Soul of an Atheist

June 8th, 2006 Fred McVittie

There are two important things to keep in mind when you are an atheist (like me).

1. The only difference between you and all those religious nuts out there is usually just One God. Most people of faith only believe in their own God and have a complete and total lack of belief in all the thousands of other Gods believed in by other people. In this they are just like you, except you believe in one less God than they do.
2. The second thing to keep in mind is that, apart from this one moment of sanity with regard to the non-existence of a God, atheists believe all kinds of crap. The evidence for the existence of the self, of superstrings, of Higgs bosons, of black holes, and of the genetic inevitability of sexual orientation is every bit as absent as the evidence for God, but most atheists, including myself, will express a belief in at least one of these.

We all live in a highly spurious, highly partial world, most of which is probably fictional. But who gives a fuck. Try this. Listen to James Brown. Listen to Otis Redding. Try a little tenderness. Pretend you have a soul. (But don’t go to church).

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Soul Revival

June 12th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Evidence for the revival (or continued belief) in the concept of the human essence can be found in changes in the way the condition of gender dysphoria is treated. This is a condition in which an individual’s biological sex is experienced as being different to their psychologically gendered ’self’. Up to 30 years ago this was considered a psychological disorder which it was felt appropriate to treat with psychotherapeutic means in order to bring the wayward brain in line with an ontologically definite, and gender defining, body. Today this approach is regarded as biological determinism, and it is more likely that gender realignment surgery will be employed to bring the body in harmony with a phenomenologically felt gender. This suggests, or at least plays into, the idea that gender is an essential attribute even though there is no test or scientific model which supports this idea.

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Believing things that are not true

June 29th, 2006 Fred McVittie

In order to perform efficiently it may sometimes be necessary to behave as if one believes in things that are not objectively true, (but may nevertheless be subjectively ‘real’). For example, there is no good evidence for the existence of ‘the self’, in fact there is a good deal of evidence from psychology and neuroscience, as well as less scientifically from certain branches of cultural theory, that the self-concept is a fiction or fabrication. Nevertheless, it would be suicidal to live one’s life in accordance with this belief and immoral to regard others as similarly lacking. A more extrapolated example of this might that of belief in the existence of the human soul. There is clearly no evidence for the existence of a soul, yet a belief in the concept of a soul is a useful tool for optimising performance in key areas associated with the arts, morality, ethics, relationships, etc. It is hard to imagine how soul and gospel music could have developed without this totally groundless, but nevertheless useful belief.

This approach reflects that suggested by Hans Vaihinger in his Die Philosophie des Als Ob (1911; The Philosophy of “As If”), and later taken up by the American Pragmatist philosophers.

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Space and Dualism

September 11th, 2006 Fred McVittie

As Bloom (2005) says, we are all ‘Descartes Babies’, or ‘natural born dualists’, believing in spite of the evidence in some kind of ineffable soul, spark, or spirit to contrast with the material body and physical world. However, we can only conceptualise this soul through through the meagre (but powerful) tools provided by evolution, which includes an inability to conceive of abstraction except through the use of embodied metaphor. As Lakoff et al demonstrate, we understand the abstract in terms of the concrete. Since the mind is pehaps the ultimate abstraction; we can only conceive of it by analogy to embodied experience. In other words, whilst our naive psychology may provide the experience of a cartesian duality, we can only think of the ’spiritual’ component of this duality in terms of the physical, the Res Cogitans in terms of the Res Extensa.

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Conceptual Entities

September 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The realm of thought and ideas does not (cannot) meaningfully discriminate between the real the fictional. Terms such as ‘fiction’, ‘metaphor’, ’symbol’, etc are about the status of certain ideas held in the mind when compared to their ‘real’ counterparts the in outside world, these terms have no significance with regard to the ideas themselves. We do not have ‘fictional’ thoughts. In the realm of thought a soul is as real as a hand.

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Good Dualism (other people’s bodies)

January 8th, 2007 Fred McVittie

One of the reasons for the widespread rejection of Cartesian Dualism in the form of the body/mind split is the perceived differences in value which historically have been assigned to body and to mind (or soul). Because there has been a tradition of the body as something ‘fallen’ and corrupt and a corresponding tradition of the soul as transcendent and divine any acceptance of dualism which seems to embrace these traditions is tainted with this difference, which most people today find unacceptable. However, we routinely have a wide range of different relationships with other people’s bodies which do not include such negative evaluation, including relationships of identification and possession, so the dualism inherent in the redefining of oneself as a non-corporeal entity ‘inside’ one’s body does not necessarily lead to alienation, or to a negative value being assigned to the flesh in contrast to a higher more ethereal ’spirit’.

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Soul of an Atheist - Past of the Self

November 11th, 2007 Fred McVittie

When we are invited to look into the past, to consider who we are in relation to who we were, in which direction do we look? When we usually look back in time we look… back. We tend to consider time as a kind of river that is bearing us forward, or as a road that we have traveled, with the events of the past littering that road like the cast-off skins of a snake, or like flotsam bobbing in a boat’s wake and receding behind us as we proceed toward the distant shores of the future. There is the school we went to, and there are our parents. And the further back in time we look the more distant are the objects and events we look to. Last year is close on our heels, our memory of reading that newspaper item about a bombing and the death of some people we will never know, or the article about that celebrity coming our of rehab. Beyond these recent landmarks, and perhaps diminished by distance, we might see that same celebrity going into rehab, and the atrocity which provoked the planting of that bomb. These remote incidents may be harder to make out, blurring into the haze of hundreds of others, or they may be occluded by those events which followed them, and which now follow us. Here is the past as a journey that we are taking, and a country that we are constantly emigrating from..

Thinking about the past of our own self, our own most personal sense of being, is somewhat different however. Whilst the events, places, and people of the past are left behind in our life journey, our past self is not so easily abandoned by the roadside. Think back to your tenth birthday, maybe you had a party, maybe someone gave you a microscope, or a Hot Wheels set, or a book about trains. Or maybe your party was cancelled because you had a fever and had to spend the day in bed. Maybe you remember that day very well or maybe you hardly recall it at all. If you can revisit that day you may find yourself looking out briefly through the eyes of your newly ten-year-old self and maybe even feeling the stirrings of those smaller bones and muscles within your own. You may find yourself drawn to stand how you stood when you took the present from your Mother’s arms, or hold your hands in the way you held them as you adjusted the focus on that microscope for the first time, squinting down through the eyepiece at the gigantic wing of a housefly.

Here the past is not behind you, lost along the road or adrift in ancient seas, the past of your self is lurking inside, just beneath the skin of the present. The skin of this snake is not sloughed off, abandoned, and left for dead, but is grown over with its circulation and its senses intact. Your ten-year-old self is not doomed to wander lost through 1970’s supermarkets or wait to be picked up by school gates that no longer exist, its home is secured in the body of the here and now.

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Soul of an Atheist - Past of the Self 2

November 13th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The past of our self is not behind us and we seem not to be able to put the history of our being down and walk away from it. Even when we look back and feel ourselves in those alien situations, doing things we could not dream of doing now, and which are out of what we now think of as our character, we cannot completely divorce our now selves from our then selves, our new selves from our old selves. The circumstances may have altered, everyone we ever knew and every place we ever went may have disappeared, every priority in our lives may have changed, every cell in our body may have changed, we may have ‘moved on’, but that person we were is not some distant memory occluded by more recent and proximal images of bombings and celebrities, but is alive and awake within our bodies and minds, nestling like a Russian Matryoshka doll.

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