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MartinJWillett on YouTube

The idea that we are human because God puts an immortal soul into us at the moment of conception does not hold water.

We know from direct experience that what we perceive ourselves to be is an experience that lives in our brains, which starts small and gets bigger as our brains get bigger. We have also seen old and sick people lose their mind as their brains stop working.

I think back to one of my earliest memories, of a time when I cannot say for certain whether I was able to speak. I remember a distinctive smell (I now know to be setting lotion, the smell that can trigger this memory even today) and the sight and sound of a curtain made of vertical strips of brightly coloured plastic. I knew my mother was here, and an older woman and there was talking going on that was no concern of mine. Was this before I was able to understand language? I don't recall anything about those memories that suggest I had the option to move around freely, was I restrained or am I remembering something from the time before I was able to walk? I believed I was in a kitchen, but thinking about it now it seems far more likely that it was a hairdresser's salon, with a private area at the back of the shop beyond the curtain. Perhaps I thought of it as a kitchen because it had a sink, smells and a floor that was not covered in carpet. Did I have a word for kitchen? No, probably not, but my mind did have the category, I knew it was a kitchen, even if I didn't know what the word was. Picking over such memories is dangerous, there is a strong possibility of contaminating the evidence with imagined false memories (that flash just now of a paraffin heater, was that really an associated memory or something from several years later?) but I do get the strong impression that the me I was then was much less sophisticated than the me of now. My mind is of the same stuff it was then but now there is more of it, I am bigger and more human, capable of more thinking and probably with a greater capacity to appreciate and to suffer. Was the mind of me as that child much different to the mind of an animal like a dog? Probably not.

Scientists are rightly very sceptical about preverbal memories as they know how easily false memories can be constructed. I also have memories of my childhood which I believe are false, reconstructions consisting of early imaginings of the story as told by my mother, such memories are old, they do originate in childhood, but they are not original, the biggest clue being the fact that they are not remembered from behind the eyes but from above the head. They are also of significant events, such as the time I went picking up stones on the railway track. The setting lotion memory is different, it has no significance to any adult, it could be preverbal, but because it has no significance to any adult there are no clues within it that fix its date.

How does that memory fit with the soul hypothesis? It doesn't. That experience was sensational, literally. It consisted of almost nothing except sensations, a strong and intriguing smell, a couple of sounds, a few visual images. There was also some degree of understanding, I knew I was safe and being cared for. I am quite clear that what I was then is not as big a person as the me that I am now, in every way. I didn't start out with a fully formed soul in an undeveloped zygote, I just growed. The whole thing that I am has grown with my brain. Not only has my sense of me got bigger as my brain has got bigger and more set in a particular way of thinking I have also experienced me being changed by my experiences, tiredness, sleep, drink, hormones and drugs. The “brain is me” hypothesis fits the experience I have far better than the “I am a soul” hypothesis. I do not have any experiences of ever being out of my brain even when I have deliberately meddled with the chemistry of that brain.

How can an immortal soul be affected by hormones? I have clear memories of a time in which girls were a horrid mystery that I had no desire to understand and then of confusing dreams that involved doing something to girls that I didn't understand, something violent, to all of them, except her. But I don't remember what I wanted to do with her, except adore her from afar perhaps. Then the dream about my stern headmistress, naked, with crab pinchers for labia. Over time my attitude to sex changed from apathy to great interest to disabling passion and more recently to something much less all-consuming, something I can at last keep in perspective. None of that fits at all with the idea that I am an immortal soul.

Never have I felt I am a sober soul trapped in a drunken brain in a drunken body. How can an alcoholic spirit change an intangible spirit?

If I ask myself where I am I know that I am behind my eyes. If I want to point at myself of course I point at my chest. But that isn't because I feel that I am there, it is more that pointing a finger at my eyes feels wrong. Even pointing at one of my temples isn't quite right. I am behind the pointing finger, not in front of it, and pointing at my eyes involves having an out of focus fingertip in my face and looking down the wrong end of a pointing finger feels as uncomfortable and wrong as looking down the wrong end of a gun. A better question than am I behind my eyes is am I between my ears? The startling answer is "partly". The more I think about it the more clearly I come up with the right answer. I am diffusely spread around the inside of my skull, one third between my ears and two thirds just above. I am my brain.

What will happen to me after my death? The question does not make sense. Death is the event of my brain ceasing all coordinated activity, the irreversible ending of my stream of consciousness. After that there is no me. There is only the body that has died. The me that I am will be no more. There will be nothing of me to experience anything. There will be just be other people's memories, a waste disposal problem and a fictional legal entity to be stripped of all possessions and possibly taxed.

When my brain ceases working I will fade out with it. Another interesting set of thought experiments come with thinking about what would happen if the pattern of my brain could be copied and constructed elsewhere. I have a clear idea of what would happen, a copy of me would be created, he would have the memories to believe he was me and as far as everybody else in the entire universe was concerned (assuming the copy was perfect) he would be every bit as good as me, or if they didn't know that I still existed they would think he was me. But I would not move. I would still be where I grew. No matter if I was constructed anew before or after killing the original me, or in the process of "reading" me. I am just the pattern of my brain, there is nothing supernatural or immaterial about me but I am this pattern, experienced from the inside. A copy of this pattern is a different individual experiencing a different continuity of experience just as a twin no matter how similar is fundamentally different. This is as fundamental as this and that. A copy of me would be just as valid as the original but it would not be the original and it makes no more sense to imagine a psychic link between the two copies than it does to imagine a psychic link between every copy of American Pie 3 or every Honda Civic.

Why do religions maintain the fiction of a soul? The soul is the mechanism by which justice can be done. In Hinduism and Buddhism a belief in karma , that what goes around comes around, is paramount. It cannot be contradicted by anything as inconvenient as reality and life experience. Real life teaches us that sometimes shit happens and not only that sometimes it keeps happening to the same person throughout their life. Some people are born beautiful and slim and rich and never have to do anything they don't think is a good idea. You could call this the Paris Hilton effect. The idea of karma over many lifetimes copes with this idea easily. Paris Hilton has had it really easy in this life, which is probably a reward for enduring suffering with forbearance in some previous life. Rich people like Buddhist ideas, the Buddha himself was a prince after all, his life as a prince and a great spiritual leader was no doubt a reward for a previous life of hardship and good works. Buddhism allows people to feel good about being over-privileged, why feel guilt, you earned your good fortune in a previous life. Not to enjoy your reward would be an insult to the universe. You should enjoy your life, not to do so is the same as spitting on the poor.

Christians believe that justice will be done in death. Those who lived well and did what they should will be rewarded, those who wallowed in sin will be cast into the lake of fire. Of course they argue among themselves over whether Hell exists or whether good works mean anything, whether a cannibal child killer who repents on his death-bed or execution cell can escape punishment and a myriad other things. They just enjoy arguing, and it is always the other guy who is wrong.

Belief in souls can be very useful, in other people.

Believing in a soul yourself is not so smart an idea. It can lead to paranoia. How can you be sure of avoiding Hell? To make sure people are afraid of Hell it has to be described as being something so terrible that even if people only half believed it the threat would be so great that they would do anything to avoid it. You no doubt have seen something similar with nuclear weapons, global warming, habitat and species loss and the hole in the ozone layer. Those who want you to be afraid of something you cannot be certain about will see increasing your fear of the consequences as being as good as convincing you of the likelihood of any bad consequences and conversely those who want you to think the risk isn't real are happy for you to believe the threat itself isn't frightening. This is of course absurd: the number of bears in a forest is not inversely proportional to their hunger for eating children. Risks and consequences are not connected, making something less likely to happen does not affect how nasty it would be if it did, or vice versa.

To ensure that people, even thieves and murderers, believed in hell it had to be made as frightening as humanly possible. A lot of effort went into this. Keeping people in line, even if only for brief intervals of guilt, was surely doing a Good Thing for public order and the King's Peace. Christianity appeals to the powerful and to the poor, especially to the pious poor. The Christian Church became a great ally to the rulers of Europe because it allowed the smart people an avenue which not only didn't threaten the king but actually bolstered his power. The smartest people, the cleverest scions of the ruling classes, especially the second and subsequent sons, could make a career in the church pouring soothing balm on the poor and needy and putting the fear of god into potential trouble-makers. And the brilliant part was the fact that the church taxed people directly according to their ability to pay: 10% of the Gross Domestic Product of the country. It was a spectacular organization and engine for social stability, run by fear and guilt. It was a massive force for conservatism and stability, all based on the concept of the soul.

Once a person has a clear idea that there will not be a great score-settling in the sky everything changes. Dualism, the idea that the universe is made up of mind and matter, different stuff, supports the concept of the soul. If you throw that out you are left with the possibility that all that we can see is pretty much all that there is. No soul. With no soul there can be no afterlife, no heaven, no hell, no cosmic justice. No justice? How can we allow that to be? We don't get to choose what is real and we can't make souls real by screwing our eyes up tight and wishing on a star. Not liking the consequences of an idea has no bearing on whether or not it is true. The evidence, as far as I can see it, clearly points to souls being a lie invented either out of ignorance or out of calculated deception. With no cosmic justice surely it now really matters how we live our lives and how we dispense our own justice.

Just in passing has it ever occurred to you that punishing the guilty on Earth makes no sense to people who believe in Hell? Hell is eternal punishment and perfect and certain justice. Anything that can be done here on Earth is by comparison unfair and a pale shadow of true justice. Why the double punishment? It makes no sense. Another thing that makes no sense is fear of death for a True Believer. How does that work? If they have perfect faith in God and their own salvation why should death have any fears for them? Is fear of death just an admission that their faith is all bluster and bravado?

I am not afraid of being dead. Death would be the end of experience of any kind. I don't like the idea of actually dying as there is no reason to expect it to be painless and I would like to get a lot more done before I go. Dying and not being alive any more are bad things, but the being dead part holds no terrors. I cannot fear something that cannot be experienced. I am as afraid of going to hell or meeting some god or another after my death as I am about being trampled by six-legged blue elephants, for exactly the same reason.

I have no memories of being an embryo. I don't know anybody who claims such a thing. The concept of a microscopic blob of tissue housing an immortal soul is quite absurd. The idea that it is injected into a human at some stage is also ridiculous. We can see the reality. We grow. A new born baby is clearly not equipped with the full suite of capabilities that an adult has. A severely premature baby has even less capability evident, they do not respond to their surroundings. Surely this is all excellent evidence that what you see is what you get, we grow. There is something of what we come to be present well before birth but little that you could honestly describe as uniquely human. We are just another animal at this stage, capable of feeling pain and suffering or feeling anxious just like a kitten or puppy. We only begin to exceed the average mammalian level of consciousness after several months of life. We are not fundamentally different to other animals, we just have more consciousness, a greater intellectual and rational capacity, more innate language potential, more co-operative skills and more proto-morality hard­wired in us. None of that equipment is something that you could reasonably call a soul and none of it will survive after our deaths.

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

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