Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
two quantum scientists have claimed that they can prove the existence of the soul, a quantum entity that acts as the program for the computer of our brain, and exists independently of the physical body after death. One psychologist says that the concept of soul is merely an extrapolation we make based on the duality that we experience between body and consciousness.
belief in the soul, if not in contradiction with it, is not supported by science.
science is not beholden to a worldview that is governed mechanistically, and is non-intentional and non-experiencing all the way down. our emotions, which are presumably not physical in nature, can actually change our brain states—even more they can affect our epigenetic patterns. But, Beauregard certainly isn’t the only scientifically-minded intellectual who believes the soul exists and has some important role to play in our investigation.
Schwartz is a famous psychologist who has argued for the soul as an important datum that informs our way of thinking about humans and the world. In several places, Schwartz has argued that you are not your brain, but, in fact, you are something more or above and beyond your brain. You are something other than your brain illustrated by the fact that your brain can be shaped by you—it’s almost as if you are an outside force that can shape and form your own neural patterns. Scientists have referred to the neural phenomena as neuroplasticity (i.e., the view that our neural patterns are malleable), which Schwartz has deployed as a way of showing that we are the kinds of agents that can change our brain states.
Comparatively little that is of bearing regarding the soul or mind is the object of neuroscientific study. In fact, it is more likely that neuroscientists are often not directly concerned with the soul question at all. Even if they have a settled opinion that the soul doesn’t exist, their own discipline tells us very little about the nature of the soul; at least not directly, so their belief may be misguided. Why then should we take Murphy’s authority claim seriously? Simply put, we shouldn’t. For, Murphy’s claim that no neuroscientist believes in the existence of souls is little more than an appeal to authority for something else going on in the discussion. Take another look at the quote above.
Some in the scientific community, like Murphy, may have you thinking that the soul is passé and no longer scientifically reputable. Three challenges present themselves to Murphy’s claim. First, science, especially neuroscience, tells us very little about the features often associated with the soul, which concern features like consciousness, thought, experience, and values. Second, there are a number of scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists who believe we have lots of reasons to think that there is a soul or, at a minimum, something above and beyond our present embodiment. Third, for these and many other reasons, not only have the scientists offered little that refutes the existence of the soul, but we seem to have good positive grounds for thinking that, in fact, souls do exist.
The Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith has provided the long awaited, first principal, biological explanation of the human condition, our capacity for so called ‘good and evil’. With the clarifying, biological explanation for why we humans became competitive, selfish and aggressive, it is now possible to look into and explain the rather elusive concept we refer to as our ‘soul’— our species’ instinctive memory of a time when our distant ancestors lived in a cooperative, selfless, loving, innocent state, or, as it is referred to metaphorically in the religious context of the Christian Bible,
Very roughly speaking, when most people think about an immaterial soul that persists after death, they have in mind some sort of blob of spirit energy that takes up residence near our brain, and drives around our body like a soccer mom driving an SUV. The questions are these: what form does that spirit energy take, and how does it interact with our ordinary atoms? Not only is new physics required, but dramatically new physics. Within QFT, there can't be a new collection of "spirit particles" and "spirit forces" that interact with our regular atoms, because we would have detected them in existing experiments. Ockham's razor is not on your side here, since you have to posit a completely new realm of reality obeying very different rules than the ones we know.
But let's say you do that. How is the spirit energy supposed to interact with us? Here is the equation that tells us how electrons behave in the everyday world:
Don't worry about the details; it's the fact that the equation exists that matters, not its particular form. It's the Dirac equation -- the two terms on the left are roughly the velocity of the electron and its inertia -- coupled to electromagnetism and gravity, the two terms on the right.
As far as every experiment ever done is concerned, this equation is the correct description of how electrons behave at everyday energies. It's not a complete description; we haven't included the weak nuclear force, or couplings to hypothetical particles like the Higgs boson. But that's okay, since those are only important at high energies and/or short distances, very far from the regime of relevance to the human brain.
If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that this equation is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn't exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren't any soul at all, and then what's the point?) So any respectable scientist who took this idea seriously would be asking -- what form does that interaction take? Is it local in spacetime? Does the soul respect gauge invariance and Lorentz invariance? Does the soul have a Hamiltonian? Do the interactions preserve unitarity and conservation of information?
Nobody ever asks these questions out loud, possibly because of how silly they sound. Once you start asking them, the choice you are faced with becomes clear: either overthrow everything we think we have learned about modern physics, or distrust the stew of religious accounts/unreliable testimony/wishful thinking that makes people believe in the possibility of life after death. It's not a difficult decision, as scientific theory-choice goes.
We don't choose theories in a vacuum. We are allowed -- indeed, required -- to ask how claims about how the world works fit in with other things we know about how the world works. I've been talking here like a particle physicist, but there's an analogous line of reasoning that would come from evolutionary biology. Presumably amino acids and proteins don't have souls that persist after death. What about viruses or bacteria? Where upon the chain of evolution from our monocellular ancestors to today did organisms stop being described purely as atoms interacting through gravity and electromagnetism, and develop an immaterial immortal soul?
There's no reason to be agnostic about ideas that are dramatically incompatible with everything we know about modern science. Once we get over any reluctance to face reality on this issue, we can get down to the much more interesting questions of how human beings and consciousness really work.
Sean Carroll is a physicist and author. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993, and is now on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology, where his research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology. Carroll is the author of From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, and Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity. He has written for Discover, Scientific American, New Scientist, and other publications. His blog Cosmic Variance is hosted by Discover magazine, and he has been featured on television shows such as The Colbert Report, National Geographic's Known Universe.
