Matthew Cobb

On the other hand, it's what I think most neuroscientists would have said.

There is no soul or there's certainly no spirit.

The word soul in the title is a bit of a cheat.

It was partly there to...

to get people to buy it.

I mean, there's very little about the soul in the book.

He says something like, I mean, so he was an agnostic with very strong atheist tendencies.

I think like most scientists, you know, who would claim to be atheists.

In fact, they're really an agnostic because, you know,

Just maybe there's possibility, but there's no evidence.

So what he said was, when we've understood consciousness, then we'll know whether there's anything left over, right?

If there's something missing, then maybe that could be a soul.

But that's it.

So really what he's doing is trying to sum up

materialist approaches to thought, to the mind, to brain function, which, I mean, his editor got cross with him and said, why is this astonishing?

Doesn't everybody think this?

And he basically said, you need to get out more and talk to religious people because religious people get very cross with you.

You know, and that's who he's aiming at.

So most of the book is a summary of neuroscience as it stood at the time.

And although it's out of print now,