Bertrand Russell on Consciousness and the soul
Russell regarded the soul as a prescientific concept rendered unnecessary by modern psychology and neuroscience.
Russell approached the question of the soul as an empiricist and a logician. He argued that the concept of a unified, persistent self — the 'soul' of religious tradition — does not survive philosophical scrutiny. What we call the self is a bundle of experiences, memories, and dispositions that change continuously. There is no stable, immaterial substance underlying these changing states.
In The Analysis of Mind (1921) and subsequent works, Russell developed a neutral monist position that rejected both traditional materialism and traditional dualism. Mental events and physical events are, on his account, different ways of organising the same underlying reality. This eliminates the need for an immaterial soul while acknowledging the reality of conscious experience.
Russell also argued that the soul hypothesis was motivated by the desire for personal immortality rather than by evidence. The wish to survive death is understandable but does not constitute evidence that survival is possible. Every observable fact about consciousness — its dependence on brain function, its alteration by injury and drugs, its development through childhood and decline in old age — points to consciousness as a product of the brain, not a property of an immaterial soul.
“There is no reason to suppose that our brains are anything more than elaborate machines. The soul is as unnecessary a hypothesis as the ether.”
“All the evidence goes to show that what we regard as our mental life is bound up with brain structure and organized bodily energy.”