Against Outsourcing the Mind to a Soul
By: Ted Wade
Tags: Philosophy, Brain, Consciousness, Psychology, Science

image: tw

Brains are not just for eating

Until 9/11 I thought that the days were over when people could be immolated for having the wrong ideas about the soul. People have long been controlled by a fear that their immortal essence could suffer for eternity if they did not obey certain spiritual authorities.

“One of these mornings, the chain is gonna break.” — Aretha Franklin, Chain of Fools

Brains, Not Chains

While those chains have now crumbled for a lot of us, belief in a soul is still pretty common. It might be less so if more of us were aware of its stunning inconsistency with everyday reality: particularly the fact that we have brains.

There is overwhelming evidence that brains are what make our bodies into people; people who speak, think, adapt, and cope with life on the planet. Brains gather and integrate sensory information derived from energy fluctuations in the environment. The more precisely we can measure brain activity the more detailed we find to be their correlations with human conscious experiences.

And it’s not just humans. When we look at nervous systems throughout the animal kingdom, we see that brains operate bodies to enable their survival as well.

Nevertheless, the ineffable, private nature of human consciousness is often part of an argument that something — call it a soul — that is not physical causes consciousness. If that’s true, then why does the brain seem so obviously involved?

Can’t You Hear Me Knocking?

To answer this question many have used the analogy of the brain being like a radio receiver. As one fairly typical source puts it:

The brain does not produce consciousness, but acts as a kind of receiver which “picks up” the fundamental consciousness that is all around us, and “transmits” it into our own being.

Some proponents think deeply enough to realize this comes with an issue. It’s whether a soul is somehow an individual or else is a sort of world soul. Maybe, they say, the world soul has knots in it that correspond to individual people. Or, assuming panpsychism, also knots for individual monkeys, mice, molds, and even molecules. If it’s all just knots, which are presumably temporary, then maybe we are at least off the hook for eternal damnation. I certainly hope so.

By the modern account of soul-ism, all those messy neuronal networks roiling away in brains only appear to be responding to the outside world. Instead, some outside spirit runs the show. This is a dualistic position, subject to … more issues. For starters, what is left for the brain to do? If it has no purpose, why does it expend more energy than the leg muscles of a marathon runner?

Many of you are aware that there is massive and detailed evidence that life here, including animals with brains, evolved by the selection of genetic changes that contributed to survival and reproduction. Consistent with that view, brains evolved as a way of reacting to the physical world, the better for the organism to deal with it. Why then would the brain also function as a receiver of information from sources external to the physical world? That’s like having a bicycle that’s also a TV, but where the same parts serve both functions. A dual-function brain seems at least awkward and possibly self-contradictory.

We can dig a bit deeper. Consider what, given the soul, is the purpose of the brain and the organism in which it resides? Why would such a puny, space- and time-limited thing as a brain or an organism need to exist when the important, eternal stuff of consciousness is really elsewhere?

We know that our physical person lives in this world. Sane people know that to survive we have to perceive this world, think about it, respond to it, etc. But if all our consciousness — including what happens when we drive the car, eat the food, go to the work, hide from the boss — if all that we experience comes from that soul, how and why does the soul know exactly what is happening in the mundane world? The soul could know this if it was part of that mundane world, and thus subject to the world’s laws, but then the soul could not be transcendent, let alone eternal.

The Watcher-Watcher

So that can’t be what’s happening. The alternative would be something like a perfect watcher. And only Dr. Seuss could contrive anything quite so — well, contrived. The soul, perched on a lookout in some other dimension, uses an inter-dimensional portal to watch our body moving about in our mundane world. Instant by every instant the soul decides and deduces everything that needs to happen in our consciousness.

For example, based on a previous thought (that it already sent to us) about wanting to look at something, the soul pokes our brain, making it in turn move our eyeballs. After the first few hundredths of a degree of movement, the soul looks through the portal at our physical environment, deduces what our visual field should now look like, and sends to our brain that new picture, so that we consciously see it. And repeats this cycle of controlling every tiny mental change for billions of instants the rest of our life and then on to the subsequent incarnations. All that electrochemical activity in the retina and up the neuro-visual circuits, all the spinal motor nerve activity — all that has no purpose at all. Seems like a waste.

So, why would something as cumbersome as a perfect watcher ever happen in any universe? Why use a brain at all? The soul should just tell the meat puppet what it perceives and what to do.

So the soul gets rid of the need for a brain, really. But what about the body, and, for that matter, the whole world it lives in? Maybe that is superfluous, too.

Why would we have a remote controller pulling our strings and dictating our reality from a realm outside of our realm, the one where we actually have to live? If such a controller did exist, it’s more like a god than an individual agent. After all, it has perfect control over our experience of “reality.” So a godlike soul does not need a body. In fact, it doesn’t need any reality other than its own. Maybe it’s just playing a virtual reality game in which we, the bodies with brains, are the pieces on the board?

It’s a Team Player, too

Now we have to ask, why does the game being played by my soul seem consistent with the game played by your soul, in the sense that they seem to be in one world, with consistent laws of physics, configurations of biology, timelines, and so forth? Like, who’s coordinating the souls to create this one-world illusion? How many levels of coordinators would there be? Here, I admit, is where a world soul would have an easier time of it, keeping things consistent.

Going back to real life for a moment: there’s a strong case that each of us (using our brains) models and lives in a kind of personal virtual reality, called an Ego Tunnel by philosopher Thomas Metzinger. What makes this work is that we are all doing our individual take on a base reality that contains all of us.

But if souls are actually in charge, doing the models and everything else, then uh-oh, there’s that coordination issue again. Souls that did not coordinate well, who had differences in their recipes for reality soufflé, would lead some of us to experiences that others would never see. People who believe in and experience unusual (“supernatural”) things should thus find the concept of souls sensible, and I think that they often do.

Just Give Brains a Chance

The brain receiver idea pops up often, as if it solves some conceptual problem of connecting the physical world with consciousness, which seems askew from the physical. But the concept has problems, as I hope I have expressed. It seems so much more sensibly self-consistent that consciousness is just a refined way of using nervous tissue to do a better job of adapting to the physical, measurable, and shared non-supernatural world that we perceive as our conscious reality.

We can be open to the possibility that all experience, even the weird stuff, comes from one universe, and that brains participate actively/creatively in all of it. For example, there are certainly transcendent experiences. Perhaps these happen when higher parts of the brain/mind’s conscious model “get out of the way.” Something like this was proposed by Metzinger to describe the experience of “pure consciousness” — the “void” or sometimes, “clear light”— during deep meditation.

To summarize: one can argue that reducing the brain to a sort of side effect doesn’t make much sense. There are also arguments that the brain is involved in rarer conscious states (like near-death or out-of-body experiences) that some think to require a soul instead. Those are too involved to address here. Maybe some readers will remind us of them.