The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 60 of 254
Soul as light bulb, brain as socket
‘What I have argued,’ he writes, ‘… is that without a functioning brain, the soul will not function (i.e. have conscious episodes) – not that it will not exist.’9 Swinburne uses the analogy of a light bulb to explain this. ‘The soul is like a light bulb and the brain is like an electric light socket. If you plug the bulb into the socket and turn the current on, the light will shine. If the socket is damaged or the current turned off, the light will not shine. So, too, the soul will function (have a mental life) if it is plugged into a functioning brain.’10 But, like a magician, it is always possible that God could cause an unplugged bulb to light up if he so wanted: ‘maybe there are other ways of getting souls to function other than plugging them into brains’. This analogy ironically shows how far materialist conceptions have come, since it is the mirror image of a much older view: that it is the body which requires animating by an immaterial soul. The philosopher Avicenna, for instance, thought that the soul animated and controlled the body, even though it did not come into existence before it.11 That even a dualist today accepts that bodies power souls and not vice versa is indicative of widespread belief in the materialist basis of the world.