The Many Fallacies of "The Soul Fallacy"

1. Preliminary

I recently finished reading The Soul Fallacy by Julien Musolino for the second time, and I thought I'd pen down some of my thoughts.

As a preliminary, I should mention that my reading of skeptical sources on whether or not there is an afterlife is extensive. In my experience, the arguments opposing an afterlife, a soul and substance dualism, all tend to be very similar. In general, it seems they employ the same fallacious arguments and mischaracterize their opponents' positions in precisely the same manner. It can be deduced from this that skeptics of an afterlife are not, in the main, independently coming up with their own thoughts, ideas, and arguments. Rather, they appear to be reading from the same sources and/or each other and regurgitating what others have already said¹.

The Soul Fallacy follows this same trend. Hence, my criticisms of the arguments that Musolino makes also apply to many of the pervasive criticisms and misconceptions of a soul that one finds echoed in both skeptical literature and discussion boards on the net.

2. What is the Soul?

Since the author, Julien Musolino, is attempting to argue that the soul doesn't exist, he first needed to define it. So how does he conceive of the soul? More importantly, does it align with the way I and others sympathetic to an afterlife conceive of it?

Early on in the book, Musolino says he agrees with the following conception of the soul:

[The soul is] the traditional idea that there is something incorporeal about us, that the body is spiritualized by a mysterious substance. In this view, the soul is the nonphysical principle that allows us to tell right from wrong, gives us our ability to reason and have feelings, makes us conscious, and gives us free will. Perhaps most important, the soul is the immortal part of ourselves that can survive the death of our physical body and is capable of happiness or suffering in the afterlife. This is the soul that this book is about. (Musolino, Julien. The Soul Fallacy (p. 65). Prometheus. Kindle Edition.)

He also informs us that, “the soul hypothesis is a scientific claim about the detachability of mind and body and the existence of a mysterious substance powering our mental lives” (Ibid. p. 87). At another point, he says that those who believe in a soul hold that “the mind and voluntary behavior is triggered by an influx of soul substance” (Ibid. p. 152).

So, according to Musolino, soul proponents hold that the body is spiritualised by a mysterious substance and this substance both creates and powers our mental lives. I'll also note that this word “substance” is strewn throughout the book with it frequently being labelled as mysterious. The obvious question here is, what on earth actually is this “substance”?

Unfortunately, he never answers this question. But, clearly, what Musolino is referring to is what is generally labelled a mental substance. I explain this term's meaning in a blog post, The self or soul as a mental substance. In brief, it is the commonsensical conception of the self. The idea here is that with every thought, there is a thinker, and as well as experiences in the broadest sense, there is someone that experiences them. So a thinker or experiencer, or more generally the self, is not identical to thoughts and conscious experiences, rather the self is that which has those thoughts and experiences. It is what we all instinctively believe. That is until we are educated out of this conception of the self as a consequence of it being difficult..nay..impossible to reconcile with materialism. Note that this self needn't entail that it survives the death of our bodies, but if it does survive, then we can refer to it as the soul.

Are phrases like “mysterious substance”, and “influx of soul substance”, likely to conjure up this commonsensical conception of the self? Clearly not. It conjures up the impression that we are talking about something unknown, obscure, and baffling. And, of course, something mysterious. Quite the converse of what a mental substance actually refers to. Why do this? Why give a misleading impression? Why not just provide a definition of a mental substance similar to what I just gave? There seem to be two possibilities here:

1. His principal purpose is to persuade people that there is no soul. If portraying souls as being something unknown, obscure, and baffling furthers that aim, then that is a price worth paying, even though it is misleading.
2. He doesn't understand what a mental substance is and genuinely thinks it depicts something obscure and baffling.

Neither possibility places the author in a favourable light.

As for “1”, if it is indeed fairly obvious that souls do not exist, then why resort to underhand methods to persuade people of its non-existence? Surely it is vastly preferable to precipitate a genuine understanding in people that mental substances or souls are unlikely to exist? Yet if “2”, surely that would make him the wrong person to be writing this book? To be fair to the author, though, those that subscribe to materialism frequently mischaracterize what a mental substance is, and in a comparable manner.

There is another major problem with Musolino's conception of mental substance. This idea that this mysterious substance “gives rise to the mind” (p. 152), conjures up the idea that the soul and mind are two distinct things, even though the mind is caused by the soul. Since we are directly acquainted with our own minds, but not souls, this will naturally lend support to the idea that souls are superfluous. After all, why hypothesize an invisible soul to account for our minds when we have our visible, tangible bodies that can fulfil that role?

But many of those that subscribe to an afterlife hold that minds, mental substances, souls, and indeed selves all refer to one and the same entity. Arguably, we are all immediately acquainted with the fact that we are thinkers and experiencers (mental substances), and the question is simply whether such a self, so characterized, survives death. There is no additional entity—a “soul”—that is being hypothesized.

In summary, Musolino's conception of the soul is a morass of misleading characterizations, leaving the reader with the impression that souls are wholly mysterious, whilst at the same time leaving the reader in the dark as to what a soul actually is.

3. The Soul is a Scientific Hypothesis?

Musolino persistently claims throughout the book that the hypothesis of a soul is a scientific one. He says:

Maintaining that the soul plays an active role in our psychological functioning, that it can operate independently from the body, and then trying to argue that these claims are not scientific is a clear case of doublespeak. (Ibid. p. 58)

And shortly after he says:

[T]he idea of an immaterial substance that can interact with our body to make us do the things that we do— act morally, feel sad or elated, or jump up and down on Oprah Winfrey's couch Tom Cruise– style— is a claim about physics. (Ibid. p. 59)

A self's conscious states do indeed play a role in our psychological functioning. What this boils down to is that soul proponents, as well as those interactive dualists that deny an afterlife, reject the idea that the physical world is closed. The phrase that the “physical world is closed”, sometimes referred to as physical causal closure, refers to the idea that all change in the world is purely and exclusively a result of the interactions of the four physical forces existing in nature (namely, gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force). Believing in a causally potent soul/self contradicts such physical causal closure.

I agree that, at least in principle, this contravening of physical causal closure will be detectable. However, I suspect that the initial impact on consciousness will likely be minute, perhaps on the quantum scale. It is only then, via physical chains of causes and effects, that this initial impact cascades into larger and larger effects. Importantly, since neuroscientists are virtually all materialists, they won't be looking for any such influence, least of all any minute influence. Furthermore, and crucially, our functional MRIs lack the resolution to make any assertions in this regard in any case.

Musolino also states that psychology and biology will be impacted by the existence of a soul. However, even if we grant that these disciplines are, in principle, reducible to fundamental physics, in practice they have their own laws--laws that are revealed by our empirical investigations of the world. Hence, if causally efficacious non-material selves or souls exist, their activity in the world will be implicitly incorporated into such laws.

There is a more decisive reason, though, why dualism, and by extension, the existence of a soul, isn't primarily a scientific hypothesis. To see why we have to go back to the 17th century when modern science was born. At that time, it was taken as a matter of fact that the world is full of colours, sounds, odours, and other qualitative aspects. This created a problem for a scientific description of the world since such qualitative aspects of the world cannot be measured, and hence cannot be captured by mathematical equations. For example, neither the red colour of a tomato nor its characteristic taste can be captured by mathematical equations.

It took Galileo's reimagining of the world to take care of this problem. In this reimagining, material objects, indeed, the whole material world including the brain, don't really possess colours, sounds, odours, and other qualitative aspects. Instead, the material world was defined as merely consisting of the quantifiable or measurable aspects of reality; namely size, shape, location, motion, and nothing else. Hence, colours, sounds, and odours and so on were no longer treated as being part of the material world at all, instead they were relegated to existing in the mind only. And in fact, at least in science, the words standing for these qualities have been redefined to refer to those aspects of the material world that precipitate the appropriate qualitative experiences in our minds. For example, colours were redefined to refer to the respective specific wavelengths of light that objects reflect. The upshot of all this is that it left the material world as being exclusively composed of things and processes that can, in principle, be detected by our measuring instruments, and thus can be measured. 

The consequence of this was that the physical sciences could now potentially describe the material world in its entirety. That is, no aspect of the material world resides beyond its ambit. Yet, science also has its limitations since it can only describe that which is measurable, or in other words, that which is material. This means that our experience of colours, sounds, and odours reside beyond the ambit of science. So too do our emotions, our thoughts, the pains we experience, and indeed, the entirety of our conscious lives. Hence, consciousness as a whole, and a fortiori, the self or soul that has all these conscious experiences, resides outside the ambit of science. 

In order to make this notion that science has its limitations more clear, it might be illuminating here to introduce an analogy. Metal detectors have a great deal of success in detecting metal. But they cannot detect wood, plastic, rubber, or anything else non-metallic. And, so long as metal detectors are merely metal detectors, they will only ever be able to detect metal, and never anything else. In a similar manner, the physical sciences can only detect the material or that which is measurable. It cannot detect that which is non-measurable, so it cannot directly detect consciousness, or selves, or souls should they exist. At best, we could only measure the effect on bodies initiated by the causal power of consciousness. But, as I have already mentioned, such an initial mental influence is unlikely to be currently detectable.

I conclude, contra Musolino, that we cannot claim that the soul is a scientific hypothesis. It is a philosophical one and, more specifically, a metaphysical one.

I perhaps should add here that although a type of dualism is seemingly entailed by virtue of the way that Galileo defined the material world, this in no shape or form entails the existence of a soul that survives the death of our bodies. All dualism means is that there are two types of things or existents in the world. There is the material world, cashed out by everything we can measure. And there is consciousness, with all its contents. There is nothing innately contradictory about physical things and processes somehow creating such a non-material consciousness.  

4. Reductive Materialism

Pixelated "illusion"

Despite the carving up of reality that Galileo introduced that seemingly entailed a type of dualism, there is a position that explicitly denies any type of dualism, a position called reductive materialism,² This holds that consciousness, if it exists at all, is reducible to material processes. The argument is that although consciousness might seem very different to any physical thing or process, this doesn't mean that it is. Musolino, near the end of his book, tries to illustrate this to his readers by presenting us with a picture of what appears to be an assortment of random pixels (see picture above). However, when viewed from afar, the pixels can be seen to represent a crude picture of Elvis Presley. Let me try to further illustrate this idea by providing my own example. A house seems something very different to its component bricks, but nevertheless, a house is nothing but an assemblage of such bricks. In a similar vein to these examples--or so the argument goes--it might seem strange that our conscious experiences are really nothing but an assemblage of neurons firing, but that is what they are. Note that, here, we are not saying that the brain somehow causes consciousness, rather, consciousness just are brain processes, but at a different level of analysis.

We would rule out the possibility of a picture of Elvis existing without any pixels or anything else composing it. Likewise, should reductive materialism be correct, then it definitively rules out any type of essence or soul that might continue on after our brains cease to function. Indeed, if reductive materialism could, purely by reason, be shown to be the correct depiction of the mind-body relationship, there would be no need to appeal to any empirical arguments in order to reject a soul. So there would be no need to appeal to, for example, an argument such as the apparent dependency of the mind on a properly functioning brain.

Yet there is a problem here, and it is this: the analogies appealed to are false, and, it seems to me, transparently so. For, at least in principle, we can always see how an object--say some elaborate model created by Lego or Meccano--is merely an aggregation and arrangement of its component parts. More importantly, we wouldn't expect that Lego bricks, no matter how many and elaborately assembled, could somehow constitute an experience. So, to mention a few examples. Lego bricks, no matter how arranged, could ever as a collective whole somehow constitute the bitter taste of lemons, or of a pain like cramp, or the experiences of blueness, or of any other raw experience. And it doesn't help if we imagine the Lego bricks are able to move in relation to each other. Nor even if we imagine the bricks to have other properties, say the ability to repulse or attract other bricks. At the end of the day, they cannot, as a collective whole, constitute anything other than an elaborate physical structure. The exact same point applies to the ultimate constituents of material reality, namely electrons and quarks. Neither the Lego bricks nor any other physical object or process, can, as a collective whole, constitute raw experiences.

It appears to me, then, that at least reductive materialism is not tenable, as it cannot be squared with the existence of consciousness. How does Musolino respond to this argument?

He doesn't. He says:

If body and mind are two sides of the same coin, then how can we reduce the latter to the operation of the former? I'll let philosophers worry about this question. (Ibid. p. 65)

So Musolino doesn't even attempt to justify reductive materialism³. He's not the only one, either. None of the authors of The Myth of an Afterlife attempt to justify reductive materialism either, nor indeed anywhere else that I've ever seen.

Musolino does, however, advance philosophical arguments against dualism, although he simply repeats more or less the same arguments that many others have made. I have argued in various places that none of these arguments has merit (for example, see my A Causal Consciousness, Free Will, and Dualism under the subheading Various Objections and my The Alleged Problems with Interactive Substance Dualism). Moreover, even if, contrary to my position, these objections did have some force and moreover were even decisive, this could do nothing to make reductive materialism tenable. It would merely oblige us to choose another position on the mind-brain relationship, apart from reductive materialism or dualism. Perhaps some variant of idealism, for example. In fact, some variant of idealism is what I personally gravitate towards.

To reiterate, reductive materialism's failure to accommodate consciousness in no shape or form implies that brains do not somehow create consciousness. Nevertheless, its failure is of high significance. For since the birth of modern science in the 17th century, it was the gradually spreading conviction that the world is wholly material that justified a rejection of a soul in the first place (see my Science, the Afterlife, and the Intelligentsia).

But if, as I have argued, consciousness cannot be reduced to material processes, then it is something extra above material processes, even though arguably produced by them. Consciousness is then not publicly observable. That is, no matter how much we might explore someone's brain, we will only ever detect material processes; we could never see someone's thoughts, or emotions, or any other mental phenomena. So instead, we are obliged to infer that others are conscious through their bodily behaviour. Yet, if their consciousness itself is invisible, how could we know that it ceases to exist when their bodies eventually cease functioning? That it doesn't depart the body and continue existing, perhaps ascending to another reality?

The answer to this question is allegedly the empirical data, and especially the fact that dysfunctional brains lead to impaired minds. It is to the consideration of such empirical data that we will now turn.

5. Dysfunctional brains lead to impaired minds

As I have mentioned, in my experience, those who reject a soul virtually never advance arguments for reductive materialism. Instead, in order to justify their stance that brains create minds, what they almost exclusively do is to appeal to the empirical evidence. This evidence, in turn, almost exclusively revolves around the fact that dysfunctional or damaged brains can have a major impact on our minds. Musolino, in common with other skeptics, likewise mainly relies on the empirical evidence. For example, he says:

If damage to only parts of the brain can make you lose your ability to see, think, or feel, then how can all these abilities remain intact when your whole brain is completely kaput? (Ibid. p. 153)

Exactly the same sentiment is expressed by many other skeptics of souls. The philosopher Sam Harris, for one, and I respond to him in my blog post, The Mind-Brain Correlations. I recommend people read that blog post now if they haven't already (it's fairly short). Here is a relevant question: would Musolino, Harris et al. be equally mystified by the fact that someone’s vision can be more and more impaired as the lenses in their eyeglasses fog up, even though, notwithstanding this, their vision is fully restored when they take their eyeglasses off?

Of course, they might attempt to counter this by saying that eyeglasses and other such examples are incorrect analogies. However, it seems to me, that such analogies are only incorrect if one assumes up-front that brains create minds. Since that is precisely the issue at hand, it follows that saying it's an incorrect analogy would, therefore, simply beg the question (in the sense of the informal fallacy). 

Indeed, on the face of it, it seems to me that in this context, the analogy of eyeglasses and vision are of a similar nature to brains and minds. For just as there is no possible mechanism in the lenses in eyeglasses that could create vision, similarly there is no conceivable mechanism within brains that could create consciousness. To elucidate, we have chains of material causes and effects occurring in the brain and these causal chains, like all material causal chains, are exclusively characterised by properties such as mass, charge, momentum, spin, and so forth. But, at the end of such causal chains, we get a sudden abrupt change, a radical disconnect from these measurable processes to subjective experiences such as the greenness of grass, the warmth of love, the smell of roses, and so on. These subjective experiences do not have physical properties, so the usual material causal mechanisms cannot apply to account for their existence. Indeed, to my mind, this possibility that brains create consciousness is, on the face of it, just as outlandish as to suppose our glasses are creating vision.

I feel I may still not yet have adequately conveyed the deeply implausible nature of this hypothesis that brains create consciousness. Let me put it this way. When I was a child, one of my favourite books was The Marvellous Land of Oz. In this book, the main character constructs a man mainly made out of wood, but also with a pumpkin for a head. A magic spell makes this wooden man come alive, that is, become conscious. As young children, I'm sure that most of us would think this is at least plausible, but as adults, most of us would find such an idea absurd. And yet, this is comparable to what we are being asked to accept. For, in a sense, it seems equally magical that brains could create consciousness, since there is no conceivable mechanism. 

But let's waive aside the deeply implausible nature of this claim that brains create consciousness. Let's, for the sake of argument, accept that it’s at least possible. That it might well be an unanalysable brute fact about the world that certain physical activity of a certain type of complexity just spontaneously brings conscious experiences into being. Why, though, prefer this possibility to the alternative that selves and their conscious states already exist with brains merely affecting our minds?

Indeed, this alternative is surely vastly more plausible. To illustrate this, consider the following. Let's imagine that I can see a tree in front of me. How is this possible? Well, the tree has to exist, my eyes need to be functioning, and the appropriate regions of my brain need to be functioning correctly. Considering how incredibly complex my brain is, this makes for an intricate causal chain. Yet, for all that, I can stop my vision of the tree, in a sense, delete my vision, by the simple act of closing my eyes. Or, to introduce my eyeglasses example again, my vision of the tree could be compromised, or even blocked if the lenses were fogged up. Conversely, my vision of the tree can be restored by the simple act of opening my eyes again or cleaning the lenses of my eyeglasses. However, opening my eyes or cleaning my lenses obviously play no role in creating my vision. The bottom line is this. The process by which we are able to visually see is a complex, involved one. Contrariwise, very simple acts or procedures can block or restore our vision. But it would be very naive to suppose that these very simple acts and procedures play any role in the actual creation of our vision.

The point is this, generally speaking, the act of creating something tends to be a convoluted and complex one, whereas merely adversely affecting something is, typically, far easier to achieve. Why not, therefore, prefer the far more feasible and relatively unproblematic hypothesis that the self and its conscious states are not created by the brain at all? That the brain, instead, merely changes, modulates, and attenuates this pre-existing self with its conscious states?

Musolino has other things to say regarding the empirical data.  He says:

Your memory, your ability to talk, and your personality can be wiped out by brain damage. People who suffer from asomatognosia will assure you that part of their body, say their left arm, does not belong to them. In anosognosia, patients are convinced that a paralyzed limb is perfectly functional. The Capgras delusion is a condition in which patients sincerely believe that their loved ones have been replaced by impostors. Individuals who suffer from Fregoli syndrome hold the delusional belief that they are persecuted by a person who can take the appearance of different people. All these conditions result from damage to different areas of the brain. The allegedly indestructible soul is very fragile indeed. In light of such evidence, how can anyone believe that the mind will continue to function when the entire brain has given up? (Ibid. p. 161)

What Musolino refers to as the fragility of the mind is simply that it can be changed and altered by the brain, which he believes implies that the mind is created by the brain. As I have already argued above, this in no shape or form follows. We also need to remember here that we’re talking about a mental substance as defining the self or soul (see part 2). In which case, beliefs, memories, and indeed personality, are properties of such a self–they can change without the self or soul literally changing, least of all without the soul being destroyed. To reiterate, the proposal is that the brain is merely able to attenuate, allow or block the expression of such properties (see my The self or soul as a mental substance, where I elaborate upon this idea).

But what, specifically, should we say about delusional beliefs? If the brain doesn't create consciousness, could it still precipitate delusional beliefs such as, for example, Capgras syndrome?

To go back to my eyeglasses. Suppose someone has perfect unaided vision and puts on a pair of eyeglasses where the lenses both contain aberrations of a certain nature. Wearing them, she might think she can read the registration plate of a car 25 metres away. But, in fact, what she thinks are the letters and numerals are incorrect, as she can ascertain by taking the eyeglasses off.

So delusional beliefs are not definitive proof that the brain wholly causes our consciousness. Having said that, if we consider this evidence in isolation, it is surely the more straightforward explanation. However, we also need to take into account that we have no conceivable mechanism whereby brains could create consciousness. Moreover, even if we did, the brain merely affecting consciousness in various ways is undoubtedly a far less convoluted and complex task than actually creating consciousness.

6. Summing Up

How impressive are Musolino's arguments that there is no soul? Of pivotal importance to his arguments is the notion that the soul is a scientific hypothesis. But, as I argue above, in no shape or form can this be maintained. Furthermore, he fails to understand both the dualism he attempts to attack and the reductive materialism he subscribes to but chooses not to defend. His attacks against the former appear to be a more or less copy and paste from other sources, attacks that I think lack any meaningful impact. Worse yet, he clearly fails to understand what is meant by a mental substance and, therefore, what a soul is. So there's a lack of understanding of any of the main terms. Moreover, the few philosophical arguments he advances are naive and shallow.

Having said that, the empirical arguments don't depend on knowing what any of these terms mean; rather, they attempt to show more directly that the mind in every way is implicitly dependent on a functioning brain. However, in the general sense, the fact that X affects Y in no shape or form implies that X creates Y. I gave the example of eyeglasses, but many other examples could be given (see my blog post Brains affecting Minds do not rule out an Afterlife where I provide more examples).

I think Musolino, just like other materialists, simply buys into and echoes the prevailing belief that our ubiquitous technology and control of the world somehow vindicates the idea that the physical sciences must potentially describe the whole of reality, otherwise why would science be so phenomenally successful? I discuss the origin of this pervasive belief in my Science, the Afterlife, and the Intelligentsia⁴ I find it perplexing that people do not understand that such a materialist perspective is not consistent with the existence of consciousness, regardless of whether consciousness is created by the brain or not.

In conclusion, I do not think that this book offers any substantive arguments against the notion of a soul. Indeed, I regard it as being even poorer in this regard than The Myth of an Afterlife (see my review of that book).

There's a lot I haven't covered in this review. I do, though, cover more of the material in my Kindle notes. In addition, I also cover some of Musolino's arguments in various blog posts here, here and here, although the latter two are not concerned with the soul as such.

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1 Of course, this doesn't just apply to those skeptical of a soul. My experience is that this is universal, most notably in politics, where people gravitate to polarised positions and adopt all the beliefs of their chosen in-group. They generally do not independently formulate their own views.^↩

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2 There are other forms of "materialism" that Musolino never mentions. Most notably, there is non-reductive materialism. However, it seems to me that in as much as non-reductive materialism holds that qualia exist and are irreducible to material processes, then it cannot be materialism; at least not in the sense of being exhausted by its quantitative properties. Rather, it seems to me that it's actually a form of dualism; namely, a form of property dualism. As such, the arguments I advance in part 5 that question the plausibility of the thesis that brains somehow create consciousness, will also apply to non-reductive materialism.^↩

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3 He claims there is overwhelming evidence supporting materialism, by which he appears to mean reductive materialism. However, it is clear to me that he simply means overwhelming evidence that the brain somehow creates consciousness. Unfortunately, Muslino seems confused about what both the words materialism and dualism actually mean.^↩

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4 Recently, I have slightly modified this Science, the Afterlife, and the Intelligentsia essay.^↩