From: Praskovia Kraskoff
Subject: Tuesday November 5th, 2002 Bertrand Russell-Life After Death

Aristotle: The soul is created when matter is organized in a certain way; when the organization is destroyed, the soul is also destroyed. The soul cannot exist apart from the body any more than vision can exist without the eye.

Bertrand Russell (Modern restatement of Simmas/Aristotle)

Point One: Personal identity is continuity of memory and characters (“habits”)
Example: Prince and Popper

Point Two: Memory & character depend on the structure of the brain

Conclusion: Therefore, the person dies with the body.

Russell’s arguments for point two: Brain injuries cause corresponding mind-injuries.
· Head Trauma causes amnesia
· Encephalitis lethargic causes a change in character
· In the movie “Regarding Henry” a brain injury causes a sleazy lawyer to become a loving family man.

Examples:
-If you bash someone on the head they can change-memories can be destroyed and personality can be altered.
-Mind altering drugs. A chemical process introduced in the brain can change personality.
-Phineas Gage, a railroad foreman in 1848, suffered sever head trauma when an iron rod pierced him through the head and produced a profound change in his personality. Once a friendly, competent and responsible man became stubborn, ill tempered, profane, and unreasonable.

Cartesian Dualist Response: The brain is an interface between body & soul.
Race car analogy: A race car driver might be skilled and able to win but he can’t if his car is damaged. You can’t drive a race car with 3 tires and missing 3 spark plugs, even if you’re the best driver in the world.

Question presented in class: What about people that are born with brain damaged or retardation, do they have normal brains when they die? (Good Question-didn’t find answer)

Vitalism: Biological life involves spiritual “life force: beyond mechanical biochemical forces at work.

This view died out in the late 19th early 20th century. Abandoned after we could explain biological life naturalistically with regard to natural not spiritual forces. Mechanalistically, biochemical processes, explained once biology advanced.

Materialist Rebuttal:
Analogy on vitalism: Just as vitalism was dropped when we could explain life scientifically, someday we’ll drop the idea of the soul when we can explain consciousness scientifically.

Descartes would say you’d never be able to explain consciousness.

Russell thinks he hasn’t been given enough evidence or reason to believe in god or the after life.

Psychological explanations for belief in immortality:
· Fear or Death
· Human pride (humans created in the image of god, how could he just let them go into the ground)

Judaism: Belief of god but not life after death.

Bishop of Birmingham: Humanity is aesthetically, morally and scientifically excellent. God wouldn’t have created such valuable creatures as man only to have him die.

Bishop of Birmingham: Man is valuable because of:
· Science
· Art
· Morality
It would be irrational of God to let man “parish utterly” at death.

Points of objection:
1. Some people seem more valuable than others
2. We think humans are valuable because we are humans
3. Ignores humanities negative qualities such as ignorance, ugliness, and evil….
4. Maybe we are replaceable, evidence from aging. Why would God create death if he wanted to keep us around? He created birth and death.

Russell says morality and art conflict with science or science conflicts with morality. Morality constrains scientific advancements.
Example: Laws for not clonning people.

Seems to be a bad argument because morality is important, so is science, so is art.
Is man really that intelligent or moral? Look at all the wars for one.

Teachers note: If you bake a really great cake you and you eat it all, it’s okay as long as you have the recipe. You can bake another one. Maybe God likes making fresh batch's and getting rid of the ones that have went bad.

Russell’s argument against Bishop:
· Aesthetics and morality often conflict with science (as said before above)
· Nature is indifferent to human morality
· Morality differ from culture to culture, person to person
· Human values are myopic (nearsighted) emerging from our struggles for survival.

Reincarnation: (First emerged in Ancient Greek-Plato, Socrates) The believe the your soul lives on and leaps form one body to the next. (Only talking about from human to human not human to animal vis-a-verse)

Experiment to test reincarnation hypothesis:
1. Gather historians
2. Hypnotically regress random sample of people off the street
3. Verify the historical details

Argument against reincarnation: The population. Where did all the extra souls come from?

Read Personal Identity for Thursday Nov. 7th