The vanishing of the "soul" under neuroscience

I had known the name "Crick" to be associated with "Watson" because when we studied biology in high school, we got acquainted with the structure of the human DNA as discovered by "Watson and Crick."

I had the image of a Siamese twin attached at the waist.

That "Crick" had a separate identity of his own and composed an astounding, book called The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search For the Soul was unknown to be, till it was referenced in the illuminating NYT Opinion piece by Erik Parens, an expert in bioethics. 

Parens is appreciative of Cricks scientific approach to an understanding of what it means to be human, but is critical of the one-sidedness of the approach as well.

Published in 1994, Crick's book is evidently on the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy (if "soul" is believed to be the province of philosophy).

Raised in Christianity and the philosophy that we call Platonic, Crick was taught about the impermanence of the body and the permanence and ergo superiority of the soul. The soul, preaches the Platonic Christian admixture, is "real", i.e. more "real" than the body, which is but an illusory placeholder for the soul. Moreover, the soul is capable of reason and freewill on its own.

The scientist in Francis Crick revolted against this notion of the body as illusory and unreal container of the soul, the real seat of our humanity. 

In The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick looked at the body/soul dichotomy through the lens of neuroscience and wrote of the human subject:

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Paren interprets Crick's reduction of the human subject into a well nigh object of atomic and subatomic parts:

“You” think that you are something special, a subject who experiences joys and sorrows, memories, ambitions, a sense of identity and a free will. But that, Crick wants to inform you, is an illusion. “You” are an object. “You” are your body, a collection of nerve cells, albeit enmeshed amidst many other kinds of cells.