Why does Western science find it so difficult accept the concept of the soul?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
thank you question why does western science or western culture find it so difficult to accept the existence of the soul answer for this we need to look at western thought how it emerged history often can make us help us make sense of where we are we often look at if we are looking at say somebody who is driving and if we see their vehicle at one particular moment then we just see the distance that they are from us which is of course an important parameter to be noted but along with the distance the direction in which they are going is also an important parameter to consider and if they are going at high speed in opposite direction from where we are going even if we try to talk with them we will just not be able to connect with them so we will be talking with them but they will not hear us because by the time what we speak reaches them their vehicle has moved away so similarly if we look at the trend of western thought it is moving away from any kind of dogmas and the soul is a concept associated with religious dogmas so overall the world is becoming more and more materialistic and there is a conception of a soul people are interested in being spiritual but that doesn’t mean necessarily that they believe in the soul so let’s look at this western idea now if we most of western philosophy has evolved from the Greeks from the thought of the Greeks long ago so Heraclitus was among the earliest known western thinkers who talked about how we are dual beings there is body and there is a soul which gives consciousness to the body Plato most of his teachings are based on Socrates teachings said that he took this thought further and he said that the body is simply a temporary residence an engagement for the soul which is eternal however the soul is invisible and Democritus who was a younger contemporary of Plato said that he was not interested in any such unperceivable supernatural explanations and thus he said that actually the body is simply made of atoms, material substance which he called atoms literally in Greek means indivisible thereafter Hippocrates who is considered to be the father of modern medicine he said that since brain injury affects consciousness functioning of consciousness so thereafter therefore consciousness must emerge from the brain and the view of these two was a sea change from existing conceptions of people and the Catholic Church did talk about the soul but it did not focus so much on the soul as a concrete entity existing separate from the body it considered the soul to be more of a of Thomas Aquinas for example, a prominent Christian theologian said that the soul is essentially the soul cannot exist separate from the body and thus the soul was considered to be that’s why they had the concept of resurrection so basically the idea of a soul became much more vague during the medieval times in the dark ages what is called middle ages so at that time there was nothing called science in the west there was a murky mix of alchemy and superstition and this inquiry was not much encouraged more of analysis of scripture in bible than by elite group of people that was what was interesting at that time with the renaissance and the starting of the age of what is called as the age of enlightenment age of reason or scientific revolution it became more open to study it is studying the nature of reality not just following that’s given in some some scripture about what reality is and how we are meant to live so by such observation David Descartes a prominent German thinker came to the conclusion that I exist so I am so his implication was that there is a source of consciousness which he called as the mind which is different from the body and the mind is the source of consciousness mind is the fundamental reality however simultaneously science has started adopting the mechanistic approach towards the universe where science looked for material explanations for material phenomena and because of that anything non-material was strongly critiqued the idea was that everything all natural explanations should have natural explanations and thus so for example Newton saw the fruit falling and what is the physical, mechanical natural explanation of the fruit falling that he postulated gravity for that so in this way when the thought started becoming that there has to be a natural mechanism for everything then consciousness and mental functions also were attempted to be explained materially and certainly there is a material component to conscious experience which is associated so Descartes couldn’t explain how a non-material mind could interact with a material body and that failure to explain, he proposed the pituitary gland or something like that as a as possible places for interaction organs for interaction but his ideas were wrong and thereafter dualism was given a body blow and thus the idea became that we have to explain things in terms of what we can observe and what we can experience what we can measure what we can observe what is material basically so there are three dogmas of the materialist ideology which obstruct us in perceiving or pursuing a non-material you could call them as physicalism, reductionism and objectivism so physicalism refers to the idea that physical reality is all that exists there is nothing non-physical that exists in this world there is matter, there is energy and that’s all now this is not science it is an ideology that is masquerading as science when it appears to be or it is at best a premise with which scientists operate but so first is that there is nothing non-material physicalism is all that there is physical reality is all that there is this itself rules out the possibility of a soul then there is reductionism which holds that complex phenomena can be explained in terms of the components and how their components interact with each other so this too is something which works for machines and if the body is considered to be a machine then this explanation may make sense now the body itself is a machine we could agree with that but is there something beyond the body is there a source of consciousness so physicalism doesn’t allow us any room for that and beyond that reductionism says that whatever body phenomena whatever is a so physicalism will say the body is simply the physical structure of the body and then reductionism will say that everything that we experience is reducible to mechanical explanations so for example our experience of consciousness could be reduced down to say where is consciousness experienced primarily it is in the brain so the brain comprises neurons and synapses basically brain cells and biochemicals and electrical currents so the idea became that actually these can explain these can explain what we experience as consciousness reductionism and the last is objectivism objectivism is that reality needs to be objective by objective it means that no subjective element that means nothing apart from our physical experience our that which could be experienced with our senses that which we measure with our senses so not something which involves mind and emotions because emotions vary from person to person so they were considered subjective so length mass, breadth these are considered non-variable so if a particular thing is say 2 feet tall whether you measure it or I measure it it is 2 feet tall but if something is too tall or not tall enough if I have got a stand now that is something which we can vary in our opinions something is attractive enough or not someone’s height is enough or not somebody’s height is attractive or not the height is a parameter but something more that goes on with it and that is a variable so science focused on mathematically measurable parameters and thus the idea was that we should be able to measure everything entirely in terms of mathematics, objectivism is that it can be measured reality has to be objective and it can be measured in terms of our senses and sensory instruments so if we consider these three, they are very useful for science to measure they have been very powerful in science for observing material reality and these three ideas have helped in the development of technology have given us cars and planes and they have given us a wide variety of appliances that we extensively use in our life so as methodological principles or methodological attitudes or methodological perspectives these are fine but as metaphysical claims they are presumptions they are not conclusions but because this approach has worked so well in terms of helping us develop technology for reshaping the world around us so the result has been that more and more people especially in mainstream science have started using these as the spectacle through which all scientific investigation is done and should be done so because of that the idea of a soul first of all it goes against physicalism because the soul is not physical, it is spiritual then it goes against reductionism because the soul will be an irreducible higher entity not reducible down to physical phenomena and objectivism the soul can’t be measured so because of these attitudes science has become more and more biology based or chemical based based on the interaction of chemicals largely and thus the idea of anything non-material doesn’t find place in mainstream science but this doesn’t mean that everybody has bought into these material dogmas there have been many thinkers within the jurisdiction of mainstream science who have thought contemplated these issues and have held conclusions that are different from the mainstream so some of them for example William James James is considered to be the father of modern psychology in some ways and he was of a strong opinion that consciousness is not produced by the brain but rather consciousness is filtered by the brain and he gave for the well documented phenomena that brain injuries affect consciousness and mental functions so he gave the explanation that largely speaking there is no such thing as soul and so he said that actually because if the brain is transmitting consciousness not producing it then also an damage to the transmitter would affect the perception of consciousness or the transmission of the consciousness so for example if a prism were damaged and the light coming out of it would also not be the same multicolor attractive pattern which was there before it was damaged so he said that the brain could be like a prism that transmits consciousness and to give a more updated metaphor suppose we hear some attractive music on some radio and then we smash the radio and can’t hear any music and therefore we say that the music was produced by the radio now here the music was actually channeled or made available for us for consumption for enjoyment for experiencing by the radio it was not produced by the radio so similarly consciousness could be transmitted by the brain and this explanation could also explain adequately the observed phenomena that we see that there is damage to the brain causes damage to mental functions there are others for example in the second half of 20th century and increasing in the 21st century there are more and more thinkers who are turning away from the materialist dogma so for example William James so we have Wilter Penfield and John Eccles who are noble laureate scientists and they by extensive study of the brain have come to the conclusion that the brain does not adequately explain consciousness so for example John Eccles he did his work especially in synapses the contact point between brain cells through which electrochemical signals and information thereof is passed on so he said that I have heard that in human history is incredibly demeaned by material where it happens all so actually our emotions are real experiences within us emotions, intentions, will these are real experiences for us and brain phenomena no matter how complicated they may be they are nothing but the moving of electrochemical signals in the brain so electrical current and brain experiences they are not even similar leave alone identical they are two different categories so David Chalmers is a prominent Australian philosopher and he refers to what is the hard problem of consciousness the soft problem of consciousness which science is making progress in explaining is that which area of brain or which what kind of functions within the brain correlate with which mental functions mental functions means when we feel angry when we make a plan to do something when we reflect deeply areas of the brain are correlated with this that is something which can be thought of and which can be investigated as neuroscience has made remarkable strides in this particular area of mapping mental functions of mapping the brain in terms of which area of the brain is associated with mental function but all that this describes is correlation it is not causation because how brain functions can even can lead to conscious experience of anything there is not even a model to explain that leave alone actual or tested explanation or even a rational explanation and moreover so Wilder Penfield treated patients who were in epilepsy and he could by brain mapping he could zero down which areas of the brain were causing epileptic fits in the patients and he could remove those areas from the brain through surgery and while doing this for which he won huge amount of praise, he was a very successful neurosurgeon Canadian Nobel Laureate Nobel Laureate the brain could simulate certain actions but it could not it could not create the intention for doing those actions for example people could be activated in certain parts of the brain be induced to raise their hand, raise their arm but they always attributed such actions to the to the doctor who was giving them the electrical stimulus and they said that I am not raising the hand you are making me raise the hand through that device so that means intention came from something different from the brain and thus he concluded that the brain is like a computer but is programmed by something outside of itself now one major field which is actually developed in science and which has strongly questioned and relativized materialistic presumptions about science as quantum physics quantum mechanics quantum that it has shown that there is an irreducible role for consciousness and thus has opened the door for non material explanations to enter into science so it has biologically become more and more mechanistic physics because of quantum development quantum physics is going further and further away from mechanism and thus if you consider areas of quantum physics they are providing more and more insights that can make the make the concept of soul more intelligible and acceptable even to mainstream science whereas although mainstream science is on a train which is going away from spirituality but within mainstream science there is this train of quantum physics which is making people which is showing that material explanations are not adequate and thus is opening the door for the re-explaining of the soul