Soul: Encyclopedia II - Soul - Science and the soul

Soul - Science and the soul

Western science and medicine do recognize the concept of soul or the idea of a soul entity, though many practitioners regard it as an element of Folk psychology. In contrast, Traditional Chinese medicine accepts the existence of a soul as more than just an idea (see Shen). The two dominant scientific approaches to study of the soul can be distinguished by the emphasis they place on two alternative hypotheses:

1. Materialistic accounts of human brain function and scientific study of cultural belief systems will ultimately tell us everything we need to know about the common human belief in a non-material soul.
2. Non-material conscious entities exist, but conventional materialistic science does not have the tools needed to study the non-material soul. Only by taking seriously the idea of non-material entities will science develop the means to objectively study the soul.

Working within the Scientific method, it is a common practice to have several alternative hypotheses. Testing multiple hypotheses is healthy for science because it challenges everyone to keep an open mind and not become overly confident that we know all the answers. Openly discussing both types of hypotheses about the soul (see above) is important for science because many non-scientists feel that Western materialistic science has not given fair attention to the possibility of a non-material soul.

Scientific study of the soul has been hampered by both technical and sociological constraints. A serious technical limitation for materialistic approaches to the soul is that the details of brain function are still being discovered. No detailed account yet exists of how complex human beliefs arise through brain activity that is shaped by a complex human social environment. Many scientists are involved in foundation building that will eventually lead to a detailed materialistic account of the soul while few risk even mentioning the word “soul” in their professional work.

A search of the PubMed research literature database shows the following numbers of articles with the indicated term in the title:

1. brain – 167,244
2. consciousness – 2,918 (842, 29%, of these articles also include “brain” in the database entry)
3. soul - 552 (40, 7%, of these articles also include “brain” in the database entry. Many of these articles deal with medical ethics issue such as the implications of religious beliefs on decisions about life support for people in persistent vegetative states)

There are over 6,000 articles in the PubMed database dealing with both consciousness and the soul. These articles represent the output of a newly forming scientific sub discipline attempting to account for consciousness in terms of brain function. There are only 100 entries in the PubMed database that mention both the brain and the soul. So far, there has been no way found to objectively link material brain processes to a non-material soul.

A serious constraint on the scientific study of non-material entities is that past attempts to scientifically study many phenomena that seem to involve non-material processes or entities (for example, paranormal phenomena) have not shown a record of scientific progress and have been dominated by pseudoscientific approaches. Working scientists naturally gravitate towards topics of study that offer the likelihood of rapid progress and minimize controversies that taint scientific reputations.

Soul - Materialistic Science and the Soul

Popular presentation of the dominant scientific view of the soul often uses the "computer paradigm", which compares the brain to hardware and the mind (mental processes traditionally subsumed under the concept of "soul") to software. The departure of a brain/hardware leaves no place for functioning mind/software. This eliminative approach to the soul is exemplified by Paul Churchland and his book The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul. In that book, Churchland argues that there is no need for the idea of a non-material soul, that we can fully account for the soul in terms of material brain activity, and that the link between the brain and consciousness is primarily a matter of information processing that can be understood in terms of computational models.

Some, like the famous French neurologist Jean Pierre Changeaux, deny the appropriateness of the computer paradigm and propose an analogy with the anharmonic oscillator from physics. Needless to say, both notions have dismissed the concept of soul as a self-sustaining entity.

Some investigators have tried to measure the soul, for example by attempting to measure the weight of a person just before and just after death in hopes of determining the weight of a soul. The results of these experiments remained equivocal, especially due to conflicting reports on the findings, and are not well regarded by many scientists. [1]

Francis Crick's book The Astonishing Hypothesis has the subtitle, "The scientific search for the soul". Crick holds the position that one can learn everything knowable about the human soul by studying the workings of the human brain.

In his book Consilience, E. O. Wilson took note that sociology has identified belief in a soul as one of the universal human cultural elements. Wilson suggested that biologists need to investigate how human genes predispose people to believe in a soul.

Martyn Carruthers wrote that systemic coaching can lead to a stable state of integration and connectedness, that some people call Soul. A person experiencing this integration displays 100% verbal congruence and nonverbal symmetry and can simultaneously focus on abstract concepts and life details. During this experience, people said that Soul has an independent existence; that Soul existed before the person was born; and that Soul will continue after the death of that body. Carruthers called this Soul-work.

Daniel Dennett has championed the idea that the human survival strategy depends heavily on adoption of the intentional stance, a behavioral strategy that predicts the actions of others based on the expectation that they have a mind like one's own (see theory of mind). Mirror neurons in brain regions such as Broca's area may facilitate this behavioral strategy. The intentional stance, Dennett suggests, has proven so successful that people tend to apply it to all aspects of human experience, thus leading to animism and to other conceptualizations of soul.

The work of Roger Penrose, based on results by Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, the latter of whom proved that the halting problem is uncomputable, is possible evidence for the existence of a soul, and that it is measurable. The halting problem states that it is not possible for a computer, no matter how complex, to algorithmically decide whether an arbitrary computer program will ever halt or not. Some people maintain that humans can, in principle, make such a determination and hence, they say, that the human mind is different than a computer and thus there has to be something about the human mind that contemporary physics does not capture. A rebuttal to this argument is that since there exists simple computer programs for which humans cannot determine their halting behaviour, some people state that the human mind is no different than computers.

Soul - Scientific approaches for study of a non-material soul

A frequently documented phenomenon involves very young children (under the age of five) saying seemingly random phrases, spontaneously, with no readily traceable originating source, for example: "I remember when I died before". The parent-controlled flow of information that reaches the child does not account for the phrase, which most hearers ignore. Some people believe that a child can express past-life memories in this way.

Dr. Ian Stevenson, a prominent member of the scientific community, has spent over 40 years devoted to the study of children who have spoken about concepts seemingly unknown to them. Dr Stevenson maintains a thorough scientific method of interview and observation. In each case, Dr. Stevenson methodically documents the child's statements. Then he identifies the deceased person the child allegedly identifies with, and verifies the facts of the deceased person's life that match the child's memory. He even matches birthmarks and birth defects to wounds and scars on the deceased, verified by medical records. His strict methods systematically rule out all possible "normal" explanations for the child’s memories. However, it should be noted that a significant majority of Dr. Stevenson's reported cases of reincarnation originate in Eastern societies, where dominant religions often permit the concept of reincarnation.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Science and the soul", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki