No plot spoilers here, just wanted to flag a bit of poor reasoning that shows up in Chapter 39:
I shouldn't have believed it even for all of thirty seconds! Because if people had souls there wouldn't be any such thing as brain damage, if your soul could go on speaking after your whole brain was gone, how could damage to the left cerebral hemisphere take away your ability to talk?
This is a surprisingly common fallacy. Just because X depends on Y, it doesn't follow that X depends on nothing but Y. A phenomenon may involve more than just its most obvious failure point.
To illustrate: Suppose I'm trapped in a box, and my only way to communicate with the outside world is via radio communication. Someone on the other end argues that I don't really exist -- "There's no person beyond the radio receiver, for if there was then there wouldn't be any such thing as damaged radios!" Pretty silly, huh? But people say this kind of thing in defense of physicalism all the time.
(N.B. This is not to defend the existence of souls. It's just to point out that this particular argument against them is invalid.)
Did these fundamentally arbitrary assertions get more stupid? That's an angel dancing on the head of a pin argument.
Notice that those weren't the assertions before we learned about brains. The mind was a spirit/soul mysteriously trapped in a physical body. Then we started poking around in brains, and finding that the mind didn't seem to work so well when bad things happened to the brain. So minds retreat to epiphenomenalism. Then they can retreat in time, and only actually do anything after you're no longer alive, and no one can see anything actually happening.
So, yes, the original theory of the soul got less likely after we learned about brains, but your new theory of the soul, specifically crafted to avoid contradiction with the new evidence, might not have.
God, souls, immaterial minds, elan vital, essences, etc., are all a bunch of cockroaches, always scurrying back into the darkness, retreating from the expanding light of evidence. How many retreats do we need to see before we're convinced they will never be able to stand their ground?
I anticipated the "functional swap at death" argument, as it was the logical next rampart to retreat behind, but thought it was pointless to say anything about it. I think we've learned by now that the chase never ends. I could just as well say that your mind will continue only if you had duck within a week of your death, and the Spirit of the Duck was within you to transfer the function of your mind to live out the rest of eternity in a lamp post. That's a spiritual lamp post, of course. We can't actually see the the lamp post, you silly goose. Or should I say, silly duck?
We really need a clear and concise statement for the rejection of the infinite class of arbitrary assertions consistent with all currently known data.
The first was an assertion before we knew more about brains. Richard Carrier in particular believes that this is pretty much what Paul and early Christians believed 1,2; that you need to be given a new body in the resurrection in order to have life after your normal body is destroyed. According to Carrier and others it wasn't an uncommon belief that humans gained another better body spiritual body at the resurrection. Spiritual body in this case doesn't mean non-physical, but instea... (read more)