Problems with the idea of soul substance

• Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of the Mind (1949) ridiculed the Cartesian account of the body-soul relationship
• Ryle called the Cartesian idea of the body-soul relationship 'the ghost in the machine'
• The ghost is the soul, the machine is the body
• "It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind"- The Concept of Mind
• Cartesian- Relating to Descartes, emphasis on reason and innate ideas over sensory experience
• "The dogma is therefore a philosopher's myth"- Ryle
• Dogma- a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true
• Ryle's 'Category Mistake'

  • a guest visits a uni and sees the library, classes and labs
  • still asks where the uni is
  • the category is not the same as individual components, the uni is the category, everything else is the components
• In 'The Immortality of the Soul', Hume begins by saying the whole idea of 'substance' is completely confused
• To argue that the consciousness emerges from non-material substances solves nothing
• "We need to explain how a substance can think. A substance can think because the soul exists as a thinking substance"
• Hume argues that thinking comes from, or is caused by, the material substance
• Hume's view that ultimately thought has a physical/ material explanation is the most common in the 21st century
• Hume asks how we know there's only 1 soul
• We're making an assumption of a one-to-one body/soul relationship
• Many philosophers argue the 'self' is an illusion, a construct derived from all of the mind's different sense experiences
• 'Self' is the flow of experiences, not something that sits in the soul and looks at them
• Hume says there is no 'substantial self' to do the looking at experiences