Joseph Knippenberg, who has written for us and writers regularly for the No Left Turns weblog, sends a link to an interview with Daniel Dennett in today's New York Times Magazine, "The Nonbeliever".
He that he’s a village atheist at heart. This is not profound or thought-provoking stuff." For example, when the interviewer asks him about the "everlasting soul," he replies:
Ugh. I certainly don't believe in the soul as an enduring entity. Our brains are made of neurons, and nothing else. Nerve cells are very complicated mechanical systems. You take enough of those, and you put them together, and you get a soul.
You get a brain, if you know how to put them together just right and have learned how to animate them, but do you actually get a mind, much less a soul? Dennett's kind of dogmatism always leaves me, a constitutional agnostic, asking, "But how do you know?" Given what we know about such things, the supernaturalist explanations are just as plausible as the materialist, and the materialist just as dogmatic, as religious, as the supernaturalist.
James Loder uses a very interesting example in his discussion of the human spirit, noting Wilder Penfield's studies on this issue.
In The Knight's Move Loder writes, "His electrical probes of the brains of epileptic patients during open skull surgery, while the patients remained conscious under a local anesthetic, proved to be ground breaking for locating functional aspects of consciousness in particular aspects of the brain structure. Music, speech, motor activity, memory, and, if Julian Jaynes (an interpreter of Penfield) is to be believed, even the ancient voice of the gods can be specifically located at various points in the neruonal structure of the brain.
"For our purposes, however, discovery of these so-called tapes in the brain is secondary to a more striking observation. When Penfield touched a portion of the cortex and a patient moved his arm or heard musci, he would say to Penfield, 'You did that; I didn't.' No matter how Penfield probed the various centers of the brain, he could not locate the 'I' that said 'I didn't.' Penfield conclued that if one were to simply take the evidence available, one would have to posit 'two essences': one would be the brain, its structures and programmed patterns of behavior; the other would be the 'I' who had the capacity to enter into the program and 'blaze new trails through the neuronal structure,' create new programs and redirect previously programmed behavior. This is the source of choice, meaning, and belief."
This reminds me of the scientists who also still strongly assert a universe which recycles itself through expansion, reduction, and collapse, to start the process over infinitely. However, they hold this view in contrast to all available evidence the universe is a one shot deal, expanding and then likely slowing down, but never collapsing. They believe in the collapsing universe not because of the science, but in spite of the science and because their beliefs could not have them conceive of a universe that is a one shot deal. That would imply something started this whole show, and that is anathema to Science, no matter what the actual science might say.
So too with the soul. It is not a measure of the science but a measure of the horror that the discovery of a soul would bring to too many of those whose whole philosophy depends on there not being a soul, and the question the existence of a soul necessarily raise.
Posted by: Patrick | January 24, 2006 at 11:03 PM