Column: Brain, consciousness, soul
By Charles Jeanes
Experiment: take human brain, add consciousness, stir
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
This column is a far stretch from my columns on history or culture, I admit. Be forewarned, I’m playing with ideas, not establishing facts, about consciousness and humans. The inspiration for my meandering mind today: two miracles are life and consciousness. My questions are about how the two are related.
Consciousness: emerging or seeding in brains?
Is your sense that you are conscious a sense you have because your brain, its materials and energies, creates it? Consciousness emerges from grey matter (neurons), processes, energies, chemicals, operating in that material.
Or — Is your sense that you are conscious a sense that has been planted in our species, but might never have emerged from material? Consciousness is already existent, so to say; it seeds itself in organic brains in living beings.
“What can consciousness be? Well, we don’t know. But there are two major possibilities. Either it is an emergent property of matter… What’s the other possibility? Consciousness can be a fundamental phenomenon.”
Because we possess consciousness, we have soul. Soul is a word not everyone understands the same way. But our long historical record of thinking about soul, in our religions and arts and philosophy, argues that humans need to have this concept. Soul is consciousness in an intelligent living organism.
Consciousness is an existent phenomenon whether or not there are humans or other living organic brains. It takes root in some — but not in other — forms of intelligence; not in artificial forms. That is my opinion.
Consciousness in an Artificial Brain (AI)
A. I. is without consciousness; Harari makes this absolutely necessary point about AI and consciousness. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1566436060602108
[ You might want to read these to see what neuroscientists say about consciousness and soul.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/soul-consciousness-science-sudhir-shah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk4euj7xYOM — listen from the 10 minute mark.]
Soul
Science does not generally say anything about soul. Religion often does. (Appendix two) “Scientists are atheists” is a common understanding; they dismiss soul as a concept with no scientific truth to it.
“… science may someday prove that the mind is really just the brain, and that humans are just matter.” { from this essay exploring perspectives on science and the soul: https://strangenotions.com/what-science-really-says-about-the-soul-life-after-death/ ]
But that is not the last word. I say damn the scientists who declare the soul “unscientific and unverifiable.” I prefer to read Charles Taylor, who has written extensively about humans’ natural tendency to think of the soul as a reality and to attain sense of meaning from it. (see Appendix two.)
My immodest proposal
I would propose a counter-hypothesis to the scientist who believes only in a reality of matter or particles, and energy, as understood by physicists.
Here’s my thought-experiment, in three tenets.
1. Consciousness is a fundamental phenomenon, life is not.
2. Life emerges from non-living matter; consciousness is present in the cosmos in the way matter and energy are.
3. Life evolves; consciousness is constituted so as to encounter life – just as gravity occurs between particles of matter.
Consciousness will always experiment with life, to root in life – i.e, nest in whatever varieties of living organisms can offer a soil in which consciousness can root itself. The vast differences in consciousness that we observe, say the consciousness of a human, of a dog, of a tree, or of an alien life-form, are differences determined by the life it is rooted in.
[My proposition is not in agreement with the central idea of panpsychism.
https://selfawarepatterns.com/2016/02/04/panpsychism-and-definitions-of-consciousness/ ]
Time and Mind
This blessing that human brains have, consciousness, is what makes time exist for humans. Unconscious, we would not experience time. Here is an essay about time and human understanding of time with our science; some of his points illuminate my own. https://larrygmaguire.com/does-time-exist/ It is an interesting essay in its own right, unrelated to my own exposition here
Individual human personhood
I am fascinated by the notion of what makes humans individuals; two are never precisely alike. It is not consciousness in us that creates character and ego.
A famous historic accident is evidence that brain matter makes a personality. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7735047/ (See Appendix one for a fuller examination of this subject.)
Consciousness is shaped by the vessel, the material nest, in which it resides, from that follows the notion that consciousness itself is not a force in the formation of a human character or personality. Rather it is the case that matter shapes the consciousness that lives in it, and all the things that make a single human unique, react upon the consciousness, the soul, and shape that soul.
It indicates to me that the quality of human soul is without personhood, or ego.
I do not believe in souls returning via reincarnation. One incarnation is enough. The soul released at death from a body goes back into the oceanic consciousness fundamental to the cosmos. It is a discrete drop in that ocean, and is poured back into it when the body dies.
Here is a succinct way of describing personality within a single human body: “… the incalculable complexity of life fought upstream against the relentless disintegration of the universe. Anything so complex as a living body was certain to break down eventually. She envisioned herself as a colony of micro-organisms. Her personality seemed fragile as a soap bubble and strangely peripheral, an envelope of habits and manners and memory to enclose the world inside.” — C. Holland, Home Ground
Personhood is physical, and inhabits one body. Soul is egoless — it’s without personality. After death, soul exists, but not the individual identity that was the character of the person and the body where the soul resided. Soul is not “you” in any sense of carrying your history or any imprint from life on earth.
Conclusion: why consciousness matters
It now falls to me to explain why I bothered readers with airy speculations. I feel quite certain, all consciousness on this planet is attuned to the state of the air, water, soil, trees – to a myriad of living things: the changes in climate and to our environment, caused by human activity since industrialism, are of a indisputable magnitude.
Therefore, consciousness among earthly beings is registering these physical transformations, and reacting to them. Fear is one reaction, and dismay that we’re so “awful”; many responses are possible.
Religious thinkers have put a lot of energy into the concept of how humans, who make a world like ours so filled with beauty and suffering, can be the agents of making the world better. Rabbis call it tikkun olam, “repair of the world”. (Appendix four).
One Christian thinker, Teilhard de Chardin, elaborated a picture of how humans can repair their world. He argues that human consciousness, the sum of all human minds on earth, will itself be a contributor to the transformation of our planet to the end of enhanced life here. This sphere he labeled the noosphere. ( See https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/drew.whitworth/webdesign/noos.html and Appendix two. )
Combined consciousness on earth now is massive because so many human brains are alive on the planet, more than any time in history; this mass of souls is not inert, its force is possibly of consequence in transforming human futures. Consciousness is, plausibly, the key to the lock of our self-destruction.
It’s a pretty insubstantial hypothesis, I admit. But it’s better than despair.
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Appendix
1. More about Phineas Gage, his personality change, and the location of personality in the physical brain.
https://www.verywellmind.com/phineas-gage-2795244
That the brain is the seat of character is summed up nicely here:
As one neuroscientist has written, “beneath the tall tales and fish stories, a basic truth embedded in Gage’s story has played a tremendous role in shaping modern neuroscience: that the brain is the physical manifestation of the personality and sense of self.” That’s a profound idea, and it was Phineas Gage who first pointed us toward that truth.
A contemporary of Gage said, “he had lost his soul” in the accident.
2. Charles Taylor on “loss of religion” in the modern secular age:
https://www.templeton.org/charles-taylor-spiritual-thinking [an interview]
https://peped.org/philosophicalinvestigations/handout-charles-taylor/ [a deep read on Taylor and his thought on science, religion, and secular modernity.]
3. More on Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit theologian, and the “noosphere.”
https://www.pauldejillas.com/news/teilhard-de-chardin-and-the-noosphere-/
De Chardin was prohibited by the Vatican from teaching.
4. “Repair of the World” or tikkun olam:
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/social-justice/does-tikkun-olam-mean-what-you-think [an interview with a scholar focussed on “repair of the world”]
https://www.brandeis.edu/jewish-experience/history-culture/2023/may/tikkun-olam-history.html [historical background to the idea]
5. For every human alive now, it is estimated that there lived only 18 other humans since humans evolved. We have indeed reached a massive sum of human consciousness all alive at one time in 2024.
The second article in Scientific American is an opinion piece at odds with any notion that the mass of human life and consciousness in 2024 is a positive phenomenon. My attempt to see a positive in it may appear quite feeble.
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