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without irony. “In my opinion, this has at least two consequences: (1) It further erodes the spurious distinction between facts and values. If believing that ‘torture is wrong’ and believing that ‘2 plus 2 makes 4’ are importantly similar, then ethics and science are importantly similar at the level of the brain. (2) It suggests that the validity of a belief depends on how it came to be—on the chains of evidence and reasoning that link it to the world—not merely upon a feeling of conviction.” So what? So plenty, Harris continued in his response to my query, because “the feeling of conviction is what we rely upon as consumers of beliefs—but clearly this feeling can become uncoupled from good reasons and good evidence in any domain (mathematical, ethical, etc.).”40

Hopefully, what can be decoupled from good reasons and good evidence can be recoupled through counterarguments with even better reasons and better evidence. That is, in any case, what all producers of scientific knowledge hope, which does, after all, spring eternal.41

PART III

BELIEF IN THINGS UNSEEN

I worry that … pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us—then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

—CARL SAGAN, THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

7

Belief in the Afterlife

In June 2002, baseball legend Ted Williams died, a newsworthy enough story that then got legs when his son whisked the body away to Scottsdale, Arizona, where it was cryogenically frozen at minus 320 degrees, with the hope that someday “Teddy Ballgame” would be resurrected to play again. If Williams’s body were one day reanimated would it still be the cranky perfectionist who was the last person in baseball to hit .400? In other words, if future cryonics scientists could bring him back to life, would it still be “him”? Is the “soul” of Ted Williams also in deep freeze along with his brain and body? The answer depends on how soul is defined. If by soul we mean the pattern of Ted Williams’s memories, personality, and personhood, and if the freezing process did not destroy the neural network in the brain where such entities are stored, then yes, the soul of Ted Williams would be resurrected along with his body.

In this sense, the soul is the unique pattern of information that represents a person, and unless there is some medium to retain the pattern of our personal information after we die, our soul dies with us. Our bodies are made of proteins, coded by our DNA, so with the disintegration of DNA our protein patterns are lost forever. Our memories and personality are stored in the patterns of neurons firing in our brains and the synaptic connections between them, so when those neurons die and those synaptic connections are broken, it spells the death of our memories and personality. The effect is similar to the ravages of stroke, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease, but absolute and final. No brain, no mind; no body, no soul. Until a technology is developed to download our patterns into a more durable medium than the electric meat of our carbon-based protein, the scientific evidence tells us that when we die our pattern of information—our soul—dies with us.

That is the monist position anyway—that there is only one substance. Dualists believe that there is a conscious ethereal substance that is the unique essence of a living being that survives its incarnation in flesh. The ancient Hebrew word for soul is nephesh, or “life” or “vital breath”; the Greek word for soul is psyche, or “mind”; and the Latin word for soul is anima, or “spirit” or “breath.” The soul is the essence that breathes life into flesh, animates us,