Just watched Ghost in the Shell 2.0 (sooo good), which calls into question the nature and existence of the soul. Though most people seem to intuitively accept the idea of the “ghost in the machine” - the idea that we have a spiritual self occupying and operating our physical bodies - we seem to have no good reason to believe this is true. There is probably no better way to see this than in the way science has dissected the soul through the study of brain damage. Every quality that we tend to imagine a soul possessing (e.g. the ability to see, hear, remember life events, feel specific emotions, recognize faces, speak, think analytically, etc.) can be shown to be destroyed by damaging physical matter in a given region of the brain. Destroy a certain part of the brain and suddenly you’ve lost the power to understand speech. Destroy another part and your normal range of emotions alters so dramatically as to make you “a different person” in the eyes of your own spouse. Even your morals can change through brain damage. I recently read an article about patients who have suffered a rare type of damage to a central region of the brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which distinctly altered their sense of moral judgement (

http://weber.ucsd.edu/~ecomisso/Moral%20Jdgmnt.pdf). The idea that all these characteristics will survive the total destruction of the brain (death), lifting off intact to go to heaven or haunt houses or whatever, seems nonsensical. The mind (or spirit or soul) seems to be nothing more than what the brain does, generated by purely physical processes.

“When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anythig that must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry? If forms of life exist whose chemistry is based on silicon rather than carbon, or ammonia rather than water, if creatures are discovered that boil to death at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of life is found that is not based on chemistry at all but on electronic reverberating circuits, will there still be any general principle that is true for all life? Obviously I do not know, but if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutioary process. 

“But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent, kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.

“The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun than conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’.”

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RICHARD DAWKINS
THE SELFISH GENE
THIS BOOK IS AWESOME 

Aubrey de Grey: Seeker of immortality

Aubrey de Grey, British researcher on aging, claims he has drawn a roadmap to defeat biological aging. He provocatively proposes that the first human beings who will live to 1,000 years old have already been born.

Why you should listen to him:

A true maverick, Aubrey de Grey challenges the most basic assumption underlying the human condition — that aging is inevitable. He argues instead that aging is a disease — one that can be cured if it’s approached as “an engineering problem.” His plan calls for identifying all the components that cause human tissue to age, and designing remedies for each of them — forestalling disease and eventually pushing back death. He calls the approach Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS).

With his astonishingly long beard, wiry frame and penchant for bold and cutting proclamations,de Grey is a magnet for controversy. A computer scientist, self-taught biogerontologist and researcher, he has co-authored journal articles with some of the most respected scientists in the field.

But the scientific community doesn’t know what to make of him. In July 2005, the MIT Technology Review challenged scientists to disprove de Grey’s claims, offering a $20,000 prize (half the prize money was put up by de Grey’s Methuselah Foundation) to any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that “SENS is so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate.”The challenge remains open; the judging panel includes TEDsters Craig Venter and Nathan Myhrvold. It seems that “SENS exists in a middle ground of yet-to-be-tested ideas that some people may find intriguing but which others are free to doubt,” MIT’s judges wrote. And while they “don’t compel the assent of many knowledgeable scientists,” they’re also “not demonstrably wrong.”

“Aubrey de Grey is a man of ideas, and he has set himself toward the goal of transforming the basis of what it means to be human.”

MIT Technology Review

LISTEN TO THIS MAN SPEAK: http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html