Neuroscience and psychology have rendered it basically unnecessary to have a soul

[Socrates92]

Even apart from miraculous cases, though. Fr. Ripperger’s argument is that modern psychology is based on a fundamental misunderstanding, or total lack of understanding, of the nature of the human person. If you don’t understand what you are treating, naturally you are going to mis-prescribe.

@thorolfr: Far less likely, yes, in-so-far as disordered living (living contrary to Catholic teaching) causes a substantial amount of disorder within the person’s intellect, will, emotions, etc. (ie: mental illness). Getting rid of this particular root cause will naturally undermine the sickness that it can bring about. There can be other causes, other than immorality, of course, as Ripperger himself admits if I remember correctly. One substantial one is abuse or trauma - the suffering individual himself is not at fault - but still bears the consequences. Then there is a minority of mental illnesses which don’t fall under either category.

The problem with your hypothetical is that all these things can be intertwined. For example, someone could have brought difficulties upon himself through immorality, but the mental illness effects have become so engrained in habits, thought processes, emotions, that simply stopping the immoral behavior (although necessary) won’t fully do the trick. Again, this is not to imply that in all cases of mental illness the suffering individual is to blame. So it’s not a black and white “Be Catholic or suffer from mental illness”, but properly ordered living does contribute, and as Fr. Rippergers argues as a clinical psychiatrist, contributes significantly.

 

[niceatheist]

The problem comes down to this point. If the soul is “a little something extra”, but in effect all properties of the mind are measurable as brain activity, then the soul has no utility as an epistemological claim. Obviously, like all things in the atheism-theism debate, an atheist like myself can’t really claim the soul doesn’t exist, but what we can assert is that there is reason to consider its existence at all, at least when discussing neurological or psychological functions.

 

[christofirst]

I also had some reservations about this particular part of the quote I provided from Gravino’s book, but I added it anyway since the original question had to do with whether the soul was completely irrelevant now thanks to advances in brain science. The quote does make it sound like, “Get your spiritual life in order and you won’t have mental illness,” and many of us know from experience that this is simply not the always the case. As Catholics, we understand ourselves to be both body and spirit, and it does seem to me that some us are clearly more challenged than others when it comes to the physiological and/or psychological side of our makeup. My personal opinion, for what’s it’s worth, is that medicine and psychology have their very useful place in helping us to be at our best, but to completely ignore our spiritual side as though it does not exist cripples our potential health and healing, if that makes sense.

 

[Servant31]

Hey Thor how’s it going? I obviously dont have every explanation however most near death experiencers report that they are very much themselves during their experience, despite whatever condition their body is in at the time. In fact they often say that the world we live in is actually like a world of shadows by comparison. I can only offer my impression here; it seems that the physical (neuroscience) is an interface between the physical world we live in and the realities of the soul/spiritual.

 

[christofirst]

an atheist like myself can’t really claim the soul doesn’t exist,

I appreciate your saying this, and we can at least agree on this point. I really can’t show you a soul either. All the anecdotes, tests and personal experience one way or the other will not be convincing for everyone, at every stage of life. As it happens, I am a believer and my son is also an agnostic or perhaps atheist. Why this is so is a mystery to me. I have not had to overcome great intellectual hurdles to accept the faith. Enough of it just makes sense to me. Not so with my son, but not for lack of trying. There is what I would consider some kind of obstacle or stumbling block for him that I do not have. It is beyond me, but we still respect each other and make the best of things, each in our own way. (You can see why I don’t post in the serious threads all that often. I’m not the most convincing apologist.)

 

[Shakuhachi]

Coming from a more Eastern view, the soul is the witness of all the brain states but not dependent on them.

 

[Servant31]

Hello again Thor. So I don’t think a good catholic life is some magic bullet against all diasease, mental or physical. I do believe that cures happen. I can offer my own experience regarding this. As a person who grew up in Catholic schools and a Catholic environment I would describe it as very psychologically healthy. It wasn’t perfect, there were times I had legitimate complaints. However there was general accountability, a general respect for the truth, respect for each other, and for the human person. When I was involved in secular society more deeply (college, the science department in a liberal institution, secular medical clinics, etc). I would actually say my mental health degraded slowly over time. Including depression and a round with OCD. There seemed to be a lack of the above mentioned characteristics. I tried attempts with thearapy etc. After some time I finally said “what’s the point?” No one seemed to be concerned with what caused the problem but addressing some of the symptoms. I don’t mean to dig on psychology specifically, I think a good psychologist absolutely has their place, however there seemed to be a dismissiveness of guilt and accountability. Why not just take responsibility for ourselves, forgive those who have wronged us, recognize what we can’t change, do the best with what we can, and recognize that their exists a greater purpose? That’s not to say Catholics, other Christians, or my experience has been in any way perfect, but the general trajectory has been towards health ever since I returned to actively practicing my faith. So in my experience faith has provided some major benefits towards mental health, and after an attempt to address some of them with a more secular approach (against my better judgement btw, but I wanted to listen to the experts) the faith perspective when done correctly ( I want to emphasize when done correctly) provided the best result. Ultimately I would argue that Fr. Ripperger’s claim, in my personal case, is somewhat accurate.

Ps edit, sorry for the novel here but I think context and clarity are important here.

 

[Servant31]

+1 for this quote as well, we are after the truth after all not to assault each other

 

[Wesrock]

How is the soul different from the brain? . . So, if all the things I listed such as emotions, memories, etc. are produced by our brains, then what would our soul be if the brain isn’t working properly? Would it be something with no emotions, no memories, no personality, etc., and if so, wouldn’t it be kind of an empty shell?

For Thomas Aquinas and for modern Thomists, what separates animals from men is the ability to abstract from particulars to universals. So I can encounter individual triangles and from that abstract to triangularity. Note: this is not imagination or visualizing another particular instance, but grasping triangularity as such. The same goes for other universals, propositions, mathematics, etc…

This isn’t memory, or emotions (indeed, emotions are passible and there are reasons we don’t attribute such passible emotions or discursive thinking to God or angels and why Thomists aren’t troubled by the idea that animals are conscious the way a Christian Cartesian dualist might be, as that’s all compatible with Thomism).

I don’t feel like engaging in a long philosophy of the mind discussion, but part of the reason why we hold that this must be a power of the soul is the “problem of intentionality” or the aboutness of thought. When discussing the reality of abstract objects in other topics with non-realists (or those not committed to any position), it was pointed out that the writing out of 1+1=2 isn’t real, that those symbols don’t actually mean anything, and I agree, which is precisely the issue. The written phrase “the cat is on the mat,” written in English or German or braille has the same issue. These are symbols which are objectively meaningless. They are not the concept of the proposition “the cat is on the mat” per se, but something we use as a conventional pointer to the concept. The same goes with the spoken words. Objectively meaningless sounds. There is no real information about “the cat on the mat” embedded in it. Well, what makes patterns of neuron firings any different? There is no meaning of “the cat is on the mat” embedded in any pattern of neuron firing, nor could there be, yet we grasp the proposition as a universal concept even so. No material symbol, whether written or light or or audio or electrochemical actually could objectively carry such information, but by convention we use them as pointers to these topics. If what abstracts from these to the universal were also material, we run into the same problem, we just add an additional level, and so on to infinite regress until we allow for a non-material power which grasps the concept (or pattern or form) as a universal. Or we can deny our mind altogether.

Indeed, a human soul without a body is naturally thought to be handicapped, which is as it should be, since it’s natural for us to have body and soul.

 

[IWantGod]

Quartz

Neuroscience and psychology have rendered it basically unnecessary to have a…​

Hurray?

Would like thoughts- this is troubling for me!

I think the most important thing to understand is that the conclusion of this article is not a “scientific view” but rather it is some persons philosophical interpretation. It’s a materialistic and necessarily mechanistic interpretation.

How do we know it’s wrong? Because are very experience dictates that it is wrong. If it were true then every thought, word, conversation, and concept we ever had would just be the inevitable result of blind unguided natural processes that were at play since the beginning of the universe. We wouldn’t have freewill, and there wouldn’t be any goal direction in our thoughts. But we do have goal direction in our thoughts, and we experience freewill. So based on our experiences we have no good reason to reduce the human intellect to natural processes alone. There is certainly an interdependecy between our subjective experiences and the brain, but at the same time there is every reason to think that there is in fact a duality also.

Materialism is hopelessly incapable of providing a reasonable explanation of the mind’s activity in terms physical causality alone. It’s an unintelligible philosophy of mind, since if materialism is true there is no mind as we now experience it, and our experiences contradicts materialism.

The materialist will conclude that our subjective experiences are just an illusion, but that just goes to show that materialism is just begging the question because the materialist is assuming that materialism is true without any justification. In reality they are just ignoring any evidence that defeats their position; in this case the very existence of the minds activity itself.

There is certainly some kind of desperate need to make materialism a legitimate science, but it has failed, and those who do not accept that conclusion are in denial. It survives only because of the unproven belief that all things are physical. And make no mistake, it’s just a belief.

 

[otrrl]

Neuroscience and psychology have no use for a soul because they haven’t asked the right questions.

For example, what is the difference between right and wrong? good and evil?

Theirs is merely one form of the paradoxical absolute statement that there are no absolutes.

 

[niceatheist]

Right and wrong are heavily dependent on culture. The Spartans believed leaving unfit infants to die of exposure wasn’t just a reasonable act, but a fundamentally moral act. Slavery was widespread in many cultures, including Biblical cultures, not to mention Christian society in large parts of the United States. In almost all common law jurisdictions women were chattel, and marriage was basically a bill of sale between a father and the new husband. Child labor has been common in many places, and the Church was in fact all but a full on opponent of liberal democracy. Some cultures practiced cannibalism, some performed human sacrifices. Even supposed “universal” taboos like incest didn’t hold true universally: the Ptolemies of Egypt had the practice of marrying siblings.

 

[SalamKhan]

Have a read of these:

The Existence, Immateriality & Immortality of the Soul

The arguments laid down in this note are by no means the only proof of the existence and immateriality of the soul. Matter [ماده] is esse...

sadrianmetaphysics.blogspot.com

Does the Soul Exist? Consciousness, Brain and Quantum Physics

“Whatever may or may not be the soul’s future, there is one impregnable central fact in existence: that here and now, in this world, we have a soul which has a life of its own in its appreciation o…

ismailignosis.com

 

[Aloysium]

Thanks for the links:

I want to make one comment about the first one, specifically the assertion that:

matter is not essentially animate or alive, and if it is not essentially-animate then it must be essentially-inanimate or dead, because death is the opposite and the negation of life

Matter constitutes one of the building blocks of living things. We think of it in terms of what we recognize through our perceptions. Through the science of chemistry and physics, we delve into how it works, and have come up with mathematical relationships and specific constants that define its activities. Quantum mechanics looks something like this:

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While this is all well and good for an undergraduate course in physics, what does it mean? How are we to translate this into something meaningful to our understanding of how the universe works? What we do is to come up with a number of interpretations about quantum events that begin with the conclusion that they are weird and include that they can be both waves and particles, can affect one another over huge distances, and that because you can’t measure something without distrurbing it, they are subjective. I’m going to suggest that we not so much try to understand them in terms of what we observe in our day to day interactions with the world, but consider matter to be what is shown in the illustration above - as information in action. This information describes the material building blocks of of our being.

That information which describes the workings of the subatomic is organized into larger, more comprehensive systems that are atoms and molecules. These in turn are subsumed into greater wholes which are cells, and these into the tissues that form organ systems, interacting within a comprehensive whole - a living being. Each layer in this hierarchy describes a greater whole which behaves in a manner that transcends its constituent interactions.

When we turn the page on the sheet above and get an entirely different description of how things work:

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All this information is utilized in the structure and physiology of the brain, for example:

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As we read and think, everything shown above is going on. All the information is coming into play within the unity that is the person, you and I, who exists in relation to what is other to our selves.

I don’t think of matter in terms of being alive or dead. In a sense, the entire universe is “alive” in that everything exists. Obviously the whole being that is me will perish if the matter that comprises my physical structure fails to maintain its necessary organization. It could be then considered dead, but it is I who am dead.