You Are A Soul

For the further fact view about personal identity

0 Introduction

You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

—A quote falsely attributed to CS Lewis.

For a while, I was a hard-line Parfitian. I agreed with Parfit about most things—moral realism, for a short time even the triple theory (though this was because I was confused about what rule utilitarianism was—in my defense, I was in 11th grade), and reductionism about personal identity. But over time, I feel myself slowly departing from the Parfit party line (try saying that three times fast!) and abandoning many of Parfit’s beliefs. Despite Parfit’s obvious brilliance, the arc of history so far has largely bent away from him. Here I’ll describe the considerations that move me away from reductionism about personal identity and towards the soul theory.

It’s important to begin by defining souls. A soul is a non-physical entity which makes one the same person over time. The reason I’m the same person as my four-year-old self is that we share one soul. Another way to think of it is that the soul is what determines who has the experience. There’s both the contents of what one experiences and the soul that determines that they are the ones having the experience. Someone else could have an identical experience to me and could have been born instead of me but they’d be a different person—that’s because their soul is different.

What differentiates believers in the soul from other dualists is that they are substance dualists. They think that the mind is a separate substance—a thing in itself—rather than merely a property of the brain. My shirt has the property of being red (and awesome looking!) but that’s not a separate substance. The soul theory is slightly different from substance dualism—you could in theory think that you’re a mental substance but that mental substance is just a collection of experiences—but that would be a rather odd and disjointed view, adopted by few. Here, I’ll present a variety of arguments in favor of the soul theory, though if you want even more arguments, look here.

1 The bare intuition argument

Here’s a plausible argument for souls: beyond just what is experienced there is a further fact about who is doing the experiencing. This fact is not a physical fact—it’s theoretically possible that I could never been born, and instead some other person with identical physical and mental properties would have been born. Similarly, in theory my mind could be replaced with another mind that has the same thoughts and experiences, while everything else remains physically the same.

This is the most direct argument. If there’s an additional fact about who is having the experiences beyond what is experienced, and that’s non-physical, as is true of the container of the mind if one buys the arguments for property dualism, then that means there are souls. A soul just is a non-physical container of experiences.

2 Multiple minds

It seems at least conceivable that I would have multiple identical minds. Currently, I’m aware of certain thoughts that I have. But it seems conceivable that paired with my body in the same way, there’s another identical mind that thinks the same thoughts. It seems ideally conceivable that there could be two minds paired with one body (which means it’s possible).

These would be different minds. Yet what would make them different? It can’t be a physical thing because they pair to identical physical things. Similarly, it can’t be anything about what is experienced, because they have identical experiences. The only thing that can differentiate them is who has the experiences, if it can’t be what is experienced or anything physical. So for them to be different, there has to be a non-physical container of minds—in other words, a soul. The argument is formalized as follows:

1. I could have multiple minds.

2. Those minds would be different.

3. For them to be different, they would have to differ either in regards to physical properties, mental properties about what is experienced, or mental properties about who it is having the experiences.

4. They wouldn’t differ in terms of what is experienced or physical properties.

5. Therefore, they must differ in regards to mental properties about who it is having the experiences.

6. If two minds can differ only in regards to mental properties about who it is having experiences, then souls exist.

7. Therefore, souls exist.

You might grant this argument and say that souls exist, in the sense that they’re possible, but think that people are not souls. You might think that my mind is a mental property of a physical thing and that this duplicate would be a different mental substance, replete with its own soul. But crucially, it seems like I could have a mental duplicate that’s the same type of thing I am. So if my mind is just a property, it seems there could be a clone that’s the same type of thing. But I couldn’t have two distinct but identical mental properties, for there would be nothing to distinguish them.

There are a few other arguments in the vicinity. The first will establish that souls are at least possible. The argument is as follows: we could imagine two different disembodied minds that have the same experiences. However, they would not be the same. Because they’re non-physical, the difference can’t be physical, and because they have identical experiences, it can’t be about what is experienced. Thus, the difference must be some non-physical and must be some further fact about who has experiences. But that’s just what a soul is.

Now, you might think that this establishes that souls are possible but not that we’re souls. I can also conceive of tables but that doesn’t mean I’m a table. However, souls seem much more like the kind of thing that’s all or nothing—either all minds are souls or none are. It’s odd to imagine that you could have this non-physical experiencer, but that none of us are those. Intuitively, it seems like either souls require a further experiencer or the idea of a further experiencer is incoherent—it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that can be true of only some minds, that only some experiences would have some further fact about who is the experiencer.

Another argument is that it seems that I could survive my body being destroyed. It’s seems at least conceivable that a God would destroy my body, for instance, but I would continue to exist, perhaps not even knowing that anything has changed. But if this is true then my mental life must be a substance rather than a property. A property can’t continue if the thing that it’s a property of stops existing—if my red shirt is destroyed, it’s property of redness can’t remain. Likewise, it couldn’t be the case that a man was destroyed entirely, leaving only the property of being tall. So my mind isn’t a non-physical property and it can’t be a physical thing, so it must be a distinctly mental thing.

The final argument in this vicinity is that it seems like two beings with identical mental lives can swap minds. Suppose that in a galaxy far, far away, there is a physically identical copy of me. It seems that he and I could swap minds. One way to see this is that, perhaps now it’s the case that tomorrow I’ll have a red tomato fall on my head and he will not. It seems that we could swap such that instead it would be his mind that would tomorrow have the red tomato fall on his head. But how can non-soul-theorists make sense of this swap? No physical fact is changing, nor are any facts about what is experienced changing. The only thing that’s changing is the extra fact about who is having the experience. Saying it’s a property will do no good—if me and my brother have identical red shirts, the shirts couldn’t swap the property of being red without any physical or mental changes occurring. This argument thus shows that what I am is a soul—that I could swap bodies with someone without experiences changing, proving that part of my nature contains a non-physical experiencer, over and above what is experienced.

3 Personal Identity

In his book Knowledge, Reality, and Value, Michael Huemer provides the following constraints on a plausible theory of personal identity:

i.Identity is a one-to-one relation: Every being is identical with exactly one being; no one is ever identical with two beings.

ii.Identity is transitive: If x is identical with y and y is identical with z, then x is identical with z.

iii.Identity is intrinsic, not extrinsic: Who a given being is depends solely on facts about that being; it does not directly depend on facts about other beings. You cannot, for example, end a person’s existence solely by creating another person with certain characteristics who never interacts with the original person.

iv.Identity is objective: If A is a person and B is a person, there is an objective fact as to whether A=B. It is not subjective, indeterminate, or a matter of convention whether, for example, I exist in any given possible scenario.

He shows that the soul theory is the only view that can maintain these intuitions. Every other view in the literature violates one of the constraints, as he explains:

Say we’re trying to articulate the conditions for some future person to count as you (that is, a later stage of you, or “the continuer” of you). We can’t rely on any purely qualitative conditions, because that violates condition (i), that identity is a one-to-one relation. We can’t rely on a qualitative condition together with a nobranching clause to exclude duplicate “you”s, because that violates condition (iii), that identity is intrinsic. We can’t rely on the identity of any composite physical object, because that violates condition (iv), that identity is objective. We can’t rely on the identity of a simple (having no parts) physical object, because, well, that’s just super-implausible. What’s left? It seems that the only remaining possibility is to appeal to the identity of some non-physical, simple entity. If there is a simple, non-physical entity that determines the identity of persons – well, that’s pretty much the definition of a “soul”.

For example, you might think that some being is the same person as you if they have a chain of continuous experiences tracing back to yours. But two people could do that. If my left hemisphere went in one skull and my right in another, they would both be psychologically continuous with me. But they couldn’t both be me. It can’t be about having the same physical brain because that’s vague—there are borderline cases where there isn’t a precise fact about whether something has enough of my physical brain to remain the same person.

Now, you could give up on one of these constraints. But they’re all extremely plausible. It’s really hard to believe that there would be no fact of the matter about whether I survive some brain surgery or that it would depend on how people react to me or that it would depend on what happens somewhere else or that multiple people would survive. If you’re dogmatically committed to there not being souls, you can say personal identity isn’t very real and doesn’t matter. But why in the world would anyone be dogmatically committed to that? If the cost of denying souls is you have to deny the transitivity of identity, for example, then it’s hard to see how that’s an attractive option.

Happy new year to all the souls reading this!