David Chalmers - Is the 'Soul' Immortal?

The claim that human beings have or are an 'immortal soul' goes back to the ancient Greeks, if not further. In a pre-scientific world, it would seem absurd for our inner awareness not to continue, irrespective of what happens to our bodies. Today science rejects the soul, yet there are diverse viewpoints around.



David Chalmers is an Australian philosopher specializing in the area of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University.


Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[normaodenthal]

Just love David Chalmers; I’d like him to live forever too. He’d be really rockin’ that look in the afterlife.

[PetraKann]

Chalmers covers almost all of the intellectual disciplines including physics, mathematics and the humanities. He also plays and performs music life. A modern day version of an ancient Greek philosopher. (perhaps the only deficiency is the inability to use a sword)

[DestroManiak]

Hippy chalmers is best chalmers. His new style isnt this cool xD

[gyorgyor]

I love his 80's rock hair do, he pulls it off epically. Get him a guitar and amp.

[yukip]

Rather than living forever in this world, I would love to let my soul travel across the multiverse and reincarnate in better world with happy family

[MoneyMotivation]

Scientists are the least credible when it comes to talking about the after life. They’ve turned the switch off to new possibilities that can’t be explained.

[MichaelDembinski]

Qualia memory. Recall an experience from childhood - the first snowflakes on an evening before Christmas, the shops lit up and full of toys. A trip to the seaside - the bracing sea air, the sting of salt, the smell of sun cream on warm, wet bodies. Can you feel that subjective conscious experience as a memory? THAT'S your soul. There's not an atom of the adult you are now that was a part of your body when you were a child - all has been recycled since. And yet memories of the subjective experiences (qualia) remain.

Have you ever experience flashbacks to such moments? Some are triggered (by smells, for example); some are bidden (have those two examples I gave above set off qualia flashbacks?) - and some are entirely spontaneous.

So you have these spontaneous qualia flashbacks to events in your distant past that you can identify. I have (from time to time, but consistently across my life) had spontaneous qualia flashbacks that are entirely anomalous - from another time, another place. Typically, they feel like 1940s/1950s USA (I grew up in West London, UK). This is how I see the immortal soul; weak signals picked up by your consciousness. Much more on this over on my blog (easy to Google).

[shahrazade]

David Chalmers has been my favorite philosopher since circa 1995. Yes, I'm that old.

[williamesselman]

One of the oldest thoughts humans have.

[lorenh]

I loved when Chalmers helped prep Wayne and Garth for the big concert in Aurora!

[spursnation]

Maybe all these physicists with their degree’s and Ivy League college’s are all wrong, maybe consciousness is a mystery only explained only after we die and meet our true creator.

[equinox]

You'll never find the evidence, if you knew the truth would that strengthen your faith knowing there was life after death or would you loose faith if you knew there was nothing. Whoever set this up was only evidence you have is faith but do you believe is the question 🤔.

[nephew_tom]

David Chalmers needs some yoga, vedanta and tantra...
Then he will realize that dualism is silly and will have/see the evidences.

[jano]

The soul is the conceptualization of awareness from the ego/self perspective. Awareness resides in the heart, once it is taken to the front, thoughts become secondary, and you can feel that everything is awarness. Objective evidence will never grasp this, and this has huge implications for the individual and society.

[dogsarentpeople]

At this point I don’t trust any philosopher that doesn’t look like a homeless guy

[ScarredRomeo]

Anything that is immaterial is incorruptible, so it is potentially eternal.

Metaphysics is the study of being qua being, and unless you’re a physicalist, you believe that is inclusive of both material and immaterial beings.

Aristotle believed the soul to be the *form* of a living thing. He also believed the mind to be immaterial because of its power of abstraction, which is its ability to know and understand concepts, the essences of things apart from their physical instantiation.

It’s ironic how he says he believes in mathematics as some kind of anti-position to believing in the immortality of the soul. Math is an abstraction, and thus formal and immaterial. A paper by James Ross titled “The Immaterial Aspects of Thought” argues for this, because pure forms like mathematics or logical operators like modus ponens are determinate, whereas the physical is indeterminate. What the latter means is we can not know with certainty what formal process, e.g., algorithm, a physical instantiation of it is running due to its intrinsic physical limitations.

It is not a far cry then to believe in an immortal soul from our own introspection.

This is why the ancients said, “He who knows himself knows His Lord.”

[christiancastruita]

I am a physicist and when I began I thought everything was just something mathematical. That is, colors, pain, etc., are just mathematical patterns in the physical world. It took me a while to realize, while that's true, I cannot describe color or the feeling of pain with math. They are separate things, and somehow they are linked together. As Chalmers said, we can map our mathematical brain signals corresponding to things like color. One of the possibilities I want to explore is stimulating the brain so we experience a new color.

[gregariousguru]

There is no empirical evidence that matter brings rise experience, or that natural law brings rise to consciousness. Claiming its natural law that did it is just another way of saying, "we don't know how this phenomena exist at all or why it even exists."

[blakelandry]

The concept of the soul is probably the most dead idea in all of theology. We know that your brain is purely who you are. Any damage to specific regions can completely change who you are, what you believe and create a new personality.

[johnnastrom]

Great interview with Chalmers. I wish Robert would do an interview with Peter Russel or Tom Campbell.