A Response to ABOUT SOUL from Robert Nathan

13/09/16

A response from Robert Nathan to Tim Wainwright's ABOUT SOUL film project; 

Very lovely.  About Soul has become for me inextricably linked with About Mind.  Soul and mind have no empirical existence.  But we casually refer to the mind as if we're certain it exists.  "Well, my mind is at work." Sure.  How else do we explain what we're doing if the brain is just a processing organism, not a thinking one?  We refer to mind as the explanation.  Some biologists and neurologists think the brain invents the mind so that it and we can function.  That's not the same as soul but it's related.  It's about the very nature of consciousness and how we explain it to ourselves. My friend the converted Catholic, and a serious Catholic she is, thinks a great deal about the nature of consciousness and says every explanation is ridiculous.  Because she so strongly believes in the soul she would say the same about it – that just because there's no good explanation doesn't mean it doesn't exist.  Some of your subjects essentially take the position that it doesn't exist, that it's a way to think about ourselves as unique creatures that may be delusional.  Delusional, but effective.  None of them quite puts it that way but that's in essence what they're saying.

About Soul gives me a new perspective on the question of consciousness. There are plenty of explanations and none are satisfactory. In the end they're like the Big Bang theory: The world was created out of an explosion of something called a black hole that gave birth to matter.  Uh huh, sure. As the believing physicists say, that's right up there with the preposterous idea the Christ rose from the dead.  Both ideas are preposterous, so when a scientist wants to tell you God doesn't exist he'd better be prepared to acknowledge the total bullshit of the Big Bang theory.  It's no more believable than the existence of God or Christ rising from the dead.

A bigger subject for another day.

 

Read the original article HERE