People love their souls. They want some eternal, individual force inside them because it gives them eternality and individuality. Without a soul, they become temporary and lose their distinctiveness. They become grounded to the world, without any sort of essence giving them transcendentality. And this prospect is terrifying. But it’s still the truth. Even a terrifying truth is still a truth. The truth is that we have lost our soul.
First, let’s take a look at individuality. In literal terms, ‘individual’ means ‘indivisible’. In fact, this is how the philosopher René Descartes described the soul in the 17th century. The soul was separated from the brain since the brain is mortal and divisible into different sections. Clearly, we cannot have a reality where our own transcendentality is mortal and divisible, so the soul must be a distinct whole separate from the brain. Since the soul embodies the mind and consciousness, it would make sense for the latter two entities to be indivisible as well. An indivisible mind and consciousness are crucial to the concept of a soul, and it’s been a truth for centuries.
However, in 1960, these ideas were shaken to their core. Roger Sperry, a Nobel Prize
laureate, showed that both the mind and the consciousness are divisible, shattering the concept of an indivisible soul. He studied patients with a severed corpus callosum (the highway between the left and right halves of the brain). This severed connection blocked the transfer of sensory, perceptual, motor, and cognitive information. One single half could be trained to do something, but this task wasn’t achievable by the untrained half. Essentially, the two halves worked independently of each other. The severing of the corpus callosum had created two separate consciousnesses and minds. The soul had been divided into two, and Sperry had stripped humanity of half the soul.
But what about the other half? After all, the immortality of the soul is what contributes greatest to its transcendentality. The only way to rid the soul of its immortality is to prove it to be the same as a mortal entity. Here, we look to the greatest mortal entity itself, the one that Descartes himself had used to define the soul: the brain. If the brain is shown to do everything we perceive the soul to do, then the soul becomes useless. If there is nothing left for the soul to do, then our concept of it disappears.
The soul holds emotion and motivation, stores memories, reasons, and takes decisions. As we will see, each of these function is performed by the brain. Let’s consider memories first, which many-including Plato-attributed to the soul. If the soul is a separate immortal entity from the brain, what happens to the brain should not affect memory. Yet damage to the brain can cause memory loss and dementia. So, we see that memory resides in the brain, not a soul.
Emotion, motivation, and reasoning are also controlled by the brain. Chemical manipulation of the brain will alter moods, which affects emotion and consequently motivation and reasoning. For example, by creating a certain chemical imbalance in the brain, it’s possible to induce depression in some people. Since the brain is what we change to change the functions the soul is claimed to perform, then the brain is what actually performs the functions. The soul is defined by what it performs, but that performance has been stolen by the brain. At this point, what is left for the soul to do?
The immortal and indivisible aspects of the soul are two halves of a whole. They define the soul. However, modern neuroscience has long since shown that the ‘soul’ is indeed divisible and can be split into multiple consciousnesses. So, that was one half of the soul lost. Neuroscience has also shown that everything the soul is meant to do is done by the brain, leaving no task for the soul to perform. All the emotions, all the decisions, and all the memories are not a product of the soul. The brain has sapped all purpose of the soul, making what we idealize as the soul into simply one of our vital organs. The soul’s synonymization with the brain strips it of immortality. We’ve lost our soul. Yet we still cling on to it. The soul may be a lie, but it’s still a blissful one. We transcend mortality with the soul, but without it, the wings disappear and humans are grounded to reality. Even a blissful lie is sometimes worth choosing over a terrifying truth.