Reaching into Plato's Cave

Exploring the tensions between Christianity and the 21st century

#10 Soul and Afterlife: Scientific explanation for the soul

Can there be a materialistic explanation for the soul!? Does the soul have to be immaterial?

In the previous episode, we found that scholars  — scientists and philosophers — have long wrestled with the concept of an immaterial soul (and spirit) and come to a fully reasoned conclusion that it doesn’t work.

Here, we first look at what the soul “does” for us, and then at an idea that explains all those functions using neurobiology. So could “the soul” be a material emergent property of the material brain? The Bible never speaks clearly on what the soul is (note: it never says that soul and the immaterial spirit have to be one and the same thing).

But to get to the bottom line, we need to first define what “material” and “immaterial” are, and then go over some basic neurobiology. With that in place, we can talk about the human soul being an emergent property of the material brain: a very complex and intricately wired region of the brain which represents the “self” to oneself, to other humans, to the rest of Creation, and … if one is so inclined … to the Divine.

This material view of the human soul opens up whole new avenues for understanding postmortem resurrection (the topic of next week’s episode). It also opens up a way to bring together the Hebrew understanding of “the imago Dei” (being created in God’s image) with the very different Greek understanding of that concept.

Tell us what you think … leave questions or comments at bottom of this page (stir the pot a little bit!).

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lukejjanssen

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2 responses to “#10 Soul and Afterlife: Scientific explanation for the soul”

  1. PeGITO Avatar
    PeGITO

    Luke, are you not just using “emergence of the gaps” to explain the mind?
    You haven’t really defined what type of emergence you are talking about and also backed it up with data or other examples.
    Also I get the sense that you simply use bottom up and top down processes to mean the mind or soul without defining what these processes are .

    I agree that emergence can be a means to describe substances in terms of their underlying components. For example the emergent properties of water such as surface tension, freeze point, viscosity, density, etc can be described as arising from the collective properties of the molecules which compose water. This would be an example of weak emergence. Note however that the emergent properties of water have no effect on the properties of the water molecule itself.

    The problem with using emergence as a means to describe the mind is that the mind can actually have an effect on the properties of the neural states of the underlying brain. If as you say the mind is simply the result of neural processes and feedback loops then what room is there for the volitional aspects of my mind. The top down process that you invoke can’t come from weak emergence. Some people suggest that this is strong emergence whereby the mind now has an effect on the material of which it is constituted. You need to be clear which of these positions you hold. You also need to better explain how free will can arise from the simple firings of my complex brain and the resulting feedback loops. If I can use an analogy you have done an OK job of describing how a car works but have done nothing to describe where it is being driven and who is driving it.

    Any type of emergence also doesn’t really explain the sense of what it means to be “me”. The sense that I have I have some sort of control of my thoughts and the perception of the experiences I have. That is why using artificial intelligence as an explanatory example of how a mind or soul arises is not very good. AI can do all sorts of wonderful computational things and may one day even be able to fool a human into thinking that it is intelligent but it may be absolutely soulless and have no sense self or experiential knowledge.

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    1. lukejjanssen Avatar
      lukejjanssen

      An explanation doesn’t have to have *all* the necessary evidence, and explain *everything* that pertains to it. Many scientific explanations … I might even say “all” scientific explanations … lack some amount of evidence and/or explanatory power. It only becomes an “of-the-gaps” explanation when it has no evidence and explains nothing. Our growing understanding of consciousness, mind, and soul have much evidence and explanatory power. I’ve already elaborated on this in my podcasts and blogs, and at length in the book. I’m not going to repeat that here.

      As for your points/questions about “emergence”: again, I’ve already addressed these in my on-line posts and in the book, and can’t/won’t repeat all of that here. But I will drop a few terse comments which will make sense if you’ve read those posts and the book. (I don’t intend that to sound condescending; it’s just that I can’t re-summarize all of that stuff in the space of this comment box). Emergent properties *can* influence themselves: a murmuration of starlings can suddenly swoop in a new direction simply because *one* bird suddenly changed direction. Artificial intelligence *can* write new programs or new algorithms that were not pre-programmed into them. A single neural reflex will only ever produce one output, but a circuit with several inputs can produce several different outputs … and a circuit with billions of neurons making trillions of connections will produce some very complex and unpredictable outputs.

      Finally, about your philosophical points about what does it mean to be “me” and whether artificial intelligence will ever be able to have the same experience of reality as we do, I’ll just say: yeah, I don’t know either. I hope I live long enough to see if we ever get good answers on those.

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