Whilst the substance of the body retains roughly the same structure, it tends to perform continuous functions - my heart, my liver, my bowel, kidneys, lungs, etc still function in the same way as they did when I was 10 years old, with no disruption even through the process of being replaced by entirely new collections of cells over the years.
The functions of your organs may be the same, but they are becoming less efficient. For example, your body might not be able to remove excess sugar efficiently, or you might start losing your hairs, etc. You can tell you are aging, even if the process is very slow, but your consciousness of yourself does not change. You know that you are still you.
Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to witness a loved one succumb to dementia knows that whilst the body remains whole, the personality is fundamentally altered. This is very strong evidence that personality, memory, and consciousness itself are all dependent upon a living, functioning brain.
Oh yes, the soul is dependent on the body (the brain and other organs). But it depends on the body, not essentially, but instrumentally. The soul cannot think properly without the brain, but this does not mean that the act of knowing, for example, is primarily the act of the brain and not of the soul. In the same manner, a pianist cannot play music without the piano, but that does not mean that the act of making music is primarily the act of the piano and not of the pianist. I look at the bodily organ (such as the brain) to be merely the instrument of the soul. Just as a pianist cannot play good music with a broken piano, so the soul might not be able to function properly if the brain suffers an injury.
To illustrate further the instrumental function of the brain, consider what happens when you explain the circle to a child. To tell the child what a circle is, you probably will draw different circles on the blackboard – some big, some small, some red, some yellow, some blue, and then tell the child that those are circles. Also, you could draw different shapes – some circles, some triangles and some rectangles. Then tell him which figures are circles. You don’t really have to draw too many of them. By a mental process of abstraction, the child will quickly get what you mean by “circle.” The child will understand that its being round is what makes a circle a circle, and that its color, size or location on the blackboard does not matter. The mind is amazing. It knows what a circle is in general, independently of the material qualities of the circles that it started with. When that happens, then you can tell that the child no longer depends on those images for its understanding of the circle. Sure, this child might still have a mental picture of the circles that you drew on the blackboard, but the idea of a circle that he knows will not be limited to a red, yellow, or blue circle, or a big or small circle. So, although the child started with those sensible circles, he ends up with an idea or understanding of a circle that is in a way universal, non-sensible, and independent of the material characteristics from which the idea was originally derived. Then as the child grows, it then acquires understanding of more complex ideas that you can’t even picture or imagine. For example, he acquires an understanding of “justice”, “truth”, or “infinity” – all of which are not even imaginable because they are non-sensible. So, while the soul is dependent on the brain, the sense organs and various sensible impressions for its original source of knowledge, the kind of information it ultimately produces in itself is non-material and non-sensible. And if these are non-material, then they could not have been the product of a material organ like the brain. Knowledge and intellection by nature are non-material functions. Therefore, the seat of these non-material functions must be a spiritual soul, not the brain.
Some people have compared the mind to a super-computer. But any such analogy ends in dismal failure. The mind is not a machine. The human mind has consciousness and can reflect upon itself, which no machine could do. The eye can never see itself seeing, but the mind can think of itself thinking. This ability to reflect upon itself shows again the non-material nature of the soul, and it shows the big difference between the soul and so-called “thinking machines.” Computers are nothing but high-speed idiots.
One of the reasons that it is so difficult to study consciousness is that we have to do so from the inside.
It is the only reason why you know anything about consciousness at all. Without experiencing consciousness, you won’t even know what consciousness means.
The problem with considering the soul as the seat of consciousness is that no-one has ever detected any such entity, nor has any such entity made its existence known to us independently of a body.
If the soul is spiritual, then it would be futile to try to detect it in the laboratory by means of physical tools and equipments. You learn the existence of a spiritual soul, not by experimental methods, but by introspection and by a rational method or philosophy. You start by analyzing how the mind works, and finding out what the nature of human knowledge is. Once you establish that human knowledge is essentially a non-material operation, then you know that the power that performs it is non-material (although it could have been using material organs as instruments).
If the conscious entity is ultimately independent of the body - as it must be in order to survive the body’s death - then at what point does it enter the body?
The human soul, being spiritual, could not have evolved from, or with, the body. Therefore, it must have been created directly by God at the moment of conception.
from a scientist who also loves philosophy.
