[Published in the Philippines Free Press, 10 April 1971.] THE SOUL AND BERTRAND RUSSELL Rolando M. Gripaldo “So long as we adhere to the conventional notions of mind and matter we are condemned to a view of perception which is miraculous.” The words are those of Bertrand Russell who, in his essay, “What is the Soul?”, reasons: “Mind (or soul) and matter were something like the lion and the unicorn fighting for the crown; the end of the battle is not the victory of one or the other, but the discovery that both are only heraldic inventions.” The history of philosophy is replete with bad arguments as to whether the body is the creation of the mind or the mind is an emanation of the body. The controversy has been raging since the time of the ancient Greeks. British empiricist David Hume, after analyzing the mind through introspection came to the conclusion that no particular soul entity exists and that the mind is merely the sum total of its states. Hume’s analysis was an extension of the conclusion drawn by Bishop Berkeley that matter is but an invention of individual minds and that ultimately, the physical universe and everything in it are mere ideas in the mind of God. Apparently influenced by Hume, some psychologists later asserted that the mind as a thing does not exist. William James regarded consciousness not as an entity but as the function of knowing, that is, as a stream of consciousness. Russell offered a solution to this controversy by invoking the conclusions of modern physics and physiological psychology: “Physicists assure us that there is no such thing as matter, and psychologists assure us that there is no such thing as mind.” Modern physics is becoming increasingly mental, for in the words of physicist James Jeans: “…the cumulative evidence of various pieces of probable reasoning make it seem more and more likely that reality is better described as mental than as material.” On the other hand, modern psychology is trying to reduce what appears to be mental activities to bodily activities. If mind could be made less and less mental and matter less and less material, thought Russell, then there must be “something that is neither mind nor body, out of which both can spring.” This philosophy Russell called “neutral monism,” which is neither materialism nor idealism. Reality is something difficult to know. One is tempted to associate the concept of neutral monism with Immanuel Kant’s noumena, Anaximander’s “Boundless Infinite,” and Herbert Spencer’s “Unknowable.” The following is James Jeans’s description of the world of reality: “…deep-flowing stream; the world of appearance is its surface, below which we cannot see. Events deep down in the stream throw up bubbles and eddies on the surface of the stream. These are the transfers of energy and radiation of our common life, which affect our senses and so activate our minds; below these lie deep waters which we can only know by inference. These bubbles and eddies show atomicity, but we know of no corresponding atomicity in the currents below.” To Russell there is no such thing as a substantial “I.” He in fact defined a “thing” as a “class of events” to get rid of the concept “substance.” The physical universe, argued Russell, “consists of events, not of things that endure for a long time and have changing properties.” Modern physics has eliminated empty space and replaced it with a field of force or, in the words of mathematician-philosopher Alfred North whitehead, “a field of incessant activity.” And since matter has been identified with energy which is sheer activity, modern physics sees the particles (electrons, protons, etc.), as intersections of a number of waves of energy. These intersections Whitehead called “point-events,” a collection of which “forms a 1 body such as we ordinarily perceive. The simplest body of this kind is a molecule and a set of molecules forms a lump of ordinary matter, such as a chair or a stone.” In Russell’s phraseology, “The electrons and protons…are only crude first approximation, a way of collecting into a bundle either trains of waves or the statistical probabilities of various kinds of events.” Hence, “what has been thought of as a particle will have to be thought of as a series of events. The series of events that replaces the particle has certain physical properties…but it has no more substantiality than any other series of events that we might arbitrarily single out. Thus ‘matter’ is not a part of the ultimate material of the world…” What the physiologist sees when he examines a brain is, in one sense, in the physiologist, not in the brain he is examining. “We suppose that a physical process starts from a visible object, travels to the eye, there changes into another physical process, causes yet another physical process in the optic nerve, and finally produces some effect in the brain, simultaneously with which we see the object from which the process started, the seeing something ‘mental,’ totally different in character from the physical processes which precede and accompany it… Everything that we can directly observe of the physical world happens inside our heads and consists of mental events in at least one sense of the word mental. It also consists of events which form part of the physical world. The development of this point of view will lead us to the conclusion that the distinction between mind and matter is illusory. The stuff of the world may be called physical or mental or both or neither as we please; in fact the words serve no purpose.” It must be noted that events have causal relations through which we can collect the events into groups. “If the causal relations are of one sort, the resulting group of events may be called a physical object and if the causal relations are of another sort, the resulting group may be called a mind. Any event that occurs inside a man’s head will belong to groups of both kinds; considered as belonging to a group of one kind, it is a constituent of his brain, and considered as belonging to a group of the other kind, it is a constituent of his mind. Thus both mind and matter are merely convenient ways of organizing events.” The nonphilosopher should realize that the common sense point of view contains a number of epistemological errors. For instance, when a person bumps his head against a stone wall, he does not really touch it. Certain electrons and protons in his body are attracted and repelled by certain electrons and protons of the body he thinks he has bumped against. But there is no actual contact. The particles of his body are agitated by their nearness to the particles of the stone wall, thus transmitting a disturbance along his nerves to his brain. Hence the deceptive sensation of contact. When Russell died last year [1970] at the age of 97, one recalled his belief in the nonimmortality of the soul or of matter. Said he: “There can be no reason for supposing that either piece of matter is immortal. The sun is supposed to be losing matter at the rate of millions of tons a minute. The most essential characteristic of mind is memory, and there is no reason whatever to suppose that a memory associated with a given person survives that person’s death. Indeed there is every reason to think the opposite, for memory is clearly connected with a certain kind of brain structure, and since this structure decays at death, there is every reason to suppose that memory also must cease.” [end] 2