Locating the human soul

Originally posted to Minority Reports on 28 January, 2015

This is a reflection on the human soul and spirituality that requires no religious grounding, and rejects clockwork universe conceptions that all things are measurable and reproducible.

It also rejects the misappropriation of terminology like intelligence, spirituality, and soul to be somehow incompatible with each other, or limited in meaning by a false determinism.

Moreover, it is a demand that scientific determinists stop advocating the robotisation of human beings and the dehumanisation of human societies.

I came to write down these ideas after considering Gideon Rosenblatt’s meditation on the human soul, and an ensuing discussion on Google Plus. I do not speak for Rosenblatt or his discussion group in what I have to say, and I didn’t post to his thread to refrain from derailing it.

The soul and spirituality without god

I begin by examining the idea of a human soul from the perspective of a man with no religious convictions, but with direct experience of moments that are spiritual and speak to my soul without the presence of anything remotely divine.

To begin, let’s travel back in time a little bit.

Australian Aborigines are estimated to have migrated from Africa via Asia up to 125,000 years ago. Contemporary archaeological evidence can prove occupation for about 40,000 years. At about that time Homo Sapiens mingled with Homo Neanderthalis in Europe, while North America seems to have yet been unsettled by humans, and human settlement of China was already a million years old.

Forty thousand years is nevertheless a long time by human evolutionary standards. In that time Aboriginal Australians remained a nomadic hunter gatherer people, moving between land areas, and developing what is today referred to as an affinity with the land, perhaps synonymous with a spiritual attachment.

To many Australians who arrived much later, it can often seem striking just how much a part of the Australian landscape Aborigines are in outback regions, and how at home they seem in what many others would regard as harsh, unforgiving country.

Having spoken to many Aborigines about their feelings about the land, I gained many different impressions that had in common only their sense of community in their ‘mobs’, which might be thought of as clans or tribes, and the attachment to specific tribal lands. The specific feelings about the land are different for different members of each tribe.

I don’t know that I have the same affinity or spiritual attachment, but I have definitely felt something tremendously moving about the solemnity of a snow-covered German countryside at Christmas when I was a child, and the heart-wrenching, breathtaking beauty of Australia’s endless white sand beaches, and its horizon-to-horizon deserts since my childhood.

I think this is a kind of spiritual experience which needs no religious grounding, and cannot be explained glibly with neuroscience and talk of generalisable brain chemistry. I feel it as uniquely my own experience — felt as I feel it only by me, even if others have similar experiences. Felt uniquely by me because of the unique set of experiences, knowledge, and sensibilities I bring to such moments.

British political philosopher, and conservative commentator, Roger Scruton summarised it as a Burkean conservative reflex:

It comes to us with imperative force. For some it has a religious meaning; for others it speaks of home, neighborhood, language, and landscape.

The reflex is grounded in a sense of belonging and community:

… the knowledge that we need in the unforeseeable circumstances of human life is neither derived from nor contained in the experience of a single person, nor can it be deduced a priori from universal laws. This knowledge is bequeathed to us by customs, institutions, and habits of thought that have shaped themselves over generations, through the trials and errors of people many of whom have perished in the course of acquiring it.

This is not a matter of science or rationality alone. It is a matter of some unique and some shared values we attach to experiences and thoughts that have no market value or empirical tests. Scruton once more:

To put the matter succinctly, that is sacred which does not have a price.

It is in this sense, and derived from my own experiences, that I propose a definition of soul that cannot be metricated and dissected the way determinists would like, but is equally not beholden to religion or mysticism seeking to impose an interpretation on all others.

I think the soul can be thought of as an integral part of human intelligence, working with logic and rationality, but not as an adjunct or lesser quality. The soul, in my conception is the intersection of instinct, aesthetics, ethics, and human decency, where decency is the ability to transcend ulterior motives, Silurian savagery, or utilitarian determinism. Spiritualism in this context is a self-awareness of soul and human instincts that are not merely rational.

Moreover, as Scruton hinted at, the soul and spirituality of dead people survives in some small part in the memories, thoughts, and actions of those whose lives they touched.

This is often how I feel about my departed friends: some part of them will live on in me as long as I live, and then in others whose lives I have touched.

Reductionist determinism

Having mentioned determinism several times now, and knowing how much my interlocutors are confused by this terminology, let me explain both my conception of determinism and reductionism; these two are almost always in company.

In its simplest form, determinism is a mindset that adopts a priori rules, either as a religious necessity, or as a secular analogue. The commandments of a deity or similar tyrant, or the inflexible demand that some rule of science or practice shall never be challenged or breached.

Less simple-minded forms of determinism are a particular kind of Enlightenment Era conception of a clockwork universe, in which everything that can be observed can be reduced to numbers and mechanics. This is an attractive antidote for many seeking to escape the childish brutality inherent in most religions. But it is a misconception all the same.

The misconception lies in failing to remember that all science and rationality is only a tool for abstracting and reducing to manageable models anything subject to a human purpose.

Let me illustrate this with a personal example. In 2005 I broke my wrist. To be more precise, I fractured my right radius, which sustained a hairline fracture from the wrist to several inches above it, but also breaking away the knuckle of the radius where it meets the trapezium and scaphoid bones as well as the palmar radiocarpal ligament. The broken part of the knuckle was further shattered into two pieces. In addition, the trapezium bone was also shattered into two pieces.

This was a pretty bang up fracture, and five years earlier an effort would have been made to set the bones, but without much hope of me ever regaining flexibility in my right wrist.

Except! In the late 1990s an American surgeon pioneered a method for using small pieces of titanium to bolt the tiny bone fragments back together, and without the incredibly painful bone graft from the hip that was customary to pad the crushed bone until it could re-grow.

The technique relied on his understanding of the tensile strength and flexibility of very small pieces of metal and the pins and screws to hold them together.

His colleagues called this surgeon crazy and deluded. But he persisted in evangelising the technique to the extent that there were several surgeons in Brisbane able to perform this operation on me. One of them spent six hours reconstructing my shattered right wrist.

The science and rationality in this story were contained in both the crazy surgeon, and his critics arguing that he was crazy. But the soul and spirituality existed only in those who passed on this technique free of charge to help inured people like me as an expression of medical ethics, human decency, and the desire to help others.

Reductionist determinism dictated that this technique could not be used because it was not part of the medical canon. And reductionist determinism should not dictate that it remains the sole and best solution.

But soul and spirituality should drive people to seek better solutions with the end of helping other people as an expression of community, belonging, and benevolence.

Perhaps the most apt expression of Enlightenment reductionist determinism was the Terror during the French Revolution. We have some other potent examples in Western history of reductionist, determinist technocrats visiting absolute terror on millions of people for the sake of ideology, efficiency, science, and ‘progress’.

To derive from reductionist determinism the demand that all observable features of the universe can be metricated, dissected, and modeled as mechanical contrivances is childish silliness approaching a kind of religious belief-without-question in itself.

To approach human experience from such a position is to misunderstand what it means to be human rather than inanimate, or merely the puppet of some prime mover.

That is why there is room for the soul and spirituality which neither endorses religious nonsense, nor violates the utility of science and rationality. It imbues the human in people who would otherwise be unimaginative, dull automatons without the imagination to fix broken wrists and other audacious ventures.

The fantasy of AI

One of the most pervasive, and yet childish contemporary secular religions is the one that technology can solve all problems. Never mind that the ‘problems’ are usually a marketing construct designed to extract money from people rather than real complexities in an existential sense.

One simple example of this is that no amount of innovation or technological development has ever really addressed mental illness, homelessness, poverty, and related disgraces on the face of affluent Western societies. Only human will and willingness to hand over money has any chance at such humanist outcomes.

But perhaps the most annoying article of this church of technology fundamentalism is the idea that intelligence can be replicated artificially.

So let’s look at the proposition for a few minutes.

Conventional definitions about intelligence usually start and stop with problem solving skills. That implies problems to be solved. I see it as a much more holistic concept starting from the Cartesian cogito, and moving though a full range of interpretive abilities that turn experiences (including structured learning) into concrete and abstract skills, knowledge, imagination, intuition, and will.

No matter how much some people like to talk about the intelligence of animals, the concept of intelligence is human, and therefore anthropic.

In my earlier definition of soul and spirituality, at least half of the qualities and outcomes of intelligence are not empirically measurable or reducible to numbers that are capable of reconstruction.

The idea that even advanced pattern matching and simulation of neural networks can do more than advanced processing is just silly. Heuristics are nevertheless programmed routines that only simulate learning by presupposing what learning is.

There is no prospect that anything resembling AI will actually eventuate in the near future. To understand that proposition, just examine the gullibility with which we all refer to some pretty basic technology as ‘smart phones’. First, the miniaturisation of processing power is not really a major advance any more, but makes it possible to run many more functions on smaller and smaller devices. These functions, or apps, are still just programming routines which amaze only the simple-minded, and have never come close to being smart in any real sense of the word. They fulfill predetermined functions that may or may not be useful. They have no capacity for becoming useful to a person with no use for them.

What I mean is, if a restaurant guide on my phone rates restaurants according to popular reviews, it will never reflect for me any indication of quality. After all, reality TV, Justin Bieber, and the Kardashians are all popular too; need I qualify that statement?

So, coming from a misconception of what ‘smart’ means, as opposed to what marketing liars would like us to believe it means, it becomes clearer that no one will sell us any ‘dumb’ technology. When striving for the next step in the consumer marketing game, therefore, no one wants to hear about being offered increasingly limited choices based on popularity and pattern matching applied to an inferred, limited set of previous personal choices. What we want to hear is that an intelligence is at work here to give us our ‘coke and fries with that’. An artificial intelligence because, of course, technologists see it as some kind of holy grail to reduce human interaction, and therefore also employment of human beings.

There will doubtlessly come a day when the size of hardware is sufficiently small, and the sophistication of algorithms is sufficiently large to fool people into believing that an array of chips is learning rather than just executing routines, and able to ‘think’ rather than choosing from a large number of responses to inputs.

But the day that soul and spirituality can be reproduced this way is nowhere on the horizon. And without these two human qualities, there is no self-determination, which is my ultimate test of intelligence.

Turning this around, if by some flight of science fiction fantasy, a completely fabricated intelligence were devised, it would no longer be artificial, and the people who built it would be gods. But that is precisely the territory warned of by Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk when they caution about the likelihood that such intelligences would not necessarily be well inclined toward the human race.

The pendulum swing of rationality

There is an inevitability in history to the certainty that no status quo lasts forever. Just so the current human obsession with handing over all the wealth of the planet to the very people working hardest to destroy the planet will come to some end, no matter how catastrophic this end might be.

Until that time, though, I am increasingly drawn to the idea that the Enlightenment Era has moved us too far away from spirituality and non-rational humanism. Granted that the depredations of religion were so great that a huge counterreaction was almost inevitable, it is time to reflect on the existence of spiritual inclinations for as long as human history extends. It is not inevitable that this spirituality be organised as religion, or trifled with as moonbeam pretense.

We already know that we respond to art with more than rationality and cold logic. We know that we can be passionate about things that cannot be explained as mere functions of chemicals. We know that we can surprise others and ourselves by not being predictable. Even the most straight-jacketed cubicle worker among us knows he’s still human, no matter how much the boss tries to dehumanise him. Even the most oppressed woman knows that she is still human, no matter how much misogynist barbarians want to treat her like chattel. These are all domains of the soul, not reductionist, determinist games with numbers.

Human history may not have come very far on a scale measuring the history of life, but it seems to me it has progressed far enough for there to be no space left to move to as an alternative to solving the problems we are confronted with where we are right now.

We can choose now, or in the next few years, whether we address those problems by making slaves of 90 per cent of the people in the world, or whether we decide to embrace again a simple spirituality to soften the harshness of the cult of numbers. But we don’t have much time left before we get to choose nothing at all as we destroy the capacity of the planet to support our options.

This is not a plea. I think we have already left it too late, but I also think where there is life there is still hope, and ingenuity as yet untapped in the field of sustainable survival.

If this is all getting too soft, touchy and feely for you, I have one more observation to make about soul and spirituality. It sits right on the edge of our most advanced science and our most profound philosophy.

A stronger anthropic principle

In the 1970s, when Stephen Hawking popularized the science behind the origins of the universe, time and space, and enigmas like ‘black hole’ singularities, he anticipated the questions and concerns of religiously-minded people who were likely to be hostile to the idea that there is no god or creator.

Hawking used an ingenious but simple device to avoid making statements about creation: since time and space came into existence only at the moment of the big bang, all speculation about what was before, and what caused the big bang, are irrelevant to understanding the ur-event itself. I don’t think that argument stands. We will seek answers to this question before we have answers to even how our own little planet works. And how it does not.

However, in that device, Hawking reflects a principle that is not subject to the laws of science, but is nevertheless part of science: things are the way we see them because we are as we are to see them.

This has been called the anthropic principle, which comes in various flavours, one of which states that the almost miraculous existence of conditions capable of supporting life like us in an otherwise immeasurably violent and destructive universe is explained by the proposition that without these conditions we could not be making such observations.

Put another way, we would certainly not be observing the universe if we did not exist.

I have speculated on this ‘strong anthropic principle’ to extend it to a stronger one.

We know the universe exists, and that it has some properties we can measure and explain. We know we cannot explain everything — yet — but we will persist.

One of the things we think we know is that after some indeterminate period of time an incredibly hot plasma, possibly subject to entirely different laws of physics than exist now, cooled and separated enough to form stars and clusters of them. We think we know that successive generations of stars being formed and dying populated the universe with the raw materials to create more complex elements than Helium and Hydrogen. We think we know that this evolutionary process eventually created a generation of stars, like our sun, that was surrounded with sufficient heavy elements to support life and its evolution to the present day.

A corollary of that knowledge, which I assume to be the best explanation available, is that all life on Earth, including human beings, is part of the evolution of the universe itself. This means we are not special, or external, or independent observers, but integral, if small parts of the entire universe.

Leaving aside the probability of other sentient life interested in observing the universe, this means that we are in fact the consciousness and biological intelligence of the universe considering itself. I know this seems far-fetched, but imagine looking in on the universe from somewhere outside it, and discovering our little planet. Would you not conclude that it is part of the universe, as are its living creatures? Would you not assume that it is the sentient part of the universe in the absence of other explanations?

In my proposed ‘stronger anthropic principle’, the existence in human beings of more than robotic task-orientation means also that the universe is more than something that can be reduced entirely to numbers and mechanical functions. It is more than a clockwork. It has soul and room for spirituality. Without contradicting or invalidating the science we know, and have yet to know.

Time for a revitalised humanism

It would be foolish to argue against science and rationality as essential to human survival and advancement, as is being done by barbarians using religion as an excuse.

But it seems equally foolish to deny the importance of soul and spirituality to people — as an essential ingredient to humanity itself.

In fact, a less determinist, reductionist conception of soul and spirituality — not degenerating into religious stereotypes — would take a lot of wind out of the sails of cretins spouting religion to achieve divisiveness, immiseration, hate, and war.

It would also reduce the relentlessly destructive impact of numbers-driven people whose sole contribution to mankind has been extractive: digging and uprooting everything of value just to replace it with rubbish and pollution.

Maybe, just maybe, people with soul and spirituality, and not beholden to any human doctrine, could restore a measure of decency and community to at least the Western world.