Saturday, October 6, 2007

"Soulism"?

I've been keeping my eye open, as always, on Arts & Letters Daily for pertinent articles, and today one appears that is effectively a refutatio of the polemical direction of Huxley & Mill. It also coins a term: soulism.

The Spiritual Brain
A Neuroscientist's Casefor the Existence of the Soul
By Mario Beauregard
and Denyse O'Leary
HarperOne. 368 pp. $25.95
....the materialists have two problems. Their certainty of victory is, for the moment, a leap of faith. There is no clear scientific consensus on how the brain produces the higher functions we call being human. And, second, the great mystery, the ultimate hard question, remains: How does matter produce mind, how can it? Irrespective of religious belief, immaterialism cannot easily be dismissed. What is the nature of what I am thinking and feeling now? To tell me that it is all a by-product of my brain is to tell me nothing. What I am is at least as real as the chair I am sitting on, and what I am seems to be immaterial.

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