Daniel Dennett on Consciousness and the soul
Dennett argued that consciousness is fully explicable in physical terms and that the 'soul' is a prescientific holdover.
Daniel Dennett spent his career dismantling the idea that consciousness requires anything beyond the physical brain. In Consciousness Explained (1991) — a title his critics joked should have been called 'Consciousness Explained Away' — he argued that what we call subjective experience is the product of multiple parallel neural processes, none of which individually constitutes a 'self.'
Dennett's view, sometimes called 'strong functionalism,' holds that there is no hard problem of consciousness — or rather, that the hard problem dissolves once we abandon the intuition that there must be 'something it is like' to be conscious over and above what the brain does. Consciousness, on his account, is what the brain does, not something the brain has.
For the argument about the soul, this is devastating. If consciousness can be fully explained by neuroscience (even if we haven't yet completed the explanation), then the soul is explanatorily redundant. Dennett compared it to vitalism — the once-popular idea that living things contain a special 'life force.' Biology dissolved that mystery without finding the force. Neuroscience, Dennett predicted, would do the same for the soul.
“The mind is the brain. More precisely, the mind is what the brain does — not a ghost in the machine, but the machine itself, doing what it does.”
“There is no single, unified 'self' inside the brain. The self is a useful fiction — a story the brain tells about itself.”