Physics Solves Problem of Immortality, Again!

As I've said many times, I do my best here not to enter into the usual blogospheric disputations. But there is a certain kind of science writing that has irked me for years, and that is now much harder to avoid as a result of the proliferation of blogs, that I cannot refrain from briefly denouncing.

It is proliferated by scientists and science amateurs alike, but in both cases it seems to have roughly the same connection to science as Cosmo's sex-position tips have with Eros. Whatever concrete domain of science it addresses, its underlying message is: science is awesome. This genre works by a sort of magic, turning anything and everything that it takes to be of interest into 'science' by its simple attention: the way light shines through stained-glass windows, the way foods cooked sous vide affect the palate, and so on. This transformative power parallels that of the practitioner of yoga, who will claim that in virtue of her commitment to yoga everything else in her life is charged with yogic specialness as well. It is a presumption that, whether yogic or scientistic, must be resisted by intelligent people.

All this a fortiori when, on the basis of this presumption of the universal authority of the scientistic outlook, the science writer ventures into philosophical territory. A fine example of this was Sean M. Carroll's recent blog post for Scientific American on the impossibility of the immortality of the soul. Now Carroll is a friend of many friends of mine, and seems like a gracious and thoughtful person. I hope we can disagree non-crazily, as he would put it. But his post is simply bad: a pseudophilosophical conclusion, drawn from pure non-sequiturs, and based on nothing but the aura of authority with which his social status as a physicist is supposed to imbue his opinions.

At the heart of Carroll's argument is the un-argued-for presumption that souls must be the sort of entities that attach to particles, that they cannot exist without particle hosts, and, further, that since no empirical data about the host particles of souls has been forthcoming in the now-complete physics of everyday life, we are justified in assuming that whatever it is we think of as 'soul' dissolves with the death of the body.

Carroll believes that anyone who is committed to the existence of an immortal soul must answer the following questions:

If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

Now some philosophers have argued that souls must remain attached to or associated with particulate hosts (the Stoics, for example), but this is probably a minority view in the history of Western philosophy. There are varieties of soul, the vegetative and sensitive, that are generally held to be indissociably wrapped up with the body, and thus to perish along with the body. But these are generally contrasted with the rational soul: the soul that is capable of knowing the eternal truths of mathematics, etc., and that is ontologically independent of whatever biological host it happens to ride for a while. There is no reason to expect to find this soul stored after death in a physical substrate that can be accounted for in terms of the physics of everyday life: this soul is not the information stored by the brain, which would then after death be transmitted to some other physical storage unit.

Now I sure as hell am not going to argue for the existence of a soul, but I know that if I were to seek to argue against it, I would not suppose at the outset that what is meant by 'soul' is 'brain-stored information about the self'. There are other options in the history of human thought, options that have been well defended, and that require sophisticated refutations based on knowledge of the history of philosophy.

Since Carroll attempted to impress us all into agreeing with him by trotting out Dirac's intimidating-looking equation --it looks hard, the implicit message goes, therefore anyone who understands it must be able to answer our questions about life after death--, I think I'll reply in kind by citing a profound bit of philosophy in French and declining to translate it: où il n'y a pas un être, il n'y a pas un être. Don't worry about the details; what this says is that for deep metaphysical reasons, it is not possible that reality should consist in physical particles, let alone in congeries built up from physical particles. Whatever deserves to be called a being, is going to be absolutely simple, one, monadic, and this means, among other things, undetectable by the physics of everyday life.

Is it true? I have no idea. I am convinced, as are Carroll and Alva Noë, and as is pretty much everyone who qualifies as salonfähig in our era, that the best explanations are naturalistic, that is, that they are based on what is detectable. But it is one thing to circumscribe the domain of permissible explanations, quite another to dismiss an entire order of explanation as false. So again, I don't know whether reality is one and simple or whether it consists in clumps of particles, but I do know that the author of that French phrase thought at least as hard about the nature of reality as Sean Carroll has, and that if the phrase is not true its untruth will not be established by appeal to the current state of physical science. It is not up to the physical scientists, in other words, to refute it, and still less is it up to them to dismiss it. The fact that they are allowed by editors and readers to do so anyway is a matter principally of sociological interest. 

*

Postscript, 30 May:

I realized quickly after hitting 'publish' one thing that I should have made clear, and that is that I am certainly not arguing for a strict division of labor between scientists and philosophers, with scientists holding forth on the features of the phenomenal world and philosophers uniquely qualified to speculate on what if anything is grounding the appearances. To argue such a thing would be to go exactly against the spirit of what I have been pushing elsewhere, as in my recent piece for The Stone, where I urge that what is most needed is a return to the era when science was constitutive of philosophy, rather than at best complimentary to it, or at worst antagonistic. But this reconciliation will not occur simply by allowing any scientist, trained in the way scientists are today, with no real awareness of their place in the history of natural philosophy, to hold forth on philosophical questions.

When I was 10 years old or so I came up with what I thought was a knockdown argument against the possibility of reincarnation: I called it 'the demographic argument', as it appealed to the fact that there are vastly more people alive today than in the past, and therefore only a small percentage of them could have a series of past lives going all the way back to the beginning of human history. This was intellectually satisfying, but it failed to grasp the alternative conceptions of history (roughly speaking, cyclical rather than linear), and of the scope of the shared community of beings (extending to all life forms rather than just to human beings), that make theories of metempsychosis make sense. Understood holistically, embedded in the total belief system of which it is a part, metempsychosis makes powerful sense, and it is only a ten-year-old know-it-all mentality that would rest content with an argument such as the demographic one, which imports all of the presumptions of our own contemporary philosophical (or weltanschaulich) predicament for the assessment of a theory that does not arise from that predicament. This is similar to what happens when scientists untrained in the history of philosophy swoop in to settle its millennia-old questions.

Comments

[Shlarl]

"I do know that the author of that French phrase thought at least as hard about the nature of reality as Sean Carroll has, and that if the phrase is not true its untruth will not be established by appeal to the current state of physical science. It is not up to the physical scientists, in other words, to refute it, and still less is it up to them to dismiss it"

That will stick in my mind for a while.

[Dave Hilditch, Ph.D.]

Prof Smith, You've hit the nail on the head in calling attention to the background belief that "science is awesome" and has "universal authority." This frees us from having to recognize and investigate our own assumptions, and is a recipe for the sort of hubristic overreach of which Carrol is guilty. Philosophers aren't immune to this tendency either (e.g., Noe's claims about "the background" Re: rationality of belief in an afterlife are simply false). One cause of this has to be the loss of that spirit of curiosity you write about in The Stone. The objective correlate of this is the thinning out of our sense of problem domains and contexts, and a lack of depth in understanding intellectual history. How can this not contribute to a narrowing of our conceptual imaginations?

[Gabriel Bergevin-Estable]

Funny how a physicist would probably never pretend knowing about all there is to know in hair styling, but seems pretty well at ease dismissing the throngs of philosophical experts out there who have opinions on how to answer (or not to answer) philosophical questions (and which ones ARE philosophical answers). And just about no one but other philosophers would attempt at putting him in his place (way to go by the way Justin). As an academic discipline, it's hard to imagine falling much lower, unless we closed all courses in philosophy and only continued teaching the history of philosophy, like other disciplines, say, phrenology. Only teach the history of philosophy... wait no I won't go there.

Philosophy has taken a beating over the past hundred years. It's not what it once was in the public opinion or in the opinion of other academics. The word is too old, too disseminated in the culture, too often used to despise our work, and beyond our capacity as a social group to control strictly its meaning. My search on RSS feeds on yahoo pipes for the word philosophy brings up more sports news than anything else, a use of the word that has as much to do with philosophy as we do it as my painting of my kitchen walls have to do with fine arts.

I believe we need to get with the zeitgeist and execute the performative act of re-branding it. The way propaganda became public relations. I myself pitch in with the contributed suggestion of "conceptual expert", "conceptual analysis", "conceptual structure specialist", or some such alternative. Because really we can't do without concepts in academics, and even if everybody uses them, like computers or writing or the bus, no one is more aware of the options of those tools (the conceptual ones, not the mechanical ones) than philosophers are.

We still have our place to play, but the definition of our field as the study of a group of historical texts (even if it is a tradition we still inherit from) is not enough to encompass all of what we can do. While we're sticking to the musky smell of the tomes of knowledge pas that we surely appreciate more than others for several reasons, conceptual analysis is being taken up by linguistics, psychology, politics, administration, communications, public relations, mathematics, and of course, physics. And while I'd argue, and others would agree, that some of those fields are really fielding philosophical players carrying out philosophical activity, the claim can't be taken seriously, because our weight in society, our capacity as a social group to organise ourselves and to negotiate our role and to assert our power as social actors is negligible. Maybe laughable.

[swampthings]

Excellent article! I loved it! This is an excellent discussion of science and the future.

[Doug M.]

I think you're (slightly) overstating Carroll's argument. He isn't claiming that the soul must be a brain-stored substrate, nor that it must necessarily be "transferred to some other physical storage unit". His claim is a bit more general than that. If I'm reading him right, he's saying that if the soul is going to interact with the body, then since the behavior of the body -- right down to the subtle changes in the brain that we call "thought" -- are physical, the soul must be able to exert some physical influence on the body. Since we can detect no such influence, it seems unlikely that there is a soul, immortal or otherwise, independent of the physical body.

Now, there are a variety of ways to get around this. I'm not a philosopher, but I can think of a couple without breaking a sweat. But I think Carroll's point is important, and worth more than the rather huffy dismissal you're delivering here. If something we could call a "soul" exists, then the question "does it interact with the physical universe, and if so, how" is legitimate -- and legitimately within the purview of science, which after all about the observation and understanding of the physical universe.

I can see why you'd find Carroll's approach annoying. He's not even dignifying philosophy with a huffy dismissal; he's simply ignoring you. But if you're going to refute him, then perhaps you should do something more than say "you're ignoring two thousand years of philosophy!" Can you give us some examples of those "other options in the history of human thought", for instance?

Finally, I'm a bit confused by the statement "it is one thing to circumscribe the domain of permissible explanations, quite another to dismiss an entire order of explanation as false." This seems to imply you could have explanations that are not permissible, but that cannot be dismissed as false. Okay, I can think of such explanations. However, the ones I can think of share a common trait: they're all unprovable. (This may reflect my own intellectual limits, sure.) "God created the world ten seconds ago. He created me too, with perfectly consistent false memories of everything previous." That would be impermissible, but not dismissible as false. Is this the sort of thing you're thinking of? (Not trying to troll, I'm sincerely curious.)

thanks much,

Doug M.