I have no idea what I did with the link there. Sorry about that. I'll try again: http://neurophilosophy.wordpress.com/200...neas-gage/
As for my take on the mind/soul thing, I've said it elsewhere and often that the mind may be the brain's way of experiencing what it feels like to be a brain from the inside. And cases such as the Phineas Gage one suggest that the soul may be nothing more than our own attempts to understand what it feels like to have a mind. Jeff Dee (iirc) once remarked on the Atheist Experience about a case in which a devoutly religious person suffered a brain injury, after which his personality changed and he was an atheist. This is not to say that atheism is the result of a faulty brain, but the question then becomes what happened to this person's soul? Did he somehow lose his original one and had to be issued with a new, atheist one?
As for my take on the mind/soul thing, I've said it elsewhere and often that the mind may be the brain's way of experiencing what it feels like to be a brain from the inside. And cases such as the Phineas Gage one suggest that the soul may be nothing more than our own attempts to understand what it feels like to have a mind. Jeff Dee (iirc) once remarked on the Atheist Experience about a case in which a devoutly religious person suffered a brain injury, after which his personality changed and he was an atheist. This is not to say that atheism is the result of a faulty brain, but the question then becomes what happened to this person's soul? Did he somehow lose his original one and had to be issued with a new, atheist one?
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
