I’ve had a question floating around in my mind for a little while now. It’s a question that seems simple at first, but grows in complexity the more I think about it, and it’s taken a long time to untwist all the different pieces into an answer that makes some kind of sense.
The question is: who am I?
Let me try to answer with a few obvious details:
Nice to meet you! We’re officially friends now.
Except I guess that’s not fully me; it’s just a few pieces of basic information. I’d like you to know who I really am, so I suppose I should go into a bit more detail.
Is that enough information? (I’m not drawing every body part.) I’ve told you a few facts and shown you a few details, but I still don’t feel like you know the real Jon Headley yet…
I guess I could show you a few images from my everyday life. For example, here are a couple of the books I’m reading right now:
This is my dog Max, looking sad because he sees food that doesn’t currently belong to him:
And this is a picture of my favourite Welsh mountain, Cadair Idris:
Nice.
I feel like we’re getting a bit closer to who I am now, but it still feels like fairly surface-level stuff.
Maybe I could tell you about a few of my interests: for instance, I’m a musician and composer; I love learning about science and walking in quiet places; I enjoy writing and do a lot of reading; I watch as many films as I can (favourite of 2018 so far: ‘The Rider’); and I like to turn my brain off by playing old video-games.
I could tell you that I’m a really bad cook (I once poisoned myself with a home-made chicken curry), that I know a few words in the Polish language (dzień dobry) or that I hate playing team sports.
Or I could share some stories, like the time I went on a long walk alone through the Yorkshire moors for a week, or the year that I forgot my own brother’s birthday, or the satisfaction I felt when I received my first paycheck for writing music, or the guilt I felt as a kid after stealing a toy from Sunday school.
But I still feel like I’m coming up short. I really want to introduce you to who I am, not just tell you stories about me. Maybe I need to go deeper.
Well… I have a naturally optimistic and hopeful perspective on life, but on bad days I feel like I might just be naive. I was a Christian for most of my life, but I left church and lost my faith a few years ago. I consider myself a spiritual and open person, with a science-loving and skeptical mind. I struggle with crippling self-doubt at times. I’m an introvert, which is fun for me but might make me appear antisocial and shy to some people.
I guess this paints a slightly more detailed picture, but honestly it still doesn’t come close to the full story of who Jon Headley is. What does it take to really know a person?
I feel like I usually have a pretty good grasp on myself. I know what interests me, what puts me in a bad mood and what helps me relax. But then there are other days when I feel like a complete stranger to myself, days when I feel confused or frustrated or depressed or way more hyped up than usual, days when I’m full of self-doubt, days when I’m worried about the future, days when my own actions surprise me.
There are parts of me that I even dislike, tendencies and behaviours that I’m not proud of at all. I do things against my better judgement. I want to go for a run because I know it’s the healthy thing to do, but instead I decide to sit down and watch Youtube videos all day. It feels at times like I’m stood outside of my own actions, watching them from an audience perspective.
How can I possibly explain myself to you, when I can’t even understand myself myself?
I feel like this complex mixture of atoms and neutrons and hopes and dreams and tastes and genes and fears and skin and bone and blood and memory and thought and faith and doubt and chemicals and physics and belief and perception and pleasure and pain and nerves and organs and hobbies and contradictions and blind spots and brain tissue, and all of this just leads me back to the question I started with:
Who am I, really?
I’d like to ask you a couple of morality-based questions here; just try to answer as honestly as you can.
Q1. Is it morally acceptable to tie up Jon Headley and throw him into a lake?
….
Q2. Is it morally acceptable to tie up a rock and throw it into a lake?
…
I hope to God you answered ‘no’ to the first question, and I would make a confident guess that your answer to the second question is ‘yes’ unless you’re some kind of extremely hard-core vegan or something.
So what’s the difference between Jon Headley and a rock?
As you can see, there are plenty of differences here, but the one that I think causes the moral distinction is that Jon Headley is alive, and the rock is not.
Congratulations if you’re able to follow this complicated line of thinking so far.
But what does it mean to be alive? If we took an extremely powerful microscope and looked again at Jon Headley, we’d see a very different picture:
Cells like the one above are the building blocks of all living beings. There are 37.2 trillion of these cells in an average human body; if you lined all of your cells up in single file, they would reach to the Moon and back.
One day, you were a single cell. Over nine months in the womb, you split and multiplied again and again, and different cells somehow knew where to go and how to do different jobs. Some became bone cells, some became nerve cells, some brain cells and blood cells, until eventually trillions of them arranged themselves into the positions necessary to build a human being.
If that doesn’t make you say “WHAAAT??!” then you’re probably reading the wrong article.
Cells are amazing things. They each have a specific job, they sense and react to their environment, they take in energy to fuel themselves, and they reproduce. In other words, they do all the things that we associate with being alive.
But is a cell really alive? Well, no single part of a cell is ‘alive’ in the way we’d normally define it; it’s just dead matter reacting chemically with other dead matter, causing a series of reactions. It’s essentially a tiny robot, governed by the laws of the Universe.
So here’s my question. If, at a basic level, I’m a collection of trillions of robotic, not-alive cells, where does my consciousness come from? Why do I feel like one whole person, one self, rather than feeling like 37.2 trillion separate pieces mashing against each other?
There seems to be more going on here than just physical ingredients. I feel like more than a body. In fact, I often feel like I’m riding around inside my body, using it like some kind of flesh-vehicle to get from place to place. We can see this more clearly with the help of a few thought-experiments:
Thought-Experiment #1
What emotions do you feel when you cut your toenails? Speaking personally, I don’t go through a mourning process. I don’t gather my friends to tell stories about my old toenails and the good times we shared. I don’t bury them in the garden inside tiny little toenail coffins.
Why? Because I don’t feel like I’ve lost any real part of myself. Even though my toenails are technically part of my body, and I have physically changed in a tiny way after cutting them, I don’t feel like a different person.
Thought Experiment #2
Let’s go for something slightly more drastic: what if I was in a terrible shark-related accident (God forbid), and my right arm was bitten off?
This would obviously change my life in certain ways. I’d have to learn how to do everyday tasks with one arm instead of two. I might have some changes in my personality as the result of a traumatic experience.
But still, I don’t think it would take away from who I am: I feel like I would remain basically myself.
Thought Experiment #3
Let’s say we escalated the situation, and instead of a single shark attack, I’m the victim of a horrific piraña-fish feeding frenzy. They really make a meal out of me, devouring every piece of my body in a matter of minutes.
Let’s imagine that I’m somehow kept conscious throughout this vicious attack, watching my body slowly disappear as the ravenous fish eat it up. At what point do I lose my ‘self’?
My natural response is to think that I could lose every part of my body without losing my ‘self’, right up until they eat my head. If I was somehow kept alive as a head in a jar, my natural feeling is that I would still be me.
Thought Experiment #4
Actually, we don’t need to think about shark attacks or piraña-related tragedies. The truth is that almost all of the cells in your body are constantly being replaced. You are literally not the same person that you were ten years ago.
This reminds me of Theseus’ Paradox. Plutarch, an ancient Greek historian, told the story of a famous ship belonging to Theseus (the mythical king of Athens who defeated the Minotaur). After Theseus died, his ship was preserved as a memorial.
Over time, as different parts of the ship grew old and decayed, they were replaced with new timber. The shape and design of the ship remained completely the same, but the material was new. Plutarch wondered what would happen when eventually the entire ship was replaced with new material. The process would be gradual and piece-by-piece, until no original pieces of the ship remained. Would it still be Theseus’ ship? Or a completely different one?
Let’s go back to the human body. Almost all of your physical self has been replaced, multiple times since you were born. So are you still the same person?
My natural response (and I suspect yours too) is that of course you’re the same person. You don’t experience life as successive versions of a human; you feel like a continuous life, growing and changing over the years, but with one single thread running through it all. The parts may change, but the thread remains. This thread is your feeling of having a self.
But how is this possible? If my ‘self’ survives even when all of my physical pieces are replaced, then what kind of thing is the self itself? How is ‘Jon Headley’ even possible in the first place?
When it comes to the ‘Who am I?’ question, most people fall into two basic camps.
First you have have the physicalists, who argue that the mind is nothing more than a set of physical reactions, just as the rest of the body is. What we call the soul is just an illusion, a by-product of neural connections in our brain. If the brain is destroyed, the person is completely destroyed along with it.
Second you have the dualists, who believe that there is a split between our physical substance and our mind (or soul). In this view, even if the body or brain is completely destroyed, the essence of the person continues on somehow, whether in some kind of afterlife or through reincarnation.
The soul is one of those vague, floaty ideas that we are all aware of but can’t necessarily put into words. If I was going to draw a picture of the soul (which I am), then it would look something like this:
Floaty, ghostly, airy, without form; that pretty much describes the idea of ‘the soul’ in my mind.
Christianity (among many other religions) teaches that the soul is your true self, your eternal essence, the ‘you’ that existed before birth and that will continue on for eternity when your physical body dies.
It isn’t just religion that talks about the soul; it’s an idea that pervades our culture, our music, film, and literature. It’s even embedded in our language: think about phrases like ‘soul mates’, ‘soul music’, ‘soul connection’, ’soul food’, ‘old soul’, ‘weary soul’, and ‘soulless’.
People have been talking about the soul pretty much as far back as we can see. It’s an idea that exists in almost all cultures, from Ancient Egypt (the idea of ka) to the Greeks, from Hinduism to modern day Christianity. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica:
“There is evidence even among prehistoric peoples of a belief in an aspect distinct from the body and residing in it.”
But what is this idea of the soul actually based on? Who first came up with the concept? Is a soul something I have or something I am? Where does my soul end and my brain begin? How do we explain what happens to the souls of the mentally ill or people with dementia? Do animals have souls?
Man… there’s a lot to unpack here.
As I’ve been thinking about this article, I’ve found myself switching back and forth between the physicalist and dualist perspectives. Is ‘Jon Headley’ just some kind of illusion created by my brain, or is ‘Jon Headley’ really an immortal, spiritual being living in a human body?
There are some moments where I feel sure that I am an eternal soul, spiritually connected to Truth and Reality and the Universe and Everything:
And then there are other moments, times where I feel completely drained and soulless and mechanical, and I’m convinced that I am nothing but a machine:
I change my mind so often that it’s worth asking: does this even matter? A lot of smart people have spent their entire lives thinking and writing about these ideas, and it can seem unbelievably dense and pointless from the outside. Who cares who I am? I am me. Arguing about the rest of it is just pretentious.
But the more I’ve thought about it recently, the more I’ve realised that this is important.
For one thing, the idea of a ‘soul’ that lasts after our death is actually a core part of many of our beliefs. When I started writing this article I didn’t consider how controversial it may be; now I realise how essential it is to many of our religions and world views. Without the concept of a soul, the promise of an eternal afterlife of bliss or torment doesn’t make sense, and the need to convince others that our beliefs are the right beliefs loses some urgency.
Even for those of us who aren’t religious, the idea of being ‘more than just a body’ is something that most of us hold. Surveys show that 79% of adults in the USA (and 70% in the UK) believe in the human soul. We don’t like to be reduced to physical machines, or to consider that everything we experience comes down to chemical reactions, and I can understand why. I like being a person, and it seems demeaning to describe me as a walking bag of meat driven by purely physical processes.
Our ideas about the soul can also affect our views on all kinds of other issues; like abortion or euthanasia or animal cruelty or the afterlife (to name just a few completely uncontroversial topics). The more I think about it, the more this question seems to actually matter.
So keeping that in mind, let’s go a little bit deeper.
As I said before, my ideas of the soul came primarily from Christianity, and if you’re reading this in the Western world then there’s a good chance your ideas have been formed from the same soil, so this seemed like a good place to begin my search.
To find out where Christian beliefs in the soul originated from, I thought the Bible would be an obvious starting point.
I began with the Old Testament (the Jewish part of the Bible). The English word ‘soul’ pops up several times, as a translation of the Ancient Hebrew word ‘nephesh’ (נפש). The literal translation of this word is ‘living being’, and the first four times the word appears it’s talking specifically about animals: sea life, birds and land creatures.
In fact, the same Hebrew word ‘nephesh’ is translated into English in a variety of different ways. For example:
According to Vine’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, the translation of ’nephesh’ as ’soul’ is problematic:
“(Nephesh is) the essence of life, the act of breathing, taking breath … The problem with the English term ‘soul’ is that no actual equivalent of the term or the idea behind it is represented in the Hebrew language. The Hebrew system of thought does not include the combination or opposition of the ‘body’ and ‘soul’…”
The surprising fact (for me at least) is that the immortal soul isn’t a concept that Jewish people had during Old Testament times. There was no dualistic split between our physical selves and our ‘true’ selves. Nepesh, for the Jews, meant that the body of a human being is the soul of a human being.
Never mind, there’s still another half of the Bible to look at. Let’s move on to the New Testament instead.
The main word to be aware of here is ‘psuche’: this is the word that Greek writers used to translate the Hebrew word ‘nephesh’, and it can be translated as ’soul’, ‘life’ (an animal or a human), ‘mind’ or even ‘heart’ to describe the full force of someone’s being. The use of this single word varies a lot, and is far from a clear and distinct concept of an immortal soul. While there is some talk about eternal life in the New Testament, nowhere does it mention that the human soul is immortal.
Hmm. If we can’t find a strong picture of the soul within the Bible, then why do we find this belief in souls so prevalent among both Christians and Jews today?
Well, as with many beliefs in our modern culture, you can largely trace it back to those cheeky Ancient Greeks, and specifically two of the most influential thinkers of all time, Socrates and Plato.
Socrates, who lived 400 years before Jesus, taught about the existence of the immortal soul, and that when it was set free from the physical body after death it would be rewarded for good deeds or punished for evil ones (sounds a lot like modern Christian beliefs about the afterlife to me).
Plato, who lived 350 years before Jesus, taught a dualistic view of humanity; each human being was a body inhabited by an eternal soul. Plato had an interesting theory that the soul was made of three distinct parts; he compared it to a chariot driver controlling two unruly horses:
This reminds me of Christian teachings about ‘the flesh’: the idea that we have a spiritual side that is good, and a ‘flesh’ side that wants to give in to temptation and must be kept under tight control.
Both Judaism and Christianity became immersed in and influenced by these ways of thinking, and by the first century AD the Jewish philosopher Philo was teaching that ‘the death of a man is the separation of his soul from his body’.
As we move along in time, we can see the idea take a firmer hold within Christian belief. For example, in the 4th Century, a monk called St Gregory of Nyssa wrote a famous and influential dialogue called ‘On The Soul and the Resurrection’, discussing the place of these ideas firmly within Christian belief.
And then we have one of the A-list celebrities of early Christianity, St Augustine himself. Say hello, St Augustine!
Augustine was one of the most influential and respected church fathers, and many of his teachings became firm foundations of Christian belief.
Augustine also followed many of the teachings of Plato, and wrote about the immortality of the soul. He described the soul as:
As you can probably see, his writing was heavily influenced by Greek thinkers, and in turn further influenced Christianity to adapt those ideas for itself.
As the centuries passed, many big-name thinkers discussed the soul and further shaped the idea in public thought; people like Spinoza, Kant, William James, & Rene Descartes (who thought that the soul was located in a tiny, specific part of the brain called the pineal gland).
I’m aware that I’m rushing over a lot here, leaving some great stuff out, and focusing completely on Western thought; but this is a long article already, and it would be impossible (or at least really, really boring) to go through all the wide variety of teachings about the soul through history. What I do want to do is point out the mixing of different cultures and belief systems over time; rather than one distinct and obvious truth about the soul that has always existed, we instead find a growing and changing idea that shifts and expands as more people think about and add to it.
The soul is not a Christian idea, it’s a human idea. It seems to have come from a multitude of sources, and to be almost hard-wired into the way we think. For many cultures, the idea of possessing a soul falls under the category of simple common sense. But as I’ve pointed out before, common sense isn’t always a good guide towards truth.
My next question is this: using the scientific method, is there any evidence to back up the existence of the soul?
Well, when I first started researching for this article, a few friends told me about an experiment that I’d never heard about. Apparently there was real evidence that the soul exists: a scientist had discovered that the exact weight of a human soul was 21 grams.
This seemed like it would be worth looking into, and so I’d like to introduce you to Dr Duncan MacDougall:
In 1901 MacDougall reasoned that if the soul was real, it must be measurable in some way. He wondered whether he might be able to measure the soul by weighing a human body before and after death; the difference in weight could account for the soul leaving the body when it died, flying off into the next life.
To test this hypothesis, Macdougall set up a special bed with weighing scales underneath, and monitored six patients who were close to death, recording their weight throughout the process. He discovered that upon death, there actually was a sudden weight loss in the patient. In his own words:
MacDougall looked for alternative explanations for the weight loss, but none seemed to hold up: for example, it couldn’t be the oxygen escaping the lungs, because when MacDougall measured himself and exhaled as far as he could, there was no weight difference; and a sudden bowel movement at death wouldn’t explain the weight loss either, as any faecal material would still be weighed on the bed.
His only remaining conclusion was that this must be the ‘soul substance’ leaving the body, and the weight of this soul substance was three-quarters of an ounce, or 21 grams.
It’s a fascinating study to read about, intriguing and almost tempting to believe; but by looking closer we can quickly see that it’s a classic example of bad science.
A good scientific theory needs to make accurate predictions that can be repeated. Dr MacDougall used six human bodies for his experiment, and the famous drop of 21 grams only occurred once out of the six tests. Of the other five, the results were varied: two of them had to be discarded; one dropped in weight, then returned to normal, then dropped again; and the final two dropped in weight gradually in completely different amounts.
The measurements were imprecise, the sample size was small, and the results were inconclusive. To explain away the two results that showed gradual decrease in weight, MacDougall even suggested that those particular souls had a ‘sluggish temperament’.
In order to further test his claims, MacDougall performed the experiment again, this time on fifteen dogs. In this test, he found that there was no weight loss upon death. Funnily enough, instead of challenging his theory, MacDougall took the results as evidence for the 21 gram soul; he said that as only humans possessed souls, it was to be expected that there would be no weight change in animals (confirmation bias in action).
Other scientists at the time refuted his theory with other valid explanations of the weight loss, and Macdougall admitted that many more tests were needed before making any real scientific claim, yet he never investigated it further. So, if you’ve heard about the ’21 gram’ theory, now you know: it’s based on literally one measurement.
By the way, after these experiments were over, Dr MacDougall turned his attention to the more serious matter of trying to photograph a soul as it left the body. He never succeeded.
Macdougall’s study was discredited, but that doesn’t disprove the existence of the soul. Actually, since Plato’s time the soul has been described as immaterial and weightless, so of course it couldn’t be measured using weighing scales. That’s just ridiculous.
So is there any good scientific evidence to prove the existence of the soul?
Well, I looked for it. I really did. And I couldn’t find anything. I found stories of out-of-body experiences, interesting (and currently unfounded) attempts to link the soul with quantum mechanics, and people who claimed to remember past lives; but absolutely no observable and repeatable evidence.
What does this mean? It means that the soul currently has no backing in science. That doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t exist, but according to the scientific method, we must place an appropriate amount of confidence in an idea based on the amount of evidence there is to support it. And for the soul, there simply is no evidence.
Still, I can’t shake this very convincing feeling that I am more than just my body. What’s going on here?
We use the word ’soul’ to describe the mind, the will, the emotions, and that extra something that makes us feel like more than just physical bodies. But there’s another word we could use to describe the same idea: consciousness.
Consciousness is the state of being aware of and responsive to your surroundings. Without consciousness, you would feel nothing, think nothing, and experience nothing. You’d be a zombie, driven by instinct, unaware of everything that happened to you.
Using this definition, we can all agree that human beings possess consciousness. But do other creatures have consciousness? It reminds me of a question I often had as a kid: do animals have souls?
When I think of my dog Max, or see pictures like the one below, I am convinced that some animals must have souls:
Awww.
But when I see this fish, there doesn’t seem to be much quite as much going on behind the eyes:
I have to really imagine hard to see anything resembling a soul in one of these beasts:
And then of course you have cats, who as we all know steal souls to feed to their children:
But let’s try swapping the word ‘soul’ for ‘consciousness’. Now the question becomes: are animals conscious? It’s a question that is endlessly debated, and has no definite consensus, but one idea among some neuroscientists makes sense to me.
This idea suggests that different animals may have different ‘levels’ of consciousness. For example, there may be more consciousness in an elephant than in a woodlouse. I can imagine more awareness in a dolphin than a jellyfish. And I would put a cactus on a far lower consciousness level than a chimpanzee.
Having a soul is an either/or option: either you have a soul, or you do not have a soul. But maybe consciousness isn’t a simple on/off switch; maybe consciousness is more like a spectrum.
In this spectrum we move from a rock (no consciousness), to a thermostat (the most basic level of consciousness, simply measuring temperature) to plants and insects, all the way through to dolphins, apes and humans at the far end. Of course this isn’t based on any objective measurement; I’m just using rough examples to make my point.
Maybe the more highly developed a creature is, and the more powerful its brain, the more conscious it is, and the more it displays characteristics that humans associate with something called a ‘soul’.
As evolution did its work over an insane amount of time, the simplest life-forms began to develop greater complexity. Single-celled life became multi-cellular life, sponges became fish, and the first creatures walked on land. Eventually, simple brains evolved. Scientists believe that the first brain system appeared in worms over 500 million years ago. These brains adapted and grew, becoming more and more complex as time went on, until eventually we arrived at the high end of the consciousness spectrum, the human brain.
Now we arrive at the physicalist point of view, and I can already hear some objections:
“A brain is impressive, but it’s still just a physical object: a part of me, but not really who I am. I use my brain, but it couldn’t be the source of all my personality and emotions and the complicated web of stuff that makes up my self. That’s just not enough to explain who I am.”
Well in response, I don’t think you realise how powerful your brain is. Seriously.
In 2014, a massive supercomputer in Japan called the K supercomputer (it has over 700,000 processor cores and 1.4 million GB of RAM if that sort of thing interests you) accurately mapped 1% of one second of human brain activity. It took 40 minutes.
Wait wait wait. Don’t rush past this point.
Something that looks like this…
…took 40 minutes to do 1% of what your brain does every second without you even being aware of it. Look at you go!
Your brain is incredible.
Advances in science in the last few decades have started to uncover a vast amount of information about what happens inside your skull, information that most of our greatest thinkers, from Plato to St Augustine to Descartes, had no clue about. If they did, maybe it would have changed their mind about the immortal soul.
Your brain contains 100 billion neurons (nerve cells that are specialised to carry messages) connected via trillions of synapses. Its size and complexity allows it to build ideas, recognise patterns, learn and acquire skills, filter memories and survive extremely well.
We find it hard to imagine that a physical object like the brain can be responsible for soul-ish things like emotions or personality, but we’ve already identified parts of the brain related to empathy, fear, romantic love, hunger, physical and emotional pain, religious beliefs, and have even found a link between glucose levels in the brain and our ability to resist temptation. That last one really shows me something important: something as intangible and ‘spiritual’ as struggling to resist temptation can actually be shown as a physical event inside my brain, made worse by the simple problem of not having enough fuel.
Even with all that humans have learned about the brain so far, we’re only just getting started. There are so many mysteries and questions regarding the human brain, and so much to explore. But the more we do learn, the more we realise how much of our weird human behaviour comes down to the grey and white matter between our ears.
Interestingly, the human brain has the same basic structure of other mammal brains; it’s not that different to the brain of a chimpanzee. That’s what the theory of evolution would predict, and it backs up the idea of a kind of ‘consciousness spectrum’; we are not on some separate plane to other creatures, but are simply higher up the same ladder due to the way we evolved.
If that’s true, then it raises a whole bunch of other morality questions: for example, should animals have rights according to how conscious they are? Is it morally okay to eat meat? What responsibilities do we have as creatures at the top of the ladder?
I’ve been reading a flipping fantastic book alongside writing this article: ‘I Am A Strange Loop’ by Douglas Hofstadter. I’m going to recommend that you check it out if this stuff interests you; it’s a beautiful, mind-blowing read.
The book is about a lot of things, but the big idea is that consciousness is simply a natural result of what a brain does, and not some magical extra ingredient. The author compares it to a person buying a car:
The point is that whatever the man is trying to purchase as ‘Race-Car Power!!’ isn’t an optional extra with that car: it’s simply a result of how powerful the engine is. If we buy a powerful car, it will automatically have ‘Race-Car Power!!’; if we buy a crap car, then the ‘Race-Car Power!!’ will be much more limited.
Consciousness works in the same way. It’s not a magical extra ingredient like ‘Soul Power!!’ that certain creatures do or don’t have in addition to their physical bodies. It’s a natural side-effect of what a brain is. Once you get to a certain level of brain power, consciousness is an inevitable result.
So, why do we have this feeling of possessing some magical ‘Soul Power!!’? Hofstadter explains that the human brain has two ingredients that lie behind this stubborn idea:
#1 — an ability to perceive the world around us,
and
#2 — an inability to see below the ‘high level’ that we live at.
We’ve already talked about #1, which is how we defined consciousness.
#2 means that we are trapped at the high level of experience where we live our everyday lives: the level of friendships, heartbreak, job offers, language, Christmas trees, Netflix, religious services, checking emails, feeding the dog, taking a bath, clothes and music and forests and rocks and laptops and bedrooms and weekends and temptations and pirañas.
We cannot grasp things that are going on at the low, microscopic level of reality: the world of physics, of atoms and quantum mechanics and 100 billion neurons and 37.2 trillion cells and the septillion atoms that are constantly firing, dying, and being reborn in you every single second. We cannot possibly even begin to comprehend the amount of activity that happens down here each moment, never mind grasp how it could cause the high level experiences that we are familiar with.
In other words, we cannot figure out how physical things like cells and chemicals could cause soul-ish things like emotions and personality, because our brains are completely unable to grasp the complexity of what is going on inside themselves. That’s why we cling to ideas like the soul: because it’s easier for us to grasp at the higher level of perception we live with.
Is your head starting to hurt yet?
In this view, what you call your ‘self’ is something that gradually formed as you grew older, as a result of your brain perceiving itself and the world around it. There was no ‘you’ before you were born, because there was no consciousness before you were born. There is no immortal ‘essence’ of you that would exist without your brain: you are your brain.
If this is all messing with your head a little bit, then don’t worry: it’s messing with mine too, and we’re about to wrap things up so you’ll be just fine.
The main point is this: the way that the brain works means that it is blind to what goes on at a microscopic level. That’s where the feeling of having a soul comes from: it’s a complex illusion caused by your inability to accurately perceive reality.
Here’s one final thing for you to chew over: what would happen if we could copy all of the information contained in your brain over to a robotic body just before you died? Sounds crazy, right?
Well it isn’t as crazy as it sounds: in fact, there’s a lot of very smart people who believe this will be possible within the next century. And we’re making progress: scientists around the world are currently racing to be the first to create a complete map of the human brain. This is a huge goal, unbelievably huge, as we alluded to earlier. But in theory at least, it’s fully possible.
This video blew my mind: scientists have successfully placed a digital copy of a ringworm brain into a small robot, which then proceeds to move in a manner similar to the ringworm, without any programming necessary. It is simply a copy of the ringworm brain controlling the robotic body.
Theoretically, with a powerful enough computer, somebody could copy all the information stored inside your brain, upload it to a computer, and implant it in a robot, which would then think, act, and live exactly like you; building up its own experiences and memories, growing in knowledge and living a normal (but robotic) life. This is not some crazy sci-fi fantasy; it’s something that we seem to be moving towards.
If we could create a robot with a human brain, would that robot have consciousness? Before you are too quick to shout ‘NO WAY’, let’s look at the differences between you and the robot:
As you can see, the differences aren’t quite as obvious as you may think.
You could argue that the robot wouldn’t really ‘feel’ anything: it would simply be acting as if it had feelings. But what even is a feeling? As I said earlier, neuroscientists can ‘watch’ different emotions forming in the brain, and we can link feelings to specific chemicals and reactions. This doesn’t make feelings any less ‘real’, but it does show that they aren’t necessarily some kind of spiritual, magical essence; feelings are formed and rooted inside our brains.
If this is true, why wouldn’t the robot have feelings? It would have the same wiring, the same brain parts, the same reactions to its environment. Just because it was created by a human, would that make its feelings any less ‘real’? Would it be any less conscious than we are? If consciousness is simply a natural byproduct of the brain, and not an extra add-on like ‘Race-Car Power!!’, then surely any machine with a human brain would be just as conscious as us.
That’s a challenging and scary thought, and definitely makes me think twice about what we mean when we talk about having a ‘soul’. Maybe in a few decades from now we’ll be writing articles about the morality of cruelty to robots; or maybe the robots will be the ones writing the articles, organising protests and fighting for their equal rights.
I feel like I have two minds at the end of this piece; the mind that says there’s no such thing as a soul, and the mind that says it doesn’t really matter. I’ll take them in reverse order:
#1 — Why Believing In The Soul Isn’t Such A Bad Thing
Just because the soul may not be literal doesn’t mean the soul isn’t ‘true’; it describes something important about how it feels to be a human being. As well as my physical feelings, I have hopes, dreams, fears and desires; I feel pain in the pit of my stomach; I have moments of deep connection; I experience things that I can’t put into words.
As we saw before, we are limited by our own brains, trapped on the higher level, unable to grasp the complexity of what is physically going on inside us; but this doesn’t make our higher level of experience any less real than the lower level. Because of this, using language about the soul and the self is helpful and necessary.
Talking about the soul may also help us to value people, whatever our differences may be; it can lead us to conversations about our responsibility to other people, other animals, and our world itself; it can help us to deal with death and the loss of loved ones. Even though I personally doubt the existence of an afterlife, there’s something powerful about the idea that even when we lose a physical person, some aspect of who they were remains with us and marks us in a very meaningful way. We carry an image of that persons ‘soul’ in our own mind, their ways of thinking and talking and seeing the world, and in this way they stay with us long past their physical death.
So, there may be good reasons to talk about the soul, and as a metaphor I think it’s valuable. But still…
#2 — Why I Don’t Believe In The Soul (at the moment… I think)
I have three main problems with the soul being literally real. The first comes down to senses.
I used to believe that my soul would somehow ‘live on’ when my body died; but now I can’t see how a soul could exist without a body. We know that all of our senses are possible only because of how our bodies work. We see things because our eyes take in a certain frequency of light, and our brains process that light, flipping the image upside down and interpreting it as colours and objects and people. We hear things because our ears pick up vibrations in the air and our brain interprets that information as speech, or music, or the sound of traffic or a waterfall or birdsong.
Without my body, I couldn’t see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or think. I could have no way of perceiving the world or being conscious. The only way I could see around this is if we believe that our souls are somehow ‘stored’ or kept safe, like jars in a kitchen cupboard, until eventually being placed into a new replacement body.
But that still doesn’t make sense to me, because of the next problem:
When the brain receives physical damage, it can change all kinds of things about a person’s character and behaviour. We can lose our ability to recognise faces, develop a passion for something we previously had no interest in, or act like a completely different person altogether. If we want to believe that we are somehow more than our brains, some kind of essence that lives on regardless of what happens to our physical selves, then it’s difficult to explain those personality changes away.
And talking of changes, that’s my third key problem.
I used to believe that the ‘soul’ was where my essential personality and character lived. But then I think about this: I don’t even recognise myself from ten years ago. I sometimes use the examples of Old Me and Present Day Me in my articles, because they show so clearly how much my mind has changed on various ideas; but I really can’t fully describe just how much things have changed. If Old Me and Present Day Me could somehow meet today, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t get along:
My personality, my beliefs, my relationships, my interests and fears and hopes and dreams have all completely changed in only one decade, and they continue to change today.
That’s part of the normal way of life, and partly why it’s so hard to describe ‘Jon Headley’ to somebody else. Of course there’s some continuity, but when you look back it’s very hard to say that my essence has remained unchanged. If I can change so much in ten years, imagine an eternity! For me, this simply doesn’t fit with the idea that I have some kind of immortal, unchanging essence at my core.
All of this is to say that I am pretty convinced that the feeling of having a ‘soul’ is actually a result of the incredible power of the human brain: a hugely powerful illusion that is potentially impossible to fully break out of.
So, to go back to the original question:
Who am I?
I am a blend of my parents DNA that developed a brain according to its blueprint. I am the consciousness that has emerged from that particular brain as it began to perceive the world, and perceive itself acting in that world. I am a unique set of experiences and memories and emotions and feelings and beliefs and perspectives, all valuable but all formed from an incredibly complex, powerful, and mysterious organ inside my skull.
I guess I’m one of the physicalists.
And I still find that idea slightly uncomfortable, because it goes so against everything that I feel to be real, and I know that once I stop actively thinking about it for this article, I’ll probably go back to feeling like a soul every now and again.
In a few days I’ll forget about the illusion completely…
…and I guess that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
