Brain and soul is different

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How do we know that the soul is not just brain, is dependent of it, but isn’t same. How are the arguments for existance of soul which is immaterial and different from the brain, even If neuroscience say that this two is same.
 
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adrian1 said:
How do we know that the soul is not just brain, is dependent of it, but isn’t same. How are the arguments for existence of soul which is immaterial and different from the brain, even If neuroscience say that this two is same.
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Neuroscience has nothing to say about what is immaterial.

The rational soul is immaterial and continues to exist after the death of the body and is reunited to the body at the general resurrection.
 
Brittany said:
Think of the soul as electricity and the brain/body as the power tool. Electricity (the soul) is not the power tool (the brain/body), but the electricity (the soul) is necessary for the power tool (the brain/body) to work. The power tool (the brain/body) is needed to properly utilize the electricity (the soul). They are not the same.
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What is your evidence for any of this?
 
The brain is an organ in the body, just like the spleen or the lung.

The soul is immaterial and immortal.
 
I’m not looking for evidence of a soul, but evidence for your analogy.
 
The brain is, what I consider, to be a physical representation of the soul. Obviously it’s not as dynamic. Its like looking at a flat picture of the earth compared to the real thing (which I’ve heard is BEAUTIFUL) The soul is spiritual, immaterial. But the brain is apart of the body and the body is naturally meant to be with the soul. That’s why we get our bodies back at the resurrection because they’re destined to be together.

It’s kind of like a radio. You can’t see the waves, but you know it has to work somehow to be able to deliver a clear message. Though we can’t see it, we know it’s there.
 
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Neuroscience does not say the two are the same. Neuroscience deals with the physical, not the spiritual.

Neuroscience isn’t even able to explain the existence of the self-aware conscious mind in humans or animals. In fact, some theorize that the mind doesn’t truly exist and that our individual thoughts, concepts of reality, etc. can’t actually happen - that we’re not truly self-aware. Of course, if we were just meat-slab automatons, existence would be rather bleak.
 
Well it depends on whether you accept the idea that the physical universe or ‘nature’ ‘is all there is’ and that everything can be explained by observation of what there is’, or whether you accept the idea that there can exist things outside of nature (supernatural) which cannot be evaluated by observation (the ‘natural’ way of assessing evidence in the ‘natural’ world).

Let’s explore. IF there were a ‘natural world’, call it Earth, and there existed all around it all sorts of physical entities like the universe, planets, stars, etc., all of these could be observed physically, i.e. taste, smell, touch, sight, and OBSERVATION and experimentation, seeing ‘what happens’.

What if that world came into existence, and everything around it as well, by a Being who, since He created it, is not PART of the observable physical world?

Look at a point. If it COULD be sentient, it would see only ONE dimension. Look at a line; it could see TWO. It could ‘see’ the point, but the point could not see it. The point could deduce the existence of a line but it couldn’t ‘observe’ the line. The line, OTOH, could deduce that it was made up of points, because it could observe the points, and observe other lines; but it could not ‘see’ a 3 dimensional figure. We see what we can ‘physically’ see, but if something is ‘beyond’ our sight, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist; it means that we can’t see it.
 
They cannot be the same. The Scarecrow had a soul, but he did not have a brain.
 
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stpurl said:
We see what we can ‘physically’ see, but if something is ‘beyond’ our sight, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist; it means that we can’t see it.
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Agreed. But this would also apply to a teapot orbiting Alpha Centauri unseen by you.
 
You must be new.
This is question is regularly asked at least once a year in the philosophy section resulting in months of heated debate.

CAF google is your friend.

To save you weeks of fruitless discussion let me summarise the usual result over the last 10 years:

View A:
Matter (the brain) cannot support abstract thought, “universals” or reasoning.
This is Church teaching (allegedly).

View B:
Yes it can. Computer memory and processor chips and artificial intelligence based on self learning software show capabilities in matter that the ancients never realised were there.

Also we now realise that some animals (dolphins) actually have speech and intelligence much like us and the ancients never realised this.

Its not a matter of Church teaching because this is a question of philosophy/science not religion.
(As was the case with Galileo and the place of hell and angels which is no longer in the skys nor beneath the earth).

Therefore the need to posit an intellectual soul (rather than intellectual matter) by Ochkam’s razor is superfluous. That is, the simplest acceptable answer is 99% of the time the correct one. To hold to a more complicated or occult explanation is indicative of superstitious or biased thinking due to the desire to assert some other unproven assumption (eg the truth of Christianity or belief in Spiritualism).

View A;
You are wrong, the Church says so and the Church is infallible.

View B:
You are wrong, it is unreasonable to cling to occult explanations when material one’s are simpler and now far more reasonable than in ancient times.

The Church is only infallible on questions of faith or moral not those of philosophy (ie reasoning).
Soul talk has always been from philosophy not faith.

View A:
If you are right then Christianity fails

View B:
That is not necessarily so. Soul talk was originally from, Greek philosophy (Aristotle) well before Christianity and was simply used by Christianity because it was very close to its belief in the afterlife. Christianity does not stand or fall simply on the basis of Aristotle being right or wrong.

View A:
Well it seems to be in the Catechism.

ViewB:
It may well be, but then the Church also assumed as a matter of faith that the sun revolves the earth and taught denial of this was to deny the inerrancy of Scripture. So it could be reversed likewise if evidence demonstrates this.

etc etc.

Good luck.
 
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The soul is the entire person, who is made of flesh and spirit. Every day we eat and drink, grow new skin and shed old hair. The physical matter of the body constantly changes, but the soul is constant. The soul weaves it altogether, allowing the brain to think, the hand to wave, the leg to walk. The soul is what takes the electrochemical signals in the brain and sees and hears and feels something.
 
I’ve never been in this discussion, so I might possibly contribute. Such a thought provoking question does warrant outside reading, though, it would seem to me.

The Church teaches that every soul is created immediately by God. The brain, as we know, obviously, is not. And I would reason by my intuition that the soul comes into the world as complete and not in devlopment over the course of time as is the brain.

The soul is a rather mysterious thing, in my mind, anyways.

It is said in accepted Catholic theology that the soul or the necessary essence of the human person can exist after death by some supernatural intervention by God that holds the soul in being apart from the body, but ordinarily, we know this is not possible.
 
Aquinas has given us that man is a composite being- an admixture of corporeal matter and spirit. They ordinarily cannot be separated.

Angels, on the other hand, I would venture, can be said to have a soul. We know by Faith that they are pure spirit and have no material aspect to them, yet they are able to reason and will as we do, though perhaps in a different manner. I think their intellect is qualitatively different from that that of the human intellect, though I could be wrong. We do know that they come to know things differently than we do.
 
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Just an observation…

I see a girl each day at daily mass. She is very disabled cognitively. I would say that her brain is severely damaged and has been so from her birth. Her intellect that we can measure empirically is essentially that of a child less than 3 years old, alhough I believe she is about 25 years of age.

I would not doubt for a minute that her soul is every bit as much a soul as any other human beings. I can only say that by intuition I know that her soul is not less than ours in any way, shape or form, but her ability to reason is extremely low, at least as judge from by external observation.

By my intuition combined with logic, I myself, must conclude that brain and soul are not the same.
 
JamalChristophr said:
Angels, on the other hand, I would venture, can be said to have a soul.
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Please!
There is no need to try and reinvent the wheel. The Church has taught the answer to this for at least 800 years. Why not do some research on your faith before attempting to assist others on an apologetics forum.

Angels do not have souls. Souls are made for bodies.
They are pure spirits.
 
BUT a teapot orbiting outside Alpha Centaur may not be physically seen or observed by your naked eyes, but can be otherwise verifiable by ‘science.’ That teapot, being made of physical matter, IS going to register on a probe, or in time become ‘viewed’ as we map out the universe. Heck, we found planets and such because based on the planets people DID see, they were behaving in a way that was unexplained except by there being something ‘not seen’. And sooner or later, as technology advanced, those unseen but deduced physical objects were made manifest.

The fact is, you aren’t addressing the idea of the SuperNatural. Do you, or do you not, accept that things may exist that you cannot verify by purely ‘natural’ means? That includes, by extension, the ‘artificial’ things like telescopes and material goods which are ‘made’ from ‘natural’ things or developed through processes which the physical nature allows to occur even if we induce them artificially. If you can accept that this may not be all there is (since we have no evidence to conclude it arose ‘naturally’ itself. . .it all comes down to the universe not being able to create matter from ‘nothing’ so even if it started with a ‘big bang’ there had to be something ‘there’ to produce the bang, so the bang is not the original cause), then you can accept that something ‘outside’ the physical realm may exist.

Let’s suppose that this whole universe was a very carefully set up model that exists in somebody’s room. . .a room so gigantic we cannot hope to see its end even if we mastered warp speed drive and sent out probes. And a person who made the model comes into the room. The room fits that person perfectly, just the way a study or bedroom might fit a person here on earth. The person stands in the doorway, just inside. He can see us perfectly, but we can’t see him. We can’t sense him. If he came in and started to ‘play’ with us, he would be so large that we couldn’t even perceive him, and even ‘up close’ he’d still be so far away that we couldn’t ‘register’ his presence. And if he reached down his finger to touch us it could crush our solar system, so maybe he uses magnets or tweezers, but so sophisticated that we can’t ‘see’ them and we have no basis for even comprehending them. It would be like seeing an entirely ‘new color’; how can it be described? And this being might not even truly ‘look’ like us so it might be able to use its mind. . .telepathy, telekinesis. . .but since the mind is so alien how would we know? It would be as if a human tried to make consciousness with an amoeba. . .
 
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