Souls, Pt. 2

The fire washes my soul clean
And what remains is a mouthful
of ashes—"Asche zu Asche", Rammstein (translated)

I've laid out in my previous post some of the reasons I'm not completely satisfied ruling out the idea of an immaterial soul. Now I want to paint a picture of why I'm not comfortable accepting the idea of souls wholesale. But first, I need to flesh things out a bit more...

If there must be something special called a soul, why would that be? I had said I just had a vague lingering doubt as to whether a perfect copy (and I mean perfect copy) would actually be me in every meaningful sense. I have a sense that I am, and have always been, one unique, individual, continuous consciousness, and my concern would be that that consciousness would be somehow interrupted in the copying process: either that it might be destroyed (and leave some sort of "zombie" behind that only appeared to be me), or that it might be replaced with some new thread of consciousness. So for me, invoking the idea of a soul would validate my experience of an individual consciousness, and give me a vehicle to reason about what would become of that consciousness in my "perfect copy" scenario.

It's not clear to me that a human built from scratch should "experience" anything, any more than a rock should. If he's wired up correctly, he should laugh, cry, respond appropriately to pain, be inspired by art, have unique individual tastes, even contemplate his own reality. From a behaviorist standpoint, there would be no reason to expect any difference whatsoever from a natural-born human, but I see no reason to expect that he would be "phenomenally conscious" (if such a concept even makes sense), or for that matter that any human would. (And how sure are we that conscious experience stops at the moment of death?) But I still can't completely shake the feeling that I am conscious in some special sense.

As a determinist, I believe any perfect physical copy of me would act identically to the original, that you could teleport them into separate identical universes (instead of destroying the original), and they would make exactly the same choices in every instance. Therefore, if the original expresses a deep conviction of subjective experience, the copy would, too. Therefore, either the copy has a "soul", the original doesn't, or souls can't explain any phenomena, not even my writing this blog post or any of the opinions I expressed in it! So determinism isn't compatible with the idea that you can make sense of consciousness by positing an immaterial soul.

One more alternative would be that it's fundamentally impossible to make a truly perfect copy of a human being for some special reason. That would resolve all the dilemmas I've mentioned and leave me with just the problem of how phenomenal consciousness, if it exists, could arise from entirely physical brains. But it seems kind of cheesy to me...

Here's a recap of all the possible ways I've come up with to make sense of my conscious experience:

• The sense of phenomenal consciousness is a persistent illusion
• The universe is not deterministic: there are non-physical conditions that affect the physical universe
• A perfect reconstruction of a human being is not possible; there can be no copy good enough to be endowed with the same conscious mind as the original

Souls, Pt. 1

"Water, 35 litres. Carbon, 20kg. Ammonia, 4 litres. Lime, 1.5kg. Phosphorus, 800g. Salt, 250 g. Salt Peter, 100g. Sulphur, 80g. Fluorine, 7.5g. Iron, 5g. Silicon 3g. And trace amounts of fifteen other elements. Those are the elements to make an average adult human body. You can buy these elemental ingredients at the market with the pocket money of a child."—Fullmetal Alchemist

I've been thinking a lot about souls lately. I lean towards thinking there is no non-physical soul, but I don't think I would call my bluff by consenting to be disintegrated and rebuilt from exactly the same matter in exactly the same configuration. What am I worried about losing?

I don't think memory or personality would be in question. The mechanisms of memory are still a little mysterious, but nothing about storing and recalling memories suggests anything metaphysical to me. I also don't think there's any reason to suspect that we'd intrinsically know the difference between a "real" memory and a "false" memory, as you might intuitively expect at first. As for personality, I think pharmaceuticals and basic neurology show pretty clearly that most, if not all, personality comes from physical brain states. And your personality wouldn't even have to be identical, because people go through mood changes all the time, and personality changes as you get older, and you still identify yourself as the same person.

So with identical memories and the same basic personality, there's no reason to expect that this copy would feel like an imposter, or be in any way emotionally detached from their "original" self. But would there be something fundamentally, drastically different in the copy? Would they be a "philosophical zombie" going through the motions of being "truly human", but lacking any kind of subjective experience or consciousness of their own?

I'd probably say "no, there would be nothing lacking", but I'm uncomfortable ruling the possibility out entirely (hence, I wouldn't consent to be disintegrated and rebuilt).

I'm still not sure where that leaves me, but there's plenty more confusion to come at a later date!