Why I think we’re not souls but just matter.
12:50 AM | 10 minutes ago, I was about to close my eyes and sleep. Thanks to a YouTube video on the birth of a binary system of stars I watched during dinner, I was triggered into a chain of thoughts leading eventually to the idea that essentially we’re all just star-dust, and how the biggest worries of our life are so inconsequential to the grand scheme of the universe. And yes, what reason do we even have to feel so entitled about being living organisms.
I’m not here to end the debate whether souls exist or not, but just to share my immediate thoughts, and wait to hear opposing arguments that make me think otherwise. I’d say I’m pretty open-minded to learning, and not afraid of being wrong.
Anyway, steering back towards what we’re here for. So, what makes me think that we are perhaps just plain matter and nothing else? I’m no doctor, but if you think, our body is basically an extremely complicated system of pipelines carrying fluids, muscles and tissues that have certain characteristic behaviours, and a very deeply connected nervous system. The nervous system is again, basically a complicated system of wires connecting every functioning muscle or tissue in our body with our brain. Oh and how can I forget the bones. :) Without turning this into a biology lesson, I’d share that, my immediate belief is that in this whole system our brain seems to be the most intelligent piece of the body, literally controlling everything else the rest of these guys do. Well, nothing new there.
It controls everything that we so obviously know, our heart beats, our muscle movements, the pain signals, etc. Then there’s the non-obvious stuff, that in the back of our heads we are quick to associate with our feelings, like the release of mood impacting hormones, the increase in the heart-beat when anxiety attacks (pun intended), the crying, the welling up during movies, the stress signals when we have shit loads of work. Countless of these things are essentially physical and very tangible mechanisms of our body.
We attach different types of feelings to these physical mechanisms, for example, the tension in the throat when we are ‘upset’ or crying, the extreme release of tension in our heads when we are ‘happy’, etc., so much so that we start associating these feelings to an entire entity of it’s own — a soul inside us. We say, who’s feeling joyful? This entity inside of us. Who’s feeling sad? This entity. Who’s feeling demotivated. This entity inside of us. Perhaps, and most likely, each one of these feelings is associated with a physical mechanism that ‘we tend to just experience.’
You might say — “Aha! you said ‘we tend to..’, who’s the ‘we’ in this? Caught ya!”
Well not really.
‘We/I’ is again just our brain experiencing a physical event via the signals from all over the body sent over the nervous system. So yes, it boils down to this ‘experience’ that our brain is having. Is this experience, just an involuntary physical stimuli perception & response, or is there something more deeper that we cannot comprehend? In my opinion, given the huge evolutionary process spread across billions of years, it seems fair enough to believe that the nature/our universe with it’s scientific constraints/laws such as ‘conservation of energy’, ‘second law of thermodynamics — ever increasing entropy’ etc., has created a chemical, biological, and physical organism that has a highly effective stimuli perception & response mechanism.
Perhaps you’re thinking, but does that explain ‘thoughts’ our brain has and what about ‘memory’? Those two things are too mind-blowing and just transcend our reality.
Well memory seems to be the easy one. Scientists have nearly figured out how our brains store vital memories in the form of strong neural network formations, which when triggered by an electrical stimuli raise a similar response compared to the first time the brain experienced that event.
Thoughts, Cognition And Consciousness however are difficult puzzles to pin down. Now I’m no scientist with years of experience in this field, so bear with my wild/immature ideas. Because our human organism is so extremely evolved, perhaps it has evolved such an amazing coordination between all the sensory organs (eyes, ears, nose, etc.) and the brain and its memory, that the overall perception that the organism (or the brain) itself experiences is the ‘consciousness’ that we keep talking about. On the same lines, ‘thoughts’ could perhaps be, just a triggering of a set of neural network formations, which trigger silent speech signals to our mouth, never spoken out. Alongwith, silent speech signals, perhaps our memory networks have neural connections that faintly trigger the same areas that are triggered during visual perception (our eyesight), giving us a slight feeling of imaginary pictures in our head. I’m hopeful, that most of the experiences that we associate with consciousness, could be explained by some physical mechanism inside our body; we are just yet to discover the connections.
I can go on and on. But thanks for bearing with me so far. I hope we (humans) are able to crack this puzzle soon, and also some more mind-bending stuff like ‘theory of everything’; so that people like you and I can go to bed in peace.
:)
