Soul

[Neo-Scholastic]

Since you seem to support him in this venture perhaps you can tell me why this project is so important to you. What really have you lost if it turns out the brain in fact does support all of our subjective experience.

Your last question first. I find the mind/body problem interesting. That's all. Even as an atheist I puzzled over the curious interaction between mind and body. Puzzling over this particular area of philosophy gives me much intellectual pleasure apart from any practical application. I do not find the topic in itself useful as an apologetic. Nevertheless I do attribute much of my return to faith to a deep intuition that physical reduction does not adequately explain our inner life.

What I wonder is why you think the meat in our craniums is unable to generate each and every subjective state, logical ideal or imagined pure substance you like?

Many reasons.

The first reason, is called over-determination. We do not attribute mental states to other physical systems although we find it easy to assign functional properties. From a purely physical point of view, it seems the brain could just as easily perform its functions without the need for any associated subjective experiences. Subjective experiences seem useless, i.e. causally impotent. So why are they there at all? And why do they seem so closely matched to brain organization if they have no purpose?

The second reason concerns the curious fact that each neuron seems remarkably identical to another. Yet stimulation of various sets of neurons produce wildly different kinds of sensations or govern involuntary and voluntary movements of the body with or without sensation. I find this property of brain tissue very counter-intuitive from a purely physical point of view.

The third reason is this. I think meaning, or 'aboutness', is an essential part of reality and not an odd by-product animal life. We have become highly effective at identifying particulars within the seamless continuum of the physical reality. It seems to me that pattern recognition requires pre-existing patterns. No all patterns need to fall into this category, many would be composite forms.