Do Human Beings Have Souls?

The majority of Americans believe that every human being has an immaterial soul, and they tend to base their sense of human dignity and equality on this belief. Yet the culture at large often operates under the assumption that physical reality is all there is. Which view is correct? In this episode of “The Permanent Questions,” self-described “spookiest” David Brooks talks with Shelly Kagan, a best-selling philosopher who insists souls do not exist—and that we don’t need them in order to embrace wonder, mystery, and human exceptionalism. - - - Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. “The Permanent Questions” is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Brooks?

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• 0:19Speaker 01

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• 0:35David Brooks?

  I think the essayist Megan O'Giblin was accurately capturing parts of America when in her book God, Human, Animal, and Machine, she wrote, "It is meaningless to speak of the soul in the 21st century. It has become a dead metaphor, one of those words that survive in language long after a culture has lost faith in the concept." Yet here's the funny thing. According to the Pew Research Center, 85% of Americans say that they have a soul. They really do believe they have a mystical, immaterial, spooky, ghost-like thing at the center of who they are. And I have a confession to make. I'm one of those people. Furthermore, this metaphorical and spiritual meaning of the word soul is pretty central to the way I see the world.

• 1:17David Brooks?

  Long before I ever believed in God, I was firmly convinced that each person you meet has some piece of themselves that has no size, weight, color, or shape, but gives them infinite value and dignity. In today's conversation, we're going to address the question, do humans have souls? I've laid my cards on the table. I think they do. We're going to be joined by Shelly Kagan, and he does not think we do. Kagan is the Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. For over 40 years, stretching back to his days at the University of Illinois-Chicago, he has taught a course on death to undergrads, which naturally enough, takes up the subject of the soul.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Last time, I distinguished between two ways in which thinking about the facts about the nature of death could influence our behavior. On the one hand, it could give us reasons to behave or respond differently, and on the other hand, it could merely cause us to behave differently.

• 2:13David Brooks?

  The course has become globally famous because it's on YouTube. Those lectures have been seen 33 million times in China alone. Part of its success is its intellect, but part derives from the fact that for a guy who doesn't believe in enchantment, he's a completely enchanting guy. I'm pleased to welcome Shelly Kagan to this table. Shelly Kagan, welcome to The Permanent Questions. We are honored to have you here. Now, there's a part of your chapter in your life I'm confused about. And so it concerns the time you go to Wesleyan in 1972. You grew up in Skokie, Illinois.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  That's correct.

• 2:51David Brooks?

  And you go to Wesleyan, and you were a religion major for some period of that time. But you also read John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism, which suggests to me that you're trending in the direction you're trending, which we'll talk about. But then, in your senior year, you applied to rabbinic school. So in my mind, you're trending toward a utilitarian, maybe non-believing form of life, and then you apply to become a rabbi. What's up with that?

• 3:21Speaker 03

  So I had planned to be a rabbi starting at some point in high school, and that was what I anticipated all through college. So as you say, I applied to rabbinical school, a particular rabbinical school, in fall of my senior year. I got the rejection letter, spring of my senior year. And so graduated from college and was suddenly in the situation that most of my friends had been in for four years, asking myself, so what do I want to do with my life? I thought I had known what I wanted to do with my life. But I had already come into college knowing I was also interested in philosophy, which, as it happens, I'd gotten into through Judaica.

• 4:05David Brooks?

  I guess my question is, did you believe in God, and you thought, well, I'd like to serve God by being a rabbi?

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Well, I believed in the importance of Judaism. And I suppose any traditional Jew will say something like, I believe in God. But what it is to believe in God, as I imagine you know, from the Jewish point of view, that's left much more up to you. Judaism doesn't have a central set of religious dogmas, and so how you interpret this, as well as other central Jewish thoughts like revelation, there are rival thinkers, rival sages. So Judaism was important to me through college. Judaism stayed important to me after I got rejected from rabbinical school.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  And after college, I asked myself, well, should I reapply to rabbinical school? Should I get a secular Judaic degree? And this was literally the very first time the question ever crossed my mind, maybe I should become a philosopher. Since I thought I had known what I was going to do, the question had literally never occurred to me.

• 5:11David Brooks?

  When you think about philosophy, did you think of it, I just want to talk about big ideas? Or is it, like being a rabbi, I'm sort of ministering to people's minds?

• 5:19Speaker 03

  I think it's not a coincidence that of all the different topics in philosophy, the area I ended up specializing in is ethics, moral philosophy. So I continue to think about questions about value, which were certainly the things that most drove me to wanting to be a rabbi as well.

• 5:40David Brooks?

  So now, you teach this famous course on death, which has become internationally known. Unlike a lot of courses, the professor offers, here's this person's view, here's that person's view, here's this person's view. As I understand the course on death, and I've seen it on YouTube, you're just, here's my point of view. What do you think? And so could you just summarize the argument of that course?

• 5:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so as you say, in a number of classes, including several of my own classes, when I teach introductory ethics, I say, here's four or five prominent views, here are the arguments for, here's the arguments against. I try to keep my cards pretty close to my chest. In the death class, as I began to put it together, I decided that wasn't the way to go. I wasn't going to pretend. And so I say on the very first day, here's a bunch of things that lots of people believe about death, and I'm going to spend the semester arguing, trying to convince you that they're not so. I try to be fair, I hope I'm fair, to the views that I'm rejecting, but I don't hide what my considered conclusions are.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  So as I say, most people, at least lots of people, believe in a soul, and whereby that term, I mean, using as a piece of jargon, that we have some immaterial, non-physical part of us, maybe our essence, what we really are. And that thing then can survive the death of our body. It's good to believe in such a thing because mortality is bad. It would be good to live forever. If that's not true, then death is something to be terrified of. Death is really very fearful. Suicide never makes sense. There's a variety of views like this. Death is very mysterious. What exactly is it? Something we can't know, can't really get our head around.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  And I, over the course of the semester, try to argue that there is no soul, that there's nothing especially mysterious about death or dying, that immortality would not be desirable, that fear of death does not make sense, that there are circumstances in which suicide can be rational. And so I work through the various positions and try to lay out what strike me as the most promising arguments for the views that I'm then going to turn around and then explain why I think those arguments aren't compelling.

• 7:51David Brooks?

  I want to get into the substance of it, but I'm just curious, like, these are undergrads, so they're like 20 years old, 21, 19. Why are they interested in death? It's so far away.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  When I first started teaching the class, that was before I came to Yale, I was at the University of Illinois-Chicago. And I taught the class a handful of times there, maybe four times during the nine years I was there, and almost nobody took the class. But when I came to Yale, I thought, well, it's worth trying it again. At the time, this was more than 30 years ago, but because there was no preregistration, I had no idea how many people would show up. So I thought, well, maybe 50 people will show up. To be safe, I'll run off 75 copies of the syllabus. We were still running off copies. 320-odd people showed up, and I realized, I've hit a nerve here in ways that I really hadn't anticipated. I mean, of course, it's a subject that everybody cares about.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  It's a subject that everybody thinks about. And interestingly enough, from a pedagogical, as a philosophy professor, it's a wonderful subject for an introductory class, because it allows you to move from questions in metaphysics and epistemology and value theory and ethics and philosophy of mind and the like.

• 9:01David Brooks?

  Do they push back? Are they offended by what you're saying? Are they embracing of what you're saying?

• 9:06Speaker 03

  I tell them my goal in the class, although in some senses, to persuade them of a variety of claims. What's most important to me is that they end up thinking through these issues. And if they've genuinely given the matter thought and have come away disagreeing with me, that's great. Philosophical questions are ones in which, this is a theme throughout all of my classes, reasonable people can disagree. So it's really the class is an invitation to think about some really important questions.

• 9:32David Brooks?

  So we reasonably disagree whether people have souls. Even when I didn't believe in God, which was most of my adult life, the way I would put it this way is that each of us has a piece of us that has no size, weight, color, or shape, but gives us infinite value and dignity. And that accords with my sense of just looking around the world, that everybody I meet seems to have some sacred dignity. And so if that's my sense of where human dignity comes from, so how?

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Good. So let's start with no size, was it no size, weight?

• 10:01David Brooks?

  Color, shape.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Color, shape. So start with something totally trivial. You believe that 7 times 8 equals 56. Does that thought have color? Does it have weight? Does it have shape? Well, presumably not. As a philosopher, jargon, that's some sort of category mistake to think that things like that have to have color, shape, like the glass of water. So the very first thing we have to understand is that you can, to introduce a piece of jargon, believe, as I do believe, that I'm just a material object, and that you're just a material object. People watching this show are just material objects, and so we have size, color, shape, and so forth.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  Not everything that's true of us is helpfully described in those terms. And so what I think is that you're a material object that is able to think. You're able to think about simple mathematical facts, and depending on how far you got in your math education.

• 11:00David Brooks?

  You hit the limit of it.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're able to think about more complicated facts. You're able to make plans. You're able to communicate with me. And the question is, can we point to the various properties like that?

• 11:13Speaker 03

  And explain how a material object can have the ability to think, to be creative, to fall in love, and so forth. So I don't think the fact that there are aspects about us which give us a special kind of, as you use the Kantian phrase, dignity, I'm happy to talk that way, I don't think that's a mistake. I don't think that that gives us reason to think that there's something non-physical about us. You then have to ask the question, by virtue of what is it true that we count morally? And this is a contested philosophical question. If you want, I can rattle off three theories, but I'm not sure how much in the weeds you want to get.

• 11:58David Brooks?

  Yeah, let's go there.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  So let me start with one that I think is probably part of the story, but won't get you all the way to dignity, at least all the way to dignity in the sense I think you mean it. So as I say much by intro to ethics students, if I were to bring in a cat, douse it with gasoline, and then set it on fire, and then it shrieks in agony till it dies, most of us would agree, maybe not everybody, but most of us would agree that that would be wrong. It counts morally. It's a stray cat, let's pretend, so it's not that I'm hurting its owner, right? I'm doing something wrong to the cat. The cat counts in its own right. By virtue of what? And a natural plausible thought is that it counts by virtue of the fact that it can feel pleasure in pain. And I think that that is true about cats.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  One might think it isn't true about animals, that's all. But I suppose that it's true, as most of us do think, that cats feel pleasure and pain. That makes you count a certain way. And it would explain why it would be wrong for me to douse you, in part, why it would be wrong for me to douse you with gasoline and set you on fire. So that's one story. I don't think that's probably the whole story, and maybe not the most important part of the story. Since you used the word dignity, the Kantian story, Immanuel Kant, you know, the great German philosopher, thought that our moral standing, which differentiates us from animals, Kantians have a hard time explaining why animals should count too, but Kantians basically

• 13:25Speaker 03

  think it has something to do with our freedom, with our rationality, with our autonomy, the ability to send, to set ends for ourselves, to decide how we want to act, and to reason about what goals make sense and what actions make sense in light of all of that. I find that a very plausible and attractive idea. And so by virtue of your being an autonomous being, autonomy, the etymology, auto, self, nomos, law, so you're the kind of being that can give laws to yourself, decide for yourself how you want to live. So by virtue of your being an autonomous being, you count in a special way that animals

• 14:10Speaker 03

  that merely can feel pleasure and pain, but don't have that kind of rational freedom, they count, I think, in a lesser way. Okay, so great. So I think that you have that special moral status, we can use the word dignity to try to mark it. And so there'd be more wrong about setting you on fire than merely the fact that it would hurt. If I killed you painlessly, it would still be wrong, because as an autonomous being, you've set various goals for yourself, there are things you want to accomplish with your life. And so again, I don't see why bringing that in necessarily, it's a controversial philosophical

• 14:50Speaker 03

  question, but why does it have to bring in a soul if by a soul we mean something non-physical, immaterial, distinct from our body? Just like we need to be able to tell a story about how a material object can believe seven times eight equals fifty-six, we'll need a story, it'll be more complicated, but a story about how a material being can come to set goals and reconsider them and reevaluate them and so forth.

• 15:17David Brooks?

  So you said Kant believes humans have dignity. Do you, like, would you say yes, humans have? And I use the word infinite dignity, which is going up to eleven.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. So dignity is, I will confess, dignity is not one of the words that typically I'll find myself using, but I'm not troubled by using it. I think people, you know, it's obscure, what is it you mean, what is it that one means when one talks about a person having dignity? I'm perfectly comfortable talking that way. Of course, that's just as a placeholder. Then we have to start talking about what are the sorts of things that a creature with dignity, how it can be treated, how it should not be treated, what things it's permissible to do, what things you have to do for it, what things you may not do to it. Kant, to throw out more jargon, was a deontologist.

• 16:08Speaker 03

  He thought that if you took these notions of the morality being grounded in autonomy, generating a certain kind of dignity that demands respect, that this leads to a certain family of theories within moral philosophy called deontological views. And according to deontologists, there are certain actions that it would be wrong to do to somebody even if the results would be better if you were to do them. Against that, there are rival schools of thought that say, no, no, if the results really would be better, it becomes permissible. So my own view is Kant was right about morality being grounded in autonomy, freedom, rationality.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  He was wrong in believing it leads to deontology, as opposed to, to introduce another piece of jargon, a more consequence-oriented approach. But I'm happy to go with Kant about the foundations of ethics, because not everybody thinks autonomy is to the core of ethics.

• 17:09David Brooks?

  That's where I was gonna go there.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Thomas Hobbes, another great philosopher, this is British, 1650, I think, is when Leviathan gets published, something like that. Hobbes thought the ultimate basis of morality has to do with the fact that, roughly speaking, we can hurt each other, and we need help from one another. And so if we try to imagine a world with no moral requirements, we'll all be at each other's throat. You know, you have some food, I'll cut your throat, if I can, when you're looking the other way, I'll steal your food, but then when I'm falling asleep, somebody else will come along and steal my throat, as Hobbes famously put it. In the absence of morality, we'd be in the state of nature, we'd be in the war of all

• 17:55Speaker 03

  against all, let me see if I can get the quote right, "Life would be nasty, poor, brutish, solitary, and short." A friend of mine, teaches moral philosophy at Michigan, said, if life's gonna be nasty, poor, solitary, and brutish, being short doesn't seem so bad. But Hobbes's thought was, so this is what morality is about, this is the social contract, I thought. And so Hobbes is a kind of contract carer, and at least the interpretation I accept. And so basically, we all strike a deal, I agree not to slit your throat in exchange for you agreeing not to slit my throat. Autonomy's not crucial there, what's crucial there is our finitude, the fact that no one,

• 18:37Speaker 03

  any one person can be killed by enough other people, nobody's Superman, nobody can do it by themselves. So that's, again, a quite different story from the Kantian story about what ethics is all about. As it happens, I'm more sympathetic to the Kantian story.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  Hey, I heard you had a meeting about a Yale online ad. I've got a couple of thoughts on that. Isn't it corny for us to run an ad? We don't even want people to buy anything. We just want them to go and enjoy the wealth of knowledge, right? And given that, how about we run an anti-ad? 30 seconds of just like, online.yale.edu. Online.yale.edu. Or how long is this voicemail? Just run this voicemail. Okay, I can see why I'm not in these meetings. All right, bye.

• 19:29Speaker 05

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• 20:06David Brooks?

  Okay, now, I'm gonna ask you a few questions that people like me always ask people like you. So I'm sure you've heard these a zillion times, but I'm just curious what would you say? The first is, why is rape worse than a punch in the nose? And so to me, a rape is worse than a punch in the nose because a person contains a soul and that a rape is an insult to the soul in the way the punch in the nose is not an insult to the soul.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  I agree. I mean, rape seems like an especially horrific thought. Whereas, I mean, it's even easier, you know, why is rape bad in a way, a horrible thing to happen to you in a way that your backache is not? The backache could be a more intense pain, but it normally wouldn't be. Nearly a psychologically overwhelming because rape is a direct attack on, well, it's an attack on your autonomy, on your ability to decide for yourself in certain central ways how you want your life to go. And your sexual decisions are among the most central into, you know, who you want to have sex with.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  So rape overrides that in an especially horrific way. Another thing that's, I think, similar in that way is torture. Again, torture is deliberately trying to break the person as opposed to merely trying to cause them pain. That's certain truths that are essential to organizing our worldview shouldn't be beaten out of us. Now, okay, I believe all of that, but I don't see why one needs to bring in a soul. When I torture you, if I were to rape you, there are probably other things of a similar sort. What I would be doing in the most fundamental way is undermining

• 21:54Speaker 03

  your ability to choose for yourself how your life wants to go. And that's where the autonomy comes in. And so then the question just gets pushed off, right? To get ethics going the way I want it to get going, we need a story about how you can have a creature that is able to set its own goals, to step back. Lots and lots of animals are, have pretty accurate beliefs about their environment. They make reasonable decisions about how to satisfy their desires in light of the immediate environment. What seems special about us, maybe not unique about us, but certainly special about us, is that we can step back from that. We can say, yeah, I want this, does it make sense to want that?

• 22:35Speaker 03

  Yes, doing this would satisfy that desire, does it make sense to satisfy it in that way or not? That's where rationality comes in, and rationality and autonomy are tightly connected. So the question becomes, do you need to believe in anything immaterial in order to believe in this kind of ability? If we were having this conversation 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago, or maybe even 20 years ago, and asked, could we really have machines that could reason? And we'd say, I don't know, the jury's out. I don't think the jury's yet quite come back, but I think it becomes more and more credible to think a physical object is probably capable of reasoning.

• 23:13David Brooks?

  So I'm gonna try another reason why the concept of a soul appeals to me, aside from my experience of it. My view is that we're not equal in our level of brain power, and we're not equal in our level of muscle power. But we are all equal on the level of the soul. We all have the soul of infinite and equal dignity. And so to me, that's the basis of human equality.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  So I do think it's an interesting question. If you've got a story about the ultimate basis of having moral standing. So my own view is that animals count, but they don't count as much as people do. And so I've got, I owe anybody who's gonna be on my side a story about what is it that gives you standing, that can come in varying degrees or something like that. And then, as you say, it's gonna then be an interesting question. Will people differ in that regard? Because if they do, then they maybe will also have different strength rights or something like that. Suppose you accepted the Hobbesian story. Then it doesn't matter that you're stronger than me because I can get three other people and together we can beat you up. You still have to fall asleep.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  Hobbes, perfectly cognizant of this point, talked about, I won't give the exact piece of jargon, but talked about a kind of practical or rough equality. For all practical purposes, any one of us needs the moral contract. And so we'll hold out. It doesn't matter that you're smarter than I am, it doesn't matter that you're stronger than I am, or it doesn't matter that you're more creative than I am, or whatever it might be, or that I'm needier than you are. I'm not going to agree to avoid killing you and taking your food unless you agree to giving the same rights that you have. So Hobbesians have one kind of answer. Kant thinks about it in terms of autonomy, and then one might wonder, are we all equally autonomous? I suspect not.

• 25:03David Brooks?

  Clearly, not even close.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  Not even close, right? And I think, yeah, I think anybody who's a deontologist and thinks that it's ultimately based on autonomy needs to recognize that animals also have autonomy to varying degrees. And so maybe they have, you know, weaker rights than we have and so forth. Now, you said, okay, well, that, so you're gonna bring in a soul. Now, one might wonder, all right, believe in souls, by virtue of what is it true? So one question would be, by virtue of what is it true that souls are a plausible story about why we count morally? Second, even if you could tell me a story about that, do souls come in degrees? I take it was part of the assumption that they don't. Is that true?

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Saint Francis of Assisi believed, you know, famously preaches to the birds because he believes animals have souls. I haven't read enough about him to know. Did he think that the birds had souls of a grade A type? Or did they have grade B souls? Once you start allowing souls, then are there, maybe all humans have grade A souls, but maybe you've got an A minus soul. But Saint Francis of Assisi had an A plus soul. Tell me, do you think that souls come in only one size fits all?

• 26:16David Brooks?

  Yes.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  Based on what?

• 26:18David Brooks?

  Based on the idea that, well, A, it would be horrific to think that I was superior to the homeless guy in the street. That would be a morally reprehensible belief. And so if that's a morally reprehensible belief, then it must be we all have some level that's equal, and I think it's our spiritual natures.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's not bad. I mean, some people would say that's an illegitimate argument. I mean, as well, you want it to be the case that we all count morally, so you're gonna believe whatever it is that you need metaphysically speaking in order to get that to fall out. I'm not hostile to that kind of argument. Famously, Kant also argues this way. Kant thinks you can argue from moral conclusions to belief in a soul, belief in an afterlife, belief in a God, belief in reward and punishment. It's loaded, how much does one need to assume in order to get the ethical? And Hobbes, as I suggested a moment ago, thinks you don't need to believe in the soul, you know, at all. And there might be other ways that you could get that conclusion. If you set yourself the goal of designing a moral system,

• 27:20Speaker 03

  then one thing you need to take into account is, what are people like? And are people very good at sussing out micro-differences in intelligence or degrees of autonomy or what have you? And so I think, from the point of view of designing moral rules, if I were I, God, giving rules to all of mankind, I would think there's gonna be limits to people's abilities to understand very complicated rules, rules with too many exception clauses or too many sub clauses, or rules that, you know, the left-handed people get to do this.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  There'll be a kind of pressure to have the rules be similar for everybody. And that might give us equal rights as well without needing to bring in rights, or without needing to bring in souls, rather.

• 28:11David Brooks?

  Let me ask you the question. This is the grandfather of all questions that people like me ask people like you, which is, how did consciousness arise in the brain?

• 28:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, when people like you ask people like me, I say, that's not my area of philosophy. It depends, in part, I mean, there's a whole sub area of philosophy called philosophy of mind. And one of the big debates in philosophy of mind is how do you explain consciousness? So immediately, I'm gonna ask, what do you mean by consciousness? Because people, even philosophers will use this term for different things. So let me draw two broad categories of things. Sometimes what we mean by, and what other people mean by, ordinary people, you know, mean by consciousness is having thoughts, beliefs, desires, putting these things together to make plans,

• 29:04Speaker 03

  so consequently having intentions and the like. And so, you know, unlike, you know, arguably unlike your thermostat, which can turn the furnace on and off when it's warm or cold, but it's not conscious, it doesn't have thoughts, it doesn't have beliefs and so forth. Okay, so if that's what you mean by consciousness, then the question becomes, can we imagine, can we tell a story about how a physical object can have beliefs, have desires and so forth? I think we've got the beginnings of a pretty good story about. Because we already can build machines that can do, represent environments. To take the trivial example, because it's as complicated as I get. You know, a chess-playing computer, when you're playing that program on your computer,

• 29:49Speaker 03

  it represents the chessboard in a certain way. And so it has, what I'm perfectly content to say, our beliefs about where your bishop is and does it threaten or does it not threaten, you know, your king and so forth and so on. Oh, well, does it threaten its king, rather?

• 30:06David Brooks?

  That strikes me as a very weird definition of consciousness. Like, we've programmed certain algorithms into it, or in AI, we've programmed the ability to predict the next words or whatever it is.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  I'm not sure that the ability to predict the next word counts as that. What I had in mind with the chess-playing computer was that, you know, when it moves, you know, its queen to take my bishop, I find it perfectly natural to say something like, it wanted to capture my bishops because it wants to protect its king from being checked.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  I find that perfectly congenial. And all I wanted to say was, if that's what you mean by consciousness, having beliefs, having desires, being able to report what those beliefs and desires are, being able to make plans on the basis of them, we already can do that in some rudimentary ways, and we're getting better and better at it. You say, "That's not what I mean by consciousness." I say, "Fine, but here's the second thing. What do you mean by consciousness?" This one is harder to describe, though. I imagine everybody's gonna be familiar with it. You punch me, and I'll feel pain. When I feel pain, there'll be various behaviors that I'll engage in. But there's something about the experience of pain that we have not yet captured. And maybe that's what we mean by consciousness.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  And it's not limited to the ability to feel pleasure and pain. You know, right now on the desk, you've got a copy of my book. My eyes happen to be going to the little red strip on it. And so there's something happening in my mind right now, the experience of red. And I take it that when you look at the book and hold it up, you know, so that people rush off to the bookstore to buy a copy of it, they too will have, you and they, will also have something going on inside the experience of red. So sometimes we, or philosophers, mean that inner aspect by consciousness. And then the question, and I think it's a great question, is how do we explain consciousness from a physical point of view?

• 32:04Speaker 03

  If, so, if physicalism is the view that all I am, all you are, is just a physical, material object, how do we explain the ability to have this inner aspect of experience? Can a physical object have that? And if so, how do we explain the origins of that? Now, the answer is, I don't know. I mean, I say, "I don't know." I think that is the most pressing question for physicalists to answer. There are physicalists, there are philosophers who have pet theories about this. I don't myself, although it's not an area of expertise, I don't find any of them especially attractive.

• 32:46David Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 32:47Speaker 03

  But I just, but simply, I don't think bringing in the soul helps. Suppose you say, I mean, I'm not letting you give a chance to say, but suppose you say, "Ah, this is why I believe in a soul," right? You know, posit soul, now we can explain how it can happen. I say, "You haven't explained anything. You've just said, 'Imagine there's a thing that somehow can generate consciousness. I don't know how it can do it. You don't have a theory, and I don't have a theory.'" So that doesn't give us any special reason to start positing soul.

• 33:14David Brooks?

  Yeah, I would put it a little differently. I would say, I mean, we have three pounds of meat in our brain, and we produce ecstasy. We produce a bit of joy, or whatever. And to me, that's, I'm realizing that one of our distinctions is, you're a physicalist, I'm a spookiest. I think the world is spooky.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:33David Brooks?

  And so it doesn't really surprise me that meat could produce consciousness.

• 33:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:40David Brooks?

  But for you, if you think meat is all there is,

• 33:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:44David Brooks?

  then the fact that you can't explain the fundamental human experience, which is subjective experience, is kind of a problem for your worldview.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  Well, it is a problem in the sense that it's an unsolved problem. I mean, so first of all, I think the world is spooky and strange and weird, too. I mean, philosophers are basically people who never got over the thought that, boy, the world's a really weird place, and I don't understand very much of it. Aristotle famously said, "Philosophy begins in wonder." And I just want to say, "That's right," and it continues in complete bafflement.

• 34:16David Brooks?

  I can't help pointing out that Descartes said that wonder is a surprise of the soul, so.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  But again, I'm not unhappy using soul talk. I just, when you start saying, and by a soul, I mean to be stipulating something non-physical, then I say, "Why is that the best hypothesis as to all this cool stuff? All this weird ability to fall in love and to write poetry, and to feel ecstasy?" I think we can offer certain explanations of creativity from a physicalist's point of view. I don't think we can yet do it from a consciousness point of view. But does this trouble me? Well, I take some comfort in the thought that, first of all, we're just beginning to do brain science. We're in the, to say we're in the Middle Ages is too generous, you know? Or the dawn of time in terms of brain science.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  So the analogy I always give in my death class is, 100 years ago, 150 years ago, 300 years ago, 500 years ago, if you asked people how to explain life, the answer would have been, "We haven't a clue how you could explain life in physical terms. It must be that there's something non-physical going on there." And the answer was, "Come back in 300 years, 500 years, 700 years." And it turns out, oh, now we have an explanation. We don't know all the details, but we know enough to know, we can offer a physical explanation of life. I, my money is nothing more than that. I conjecture, come back in 300 years, 700 years, we'll have a story as to how consciousness could emerge from three pounds of meat.

• 35:46David Brooks?

  You could answer any argument with that, though.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. But that's just to say, look, I'll concede. I do concede. I make a point of emphasizing this. I don't think there's a story yet.

• 35:57David Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  But the question is, does, to believe in a soul, you've got to think it's got the upper hand somewhere. And I would agree with that. If you could give me even the outlines of a story, how is an immaterial thing going to experience an inner life?

• 36:12David Brooks?

  Let me read a sentence from your book, which I disagreed with.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  Great.

• 36:17David Brooks?

  You write, "Try introspecting for a moment. Turn your mind's eye inward and ask, 'Do you see a soul inside you?' I don't think you will. Like me, you may observe various sensations in your body, you may observe various thoughts and feelings, but you won't observe a soul." Now, I do. Like, when I wake up in the morning, or I'm in the middle of my day, sometimes my soul is soaring, and sometimes my soul is degraded. I mean, the psalmist famously says, "Why are you downcast, oh my soul?"

• 36:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:51David Brooks?

  And the way I experience my soul mostly is in yearning, yearning for self-transcendence, yearning for something to me to expand outside myself.

• 37:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:01David Brooks?

  And when I'm, and the stuff I pour into my soul, different experiences have different effects on it. And furthermore, this, what I'm describing, is not uncommon.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 37:13David Brooks?

  So I actually looked up all these words in different cultures for soul.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:18David Brooks?

  And you know the one in Hebrew, it's nefesh, Egyptian ka, Chinese hun, or Arabic naf, Ghana okra, like, all these different cultures all around the world, independently, have a central concept in all their cultures.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:30David Brooks?

  Humans have souls, and it's a spiritual, immaterial thing. So if, why are all these cultures wrong?

• 37:36Speaker 03

  They don't all have the immaterial thing. They have, they have a word that we can translate as soul. And then the question is, you know, what does the word soul mean in English? And are we translating it properly or not? Dualism, the view that there is this immaterial thing in addition to the body, is a philosophical conjecture that some people believe in, other people don't believe. And some religious traditions teach, and other religious traditions don't teach. And even Christianity hasn't always been dualist. The early Christians believed in part in bodily resurrection because there was no way to have, you know, be around after your death without your body, because they didn't believe in souls.

• 38:17David Brooks?

  Right. But they would say the spirit infused every piece of them.

• 38:20Speaker 03

  Well.

• 38:20David Brooks?

  It wasn't separate.

• 38:21Speaker 03

  Sure, but, so, you know, you talked, you know, you gave, you know, a number of moving sentences, you know, a minute, two minutes ago, before I interrupted. I wish I had a transcript of the sentences that you said. When you say, "My soul soars," if I'd gone through, and any place you said soul, and I just said, "I soar," or, you know, "I'm ecstatic," or "I'm moved," or "I'm down in the dumps," I'm not sure what we would have lost. Now, there's a use of the word soul in English, as in lots of other cultures, where it's a way of talking about all of those things, about the fact that when you listen to Mozart, or I listen to Dylan, something is happening to me that is not happening to me,

• 39:04Speaker 03

  I will confess, when I listen to Lady Gaga. Something happens to me. I am moved by that. Fine, I believe in all of that, and I'm not remotely troubled in saying, I want to reserve the word soul, or at least I want to use the word soul in those contexts. If we wanted to talk about our essence, you know, there's the deepest, most central parts about our beliefs, our desires, our values, the memories that are most cherished. You want to say sacred? I have no problems with that kind of language at all. And you say, and I think soul is a useful, I think, soul is a useful word for characterizing those aspects,

• 39:46Speaker 03

  those elements, those components of, more broadly speaking. If we use the word personality for all of your beliefs, all of your memories, all of your goals, all of your desires, and then soul for that central subset that you would feel like you had died if those, if you had to give those things up, then I'm perfectly happy with that. The mistake is to think that if we are going to talk that way, you must be positing something non-physical.

• 40:18Speaker 05

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where InPress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with InPress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 40:52Speaker 01

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• 41:23David Brooks?

  Let me describe to you what I think a soul is.

• 41:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:26David Brooks?

  To see if we, I think we probably have a little overlap. So I have a hobby, well, it's my job, but I interview neuroscientists because I'm just interested in what they're doing.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:35David Brooks?

  And years ago, when I started doing this, like 25 years ago, they were super interested where things were happening in the brain, like this, there. And you'd go to conferences and there'd be some BS corporate consultant and he would say, this shows the amygdala is lighting up and therefore that shows blah, blah, blah. And it was all nonsense. But now they don't talk, think that way. They talk about these vast neural, neural coalitions that cross a lot of different regions. And there's a neuroscientist, I want to give him credit, Louise Pisoa, who compares these networks, these vast widely distributed networks, he calls them neuronal ensembles distributed across multiple brain regions. And he compares them to a murmuring of swallows.

• 42:17David Brooks?

  My intuition, though I don't know, is that consciousness emerges from that murmuration. But I would say also, the soul emerges from that. So it's not without physical basis, we're infused, but the soul emerges from the swirl. The soul is the swirl.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 42:35David Brooks?

  And emergent properties, as you know very well, you take a bunch of physical things and out of their interaction, a new quality emerges.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 42:43David Brooks?

  And some people have a low version of emergent that you can understand that high quality by looking at the physical low qualities. Other people have a strong version of emergence, which is you can't understand the high quality. It takes on independent conditions that are its own thing. And then it has a downward pressure on everything underneath. So I take a strong emergent view. All of that swirl, all that energy state creates this new thing. And then the quality of our soul then influences how we feel, how we act, how we do, what we want.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  So maybe that you really are a physicalist as well. It's just that you think that you're happy, you want to save the word soul talk, and I'll give it to you. And you want to think about soul talk as this thing that emerges at the global level, which is fine. I'm perfectly happy to think about consciousness as something that emerges at the global level. You put enough neurons together of the right way and we'll get, we'll get either consciousness or something like that, right? Okay, great. I'm even happy, maybe, depending on how much you mean, in thinking that there'll be things that, the fundamental explanation needs to be done at the global level, not at the micro level. But you don't have to pretend that physicalism isn't true, or you shouldn't persuade yourself,

• 43:57Speaker 03

  would be better to put it, that you shouldn't persuade yourself that physicalism isn't true to have this kind, to believe in this kind of emergent stuff at the global, global level.

• 44:07David Brooks?

  I'm trying to give some reasons why I think there's a soul.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:10David Brooks?

  But there's a quality, a set of experiences I've had that are not reasonable. And so I'll tell you one story. I was in New York like 11 years ago. And in New York City, a city I love, the ugliest spot on the face of the earth used to be, still pretty ugly, is Penn Station.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 44:29David Brooks?

  The train station. And there's only one possibly uglier spot, which is the train, the subway station next to Penn Station. And so I'm there on whatever Eighth Avenue line and I look around the car one morning and I get the sensation that everybody in this car has souls.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:53David Brooks?

  And my sensation is these souls in each case are in movement. And some are going up and some are going down, degraded. I mean, Thomas Aquinas talks about all these movements. And, and then I thought, well, I feel this. But that is not the only, what they call numinous experience I've had, which is, you know, in nature, with my kids, whatever. And so when I have those experiences, the arguments almost don't matter.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  I'm glad you brought this up again because this allows me to do something I meant to do several minutes ago. When you quoted this sentence from my book about peering inside and not seeing the soul. This is a point I just learned from David Hume, another, you know, British philosopher, responding to that, making everything, when he peers inside, he feels, he can sense experiences, pleasures, pains, thoughts, wishes, hopes, desires. He doesn't see, doesn't experience any soul. Putting words into his mouth, you know, that's a philosophical conjecture as to how these things can occur. So I just want to say, yeah, you were in this moment and, you know, I've had similar

• 46:07Speaker 03

  moments as well, where you're just taken by the magnificence of humanity or, you know, the fact that every one of us is a unique individual and has the things that we're trying to do. And some of us are getting there and some of us are not getting there. And some of us are on the wrong path, but hopefully we'll make it and others will never, you know? That's why we can have all these thoughts. And, and having these thoughts are important. And again, I'm not any kind of foe of spiritual talk. And so if you find it most comfortable to express these thoughts in spiritual language, I won't, I won't, you know, deny them. It's only when you start doing metaphysics.

• 46:48David Brooks?

  Okay. Well, so we have a metaphysical difference, but I guess one of my questions is, what difference does it make? Like if we have totally different viewpoints on this, but how does our different viewpoints affect our lives and how we should live our lives? It sounds like you're saying it almost makes no difference. I've invented some word soul, which you think doesn't exist, but we're probably, but do you think it affects lives when you shift from being a physicalist to a spookiest?

• 47:16Speaker 03

  It needn't. In the same way that it needn't when you go from being a spookiest to being a physicalist. And I'm afraid I no longer remember, but I conjecture that when I was young, I believed in something non-physical. And it was through doing philosophy, I came to see that as far as I could see, one could continue to espouse the things that were important to me, but call it the spiritual side of life, without buying into a bunch of metaphysical baggage that I no longer found myself inclined to think was the most plausible metaphysics. Didn't have to give it up.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  Now, for some people, giving up religion just is part and parcel of a transformation in which they give up not just the spiritual, but they give up the moral and they give up, you know, they give up the ethics, right? And, and I've had any number of discussions with religious figures who basically look at me and say, how can you have morality without God, you know, or a soul, you know, or what have you? And then, well, you know, Hobbes was a story about how you could have it. And I think Kant is a story about how, you know, you could have it. So I don't think it's, there's no logical requirement that, you know, if you want to believe in right and wrong and equality and human dignity, then at least you'll have

• 48:42Speaker 03

  an easier time of it if you believe that there's this non-material object that maybe continues to exist after our biological organism decays. I don't think that extra bit of metaphysics gets you anywhere closer to the ethics stuff that you and I, and the value stuff and the spiritual side of stuff that you and I are in agreement is important.

• 49:05David Brooks?

  Shelley Kagan, it's such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.

• 49:12David Brooks?

  Thanks for joining my conversation with Shelley Kagan. As you could tell, we probably disagree pretty drastically on some of the biggest issues of life. But what I love about Shelley is that even though he doesn't believe there's a soul, he doesn't believe there's a purpose to the universe, he doesn't believe there's an afterlife, that has not made him a cold and technical and overly rational person. He's a deeply moral person. He's a deeply warm person. I don't know if Shelley would like me saying this, but you could even describe him as soulful. This podcast is produced by The Atlantic and made possible by support from Yale University. New episodes of The Permanent Questions come out on Sundays on The Atlantic's YouTube channel, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 49:55David Brooks?

  If you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. See you next week.

• 50:25Speaker 05

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where InPress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with InPress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.