Topics Mind

Question What happens to the souls of people who are in a coma?

Accepted:
August 2, 2008

Comments

Short answer: People (in comas or otherwise) don't have souls, so the question doesn't arise.

Longer answer: The idea of a soul is, in one main tradition, the idea of an entity, quite distinct from our physical body, which can at least in principle survive independently of the body (and is often thought to be immortal), is the locus of conscious mental activity and is the initiator of our actions as self-aware agents. So, this idea of a soul goes with a dualist or two-component view of the person as compromising a material body and an immaterial soul or mind.

Most contemporary philosophers of mind think that there are no good reasons to accept this kind of dualism, and very good reasons not to do so. For some of the arguments, see the opening chapters of The Philosophy of Mind: an Introduction, by myself and O.R. Jones, or any one of a couple of dozen other introductory books on the mind. So most philosophers hold that people don't have souls (that isn't, of course, to deny that people are sentient, intelligent creatures: it is just to insist that being minded isn't a question of having a spooky immaterial component).

Question What happens to the souls of people who are in a coma? Accepted:August 2, 2008

Question What happens to the souls of people who are in a coma?

Accepted:
August 2, 2008