Week 4 Post 5

Francis Crick does not believe in the soul. This is quite a bold statement to read as a person who bases a lot of his decisions on the idea of having a pure soul as much as possible. For me, and I feel a lot of other people as well, my conscious is contained in my soul. I do good things because I want my soul to be as pure as possible in order to pass through the gates of heaven. Crick says, "man has no soul, no spiritual self which transcends his/her physical frame. What we take to be the soul, Crick argues, is nothing more than a complex network of neurons. We are to the very core physical beings who have somehow deceived ourselves into believing that we are something more, something non-material, something transcendent." But what is his proof?

Crick believes that everything is based physically. He compares the conscious to senses such as sight at hearing. He believes that because these things occur because of physical things in the body, that the conscious comes from neurons based in the brain. He calls the fallacy that people have where they think there is a little person inside them telling them whats right and wrong "Homunculus" which is Latin for "little man". Essentially, he does not believe in a soul because he believes the conscious is contained in a group of neurons in the body.