Can Souls Exist?
Taking a look at one of humanity’s most enduring notions
Our brains perform a variety of roles. Part of the job of the brain is to keep the body going, making sure that breathing and heart rate and a wide range of other physiological functions are more or less optimal for whatever it is we happen to be doing at the time.
Part of the job of the brain is to ensure our bodies more or less respond in the ways we want, so we can sit and run and walk and reach out and grab hold of things, without having to expend too much mental effort.
Part of the job of the brain is to make sense of the inputs provided by our sensory organs and stitch these together in such a way as to create a workable illusion of the outside world, so that we can navigate our way through it each day.
And part of the job of the brain is to maintain a sense of self, so that when we wake each morning we don’t have to reconstruct a sense of who and what we are before we get on with the daily tasks of survival.
It’s this last job that gives rise to our notion of individual identity. When we wake each morning we have a sense of continuity, of being essentially the same person we were the night before. And during the night we had dreams, some of which felt (at the time) so real that sometimes we struggle to…
