Why I Don't Believe in Souls

I used to. I believed in souls more profusely than anything else really. Specifically, I believed that the human mind was more than just matter. As the mighty Yoda put it, "Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter." Although the concept of a soul is usually very obtuse (because tangible definition of it is usually easily proved false, so people who want to believe in it say it is incapable of being defined). As Alan Watts put it; "Most people feel that they are something or other about halfway between their ears and a little way behind the eyes, inside the head. That is what you call the ego. That's not what you are at all, because it gives you the idea that you are chauffeur inside your own body".

That's pretty much what I felt; that my mind used my body but was somehow separate. Then a friend asked me the question; "Do you think tree's have souls?". She was religious and probably thought they did, but for me to answer that question rationally I had to figure out what it took to have a soul and whether trees had it. So, the first thing is to define a soul (uh oh!);

While the substance of a soul is always in debate, you can see it based on it's effect. It brings about a personality in it's owner. A soul has emotions, memories, priorities. A soul is the thing that thinks and feels and cares about things. But here's the trick;

By then, I had learned enough about the brain, and brain chemistry, to know that each of these aspects is controlled by the structures and chemicals in the brain. Sure, energy is there, but it's not the key component. In fact, it's more of a bi-product. If you put small amounts of alcohol or any number of other chemicals in the system, the personality changes until they're gone. If you limit oxygen, preventing the proper chemical (chemical, not electrical) exchanges in the brain, the personality changes. And the most blunt fact of all; If you damage or remove the physical structures of the brain, the parts of the mind that they control are proportionately damaged or removed. Do double-blind tests running different types of energy through the brain (electric, heat, etc.) and you will see no personality change until the energies are strong enough to effect the physical processes or structure. Yet with a basic understanding of brain physiology you can remove entire parts of a person's mind with a scalpel, while leaving the types of energy running through the brain entirely the same.

(Continued in Why I Don't Believe in Souls pt. 2)