Sam Harris has said:
"we know [there are very good reasons for doubting an afterlife] from 150 years of neurology where you damage areas of the brain and faculties are lost and they're clearly lost, it's not that everyone with brain damage has their soul perfectly intact and they just can't get the words out, everything about your mind can be damaged by damaging the brain".
Sam mentions, for example, that brain damage can result in not being able to recognise faces. So it's not the case that we really do recognise faces, but find we cannot communicate to other people our knowledge. Our minds are actually adversely affected.
The problem with his argument, and the mistake that skeptics always make, is that he conflates the soul with the mind. In fact, even with brain damage, our souls can still be perfectly intact. Suppose someone has perfect unaided vision and puts on a random pair of eyeglasses. Wearing them she cannot read the registration plate of a car 25 metres away. It's not as if she can really see the plate but is unable to communicate this information. She really can't see the registration plate.
But it nevertheless remains the case that her unaided vision is still perfectly intact. Her bespectacled vision is poor, but not her unaided vision. And she merely needs to take the eyeglasses off to restore her vision. Likewise, with brain damage, our minds might be affected, but not our souls. Our souls merely need to detach from our bodies to restore full cognitive abilities (or indeed enhanced cognitive abilities).
1 comment:
Your eyeglasses analogy is spot-on!
I'm surprised that Harris would make such a poor argument because he seems to be a pretty deep and top-notch thinker (IMHO...I'm A fan).
I remember coming across this passage (or one like it) back in my hardcore atheist/materialist days, and clearly seeing the taking hole in the argument even then. It always bugged me.
The only reason I'm no longer a materialist is because one day about ten years ago, and completely out of the blue, it just kinda struck me that the existence of subjective, first-person experience made no sense from a physicalist viewpoint. Don't know why I never noticed that fact before. Maybe I used to be a philosophical zombie...?
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