Department of Philosophy

Matt McCormick

Department of Philosophy

California State University

Sacramento, CA 95819-6033

atheismblog.blogspot.com

www.csus.edu/indiv/m/mccormickm

Please do not copy, quote, or distribute without permission. MM

No Brain, No Soul, No God[1]

Neurologists at the Virginal School of Medicine recently reported an extraordinary case. A 40 year old man who had been a married teacher showed up at the hospital complaining of headaches and reporting that he feared he would rape his landlady. He was having balance problems, he had lost the ability to make or copy drawings, and was completely unconcerned when he urinated on himself.

As the case was investigated, it was revealed that previously he had never exhibited any abnormal sexual impulses. But when he became fascinated by child pornography websites, began visiting prostitutes, and making sexual advances to young children, his wife had left him. He had been convicted for child molestation and treated in a rehabilitation program. But he was expelled from the program when he propositioned women in the program.

When the doctors did an MRI scan of his brain it showed that there was an egg-sized tumor growing in his right frontal cortex, a region of the brain that is responsible for judgment, social behavior, and self-control. They removed the tumor and the man’s aberrant impulses and behaviors subsided. When the urges resurfaced later, it was discovered that the tumor had grown back. They removed it again and his behavior normalized again.

What’s fascinating and important about this case is that it is such a clear and dramatic example of how our thoughts, our desires, our beliefs, and behaviors are directly dependent upon the state of our brains.

In another recent study from the Mayo Clinic, a group of patients had begun to exhibit more extraordinary behavior. Among other unusual behaviors, they were suddenly becoming pathological gamblers, despite the fact that they had never gambled before. They were consumed with the need to gamble on the Internet or in casinos, losing thousands within a few months. One patient’s uncontrollable gambling had resulted in losing over $100,000. One said that he was, “unable to pull myself away from the tables.” They also went to great lengths to hide their behaviors from their spouses. They justified, rationalized, and struggled to control the problem with self-help programs. Other obsessive behaviors had suddenly developed too. They had become hyper-sexual, wanting sex with their spouses several times a day, seeking out prostitutes, extra-marital affairs, and pornography. One patient rapidly gained 50 lbs. from compulsive eating.

What was the cause of their sudden problems? The patients were taking a Parkinson’s drug called pramipexole. The behaviors, the aberrant beliefs, and delusions began and intensified as the dosage of the drug went up. And when doctors began to suspect the cause and tapered the drug use off, the compulsive gambling and other problems disappeared. The doctor recommended that one patient taper off his use of the drug slowly, but he was so frustrated with the havoc that had been wrecked on his life that he discontinued the drug use abruptly. Within two days, the overpowering urge to gamble ceased “like a light switch being turned off” and he had no recurrence of any of the compulsive urges or problems thereafter.

The doctors in the study argue that pramipexole is a dopamine agonist that is highly selective for the dopamine D3 receptor which forms the “pharmacologic substrate for this gambling behavior.”[2] Powerful stimulation of these dopamine receptors in the brain produces compulsive and pathological gambling behavior.

Here are more vivid case where otherwise normal people with no behavioral problems began to exhibit the most extraordinary behavior. They rationalized it, they tried to justify it, they tried to explain it to themselves in terms of reasons, they hid it, they tried to treat the problem in therapy with introspection and resolve. What had happened to them was an alteration in their brain chemistry which resulted in their having overpowering desires to do things that they never would have done otherwise.

This chapter is about the relationship between the thing we identify as our soul and the brain. More specifically, it is about the dependency of the soul or the mind on the brain.

According to a recent Harris Poll, 84% of Americans believe that they possess a soul that will survive after the death of their bodies.[3][1] Every week, millions of people attend religious services where they have discussions about and try to improve the lot of their immortal souls. Politicians and celebrities make frequent comments about their souls and the afterlife. People across the social, economic, and educational spectrum regularly modify their behavior and make decisions based on the view that there is an afterlife and that they must act to protect the fate of their souls. In short, the belief in an immortal soul is enormously popular.

The problem is that humans do not have an immortal soul. All of the characteristics that we typically associate or identify with souls are causally dependent upon the existence of a brain and nervous system. At death, the brain ceases to function, so the soul ceases to exist at the same time the body does. So, humans do not possess immortal souls.

There are two questions to be answered by this chapter: First, can the soul survive the death of the body? Second, if there are no souls without brains, can there be a God? The answer to both questions is no.

The first challenge will be to give a convincing argument for what I will call the Dependency Thesis: The soul or consciousness is dependent upon the existence of the brain. The implication of that claim is that when the brain dies, so does the soul. That is, the soul is not immortal. The argument can be stated relatively simply: Everything that we attribute to the soul—consciousness, feelings, memories, personality attributes, and thoughts—is dependent upon the functions of the brain to occur. When the body dies, all brain functions cease and the brain no longer operates. Therefore, when the body dies, the soul ceases to exist too. The biggest part of the work in this argument and a large part of the chapter is defending the claim that everything we attribute to the soul depends upon the brain.

The broader implication of this argument for atheism, and the subject of the second part of the chapter, is that the dependency of minds or souls on brains shows that there is no God. Consciousness requires the possession of a brain. God, if there were one, would be a conscious, sentient entity. But God has no brain. So there is no God. The dependency of minds on brains and the absence in the universe of a divine brain implies that there is no divine mind.

There are different accounts of what a soul is that we can separate into personal and non-personal characterizations. Personal accounts of the soul portray it a non-physical, conscious, personal entity that carries or possesses the characteristics that are essential to person’s identity. On this view, thinking, being conscious, being self-aware, and having a personality are the essential features of a person’s soul. Non-personal portrayals of the soul depict is as an energy, a life force, or some universal phenomena where it does not possess a consciousness or a mental life that is identifiable by you as your awareness. It is something bigger that all people or all life shares in common without individual differentiation. Let’s consider the personal accounts first.

It’s common in our characterizations of the soul in the west to depict it in personal terms. Your soul is you. Your body is an incidental feature of your existence, but your soul possesses those features that are uniquely your own. The Christian religion, Islam, and a host of other religious and non-religious sources in our culture describe the afterlife as someplace where a person’s soul, not their body, is rewarded or punished. It is an existence where your soul will serve and worship God, or regret not doing so enough in your embodied life. Only a conscious, self-aware, thinking entity can enjoy rewards, experience torment, feel regret, and so on. It is not merely that some consciousness or thinking entity survives the death of my body, but that my consciousness will survive. My soul is my consciousness. There will be continuity from my perspective between my awareness in my body and my awareness after the death of my body.[4] In our art, our movies, our mythology, and our religious traditions, the transition from this life to the afterlife is often portrayed like the transition we make when we fall asleep and then wake up again. When I wake up, I am the same person, with the same thoughts, memories, personal traits, and the same body as the person who went to sleep. When the soul leaves the body, however, the difference is that when it “wakes up,” it has left the physical body behind and only the soul has survived you’re your thoughts, memories, and personal traits still intact. Those 230+ million Americans who believe in the soul have it in mind that something that makes me up will survive, that I will have eternal life, that I will be reincarnated, or my soul will go to heaven. Most people will say that the things that are essential to them as an individual consciousness are their beliefs, their hopes, their dispositions, their emotional reactions, and their memories. So in these popular depictions of the soul, we seem to be identifying it with what we usually call a person’s mind.

The question that we need to explore now is whether or not there is any reason to think that one’s mind or soul can survive the death of the body. It is certainly true that some non-personal and non-conscious aspects of us survive our deaths. The physical substances that make up a person’s body survive; the carbon atoms in a person’s body, for example, become part of other physical entities like the tree that grows in the graveyard. The house I built, the books I wrote, the children I parented, the impacts I had in the world, may all last longer than I do. And to the extent that we leave a lasting trace in the world, it could be argued that we are immortal. But, these things are not me. They are impersonal effects that I had on the world by means of my thoughts or my soul. The persistence of my carbon is not the survival past death of me. If it were, then we’d all be more concerned about what happens to our toenails after we cut them, or the fate of the skins cells we scratch off our arm while watching TV. That’s not you or your consciousness that’s tangled up in the bristles of your hairbrush. The chemicals that make up my body, unless they are not configured in the way that allows my brain and body to function, don’t produce my thoughts. They will not have dreams, they will not remember, they will not have beliefs. Once they lose the configuration that makes them into my body, my molecules do not have a perspective or any awareness. To use Nagel’s famous dictum, there is nothing it is like to be a molecule. The common view of the soul that is being challenged here is the view that my non-physical consciousness will continue after the end of my physical body.

What’s the connection between the existence of our minds and the brain? All of our evidence indicates that a being cannot think, have a mind, or have a personality without a brain and a nervous system of a certain minimal level of complexity. Brainless minds, as far as our ample evidence indicates, do not occur. One of the most compelling reasons for believing that there cannot be a brainless mind is the close causal connection we observe between the states of our bodies and the states of our minds. Centuries of medical data about brain damage have made it clear that when people get brain damage, they get mind damage. Head trauma, lesions, tumors, excisions, and other physical alterations of the brain impair the mental functions that we attribute to the soul like decision making, problem solving, memories, the ability to abstract, and emotional responses. The frontal lobe of the brain is most responsible for the functions identified with the soul. It controls language, our responses to our environment, judgments, it assigns meanings to words, and so on. Damage to the frontal lobe can result in loss of spontaneity of thought. It can produce a loss of flexibility in thoughts or the persistence of a single thought. It can result in mood changes, radical personality shifts, or reduced problem solving capacity. As we saw above, a tumor that impedes the functions of the brain can make an otherwise normal person into a pedophile.

The temporal lobes on the sides of the brain are responsible for hearing, acquiring memories, and the categorization of objects. Damage to the temporal lobes can make a person aggressive, it can produce persistent talking or a failure to talk. It can dramatically increase or decrease sexual interest, or produce short or long term memory problems. Brain damaged patients can have difficulty recognizing faces, and difficulty understanding words and identifying objects. In all the cases that we have examined, significant brain damage always produces some sort of commensurate impairment of mental functions. And impaired mental functions can always be traced back to some problem or other in the brain. No one ever suffers from massive trauma to the brain and walks away with no effects at all on their consciousness.

The dependence of our mental states on the state of our bodies is also evident when alterations of the chemistry of the brain with drugs, food, sleep deprivation, fasting, or coffee change the way we think. We have all experienced the direct effect that physical circumstances have on the way we think such as being cognitively impaired from too much to drink, for example. Your physical environment can induce a prevalence of positive or negative thoughts in your mind, or it can make you irritable or happy. If we have too little to eat or drink and our thoughts grow slow and negative, too much caffeine and our thoughts race. Even the weather can have a pronounced affect on the character and direction of our thoughts. Hallucinogenic drugs induce visions in the mind of a different reality. People on PCP often envision spiders and have a powerful belief that they can fly. Millions of people take anti-depression drugs every day—chemical compounds that alter the chemical events in the brain—that produce a change in their beliefs, feelings, dispositions, and other mental phenomena. The causal dependence in these cases is clear; the mind depends upon specific chemical and electrical events in the nervous systems. Modify those physical reactions even slightly and there is a corresponding change on the mental side of our lives.