PhiloPsycho Freedom

There are many problems with this theory of consciousness that we call the soul.

First, this anthropocentric notion that only humans have souls is ridiculous. Why would only human's have souls? Why not all living beings? or everything, for that matter? What makes humans so special? Many people will probably answer that humans are god's chosen species, and that we're special like that. Do we think that we're so grand that we'll reign forever? Nothing lasts forever, just look at fossil records. Dinosaurs, had they had the cognitive capacity to think this, would have thought that they were god's chosen species. Also note that humans weren't around at that period, which means our reign is a relatively short period of this planet's history.

The most commonly presented version of the soul that I'm familiar with has been that the soul is the seat of one's personality. This is a simplistic and convenient explanation about how we act the way we do, what the afterlife is like, and gives us a source of freedom in our current and after lives.

By using the soul as the seat of personality, we're entirely neglecting the aspect of the brain as anything other than a conduit. The case of Phineas Gage can effectively counter this. Phineas Gage was a mild-mannered, kindly, young gentleman who lived back in the 1800's. One day while working as a foreman blasting rock (to prepare for a road), a blast, that was being prepared by Gage, prematurely fired and sent a large iron rod up through his eye socket and out the top of his skull. This resulted in a massive lesion that nearly destroyed Gage's frontal lobe. After the incident, Gage's personality was radically changed: He was now a easy-to-anger, violent man who ended up driving away the people he loved. Now, as the soul theory had been presented to me, the soul is a ethereal force that controls the body through. If this were true, then no matter how damaged the brain is, the personality should persist in its current form. The only difference will be the abilities with which the personality can express itself with, and, as we've seen, this is clearly not the case.

By stating that the personality is soul, the afterlife will be a bodiless version of ourselves; floating around in our afterlife destination that was determined during our life. The only problem with this is that our destination that was determined during our life shouldn't really be related to our soul. If our personality isn't in our soul, the soul is a near pointless construct - which will suffer or enjoy itself after our death - that has very little connection to the current "us" that we know.

The lesson for you extreme capitalists out there: whatever work you're doing in your current life will not benefit you, as you know yourself, but will benefit some near-3rd-party person that is so nondescript that it can hardly be said to have had any part in earning its outcome.