To discuss this matter, we need to dissect a few philosophical assumptions, some of which we already accept without even deriving their basis.
- First of all, we need to accept that the mind is not an isolated entity unconnected to the body. Unlike the soul, which is an independent self, residing temporarily in the body.
- Second, we need to accept that the mind is a product of the brain. If this is not the case, then we would not be able to study it by modifying the brain.
- Third, this means that it also is a product of evolutionary processes just like the brain.
- Lastly, we need to accept that experiences have a subjective value, meaning each individual psychological faculty has its own response to the same stimulus. Although, there is mostly consistent overlap between individuals. While subjectivity is an interesting aspect, it complicates our investigation of brain function. An example of this could be how witnesses to a crime give testimonials that are different. Usually we only consider the intersubjective information as an accurate representation of what happened and as a means of investigating the matter. This is why we usually focus on the commonalities of our experiences to investigate how the brain produces them. But, we need to keep in mind that there is a degree of subjectivity.
De Anima
Religious traditions tend to rest on a dualistic basis with some variations. They posit an agent that is independent of the body but temporarily resides within it. This accounts for the human soul and a God that does not always have a body. While the gods are usually also bestowed with higher powers (however defined). This notion is understandable from the perceptual perspective. If we think of ourselves, we could identify a conscious, wilful, controllable corpus and a reactive, unconscious, uncontrollable Anima. This notion is not unfamiliar even to more modern thinkers. So, does the soul exist? And what is a soul?
From what we could discern of religious texts, it is the self: Our memories, consciousness, intellect, subjective motivations, emotions and personality. Every part of my mind that is perceptively me. This self lives on after my body has died and decomposed into substrates for other organisms. Now, the issue here is that everything that I mentioned above can be impaired or damaged with lesions in the brain. So, I can lose my capability of producing long lasting memories if I damage my hippocampi, like patient HM (Dossani et al., 2015). He had epileptic seizures from childhood that eventually became so severe that in 1953, his doctors decided to perform bilateral medial-temporal lobe resection (removal of part of the temporal lobe), which was known to alleviate epilepsy. Shortly after, some unfortunate symptoms of the surgery unfolded. He was no longer able to produce long-term declarative memories. His memories only lasted for a few seconds to minutes after the surgery. So it seems, that this memory ability is lost with parts of the brain.
PG, in the 1800s, worked with a railway company that paved ways for rail tracks with the use of explosives (Damasio et al., 1994). In a terrifying event, the explosive powder prematurely ignited and a tamping iron used to pack sand on top of the powder flew up like a bullet, and penetrated his left cheekbone and went right through the frontal bone of his cranium. The iron severely damaged his left prefrontal cortex. Surprisingly he survived. Likely due to it missing major arteries, veins and burning shut any severed blood vessels. After receiving treatment, he experienced symptoms that changed his life forever. He was no longer able to stop impulses generated by his limbic system. He would behave inappropriately and have difficulties doing anything that was not stimulating innate motivations, whether appetitive or aversive, driven by his hedonistic desires. So it seems that this part of the self is dependent on prefrontal functions.
In 1985 CW (Robbins, 2009), had a herpes infection that spread to his central nervous system, leading to herpes viral encephalitis. The infection caused cell death that in his case tragically led to severe anterograde and retrograde amnesia. CW was no longer able to form new long term memories and started also to lose some of his previous memories. So, it seems our stored memories are also dependent on the brain.
Kluver-Bucy syndrome is a disease that is caused by damage to the amygdala and can lead to oral fixation, loss of the ability to identify visual stimuli, hyper sexuality, amnesia and apathy (Lilly et al., 1983). These examples further strengthen the idea that the self is at the very least dependent on the body, or in these cases, the brain.
Another, tragic phenomenon is neglect (Mesulam, 1994). Damage to certain cortical areas or their corresponding pathways can cause a negative symptom like loss of vision, if it’s the visual cortex and in some cases also the perception of the stimulus existence. Almost like half of the visual field does not exist anymore. In such a patient, if the right visual cortex is damaged they will be blind to the left visual field and not realise that they are blind to it. Almost like the left visual field does not exist. The same can happen with motor cortex, but instead the patient does not realise they are deprived of motor functions (Laplane and Degos, 1983). That means that our perception of the existence of reality or even our body is dependent on our nervous system.
Now, these few examples point to us that the mind is at the very least dependent on the brain and that it cannot exist without it. Unless, these mind substrates are independent of the rest of the mind and can survive without it. Like PG’s impulse inhibition or CW’s memories survived and left the body after the damage. This does not seem likely. Even so, that means that the self, will decompose after death just like my body into substrates and therefore cease to exist in a unity. What am I, if not a unified composition of all my mind substrates?
Now, if most of our personality can be destroyed by damaging the brain, what is left once we die?
Even if there is something left, it is not me any more and does not contain anything that I could call myself. My memories, emotions, consciousness, senses and perceptions disintegrate with destruction of my central nervous system (CNS). If some unimaginable part of my mind is left, it is no matter to me since I am gone. It is almost like removing part of your body, like the appendix. It is not you, it is just a part of you. I cannot imagine that anyone who goes through such a surgery ends up having separation anxiety.
Not only does damage to our CNS cause behavioural and psychological changes, so does stimulation. When surgeons are to remove a tumour from a patient’s brain, they first identify functional areas by electrode stimulation (Duffau et al., 1999). They move around the electrode, stimulating around the tumour to find the border to make incisions without damaging functional parts. If it is the motor cortex they would observe behavioural changes, like movement of the hand. If it is sensory areas the patient would experience touch or burning sensation on the specific body part that the area corresponds to. So in this case we can induce experiences by stimulating brain areas in humans.
Furthermore, there is a method called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which uses a device that focuses an electromagnetic field into a tiny spot, which if powerful enough can cause neurons to fire and induce behaviours or mind phenomena.
In animal research we have observed that stimulating different parts of the brain can induce some interesting behaviours. Like, aversive and appetitive responses. In several studies researchers found that stimulating the Ventral tegmental area, which is a reward related area in the brain, induces the same responses as a food reward, like sugar pellets or sweet milk in both rodents and monkeys (Brocka et al., 2018; Lovell et al., 2015). Moreover, in another study, they found that stimulating central amygdala induces predatory actions. The mice start hunting, even inanimate objects (Han et al., 2017). In a study that I was involved in, we stimulated or inhibited a certain neuron population in the memory area of the brain, called the hippocampus and found that we can control how well the mice could learn to remember objects (Siwani et al., 2018).
In conclusion, it seems that part of our mind like our emotions, memories, motivations and conscious control of movement is dependent on the body and maybe even specifically the brain.
A product of the brain
As mentioned in De Anima, the few pathological and experimental examples reveal to us that our mind is the product of our central nervous system. A big question is whether our mind is residing only within our nervous system. Can we dissect out our central nervous system and place it in a glass bottle, a brain in a jar basically. If we give it sufficient nutrients and saline flow to keep it alive, can a mind be active in such conditions?
A group of researchers at Yale University tried this with pig brains from a slaughterhouse and found that the cells can actually be kept alive and functioning in such conditions (Vrselja et al., 2019). Question is though, whether the brain can do any processing necessary to produce “mind actions”?
This is really a question about how necessary sensory inputs are for the mind. But, also hormonal signalling and other processes occurring in the rest of the body. Regard the former case for a second. You might be aware of sensory deprivation tanks. These tanks are designed to literally deprive you of all sensory inputs. They usually look like a giant egg with a hatch on top. Inside, is water with high salinity, which if you lay in causes you to float as though you are in the black sea. The water and in really good tanks even the air is around 36-37 degrees Celsius, which is the same as your body temperature. It is totally dark and soundproof. So you cannot see, hear or feel anything inside the tank. As though you are floating in space, blind. Interestingly your mind still exists and is relatively normal. Why relatively?
Well, there are reports that if we stay long enough, our imagination comes alive and people report visual and auditory hallucinations (Daniel and Mason, 2015). Almost like our brains try to fill in the void of sensory inputs. Although it could be argued that some people are actually falling asleep and dreaming. But if it is the case that we hallucinate, it could be explained from a mnemonic perspective. When we remember things, it is actually like re-experiencing them. So in a sensory deprived condition with no distractions, this could allow the re-experiencing to be more vivid.
But, even under those conditions you are not really totally sensory deprived. Our central nervous system still receives input about the condition of our internal organs. The beating of our heart, the movements of our bowels, the contraction of our muscles and diaphragm. It also receives hormone signalling from the liver, kidneys and stomach. Which according to William James and Carl Lange, both philosophers/psychologists/MDs in the late 1800s and early 1900s, are necessary for our perceptions of emotions (James, 1884). When we get frightened or angered, we get a bodily response, our heart rate and blood pressure rises, we get increased blood flow to our extremities and face. Those bodily changes cause a sensory reaction that stimulates our brain and according to the James-Lange hypothesis, is what gives rise to the experience of for example anger and fear (James, 1884). This indicates that the sensory inputs are necessary for the mind to exist. So could it be that our thought processes are purely a reaction to sensory stimuli?
Now these things do happen, but if we look at those emotions, anger and fear. They give the same bodily response, yet they are perceived differently (Cannon, 1927). If this is true, anger and fear would be the same emotion. Although they sometimes have the same behavioural response, they do not always. But we can perceptively distinguish between anger and fear. What does that tell us?
It states that somewhere in our mind there is another entity or substrate of anger and fear that is distinguishable. But, we can take from the James-Lange hypothesis that sensory input is highly necessary and important for our mind to function.
This was an assumption in the period of behaviourism, we are just automatons that are reacting to sensory inputs. This is a notion that we have discarded to some degree but it has not really been answered. It is still a possibility. What if all the thoughts we get are initiated by some sensory inputs that stimulate certain memories which stimulate others and creates a thought chain, which is only inhibited by another that is also initiated by some other sensory input. We can be quite sure that this happens, but is it all that happens?
Could our conscious mind initiate processes that are independent of sensory inputs?
If we do an experiment, try to initiate a thought chain just by consciously thinking about something. Start with something simple like an object or a word and see if it leads you down to some other thoughts. It does not always work unfortunately but it could. You start with a ball and that takes you to football (soccer if you are from the states), then Zlatan Ibrahimovic and how he retired, then about how to realise your dreams and your life choices and so on and so forth.
Perceptively this is true, it can happen, but the question is whether this thought was initially induced by some sensory stimuli. Like you reading this article that tells you to do it and then perhaps an object or a word in front of you is chosen subconsciously that leads you down the road.
I once meditated for 60 minutes and for about half the time with my eyes open, staring but not looking. At some point, my visual field was just perceived as a collection of shapes, colours and contrast. These shapes would remind me of objects or faces and that would trigger a thought chain which is objectively unrelated to the initial trigger. This probably occurs all the time but we are not aware of it. One of our brain’s major function is pattern recognition. It is constantly trying to figure out the world by recognising patterns and sometimes (or a lot of the time) it is mistaken.
For now we can confidently state that thought processes can be initiated by stimuli but we cannot be so confident to state that our consciousness can initiate thoughts independent of external influence/input. Although we perceive that we can it is hard to make that assumption.
I am not sure, but what I can say with more confidence is what the clinical evidence tells us about the soul.
In conclusion, does the soul exist?
Based on these few arguments, our mind is a product of our brain and that a soul that is comprised of our mind products is unlikely to exist independent of our brain. It’s important to acknowledge that this conclusion rests on materialist premises. Many people find meaning, comfort, and purpose in spiritual frameworks that neuroscience cannot address. This article only speaks to what can be clinically measured.
Disclaimer: This is an opinion piece presenting one perspective on the mind-body question. The philosophical and theological dimensions of consciousness remain actively debated.
Declaration of AI use: The author used Lumo AI for spelling, grammar-checking and proofreading during the preparation of this article.
© 2026 Samer Siwani, The Hypothesis Dump. All original content is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Privacy Policy | Terms of Service
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