It is important to think of philosophy and science as two sides to an arch. It is because of this fact that they should never be separated from one another.
Iain McGilchrist recently gave a talk at the RSA and was responding to a question concerning whether science can tell us anything about the human soul. Iain McGilchrist replied clearly with an absolute “No”. As soon as he said this the audience began to laugh, but not so much in a kind way. The question had been referring to new brain imaging technology which may have the ability to reveal the soul as that of an illusion.
He replied to the question in more detail and explained that finding something in the brain that would then correspond with the soul is just silly. Jonathan Rowson, the moderator at the talk challenged him and asked him whether science would be able to help us understand the soul and what it is in a more accurate way.
Iain McGilchrist replied that it wouldn’t, but the question is whether he was right or not.
The question that he does seem to be right about is the question that was never actually asked and this is whether science can tell us anything about the soul. Would science be able to tell whether the soul exists in any form at all? This question is similar to asking something like Whether brain imaging technology can tell us whether love actually exists. It’s just a mistake in terms of thinking. Yes there will be thoughts of love in the mind of the lover but these cannot simply be analyzed on their own, but need instead to be looked at from a top-down perspective in terms of other emotions and thoughts as well. It would be impossible to know that the individual means love without talking to them when examining the brain.
It can be easy to take the side of McGilchrist, like many of the RSA audience did, when he argued against the concept of scientism and subsequently squelched Stephen Pinker:
He described that there was more truth about the way in which humans work in the production of king Lier then there are in thousands of textbooks that are based on genetics. He explained that it doesn’t matter whether the play is a faithful account of the historical character of the Lear, or whether there was a King Lier in the first place. He argued that true science can actually have no precise way of saying anything at all and cannot say whether there is a God or not.
He went on to say that he disagrees that science can say nothing at all to us about the soul and prefers to think that science can tell us about what the soul is not. For instance, the soul is not something that seems to be able to do arithmetic, nor is it something that can be found through scientific enquiries.
Science can also tell us that we have no real reason to believe in the concept of an afterlife but we should also think about the distinction between the afterlife and eternal life, which is the experience of being within eternity, at which point time becomes meaningless.
Science generally agrees with a selection of different arguments from individuals such as Aristotle, who described the soul as being something within the living being. This is also in line with the thoughts of Thomas Aquinas.
McGilchrist describes himself as a pantheist and this tends to be his position as well. He likes to compare the soul to that of a wave, of something that is made of water but is simultaneously distinguishable from it as well. In this sense he describes the soul as something that is time bound. Perhaps souls exist in different forms and we can talk about these forms.
Science generally seems to give the individual reason to believe that nothing in this world exists forever. This can be seen in situations such as the big bang, which shows us that the universe began at some point and will end at a certain point. This gives us proof that while something may carry on for eternity, it may also not be immortal and this may be considered for souls as well.
McGilchrist has written a book which is called the Master and his emissary. This book has been heavily criticized by Raymond Tallis as well as by other individuals, as they believe the book uses science in the wrong way when relating to philosophy. Critics do not believe that the book is wrong but that it uses subjects in the wrong way and this is treated in a heavy part of the scenery in the book. These problems can be seen in the way the book describes the leap from the results of science to their metaphysical significance. However, like we described earlier, science and philosophy can be seen as two separate sides of an arch. They can only really reinforce one another in an indirect way. But this still doesn’t mean that science can say absolutely nothing about the individual soul. If you builder an arch with only one side, it will quickly fall over.
Source: The Guardian
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