Believers in immortality
Believers in immortality will object to physiological arguments, such as I have been using, on the ground that soul and body are totally disparate, and that the soul is something quite other than its empirical manifestations through our bodily organs. I believe this to be a metaphysical superstition. Mind and matter alike are for certain purposes convenient terms, but are not ultimate realities. Electrons and protons, like the soul, are logical fictions; each is really a history, a series of events, not a single persistent entity.
Source: What I Believe, 1925
Refractions on Bertrand Russell's "What I Believe"
Everything, including our own bodies, is composed of elementary particles -- the smallest units of matter. In the standard model of modern physics, these particles are treated as "dimensionless points." However, theories such as "Superstring Theory" suggest they are actually infinitesimal "strings" vibrating at specific frequencies. In other words, what we perceive as "solid substance" is, in fact, a phenomenon -- much like the timbre of a musical string.
When viewed this way, the naive belief that "the soul survives after death" encounters a profound scientific contradiction. As a fertilized egg undergoes repeated cell division, building a complex nervous system and eventually the intricate network of the brain, at what exact moment is a special, external "soul" supposedly injected? Consciousness is a "function" that emerges naturally from the high-level information processing of the brain's biological structure; it is not a "component" brought in from elsewhere.
As the philosopher Bertrand Russell astutely pointed out a century ago, neither "mind" nor "matter" exists as an independent, ultimate reality. Both are merely convenient terms used in specific contexts -- what Russell called "logical fictions."
Electrons, protons, and our souls alike are not persistent, unchanging "things." Each is truly a "history," a continuous "series of events."
We -- including we human beings -- are like a river that appears to maintain a constant shape even as its waters flow and change. We are nothing more than a temporary "bundle of patterns" created by the ceaseless flux of particles and information. To believe that the soul remains after death may be a metaphysical superstition -- not unlike believing that the "shape of a river" continues to hover in the air long after the riverbed has run dry.
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