The mind is software that your brain runs. Whatever else software is, it is also an actual physical pattern of states of the substrate it is running on, and this pattern is sufficient to explain everything it does.
I can’t tell you precisely which patterns of doped silicon and electric charges combine to make the software I am using to type this. Someone with an electron microscope, a clean room and a large jug of fuming nitric acid could have a go finding out; they could literally read out the software, because although a useful abstraction, it consists of a pattern of physical, observable entities and effects. Security researchers looking to extract codes from secure chips do exactly this, though for even slightly complex things the amount of work involved in reverse engineering this way is beyond what a single human can accomplish. This lack of knowledge on my part, though, does not make the software nonexistent, and complete understanding wouldn’t render it illusory either; it’s still a useful label to apply to a part of the world that actually exists. We don’t need to posit any kind of ghost or homunculus or tsukumogami or soul to explain my ipad: what there physically is is enough.
I can’t tell you precisely what combinations of charges and patterns of neural connectivity combine to make a mind. People with large surgery rooms, implants and scanning electron microscopes are working on exactly this problem, and each day learn a little more, though there is too much complexity for even a large group of people to grasp in their lifetimes. Neither the knowledge nor the lack of it alters how minds work. We don’t need to posit an external entity to explain the mind: what there physically is in the body is enough, and knowing how it works won’t make it go away.
(We could use “soul” to refer to the abstraction I describe above, I guess, like we use “software” for patterns of electric charge and magnetised rust. The word carries enough baggage and assumptions, though, to make it much worse than useless for the purpose - it’s like using “God” to mean literally the planet Earth: the framing is so utterly pointless that no-one ever does that unless trying to obfuscate and smuggle unsupported concepts into the discussion for a later bait+switch.)
I can’t tell you precisely which patterns of doped silicon and electric charges combine to make the software I am using to type this. Someone with an electron microscope, a clean room and a large jug of fuming nitric acid could have a go finding out; they could literally read out the software, because although a useful abstraction, it consists of a pattern of physical, observable entities and effects. Security researchers looking to extract codes from secure chips do exactly this, though for even slightly complex things the amount of work involved in reverse engineering this way is beyond what a single human can accomplish. This lack of knowledge on my part, though, does not make the software nonexistent, and complete understanding wouldn’t render it illusory either; it’s still a useful label to apply to a part of the world that actually exists. We don’t need to posit any kind of ghost or homunculus or tsukumogami or soul to explain my ipad: what there physically is is enough.
I can’t tell you precisely what combinations of charges and patterns of neural connectivity combine to make a mind. People with large surgery rooms, implants and scanning electron microscopes are working on exactly this problem, and each day learn a little more, though there is too much complexity for even a large group of people to grasp in their lifetimes. Neither the knowledge nor the lack of it alters how minds work. We don’t need to posit an external entity to explain the mind: what there physically is in the body is enough, and knowing how it works won’t make it go away.
(We could use “soul” to refer to the abstraction I describe above, I guess, like we use “software” for patterns of electric charge and magnetised rust. The word carries enough baggage and assumptions, though, to make it much worse than useless for the purpose - it’s like using “God” to mean literally the planet Earth: the framing is so utterly pointless that no-one ever does that unless trying to obfuscate and smuggle unsupported concepts into the discussion for a later bait+switch.)