Does the Soul Exist?

Is there a consciousness that is not completely reducible to brain-activity? Are there mental states that are not identical with physical mechanisms? In other words: Is there a soul within our body? As Christians we do believe in such non-reductive quality. God’s creation of man consists in breathing a soul into the human body to enable the human being to think, feel, and act as the crown of creation, responsible to reason and moral law of nature. What can be said from a philosophical viewpoint about the notion of consciousness?

Well, the mind-body-problem is one of the most complicated topics in philosophy. The classic formulation of this problem comes from Descartes’ Meditationes de prima philosophia, in which he explains the dualism of the body and the soul or matter and mind from the assumption that both can exist independent of each other. Leibniz takes up the Cartesian distinction of the body (res extensa) and the mind (res cogitans) and solves this psycho-physical problem on the one hand theologically (God put the basically distinct spheres in harmony with each other, just as a watchmaker synchronizes two watches, so that in all cases a connection is made between the body and the mind.), and on the other hand, Leibniz overcomes the dualism of the body and the soul by a logical and geometrical consideration.

In Leibniz the body and the mind are traced back to a common substance, the indivisible and indestructible monad which as an “inspired atom” forms the base of all things, both of material and immaterial kind. Thus, in Leibnizian metaphysics matter is “minded”—both the body and the soul are equally monadic entities. One could speak of a “mind-monism” in this respect, not exactly like the monism Spinoza elaborates in his metaphysics, but similar. In his pantheistic worldview Spinoza imagines both the mind and the body as expressions and manifestations of God. “Minding matter” in Spinoza does lead to a world in which everything is an unidentifiable part of God’s mind with its universal perspective, while in Leibniz the monads keep their identity. In Spinoza everything looses its identity defined by a recognizable difference between an entity and its surrounding, while in Leibniz the monads are separated clearly from each other, although material and immaterial entities show no more than a superficial difference.

As a matter of fact, the solution to the mind-body problem in Leibniz and Spinoza makes a deep metaphysical impact, as it is also observable in the proposals of dualists like Malebranche’s occasionalism. On the other hand, the dualist solution presented by Descartes himself, based on physiological consideration and an organic-mechanistic anthropology, which seeks to establish a connection between the mind and the body with the idea of the “pineal gland” is even less persuasive. The materialistic monism therefore holds that dualism is wrong, and so are “mind-monisms” backed-up by high-brow metaphysics. The materialistic monism based in recent studies of neuroscience rejects all immateriality to naturalize mind, to base it physically, to reduce it to matter, claiming, that there is nothing but body. With increasing effort neuroscientists try to investigate our brain to describe physiological states in form of measurable data. From the point of view of neuroscience the consciousness as negotiated by philosophy since centuries is completely explainable by these measures. Is that the case – really?

If physicalism is a true worldview, all (correct) information in the world is physical information. Then, physicalism would turn out to be wrong in the case that somebody learns something new about matters of fact whose total physical information he knew already before. To illustrate such a case, Jackson gives us the following example of Mary: “Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black-and-white room via a black-and-white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. [...] What will happen when Mary is released from her black-and-white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more information? to have than that, and Physicalism is false.” (Epiphenomenal Qualia, in: Philosophical Quarterly 32, 1982, 127-136, here: 130).

There were many objections to particular aspects of the “Mary-argument”, but they do not change the substantial position: There is something “more” in the human being than physiology, there is a mind in addition to the body, there is a soul. And, this soul as the core of human being’s consciousness is not describable by science and undetermined by the neurophysiological image of the brain, because the soul is something else than the brain. Although states of consciousness are related to brain activity, it does not mean, both qualities are ontologically the same. Let me in this sense conclude with Leibniz: “Pro certo enim sumo mantem aliud esse quam cerebrum aut subtiliorem substantiae cerebri partem.”—“I hold for certain that the consciousness is something else than the brain or a subtle part of it”.