In his book “The Concept of Mind” (1949) Gilbert Ryle attacked what he called the “official doctrine” of dualism or “the doctrine of the ghost in the machine”, arguing that the idea of a separate and particularly a separable soul depends on a “category error” or misuse of language.  To explain the idea of a category mistake he used the analogy of a foreigner watching a game of cricket and asking to see the “team spirit” as another feature of the game, alongside bats, balls and fielders. He also uses the analogies of a tourist visiting Oxford and asking to see “the university” separately from the colleges, libraries etc. that make it up, and of a discussion about the British Constitution confusing people into believing that there is such a document. Ryle means that when we talk about the “soul” we are confused into thinking that it is something separate from how the brain and body function, which implies that it might also be separate.  Clearly, dualists ranging from the Substance Dualists Plato and Descartes through to the Modified Dualist Aristotle, Critical Dualists Popper and Eccles and Property Dualist Chalmers would disagree with Ryle.  They all argue that there is a separate soul, which for Plato and Descartes is separable also. Nevertheless, Ryle successfully showed that dualists are wrong, meaning that he was right to say that talk about the soul rests on a category error.

Firstly, the arguments for substance dualism and the existence of a separable soul are deeply unimpressive.  Plato argued for the soul using arguments from affinity, opposites and simplicity which are mere assertions arising from Plato’s general metaphysical worldview and theory of the forms. His claim that recollection supports the existence of an immortal, pre-existent soul, articulated in the Meno through the example of the slave-boy learning geometry, is similarly unconvincing.  Chomsky’s nativism explains how the brain is structured or “hard-wired” with linguistic and mathematical concepts, so our facility in learning these can be explained biologically rather than by appealing to a separable soul.  Descartes was more sophisticated than Plato, accepting that universals are pure ideas rather than metaphysical realities in a separate “world of the forms” and yet his worldview is also antiquated. Advances in science and technology show that Descartes is wrong to give up on sense-observations as a way of understanding reality and wrong to see ultimate reality as conceptual.  Similarly, Descartes is wrong to claim that “I” am my soul when as Chan observed, what he regards as the “soul” is so affected by brain injury and drugs and when research into neuro-biology so falsifies his theories about the pineal gland.  In the end, both Plato and Descartes appeal to how we feel to support their substance dualism.  While it is true that most people feel like souls and not like bodies, having a self-concept that is largely unchanged by time or physical impairment, as both Norman Malcolm and Brian Davies have observed, the way I feel is not necessarily the way things are.  Just because I feel sober doesn’t mean that I am sober!  This shows that talk of a separable soul is confused and unconvincing, making Ryle’s argument that it is based on a category error and misuse of language convincing.

Secondly, the arguments for a weaker form of dualism, whereby the soul is separate but not separable, are more convincing than those for substance dualism and a separable soul, but in the end even “modified dualism” is still “giving up on science” as Dennett put it.  Aristotle’s claim that the soul exists as the formal cause of the body, being separate but not able to exist without a body, makes sense of both experience and the lack of evidence for a separable soul, but there is little really to support his assertion that the soul exists separately, his theory of the tripartite soul let alone his claim that the Sophia part of the rational soul might be immortal.  Similarly, while Popper’s argument for critical dualism is compelling, using world 3 evidence such as art or music as evidence for the existence of a mind or soul and world 1, in practice his own research with Eccles into the operation of the frontal lobes shows that the creativity he cites as evidence for a separate mind or soul can in fact be explained in physical, material terms. Chalmers’ property dualism is little more persuasive as although he is right to suggest that there are physical objects and separately, how we experience them as qualia, the fact that he links them and sees them as two poles of the same reality suggests that qualia do not truly support the existence of a separate mind or soul.  While as Blackmore admits, we do not yet understand the “Hard Problem” of consciousness, our lack of material explanations are not a conclusion that something immaterial exists.  It follows that we should continue looking for material explanations of consciousness and embrace Ryle’s suggestion that “the soul” is not really a separate entity but rather a product of our language and limited understanding at the present time.

On the other hand, Ryle’s claim that category errors explain all talk about a separate or separable soul could be too simple.  It is true that Ryle’s behaviourism struggles to account for the “reality” of mental events in the imagination or memory, or for qualia.  Frank Jackson’s 1982 thought experiment “Mary’s Room” convinces many that there is something more that we learn through subjective experience than we could ever learn theoretically, suggesting that there is a mind or soul whose activity and experiences cannot be described in physical terms.  Also, Popper’s suggestion that “world three” provides verifiable evidence for the activity of and so the existence of the soul is persuasive. However, in the end just because neuroscience cannot as yet explain the hard problem of consciousness doesn’t mean that one day it won’t.  As Dennett wrote and as Blackmore agreed, “dualism is giving up”.  It is also true that there is significant evidence for paranormal experiences, ranging from near death experiences to telekinesis. Vardy lists ten different types of paranormal experience which suggest the existence of minds or souls separately from bodies.  HH Price also confirms that the possibility of out-of-body existence makes sense in relation to both logic and our human experience.  Pam Reynolds’ near death experience is probably the most famous example of a near death experience where there is medical evidence that what she experienced happened when the brain had no electrical activity at all.  Dr Sam Parnia’s extensive research into near death experiences shows that experiences like Pam’s are neither rare nor explicable in physical or material terms as the product of brain activity.  Nevertheless, Blackmore’s research showed that there is much less hard evidence for paranormal activity than is claimed, concluding after 25 years that all the reports she had investigated were either mistaken or in some cases fraudulent.  Dawkins would agree that so-called evidence of paranormal events should be approached sceptically and placed in the context of the weight of evidence against their possibility.  It follows that, dualists go well beyond the evidence in concluding the existence of a separate, let alone a separable, soul on the basis of very slight evidence indeed.

In conclusion, Ryle was right to dismiss talk of a separate or separable soul and argue that this is the product of ignorance or confusion.  Materialism, as I have argued, is much more persuasive than any form of dualism.  Of course, Ryle’s argument is rather more specific than that, claiming that all discussion of soul rests on a “category error” and it is probably fair to say that this is an overstatement.  Sometimes people use the word soul in a metaphorical sense, what Dawkins called a soul 2 sense, which is not quite the same as making a category error.  However, the thrust of Ryle’s argument, that dualism is a false doctrine, still stands.