It’s been a hell week, one for the record books really. I certainly wish I hadn’t launched a new blog and then been totally incapable of posting to it for a week, but that’s just the way things go.
In any case, one of the things I’ve been working on has been research into neuromarketing for an upcoming column in Report on Business. One of the most interesting things I came across in the course of this research was a 1996 essay by Tom Wolfe titled, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died“.
Wolfe is one of my favourite writers and I must have read this essay when it was reprinted in Hooking Up, but it had totally escaped my memory. It’s funny how often something like that happens, a piece of writing needs to come along at the right point in your life or you can totally miss out on how great it is.
The essay was written in 1996 at the dawn of modern imaging of the brain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) had just been developed, and for the first time we were starting to get a grasp on how the brain reacts to various kinds of stimulation in real time. fMRI measures
the flow of blood in the brain, so as various portions of the brain demand more glucose and oxygen they “light up” the display. It’s like watching the weather patterns of the mind.
Wolfe was very impressed by the technology available at the time, but he also thought that within ten years (2006) there was a good chance that fMRI would seem primitive. That has not been the case. fMRI has not been superseded by new technologies that give a deeper insight into the brain, not yet anyway. In fact, we don’t seem to have made much progress at all, either in terms of technology or on any of the larger philosophical debates that Wolfe thought would define our discussions of morality, free will, and the nature of what it means to be human in the 21st century.
The main thrust of Wolfe’s argument is the notion that in the coming decades we’ll have so much insight into the human mind and the actual mechanics of it, that quasi-religious notions like the existence of the soul will start to seem incredibly old-fashioned. He reports that when Nietzsche wrote “God is dead,” it wasn’t a pronouncement, but rather a simple accounting of an idea that had already taken hold in the minds of educated people. Darwin had replaced the need for a God in people’s understanding of the universe. Wolfe thinks that modern neuroscience will do the same thing for the soul.
I find this argument fascinating, but I don’t really buy into it. Darwin provided an explaination for why the world is the way that it is. Neuroscience, and fMRI in particular, is merely descriptive. It allows us to see what is happening in the brain, but it has yet to provide us with a deeper understanding of why the brain does what it does. It’s a weather map, not a climate model. (Look for that line to be repeated in my column when it comes out.)
Ultimately, I think that the soul and free will have a much better chance of standing up to any advances in science than God ever did.
Related articles by Zemanta
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=b89eb8d9-14f0-4406-9f79-51f3baea2ac2)
If you believe futurist Ray Kurzweil, the resolution of brain scans will improve exponentially in the coming decades. We’ll get a lot closer to really understanding how human thought processes happen.
Whether that illuminates the “soul” issue is another story.
I think it’s a lot like the assertion that free will doesn’t exist, and all actions are the products of predetermined biological structures, brain chemistry, etc. I don’t buy that – many decisions are simply too unpredictable given current technology and anything available in the foreseeable future. As with weather forecasters, we will have to content ourselves with probabilities and inevitable errors in predicting the behavior of individuals.
Roger
Well said, Roger. Thanks for dropping by!
I also love Wolfe and his oeuvre, but his strengths lie in describing human behaviour rather than science. Even today, fMRI is in its infancy, not having revealed much about how psychoactive drugs work or how decisons are made. It does precitably show which part of the brain is involved in very specific circumstances, such as looking at various pictures, and has been used to help marketers sell you stuff you don´t need.
Religion has become less important in Europe and Canada but more important in some other places. Some people will never accept science pre-empting matters of faith. But spirituality will always be with us, and most of those who accept and promote science would see this as something to enrich the soul, rather than to replace it.
Congratulations on your blog.
Thanks Jason.
Of course, there are many places in the world that aren’t swayed by Darwin, and there’s no reason to think they’ll be swayed by neuroscience.
I think you’re right that spirituality will always be with us. Here we are almost 150 years after Nietzche wrote “Gott ist tot” and religion hasn’t exactly disappeared.