The Soul Fallacy by Julien Musolino

Author:Julien Musolino
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781616149635
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2014-11-26T05:00:00+00:00

But even this weakened version of the objection assumes both that the principle of energy conservation applies to all known purely physical interactions and that all causal interactions (or law-like connections) between events must involve an exchange of energy. The first assumption is false for the case of general relativity…the second assumption is false for the case of quantum mechanics. Thus, based on current physics, the energy conservation objection has little, if any, merit.16

I am not a physicist, but I am perfectly willing to assume that Collins did his homework and that what he is telling us about physics is correct. Even if Collins is right about gravity and quantum entanglement, these two facts are irrelevant and his general argument is misguided. What we know for sure is that Collins, or anyone else for that matter, doesn't have the foggiest idea how putative soul-body interactions work. Something else we know for sure is that whatever these putative interactions are, they cannot be just like quantum entanglement or gravity for the simple reason that those are physical phenomena and that the soul is supposed to be nonphysical. If Collins really thinks that the soul interacts with the body via quantum entanglement or gravity, is he ready to make psychological predictions (the domain of the soul) based on the equations of quantum mechanics or general relativity? I very much doubt it. If not, it is pointless to identify known physical phenomena and imply that they may represent loopholes for the nonphysical soul to interact with the body.

This brings us back to the original question. If we know that the soul doesn't interact with the body via the physical mechanism of gravity or quantum entanglement, then the question of conservation of energy arises again. How then does the immaterial soul interact with the body without violating the first (or the second) law of thermodynamics? A dualist might of course be tempted to reply that the soul interacts with the body in a way that is similar to quantum entanglement or gravity, maybe a nonphysical version of these mechanisms. But what would a nonphysical version of gravity or quantum entanglement even look like? Nobody has the faintest idea, and that's the general problem with dualism. Because dualists never define what they mean by immaterial or nonphysical, they never propose a concrete mechanism that could be assessed against what we know about physical laws. Remember, dualists do not tell us what the soul is; they tell us what the soul isn't. And so without a concrete proposal on the table, the New Dualists are left arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

To be fair to Baker, Goetz, and the contributors to The Soul Hypothesis, Cartesian dualism isn't necessarily the view they are trying to defend. In a section of their book called “A Plurality of Soul Hypotheses,” Baker and Goetz make this point explicitly:

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