Sean Carroll and the immortality of the soul

[Norman]

Has anyone else read Sean Carroll's guest blog post at Scientific American on http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=physics-and-the-immortality-of-the-2011-05-23

Please read the link above so that we are all talking about the same thing.

If I understand his post well enough, he argues that if there is a soul, then it must interact with normal matter in some way within the paradigm of physics. Using the language of QFT, how exactly would the soul particles and soul forces interact with normal matter? Why haven't we seen these interactions?

A question not raised by Carroll, but which occurred to me was: let's say there is some rational reason we have not seen these soul particles and forces yet. How exactly does your soul ONLY interact with your body? Why does your spirit only interact with the molecules in your body?

Thoughts and comments?

PS. I put this in philosophy since it seemed the most rational place for it. But if a mentor thinks of a better place, then please move it.

 

[apeiron]

A question not raised by Carroll, but which occurred to me was: let's say there is some rational reason we have not seen these soul particles and forces yet. How exactly does your soul ONLY interact with your body? Why does your spirit only interact with the molecules in your body?

The people who make these arguments would say it the other way round - the reason why soul stuff doesn't intrude into Carroll's apparently complete world of general material physics, the realm described with such precision by the Dirac equation, etc - is that it only interacts with brains or bodies. It needs the correct vehicle.

So you get quantum mysterians like Eccles, Penrose and Hameroff who argue that the complex material structure of the brain is a way to amplify or harness the immaterial spirit. It is the circuitry that amplifies the signal or the antenna tuned into the subtle broadcast.

It is hokum, but science can only constrain such speculation through model and measurement. We can say it does not fit into any of our generic models (Carroll's position) and also that there is no measurements (formal observations) that yet suggest we need to revise those models.

Hameroff did produce a set of 20 testable predictions for his own Orch-OR theory of an interaction mechanism. See appendix 2...http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/penrose-hameroff/quantumcomputation.html

He claims it is all panning out, others would say not so much...

 

[loseyourname]

Well, if such a thing existed, the difficulty in observing it would be that you can't just excise a working brain from someone's body and study it at the atomic level to observe the interactions between body particles and soul particles. You can't exactly put somebody's brain into a particle collider while it is still alive.

 

[cosmographer]

Interestingly Argentinian Electroneurobiology has been thinking along these lines for decades:

http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/localization_of_minds.pdf

Summary in technical terms: Observers’ localization in nature might be relativistically moving particles whose motion is physiologically modulated. Transdisciplinary clues imply that speed variation is imposed onto some action carriers of a force field by their coupling with intensity variations of an overlapping field. The operations of observers (minds or existentialities) in nature seem localized in such actions carriers, slightly slowed from near-c speed motion by electroneurobiological variations – which thus gate the observer’s time resolution and put her or him in operative connection or disconnection with the surroundings. Thereby minds and sensory knowledge appear in a particular point of causal sequences.

If we follow this view of psychisms as "eclosional", "popping out" to avail of one brain and not another, "minds" simply disappear from being observable after the death of the biological body. Strictly speaking that does not necessarily imply the end of the "person". Rather we could minimally only conclude that the "mind" who at one point was sensitive to the world via her body is no longer able to sense or intervene causally in extramental chains. I don't know what to make of this possibility myself, especially because I am shaky on the physics used to ground this approach. Surely immediate observation will be difficult because a) Nagel's bat and b) today's physics not having an accurate handle of the entitites and processes operating at the proposed scales.

I also hope it won't be taken as off-topic because it doesn't immediately elaborate on the blog posted in the OP. As far as I can tell the possibility of an "immortal soul" follows immediately from this neurobiological tradition. So I'd love to hear what people think. Is it possible that this is the mode of existence for our "souls"? Is it in any way possible that "mind" operates "within" the physical instant, removed from causal efficiency? I mean there still needs to be activity there for mind to differentiate? How could such interactions be outside of time-courses? Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[Norman]

The people who make these arguments would say it the other way round - the reason why soul stuff doesn't intrude into Carroll's apparently complete world of general material physics, the realm described with such precision by the Dirac equation, etc - is that it only interacts with brains or bodies. It needs the correct vehicle.

This doesn't make sense to me (doesn't mean it is wrong, I just don't understand). Brains and bodies are no different than any other piece of matter, other than the way it is assembled. So, are you saying (that they are saying) that it is some macroscopic, collective behavior? Wouldn't the collective behavior still have to appear at the microscopic level is some way?

So you get quantum mysterians like Eccles, Penrose and Hameroff who argue that the complex material structure of the brain is a way to amplify or harness the immaterial spirit. It is the circuitry that amplifies the signal or the antenna tuned into the subtle broadcast.

Ok, sorry was impatient I guess. It does seem to me that they are implying some sort of collective, macroscopic behavior. So, they want only some very small, insignificant contribution on the microscopic scale (presumably below our threshold to see experimentally), that is somehow amplified by the complex structure of the brain? Seems unlikely to me.

It is hokum, but science can only constrain such speculation through model and measurement. We can say it does not fit into any of our generic models (Carroll's position) and also that there is no measurements (formal observations) that yet suggest we need to revise those models.

Hameroff did produce a set of 20 testable predictions for his own Orch-OR theory of an interaction mechanism. See appendix 2...http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/penrose-hameroff/quantumcomputation.html

He claims it is all panning out, others would say not so much...

Thanks.