Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion

by Sam Harris

The idea of a soul arises from the feeling that our subjectivity has a unity, simplicity, and integrity that must somehow transcend the biochemical wheelworks of the body. But the split-brain phenomenon proves that our subjectivity can quite literally be sliced in two. (This is why Sir John Eccles, a neuroscientist and a committed Christian, declared, against all evidence, that the right hemisphere of the divided brain must be unconscious.) This fact has interesting ethical repercussions. For instance, the biologist Lee Silver wonders what we should do if a person with a split brain wanted to have her right hemisphere removed because she could no longer endure the conflict with her “other self.” Would this be a therapeutic intervention or a murder? However, the most important implications are for our view of consciousness: It is divisible—and, therefore, more fundamental than any apparent self.