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.^↩

The self or soul as a mental substance

Mental Substance

What is a mental substance? I think it can best be understood by contrasting mental substances with material substances. Think of material objects. They have properties such as their weight, whether they are dented, their colour and so on. These properties cannot exist by themselves, they are not freestanding, they belong to a material substance. Material substances, on the other hand, exist in and of themselves and are the bearer of such properties. Crucially, the properties can change but without changing the identity of the object or substance. So, for example, a table might acquire certain types of scratches, its colour might fade and so on as it grows older, but, despite these changes, it is still the very same table or the very same substance as it ages.

The concept of a substance and its properties also apply to the realm of the mental. There are experiences, for example, the experience of pain. But one can argue a pain doesn't exist all by itself, there has to be a self that undergoes the pain. Experiences, in other words, are seemingly always had by an experiencer, or self.

This self is called the mental substance. This self remains the same identical self throughout our lives. It is the I. It is that which makes me feel I am the very same person from one hour to the next, one day to the next, and one year to the next. My moods might change from one hour to the next, my interests and even intelligence might change from one year to the next, nevertheless, it is still me that undergoes all these changes. The I or me is the mental substance; contrariwise the moods, cognitive abilities, memories, interests and so on are the properties of the self/mental substance. These properties can change without me ceasing to exist and turning into another person. 

To try and illustrate my meaning here imagine someone throughout their lives wearing a pair of spectacles.  The lenses will age, acquire scratches and so on.  In addition, the lenses might be changed periodically.  As a result, even if that person's unaided vision remains the same, their bespectacled vision will change throughout their life.  And such changes need not be confined to the acuity of their vision.  They could have lenses that cast everything in a shade of colour or distort their vision in a particular manner.  They could even have lenses that render them unable to see at all.

Our unaided vision can analogically be compared to the mental substance/self. The bespectacled vision can analogically be compared to one's particular mental state at any time, or our minds.   Just as changes in the lenses influence our bespectacled vision but not our unaided vision, so too might changes in the brain influence our mental states (the properties of the self) but not our essence (the mental substance).

Notwithstanding the fact that throughout our lives our moods, cognitive abilities and so on continually change, we all still feel that we are nevertheless the very same self throughout our lives.  This is so even for those who reject an afterlife.  So the mental substance/self that I have described seems to align up to most peoples intuitions as to what they truly are.

Note that this self I have outlined is not the same as the sense of self just as a sense of a tree is not the same as the tree itself. Few of us would deny that we have at least a sense of self.  But most professional philosophers reject this notion of an actual self, they believe it is an illusion.

Should there be an afterlife it is my view that it is this self or mental substance that will survive.  In which case the self or mental substance can be referred to as one's soul.

Alleged problems with such a mental substance or soul

In The Soul Fallacy, the author Julien Musolino refers to the analogy of a radio. He says that this involves:

the idea that the brain does not cause the mind, but that it merely serves as a gateway for it, just like a radio set functions as a receiver and decoder of electromagnetic waves.

He goes on to say:

A radio set (or a TV, if you prefer) and the signal it receives are separate things, and so they can exist independently of each other ...  Destroy the receptor, and you still have the signal. Obliterate the brain and you still have the soul.

This then seems to be essentially the same type of analogy as my own analogy of spectacles.  So just as destroying a radio will have no effect on the signal, so too destroying one's spectacles clearly will have no effect on our unaided vision.

However, Julien Musolino is not impressed with such analogies.  He goes on to say:

a few moment's reflection reveal so many dead-ends, contradictions, and nonsensical implications that it will make your head spin.

For starters, the receptor view of the brain doesn't even begin to respond to the challenge posed for dualism by what we called the fragility of the mind. If damaging only parts of the brain can annihilate just about every aspect of our mind, then by what miracle would the complete destruction of our brain following death leave us with all our mental faculties intact so that we can recognize Uncle Fred in heaven? If the soul needs a functioning brain to be able to think, see, and feel, then how could it perform these functions without a brain at all?

But, of course, the whole purpose of the analogy is to convey the idea that the soul doesn't need a functioning brain to think, see, and feel.  If the lenses in my spectacles get dirtier and dirtier as time goes by, this can have no implications for my unaided vision when I take my spectacles off.   He needs to argue that this analogy is false or inappropriate.  Instead, he seems to have completely missed its point.

He also says:

Does the all-or-nothing radio-brain view entail that the soul signal gives rise to my entire mental life? Are the languages I speak, the memories I have, the skills I possess all the product of something beamed into my brain from above? My suspicion is that the reason I speak French and English is because I grew up in France and then moved to the United States. I am also convinced that my memories have to do with the people I've met and the places I've visited in this world. If certain aspects of my mind are the obvious consequence of my dealings with the denizens of the physical world, then what exactly is the soul signal supposed to do? Does it just make me conscious?

One's memories and acquired skills are clearly not part of the mental substance, they are, rather, acquired properties.  Also, it should be noted that the self or soul doesn't make one conscious any more than a table makes its colour or shape etc.  That is to say, a substance doesn't make its properties, a substance is the prerequisite requirement for the very existence of any properties. 

It seems to me that Julien Musolino doesn't appear to have any understanding of what he's attacking.  And he essentially says nothing else regarding the analogy.  So much for the aforementioned "dead-ends, contradictions, and nonsensical implications that it will make your head spin".

Two other people I've read that attack this analogy, but equally and independently misunderstand it, and in precisely the same manner, are Keith Augustine and Steven Novella. Keith Augustine is one of the editors and is by far the most prolific contributor to The Myth of an Afterlife (I wrote a ~13,000 word assessment of the arguments contained in that volume here).  In that book Keith Augustine says:

It doesn’t take much reflection to see that a television receiver is a terrible analogy for making sense of known mind-brain correlations. For the analogues would have to be:

Broadcast station → Electromagnetic signal → TV receiver → TV program images 

External soul ↔ Interactive forces ↔ Brain ↔ Behavior

On this analogy, mental activity itself occurs in the external soul, just as the images of a television program originate from the broadcast station. But no damage to the local circuitry of your TV set can have any effect on the television program recording playing at the remote broadcast station, or on the signal that the station puts out.

Steven Novella  raises the same objection, except he invokes the plot of TV programmes rather than the TV signal.  He says:

A more accurate analogy would be this – can you alter the wiring of a TV in order to change the plot of a TV program? Can you change a sitcom into a drama? Can you change the dialogue of the characters? Can you stimulate one of the wires in the TV in order to make one of the on-screen characters twitch?

Well, that is what would be necessary in order for the analogy to hold.

But the fact that the TV set can have no effect on the TV signal/plot of a programme is the very point. Or, to use the simpler analogy, the fact that the eyeglasses have no effect on our unaided vision is the very point.  For it is the TV signal/unaided vision that represents the mental substance/self.  They are conflating the mind, which is what results when the self operates through the brain, with the mental substance/self/soul.  In my many communications with Keith Augustine (e.g. in the comments under my amazon review of his book and elsewhere.  Update 11/2/22 Amazon have, without warning, deleted all comments under customer reviews!). I have pointed out his misunderstanding on this issue, but in his responses he has always ignored this particular point.  I'm also pretty sure I've pointed out this misunderstanding to Steven Novella too.

What would destroy the analogy and the whole concept of mental substance would be if damage to the brain could alter the actual mental substance rather than merely affecting its properties.  However, this is a difficult task since there is not much we can say about this substance apart from it being responsible for the feeling that we are the very same self throughout the duration of our lives and serving as the bearer of properties. Moreover, that feeling need not be constantly present.

 

Conclusion

So long as we feel we are the same self as time passes the default assumption should surely be that this is correct unless compelling reasons are advanced to doubt this.  And they would need to be compelling indeed since I'm sure the vast majority of us are convinced of our persisting nature, at least from our births until our deaths.  

Finally, is such an enduring self/mental substance consistent with the notion that the brain somehow produces this self? Consider that my brain changes all the time. Could a constantly changing brain produce a self that is unchanging?  Arguably this is problematic.  Hence this notion that we are mental substances implies both an afterlife and indeed "beforelife". And this is before we consider any evidence for an afterlife.

God of the Gaps

Julien Musolino in the soul fallacy says:

Thanks to Fox News celebrity Bill O’Reilly, the logic of god-of-the-gaps argument has become viral. During an interview with David Silverman, president of the American Atheists, O’Reilly challenged his baffled guest to explain how the tides so predictably and regularly go about their business. “You can't explain that!” O’Reilly told Silverman. But if you assume that God exists, as O’Reilly says he does, then everything makes perfect sense and you can understand how the tides work.

Some people (known as “pinheads” in the anchor's colorful jargon) informed O’Reilly that we do know how the tides work, and that we have known for more than three hundred years. Undaunted, O’Reilly posted a clip on YouTube in which he pushed the argument one step further. Fine, he concedes, the gravitational pull of the moon explains the tides. But where did the moon come from? (For an amusing parody demonstrating the existence of mail fairies using O’Reilly logic, YouTube is also an excellent resource—because you can't explain the superb regularity with which the mail gets delivered, and if you can, you sure can't explain where the mailman came from.)

The mail analogy is a very poor one - or at least it is if one is attempting to mock the notion that any type of "God" or metamind could be responsible for the predictability of tides. The "superb regularity with which the mail gets delivered" is, after all, due to conscious agents with an end in mind. So, if anything, the analogy suggests the regularity of the tides is also due to some conscious agency with an end in mind.

People might object that in the case of the tides that we know this is due to the existence of gravitational force. However, this buys into a certain conception of physical reality that it is constrained to behave as it does due to innate physical causes such as gravitational force. But this goes beyond what we can legitimately infer. Physical reality exhibits patterns, those patterns can be captured via mathematical equations. And, ultimately, that's all that physics deals with. I go into detail about this here. Indeed, physics has absolutely nothing to say about such a suitable conception of "God". I try and illustrate this here.

Granted this conception of God is not a God of the gaps one. But did Bill O’Reilly actually state that he was defending such a conception of "God"? I would imagine not. The God of the gaps is a silly one as I address here.

The Tabletop Illusion

I'm currently reading the soul fallacy by Julien Musolino. In it he tries to stress that we are constantly being fooled by our subjective first person perspective and in our judgements. That we need the objective third person perspective as provided by science to tell us how reality really is.

He tries to illustrate his point by the following perceptual illusion of two tables (the Roger Shepard tabletop illusion).

I think we would all agree that the two tables are different shapes. But, when we rotate the left table 90 degrees clockwise and move it over the other table, we find they are both exactly the same shape! Moreover, even when we are made aware of this fact we cannot help but see that the tables are very different shapes. Julien Musolino finds this very significant. In the the soul fallacy he says:

[This illusion] pits our first-person perspective—what our senses subjectively reveal to us—against the third-person perspective—what the result of objective measurement demonstrates. The story of the demise of the soul, to a large extent, reflects the triumph of the third-person perspective over its subjective, first-person counterpart. But there is more to Shepard's illusion than meets the eye. The analogy contains two additional virtues. After this brief demonstration, I do not know anyone who would continue to insist that one tabletop really is longer than the other because of the way they look ... The analogy's second virtue is that it reveals to us how stubborn first-person impressions can be in the face of objective evidence.

I think this is flawed reasoning. Indeed, it seems to me to be inappropriate to call this an illusion at all.

First of all, we need to draw a distinction between the image of the tables, and the actual tables themselves that they represent. The above picture is an image of two tables.

Having put that aside, let's suppose there are two tables in front of us that are in our visual field. When looking at the tables, let's also suppose that the image of the tables on our retinas closely approximates to the image of the tables we see above on our computer screens. Just as the shapes of the images of the two tables is the same on our computer screens above, so too will the shapes of the two images of the tables on our retinas be the same.

Are we fooled in the latter case? I would say not since if we approached the two tables, look at them from different angles, run our fingers over them and so on, we would definitively establish the two tables are of differing shapes. Likewise, if we are to take the drawing of the two tables above as actually depicting tables rather than arbitrary lines representing nothing, it is not fair to say we are being fooled here either. In other words, there is no illusion, as such.


We need to understand how are senses work. We don't simply passively perceive what's out there. The data we receive through our senses is hopelessly inadequate for us to see the world as it truly is in and of itself. The actual ability to see is supplied by our implicit expectations gained from our previous acquaintance with the world. That is to say, what we actually see is shaped and moulded by all of our previous visual experiences. In effect, we have an implicit unconscious theory about how the world is and this is instrumental in shaping what we actually perceive.

Without such an implicit theory, we wouldn't be able to perceive at all, at least not a 3D world of objects at various distances. We'd just see a splodge of colours in a 2-dimensional plane. In other words, we'd see the world as a computer or robot would; namely as depicted from a third person perspective shorn of any "illusions" that any minds can add.

In short, this "illusion" is not an example of us being fooled. If we didn't experience such "illusions", then we wouldn't be able to see at all! This is why autonomous cars -- which do not have the benefit of illusions to apprehend the environment correctly -- shouldn't rely upon cameras alone. They need other instruments to effectively detect the environment, such as LIDAR. Even then, they are not as proficient as human drivers in urban environments. My personal expectations are that fully (level 5) autonomous vehicles will not be widespread for a few decades yet (back in 2014 the date I gave was 2060).


So, is the subjective first person perspective inferior to the objective third person perspective as Julien Musolino claims? Certainly not when it comes to visually apprehending the environment. So much for, as he puts it, "the triumph of the third-person perspective over its subjective, first-person counterpart". This is not to deny that we are often fooled and that the third person perspective, as provided by science, is the more accurate. But I don't think this has any relevance for deciding whether, on the one hand, our essence is a soul or, on the other hand, a sophisticated biological machine. But I'll address that issue when I come to reviewing his book.

Two other relevant similar blog posts by me are:

Are Perceptual illusions always necessarily illusions?  (essentially the same argument I make in this blog post, but I wrote it over 9 years ago).

Perceptual illusions show our minds construct reality