NPR

Is Neuroscience Rediscovering The Soul?

The transcendence of human into information is either almost here, a step in evolution — or an impossibility, a mad dream of people who can't accept the inevitability of death, says Marcelo Gleiser.
Source: Getty Images/iStockphoto

The idea that neuroscience is rediscovering the soul is, to most scientists and philosophers, nothing short of outrageous. Of course it is not.

But the widespread, adverse, knee-jerk attitude presupposes the old-fashioned definition of the soul — the ethereal, immaterial entity that somehow encapsulates your essence. Surely, this kind of supernatural mumbo-jumbo has no place in modern science. And I agree. The Cartesian separation of body and soul, the res extensa (matter stuff) vs. res cogitans (mind stuff) has long been discarded as untenable in a strictly materialistic description of natural phenomena.

After all, how would something

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