Consciousness Is Overrated
After science discarded the soul, consciousness took its place.
How We Lost Our Soul
Science made us lose our souls.
We have lost our soul because we no longer need to believe that we have a soul. We have a mind, and neuroscience is showing how this mind results from the functioning of our brain. Without the brain, there is no mind.
However, our subjective experience is that there is an external world where a bunch of things happen: the wind, birds flying, people talking, music playing. And then there is an internal world where other types of things happen: pain, pleasure, emotions, inner dialog, memories.
This makes us intuitive dualists: we believe that the external and internal world are separate, so perhaps one can exist without the other. We resist the idea that an object of the external world — the brain of another person — creates the internal world of that person — a mind like our own.
Building on this intuitive dualism, religion tells us that we have souls that can detach from our body after we die and continue an independent existence, either in some spiritual realm or by reincarnating in another body. We are more than ready to accept this belief because we don’t want to die.
