"Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died"

Paper Summary:

This paper reviews and critiques the Tom Wolfe essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died", about how neuro-science has brought humanity to the brink of a final mechanistic and deterministic view of human nature. In the first section entitled "Who's Afraid of Tom Wolfe?", the author thoroughly discusses and then refutes, each of Wolfe's arguments and scientific predictions. In the paper's second section, titled "Into the Abyss," the author assesses Wolfe's views of the divine, comparing it with his own and those of other modern thinkers. The paper concludes with the author's opinion that Wolfe's essay is flawed since it revolves around naive, positivistic notions of "science", which are highly controversial and essentially faulty. Therefore, the author indicates that he does not believe it is time to do away with centuries-old notions of spirituality and human nature.

Outline
Part I: Who's Afraid of Tom Wolfe?
Part II: Into the Abyss

From the Paper:

"Wolfe starts his essay with the enthusiastic prediction that, "by 2006, the entire digital universe is going to seem like pretty mundane stuff compared to a new technology." This new technology, he announces, is "brain imaging." Brain imaging allows scientists to "actually see the genes light up inside the brain." Neuroscientists like Edward O. Wilson are about to discover "the physical repositories of such philosophical and religious concepts as "'the mind,' 'the self,' 'the soul,' and 'free will' that are already believed in by scholars." Genetics, argue Wilson and Wolfe, "determine not only things such as temperament, role preferences, emotional responses, and levels of aggression, but also many of our most revered moral choices, which are not choices at all in any free-will sense but tendencies imprinted in ... regions of the brain."

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