophers and theologians? The answer is a definite yes. Many neuroscientists including myself have joined that effort.

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Someday, brain science will cause lots of unemployment in the clergies all around the world... hahahaha....

[lovinlife]

i think it is eternal.. i see no reason to believe otherwise.. like why would it just disappear if it is already existing possibility

[tangawizi]

But there's no evidence for the soul to be existing in eternity, is there?

[avisitor]

But there's no evidence for the soul to be existing in eternity, is there?

You ascribe aspects of the mind to functions of the brain
As if the two are meshed together, and can not be withdrawn from one another.
That one provides the other ... with reality.
If the brain dies then the soul or reality dies with it??

When you sit and meditate, what are you trying to do??
Are you just trying to quiet the mind??
Does knocking your self out also accomplish this??
Are you trying to develop concentration??
If yes then what for??
Some say for enlightenment ... others say that you must be reborn ...
And still others say you have what is always there, you just have to realize it and ... wake up

Yes, there is no physical evidence of a soul to exist
Consciousness can be exhibited but can not be proven
After all, the most sophisticated computers can mimic any human response to stimuli.
And, thus provide the same responses as a human being with consciousness.

While my mind goes faster than I can write these words, the soul does exist and human spirituality does go on forever
Unfortunately, it does like everything else in this universe ... it under goes change.
So, does it remain eternal?? Maybe?? Depends on the force of life or spirit or will or strength of intent or something like that.

OMG, what have I gotten myself into now???

[GentleWind]

Uh Avi$hitor, please lay down the pipe.

[avisitor]

Uh Avi$hitor, please lay down the pipe.

Does your mind always travel in such small circles??
SmellyFart ... sorry, GentleWart, you really should be more open to the truth

[GentleWind]

$hit and run huh. I should employ this method.

[avisitor]

$hit and run huh. I should employ this method.

Why do you always go off topic and preach your crap??
You are no better than the crazy man in the NYC subways preaching his bible
No one wants to hear it and you aren't helping anyone.

Now, please stay on topic.

[GentleWind]

I have never said I am sane.

[tangawizi]

It's Saturday nite, guys!

[avisitor]

I have never said I am sane.

No, you never said you were sane.
And, often I have said so only to be rebuffed by your torrents of insults.
So be it ...

[GentleWind]

Insults are good for you. That's your practice right here.

[ladyboyfarang]

no one knows until they die.

[avisitor]

no one knows until they die.

Is death the key to knowing the truth about the soul??
Or is there another way and we must persevere til we find the truth.
I don't have the answers ... only more questions ... especially after someone attempts to answer.

[tangawizi]

check out the neurological studies and find out!

[avisitor]

check out the neurological studies and find out!

How do neurological studies explain about something as ethereal as a soul????
I think you're chasing after rainbows .. looking for the pot of gold

[tangawizi]

Don't u think chasing after the soul is as real as the end of the rainbow?

Interesting TED talk on the divided brain :

[Sisi]

We dont know everything, even if we were to put our minds together, space is huge and many unknown things, there's no evidence that eternal life does not exist also.
Also alot of things do go on in our lives that are not seen, we cant see emotions, well not all of them, we cant read eachothers minds, we cant really see what is really going on in eachothers mind and the more a person can communicate in societies way from whats in their mind, the more intelligent that person is called but really alot of us are extremly intelligent more than we can communicate whats in our minds .

But then we are all vulnerable and stupid too , that's why things go wronge,

If we look more into spirituality and not so much in carnal way of thinking , carnal as in materialistic, outside spiritual things, there is sooo much that we all cant yet see and we can see more in spiritual.

It even says in the christian Bible that there are so many things in Heaven that no eye has seen, no ear has heard!

[avisitor]

It even says in the christian Bible that there are so many things in Heaven that no eye has seen, no ear has heard!

So, I'm guessing that your vote is yes??
So, you do believe in an eternal soul.

It isn't important to know for sure since we don't need it until a later time.
But, my interpretation is that we all do have a soul. Just that some of us are more in contact with it than others.