Science has nothing to tell us about the soul? I disagree

Science has nothing to tell us about the soul? I disagree

Science tends to strengthen the argument of Aristotle that the soul is the form of a living thing – this is also the position of Thomas Aquinas, and so of classical Christian theology. I don't think McGilchrist is a Christian – he calls himself a panentheist – but it is certainly his position, too. He compared the soul to a wave – something that is composed of water, but at the same time distinguishable from it. In that sense, he was talking about souls as time-bound entities. Waves end. Perhaps there are several kinds of soul we can talk about.
Science, it seems to me, gives us reasons for supposing that nothing can go on for ever. You don't need science to believe that. But at the very least the discovery of the big bang shows that the universe had a beginning and will have an end. This shows that while something might be eternal, it cannot be immortal, and that must go for souls too.
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⦁ Do We Have a Soul? A Scientific Answer

Traditionally, scientists speak of the soul in a materialistic context, treating it as a poetic synonym for the mind. Everything knowable about the "soul" can be learned by studying the functioning of the human brain. In their view, neuroscience is the only branch of scientific study relevant to one's understanding of the soul. The soul is dismissed as an object of human belief, or reduced to a psychological concept that shapes our cognition and understanding of the observable natural world. The terms "life" and "death" are thus nothing more than the common concepts of "biological life" and "biological death."
Of course, in most spiritual and religious traditions, a soul is viewed as emphatically more definitive than the scientific concept. It is considered the incorporeal essence of a person or living thing, and is said to be immortal and transcendent of material existence.
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⦁ Science at Last Explains Our Soul

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, humanity’s time in the ‘Garden of Eden’.

Not all scientists are necessarily adverse to grappling with religious concepts. Recently 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.
Neurobiologists and evolutionary psychologists hold that the soul, or at least a belief in it, evolved as an adaptation to bestow on the individual either an equanimity, or social trustworthiness that ultimately represented a competitive advantage.
Jungian psycho-analysts relate the concept of soul to the concept of the collective unconscious. Carl Jung himself described the collective unconscious as a “psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited.”
The Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith goes further and suggests that not only is our collective unconscious inherited, but it is in fact a genuinely altruistic instinctive orientation. This, he says, is the source of our moral guidance, the voice of which is our conscience, and which we have learnt to call our ‘soul’.
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The Scientific Soul

The human soul is commonly treated as a religious abstraction inconsistent with science. Here we suggest that the soul can be described scientifically and that this concept can provide guidance to artificial intelligence research and a grounding for discussions of the unique value of each individual.

Introduction

What is the soul? Traditionally the soul has been viewed as a religious concept that cannot be observed, measured or probed by scientific means. This is agreed upon by both those who believe in it and those who do not. And yet, according to many religious views, a person cannot exist without a soul, and, it contains everything necessary for continued or reconstituted existence. According to this view almost anything, if not everything, we see a person do must be an observation of their soul.
Science is about real world observations, so it seems that we should be able to identify a scientific concept about observations that is related to that of the religious concept of soul. Indeed, a number of years ago the highly regarded computer scientist Ed Fredkin and I independently [1,2] suggested that we should adopt a scientific definition of soul as the description of a person abstracted from his or her matter. The notion of “abstraction” is the key to understanding the relationship between scientific and religious concepts. In what way is a description of a person different from the person? In addition to addressing this interesting question in this paper, I have a particular point that I feel is important to emphasize which is important for science generally and essential to the concept of a religious soul. This is the importance of each individual, i.e. that individual uniqueness is important to scientific discourse. Significantly, individual uniqueness is not generally an important part of discussions in the conventional scientific approaches of psychology, brain science and artificial intelligence.
I will thus suggest that the religious concept of soul is closely related to the description of a person, which is distinct from that of other individuals. The description has to be more than a description of what the person looks like and what he or she has done, but also include a characterization of how he or she behaves in response to what happens around him or her so we can infer what he or she would do under other circumstances. The critical abstraction that we need to recognize for the discussion of how this definition is related to the religious concept of the soul is that such a description is independent of the physical existence of the person, yet embodies the essence of the person. This closely parallels the religious concept of a soul.

The soul as it can be understood by physics and artificial intelligence

The religious concept of soul suggests an abstraction of function from matter. Even when the matter of which we are formed disintegrates the soul continues to exist. This suggests that the physical matter of which we are formed is not essential to us. It is consistent with abstractions that are familiar in science and modern thought, but it might not be consistent with more primitive notions of matter, for which the specific matter of which a system is made is essential to the nature of that system.
Consider what a basic concept of matter might be. A primitive man contemplating the rocks, plants and people around him might think that rocks are made of rock-like matter, plants are made of plant-like matter and people are made of people-like matter, and they are intrinsically different from one another. Similarly, the matter of which a person is made is absolutely essential to the person. My existence is rooted in my matter; your existence is rooted in your matter. Both science and religion disagree, at least implicitly, with this primitive view.
In religion, the concept of soul most often arises in discussions of death. Death is understood to affect the physical existence, but not to destroy the soul. The soul represents the existence of a human being independent of the materials of which he or she is made. If the essence of a human being is independent of the material of which he/she is formed it may survive death and possibly be reincarnated in some other form, time or place.
Physics has a different but also very definite way to say the same thing. According to physics, the specific atoms of which the human being is formed are not necessary to his or her function. If we replaced the atoms that a person is made of with other, indistinguishable atoms the person will be unchanged; the same behavior will be found. The proportions of atom types in a human being and in a plant or rock are different, but the atoms of the same type are indistinguishable, and thus can be substituted one for the other. In the physics view, it is the specific positions of the atoms that causes a human being to be different from other matter. Moreover, physical properties are not necessarily tied to specific atom types. As a simple example, a wheel out of steel and a wheel out of wood are still both functionally wheels.
If we jump from physics all the way to artificial intelligence, we can see a similar claim: that the function/behavior of a human being can be realized using different matter, organized in some sense in the same way, i.e. built out of silicon based computer circuits rather than carbon based biological systems. Thus, remarkably enough, the concept of creating intelligence in a computer is very close to the concept of soul. To build intelligence in a computer, it must be possible to abstract the processes that comprise intelligence and embody them in a form other than that of biological beings. It is the functioning of a human being that is separable from the specific physical matter.
Thus, according to the view of science, a human being is not directly tied to the material of which he is made. If the material of which the human being is made were essential to function, then there would be no independent functional description. Also, there would be no mechanism by which we could reproduce human behavior without making use of precisely the atoms of which he or she was formed. Instead, at least conceptually, there is a functional description that can be implemented in various ways. The biological body that the human being was implemented in when we met him or her is just one possible medium.
There is, however, an essential difference between the notion of artificial intelligence and the concept of a soul. The soul is a property of a particular individual and his/her existence. We cannot replace the soul of one individual with the soul of another. Artificial intelligence as a field, however, does not clearly distinguish between the intelligence of different individuals. The idea of intelligence has a generic flavor rather than a specific one. This becomes clearer when we consider the Turing test for intelligence that is at the core of the concepts of the field of artificial intelligence.
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