If damage to individual parts of the brain leads to a deformed personality, then why do many people still consider the soul to be immaterial and indivisible?

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2 Answers

  1. Because the soul is not a person. Damage to the brain can affect what most people understand by “I” – ego, personality – that is, a set of subjective opinions, habits, and skills based on memory. All this is not what people used to call the soul. At the moment that we are accustomed to call death, it is precisely the personality-ego, or, as the Buddhists say, the mind-body complex, that perishes. At the same time, the soul remains intact, going according to different versions of different religions further to its own place (based again on the worldview).

  2. I have a different point of view on the arguments about immortality and immateriality, but I will give the argument of other people:

    “If you damage the TV, it will show you a distorted picture, but this does not mean that the TV signal is also damaged, no, it is what it was and remains.”

    That is, some people talk about the body and its parts, the brain, as perceiving the effects of the immortal and immaterial essence of a person.

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    I, in one of the questions of the answers, told in the comments, I will repeat a little and recompile what I said:

    In general, for understanding, the soul, in many ancient languages and cultures is associated with the concept of breath. Living – breathes. This is true both in Russian and among Jews, for example.

    Genesis 2: 7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.

    From the weakening of the person with the loss of blood and then death, followed by the feeling that the blood and soul are connected:

    Deut.12: 16. only you shall not eat the blood; you shall pour it out on the ground like water.

    Deut.12: 23. but strictly observe that you do not eat blood, for blood is the soul: don't eat souls with meat;

    In Greek, too, Psyche, Psyche, is the soul, breath, butterfly. And also, it was associated with blood.

    All these concepts were born even when people did not have the concept of “material-immaterial”.

    Here is God-yes – the Jews definitely had the concept of him as completely immaterial.

    The Biblical tradition does not deny some materiality of the soul-psyche. And, as can be seen above from the ban on eating the blood of animals, the soul-psyche is also mentioned in relation to animals. Part of the psyche is explained by the movements of the flesh. The desire to eat( eat), for example, the desire of the flesh, born of the flesh. Man is constantly called in the Bible to control the desires of the flesh, i.e. the concepts of the soul-psyche, which includes the totality of animal movements, animal desires and the concept of a person who has free will like God, are divided.�

    Therefore, in addition to the concept of soul, there is also the concept of spirit. It can be seen that in the Russian language, these are indistinguishable concepts that go back to breathing in the same way. But this is not the case in Hebrew and Ancient Greek. Soul-psyche (Greek) – nefesh (Hebrew). Spirit-pneuma (Greek, the first letter is different, there “psi”, here “p”) – ruach (Hebrew). The meanings are similar, again breath, but it is the word Spirit that is applied to God.�

    If you open the Orthodox encyclopedia, which is a scientific work (texts, concepts, and so on can be studied by scientists), you can view the article “soul”. And it turns out that Christianity does not have its own definitive concept of the soul, which is why it provides an overview of various philosophical concepts from ancient times. It also records the fact that Christian theology took as its basis the philosophical concepts of the soul of pre-Christian thinkers. Including those who claimed the materiality of the soul with a variety of options, for example, the animateness of the whole world, or precisely the soul as soul phenomena,and many other things.

    As a result, in Christianity there is a general agreement in the combination of three concepts: body (matter) – soul (process, psyche) – spirit (an immaterial person with free will).

    Damaging the brain (body) we distort the psyche, which affects both the body and the spirit, but is not them.

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