In a Closer to Truth podcast last October, Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviewed Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff on “Do souls exist?” (October 8, 2024 6:03 min). Lakoff offers reasons for thinking that even if souls exist, they cannot matter very much:

Here are a couple of excerpts that give the gist of his view:

Lakoff: Presumably the soul would exist [1:55] without the body. After the body dies, you can have the soul go on. The body can be destroyed; there’s a soul. So the question is, what do you need a body for?

If you [2:03] want to know the properties of the soul, there are things you don’t need a body for. Could the soul see? Not a chance. Vision — half of our brain is devoted to vision. If you know anything about color, it’s created partly by neural circuitry and things here — if you look at shading, if you look at texture… you [2:24] need lots and lots of neural structure in the brain and structure in the eyes and so on to create vision. And you can’t 2:31 even usually … to create vision you also have to be able to move and function in the world. So the soul can’t see…

Could the soul hear? Without an auditory [2:51] cortex, what is hearing? Hearing has to do with the way the auditory cortex works and on sound waves. No auditory cortex, no sound, no interpretation of the sound waves, no hearing.

Could the [3:05] soul think? Well, it turns out that thought depends upon other facts about the body. You have to be able to use certain forms of reason in your brain, the parts of the brain that think.

Does the soul have emotions? Well, [3:20] emotions have to do with certain emotional pathways. There are negative and positive emotional pathways. The amydala has certain structures, the insula has other structures. 

Could the soul feel disgust without a body? Could the soul feel anger? Could the soul feel, you know, enraged? Well, it turns out [3:38] that there are certain structures, having to do with neurotransmitters and so on, required for those emotions. So the soul has not got emotions.

So the soul doesn’t see, doesn’t hear, [4:09] doesn’t think, doesn’t have emotions, and doesn’t have a personality. Okay, whose soul is it and what good is it, you know, if it doesn’t [4:19] fit the usual notion of a soul as you are? …

I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. [4:52] I’m just saying it can’t have any of the usual properties, it’s not much related to you. If it’s your soul, what could it mean if it has none of your memories, none of your personality it can’t see, can’t hear, can’t think and no, it can’t feel. [5:07] 

You know, sorry, it doesn’t look a whole lot like you. Now, does it exist? I’m not saying anything.

Lakoff, author of Thinking Points (Farrar Straus and Giroux 2006) and many other books, clearly thinks that the human mind is simply what the brain does (physicalism). That is a common belief in neuroscience but one that is coming increasingly under question, for several reasons.

Reasons for Doubt

Let’s start with the fact that the physicalist interpretation of the mind (or soul) doesn’t make sense. As philosopher and psychologist Marc Wittmann pointed out recently at Psychology Today, “The unsolvable problem here is, however, that ‘neurobiological processes’ and ‘subjective experience’ stem from different, even if correlated, knowledge frameworks.” In other words, there is no obvious path from chemicals like vasopressin and seratonin in the brain to, for example, the Big Bang theory of the universe, as envisioned by physicist Georges Lemaitre (1894–1966). There may well be a relationship, but a relationship is not a path.

Second, as neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and I discuss in our forthcoming book The Immortal Mind (Worthy June 3, 2025), the evidence points in another direction.

We think because of — or despite — all sorts of brain states or brain absences. That includes, for example, split brain, half a brain, key brain parts missing, sudden bouts of paradoxical lucidity in people with dementia or terminal lucidity in people who are dying. The mind seems to need the brain in order to be active in the world. But the relationship is certainly not the one-on-one relationship we might expect if the brain generated the mind.

Third, veridical near-death experiences (where the person in a clinical state of death learns something during an out-of-body experience which is later confirmed to be true) show that the mind can, at times, act independently of the body.

We simply don’t know how it all happens. Serious research is only just beginning. It is driven in part by medical resuscitations from states of death that would not even have been possible decades ago.

Does It Prove that the Soul Is Immortal?

By itself, the fact that the mind can act independently of the body, at least for a time, does not prove that the mind (soul) is immortal. The mind might be mortal but slower to die than the body. 

Arguments that the mind is immortal are usually made on a logical and philosophical basis instead: To the extent that the mind is immaterial, it is not the sort of thing that can be subject to decay or death. Decay and death happen to material things, not to immaterial ones. Of course that means that the soul is immortal whether we like it or not.

The dismissive physicalist approach that Dr. Lakoff offers, if pressed, quickly ends up denying even the existence of the mind (soul). But, as we have seen, the tables are slowly turning and that point of view (eliminative materialism) garners serious skepticism on logical grounds. As philosopher Edward Feser puts the matter,

Since science is as laden with intentionality as anything else, you will have to eliminate the very science in the name of which you are carrying out the elimination; and since philosophy (including eliminative materialist philosophy) is also as laden with intentionality as anything else, you will also have to eliminate eliminativism. Eliminativism is a snake that eats its own tail. The problem can be danced around, but it cannot be solved, … 

“Mad Dogs and Eliminativists,” August 21, 2013

It is danced around because the physicalist wants to assert that the mind (soul) is simply what the brain does while escaping the contradictions that follow if we think about it seriously for a moment. Stay tuned.

Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.