Is Neuroscience Rediscovering The Soul?
The transcendence of human into information is either almost here, a step in evolution — or an impossibility, a mad dream of people who can't accept the inevitability of death, says Marcelo Gleiser.
The idea that neuroscience is rediscovering the soul is, to most scientists and philosophers, nothing short of outrageous. Of course it is not.
But the widespread, adverse, knee-jerk attitude presupposes the old-fashioned definition of the soul — the ethereal, immaterial entity that somehow encapsulates your essence. Surely, this kind of supernatural mumbo-jumbo has no place in modern science. And I agree. The Cartesian separation of body and soul, the res extensa (matter stuff) vs. res cogitans (mind stuff) has long been discarded as untenable in a strictly materialistic description of natural phenomena.
After all, how would something
