What Can Science Tell Us About the Soul?
Suppose you found someone with no understanding of anything, to whom everything in the world is an amazing mystery.
You then show this person a totally unique, one of a kind song printed on a record, with no other copies in the world. When you play it on a record player, the man remarks that the music sounds beautiful.
When you tell him it’s merely the product of a machine in operation, he insists that the music is not at all "machine-like". It's fluid, artistic, unique. “Surely”, he says, “It is something separate from the machine entirely, even if the two occupy the same space.”
This seems obvious to him only because he doesn’t understand that it's all coming from physical information engraved into the vinyl surface of the record. Something so seemingly complicated and magical, in reality, comes from the arrangement of atoms.
What happens if you set fire to that record player, and the record melts and cracks with it? Where does the song go? Does it really “go” anywhere? Isn’t it simply destroyed, as the vinyl it’s engraved into cracks, warps and melts?
It's not a perfect analogy as a record simply stores information where the brain processes it as well, but it illustrates how a phenomenon like human personality can appear totally different and separate from the lump of grey matter it arises from.
One commonly proposed idea holds that the brain is not a computer, but instead works more like a radio receiver which is tuned to receive an individual's specific "consciousness signal". The largest single problem with this idea is the enormous complexity of the brain. Below you will see the extremely simple circuit diagram for a radio control receiver:
If indeed we are not our brains but ghosts which live within the brain or control it from afar, why is the brain so complex? Why does it process information in a computer-like fashion? Why does it store memories? Why do emotions provably arise from brain activity? Why is personality demonstrably neurological?
Shouldn't the soul do all of these things? If it doesn't, then it isn't really "you", is it? Or, if neuroscience is wrong about everything, and the soul does all of the things above, then what do we need brains for? Why carry around such a complicated, computer-like, calorie hungry organ when all it does is receive a signal?
The other argument I frequently hear is that of course scientists cannot detect the soul, because they are trying to detect an immaterial phenomenon using material instruments. Dualists believe that immaterial beings and forces are noninteractive with the material world, as otherwise we would be able to see them, hear them and so on.
But this is where the Problem of Interaction comes into play. If the soul cannot be detected because it is immaterial, and the material and immaterial do not interact, then how does the soul interact with the brain in such a way as to control it?
Thank you for bringing awareness to these topics.
'Thinking' you can understand your true essence with the mind, does not work. Your mind is better suited as a tool, like a car or computer.
You come before mind. Your true essence does not have to 'attach' to thought. It is free to dwell on thought or to ignore thought. When you spend enough time between thoughts, deep realization occurs. Life becomes easy.
But, generally it takes strife and torment endured over long periods of time, before one stops looking 'out' and instead looks 'in'.
That isn't how neurologists do it. They are assisted by computers, instruments, and other tools of the sort you referenced. It's also not just one person endeavoring to understand the brain, but a great many, coming at it from different angles. This represents a distributed intelligence much more powerful than a single human brain, in possession of artificial perceptive capacities that it lacks.
These are some nice looking words. I wonder what experiments have been carried out to discern whether they accurately reflect reality.
Thousands (millions?) of meditators have experienced various levels of awareness without thought, especially of narrowly defined linguistic thought. I am one of them, but only of momentary gaps between thoughts, because I kind of suck at it. Much science on this, though in its early stages, from researchers and "athletes of the mind," who meditate more deeply and regularly, working together.
www.mindandlife.org
I personally don't jump from that fact to a soul, but until we have better theory, it has to remain an open question. This seems like an advance, though I've only read the free chapter online. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/being-no-one
We do. The brain is something like a biological computer. Damaging specific parts of it has predictable impairing effects on the aspects of cognition they're known to be responsible for. It has been demonstrated that memories are stored locally. It has been demonstrated that emotions arise from brain activity. Everything determined about the brain so far bears out the view that we're basically biological robots, and we no more survive our own death than the contents of a pulverized hard drive.
Except for those parts of us stored in other people's brains, and in our writings, and in our environments (as @mada writes about occasionally). The whole concept of storage is pretty tricky, since the embodied cognition people and the robotics people have been showing how many of our responses are just re-computed on the fly every time.
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/06/outfielder-problem.html
I wrote about the evolving history of memory as a concept here a couple of months ago.
http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=columns&vol=randall_hayes&article=007
I'm not so much arguing against your hypothesis as making a strong personal claim as a card-carrying neuroscientist that neuroscience as a field does not yet have good answers to these questions, and should therefore remain humble in the face of our ignorance. The Epstein article quoted above, though I agree with some of it, is perhaps not the best example of the attitude I favor.
https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer
Though on a second reading it's more temperate than I 'remembered.'
Are we all just 3D hologram frequencies?? The holographic universe!
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I'd be willing to posit that we lack the proper instrumentation to measure it. In the same way we're as of yet currently unable to measure gravity directly, perhaps we simply lack the instrumentation or proper sophistication to discover or measure what is referred to as a soul.
Maybe, but the soul is not a new concept. It is a very old one. Ancient man has a very poor track record when it comes to predicting cutting edge scientific discoveries in the modern era. We are probably not about to discover Griffons or Nephilim for example.
I class the soul with stuff like that. Not hyper advanced and beyond our current understanding, but rather a misunderstanding of where personality arises from which neurology is in the process of correcting.
And that may well be the case. If so, then I hope I will stand corrected. I use gravity as an example because there were plenty of mystical explanations or non-explanations as to why things fell to the earth. That these explanations happened in antiquity doesn't negate the idea that gravity does exist; rather, they reinforce it. Perhaps a "soul" is simply a metaphysical placeholder for something we have yet to understand fully.
This has been a subject I have been intensely fascinated about, particular with regards to artificial sentient life that we will one day no doubt create.
Indeed. Gravity's effects were immediately observable to ancient man though. What I meant is the sort of stuff that is believed to be unobservable. Outside of our realm of experience entirely. Whenever science discovers totally new stuff we had no idea about, so called unknown unknowns, it is never a vindication of some ancient legend. Rather it's something so weird, nobody ever thought to predict it, like magnetars or white holes.
We can also directly observe that humans are conscious. As with gravity, ancient man invented his own explanation for this, but not a particularly well founded or rigorous one. It can be said with certainty that the phenomenon does exist, but naturally that does not vindicate the traditional/supernatural explanation for it.
I am inclined to think that the "supernatural" is not actually a category of real things, but a collection of early human misunderstandings. As we find out the real causes for the observed phenomena, they move from the supernatural into the natural.
What does this mean for the soul? One way I like to look at it is that we are not strictly the atoms which comprise our brains. Otherwise we would cease to exist after 7 years, by which time every atom which comprises our brains has been replaced. Rather, we are the configuration of those atoms.
We are a pattern, referred to by neurologists as a connectome. There is some validity to discussing patterns as inherent, non-physical "things". But then for there to be a pattern, there must be something for that pattern to occur in. Many emergent phenomena are like this.
Evolution is real, but can you hold it? Can you point to it? It exists as a confluence of natural forces, living creatures and their environment. It has a material basis, but exists only as a pattern of interactions. It may be thought of as nonphysical in one sense, yet it would not exist if not for the creatures, environments and forces it refers to.
I stumbled across the explanatory gap in another post I just read through, and I was curious about your thoughts on the matter. Honestly I hadn't really given it much thought, and I don't know if it's necessarily relevant, but it seems to fall in line with what you were talking about regarding connectomes and non-physical patterns that are expressed in physical reality.
I do think that the very fact that qualitative experiences cannot, as yet, be described in purely physical terms points to there being more to it. I would still posit that describing this gap as indirect evidence for something more driving human experience beyond the mechanical function of our neurology. I'm certain as time and technology progresses we will be able to measure and predict with incredible precision how our subjective experiences are expressed, but I'm unconvinced as to whether or not that will shed light on why they matter or how they're qualified by individuals. It may not even matter in the long run, the same way understanding gravity is not necessary to know that falling haphazardly out of a three story building will likely result in serious injury.
I just want to say I am extremely pleased with the conversations we've had here and elsewhere. I like in-depth discussions like these, even on topics where you and I may differ, where courtesy is the norm, and not the exception. Thanks for being civil and for being intelligent.
I like what you write excellent congratulations
Thank you
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