ASM039 Memory, Digital Souls, and Trumping Science with God

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memory digital souls and trumping science with god all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

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welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life in just a few weeks i'm going to be in denver with saint andrews united methodist church for their sunday morning service at 10 20 and then a little q a in the afternoon at a pub that's going to be a lot of fun there's more stuff on my events page but we've got a podcast to do so let's get it started hi mike this week i read an article about a woman named kim soozi who after learning of a terminal cancer diagnosis decided to have her brain chronically preserved upon her death at age 23. i know it's not realistic to think that we could possibly revive her brain or even upload it to a computer in the near future but hundreds or even thousands of years from now i think it's completely realistic this raises a bunch of questions for me about the afterlife if she's gone and she's either ceasing to exist or in heaven or hell and then she is somehow brought back what part of her is brought back is it just her consciousness is it her soul i don't really even know what to make of this but i'd love to hear your thoughts thanks mike i'd imagine at least a couple of people listening right now are experiencing an exploded brain and it may be a new idea to you that it may be plausible to transfer a human's consciousness into a computer that that's not just an idea in science fiction but it has at least some plausibility to it in science especially in computer science and here's why we can use math to emulate the behavior of neurons and create something called neural networks obviously neural networks are the foundation of our consciousness and the way that human brains work essentially what a neural network does is it takes a signal repeated signals through a neural network either strengthen or weaken different connections and in doing so in code information this is completely different than the way computers encode information as ones and zeros for example we encode information as strength of neurons but we can build neurons in software and because of that today we can actually emulate brain-like structures in software and we can actually using super computers emulate relatively sophisticated brains with a similar number of neurons as say a rat and in fact you can find on youtube a video of someone who took the neural network of a worm put it into a robot and with no programming at all this lego robot was able to sense obstacles and back up and move forward no programming just directly porting the brain map the neural network of a worm running it as software i don't remember that was a few hundred neurons i believe the human brain has 86 billion neurons so in pure neurological complexity uh the human brain far outstrips what computers could emulate today but as we all know there's something called moore's law and computers tend to get faster over time although i'm a computer guy above all else and it's time to let you know a little secret moore's law hasn't been doing so hot lately we're having a hard time increasing the per core performance of computing significantly at the high end and most of the energy and silicon today is going towards either adding more cores or increasing the efficiency of low power cores and mobile processors at the high end the kind of processors we put in supercomputers moore's law has hasn't applied for a while uh so the first thing i want to say i'm not as comfortable making the assumption that it's inevitable that at some point we'll be able to emulate a brain in a computer maybe like you say maybe hundreds of years thousands of years maybe computer science will get lucky and it'll be 20 years i don't know but human brains are remarkably complex and as far as we can tell neural activity isn't the entirety of brain function we have other types of cells and other types of processes and their role in signal processing the brain is poorly understood today and i know that kind of the most detailed levels of the brain we look at today are far far more elaborate than simple neurological or synaptic mapping so but let's assume for a second let's assume that at some point computers get fast enough to actually model 86 billion neurons at enough fidelity to create human-like capacity we would also need the ability to scan the state of a brain well enough to reproduce its model now with something like a flat worm it's much simpler it's very not a very complex brain it's not nearly as plastic as a human neocortex every human brain embodying consciousness is a unique configuration and in fact is changing over time now all this is premised on a pretty fundamental divide some people are duelists and duelists believes that there are a separate unseen immaterial realm with a soul or a spirit and then a physical realm with a body and a brain and those two things are linked in life but in passing they're separate other people have a more holistic view or unified view of reality and they say nope there's no difference between a soul and a mind and a brain they're all the same thing now obviously that has interesting implications for the afterlife if the soul and the mind are simply part of the brain if they're simply emergent phenomenons of neurochemistry then there really is no conscious afterlife and there is no soul to go to some other place so we're gonna have to make several assumptions to answer these questions the first assumption is computers will get fast enough to emulate a human brain number two that someday we'll be able to scan brains with enough fidelity to reproduce an existing brain and software and number three we'd have to make the assumption that souls exist independently of brains three assumptions if that's all true i would have to assume that when you booted up a copy of an old brain and software you'd essentially create a new soul a snapshot of the of a soul at an earlier point in time i don't imagine that you'd be retrieving some immaterial essence but the point here is we're making a lot of conjecture it's an interesting thought experiment but this is one of the things that actually leads me away from making definitive claims about the afterlife or definitive claims that there is some immaterial part of my being i'm actually more a materialist than anything else like like an atheist or an empiricist i don't see a lot of evidence to satisfy the idea that there is some part of humanity that is separate from our physicality now that doesn't mean i don't acknowledge the merit of the idea of a soul i think there is a soul i think we can prove a soul as some essential defining characteristic of a person or even an organism i think in some ways scientifically our souls live on after we die i think people remember us i think the things that we do in the world that change things and the things that we teach others and the way we influence people's lives live on beyond our physical deaths i think that one interesting way to look at the ongoing resurrection of christ is a memetic resurrection that the teachings of jesus live on and continue to remake the world and yet on some level because i've had such profound experiences with god and because the story of jesus's resurrection is so formative in the way that i view reality and experience the world i hold out hope for some reunification with my maker on the other side of my physical death i think terms like consciousness or being or will or agency are probably too limiting to discuss such a thing and i've talked about that in other places and writings that you know this would be a three-hour podcast if i got into that stuff but uh you know i think questions like these would the soul be retrieved if consciousness was transferred to a digital means does a lot to show us that we are using insufficient means to discuss mystery and the divine when we use human language that these sorts of logical puzzles like could god make a rock so heavy that even god couldn't lift it don't limit what god may be but reveals our relative ignorance about ultimate reality about the divine and even what it really means to be human and alive [Music] our next question came in via the email inbox on asksciencemike.com and it reads mike thanks so much for what you do with your show i believe you are making the world a better place my wife and i grew up in a very conservative christian context the mormon slash latter-day saints church we have since formed new views about life and religion and have left we enjoy skepticism science and have a new sense of wonder about the world but it has been a difficult road we still have many close friends and family in the church and we want to have good relationships with him many are very respectful and kind but they often make comments to us about how we are deceived and lost and they treat many of our views and actions with suspicion we feel strongly about certain social issues such as the treatment of the lgbt community but we are less vocal about our views than we want to be because they are usually taken as deep personal attacks against faith we do not enjoy conflicts but sometimes we feel we must say something the strong reactions and conflicts that result make us want to give up or distance ourselves but that seems wrong too how do we make an impact in the world without isolating ourselves or hurting those who disagree with us this is a fantastic question and one that comes up a lot with people that i see in person at events or or just socially in life how on the other side of a faith transition do we continue to get along with the people we knew before and it's tough i can't say that i've nailed this in my own life i have people who were once very very close friends that my pulse elevates if i see them because i'm afraid of what confrontation could happen so before i answer let me say i'm learning how to do this as well um i surprised myself on the last episode of the liturgist podcast when i started to talk about calvinism and i had no idea how vehement my thoughts on calvinism were related to that conversation i would say that probably reformed or calvinist theology hyper calvinist theology would be my equivalent of your experience with the mormon or latter-day saints church here's a couple things i would say that i'm figuring out one don't try to control other people and you might say well i never try to control people but all humans try to control other people all the time we try to control what they think about us we try to control their actions in the context of how they relate to us and we even try to control their actions in their own lives in ways we think that benefit them or benefit ourselves and the fastest way to have greater happiness greater personal peace is to completely let go of the need to control other people how they feel how they act and what they think about us so that means if they think you're lost they think you're lost okay great i make jokes about people who think i'm lost in their presence as a way of disarming that tension and i don't do that disrespectfully i just kind of name the elephant in the room with a joke i also think it's essential to set boundaries you can control what people say about you in your presence in regard to your own mental health this is not saying they can't say things about you it's simply saying the terms upon which you'll be in relationship with other people and there is nothing wrong with that there's a noble notion in the christian faith of forgiving and that's good and that's healthy but we take those teachings and we somehow interpret it to mean that we have to maintain all of our relationships but if a relationship with a person hurts you and hurts the other person and continues to do so i see no problem with setting boundaries on that relationship for the benefit of both parties so there are people in my life who are conservative southern baptists that i've known for years and we can go to lunch and we can talk we can laugh we can talk about things we disagree about and nobody gets upset and there are other people in my life who are conservative southern baptists who have known for years who literally can't tolerate my presence so i set boundaries with those people i don't spend time with them i don't hold ill will against them i don't hope bad things happen to them i hope their lives are successful i think about them i pray for them but i don't call them and ask them to lunch if they were to call and ask me at lunch that's something i would very carefully consider before i went what i'm saying is it's healthy it's good it's beneficial to be part of community that helps you grow and flourish in a community a social community a spiritual community whatever kind of community it is for it to help you grow and to flourish one it has to be able to love and accept you exactly as you are without reservation and two it needs to be able to draw you into who you are becoming who you could be as my friend bob goff says can help you become love that's that's what this whole faith is about is about becoming love becoming love in the world becoming like god becoming like christ so i'm part of community today that loves and affirms me and accepts me and draws me forward that sands down my rough edges that points out the things i get wrong with grace and that's my final point you want to confront harmful speech and harmful actions with grace but you do want to confront them and i do that by looking for things we can agree on so i am radically affirming of lgbtq relationships in marriage radically affirming no reservations i refuse to call any of those things sin but that's a long way for other people to go they're not there yet and guess what a few years ago i wasn't there either so if i know someone who is nowhere near me and not interested in affirming same-sex relationships i don't try to lead them there i can't leave them where they don't want to go but i do confront them if they say harmful things in my presence about lgbtq people and i do see if we can agree at least that the way lgbtq persons in our society are treated is immoral and harmful and can we agree that for example using the word [ \_\_ ] only contributes to teen suicide and does nothing to further either your cause or mine i do that with grace i do that by saying listen i'm not saying i have life figured out but i am saying that using that word in that context causes harm i live in the south i take a similar approach to racial issues when i have friends who are white who use racial slurs or make racial jokes about people of color i confront that with grace but i do confront it because to sit in silence and behaviors like those is to contribute to the kind of systems that lead to the oppression of people so to wrap it up to review one don't try to control other people you cannot lead them where they don't want to go number two set boundaries as needed to maintain healthy relationships and distance in the case of abuse and number three confront harmful speech with grace and all this leads to one idea you feel a call to follow christ and in doing so love the world but never in the midst of that call make the mistake of believing that you are christ and that your suffering and sacrifice will save the world because it won't sometimes we have to suffer for love sometimes we have to suffer to help improve the lot of others but we also have to take care of ourselves we have to be healthy in order to help others [Music] hi mike i have a question about memory and in particular why some people seem to be so much better at remembering things than others and i guess i'm also wondering as a person with a really terrible memory is there any hope for me is there any research suggesting that you can make real lasting improvements to your memory or am i just kind of stuck here so yeah memory how does it work thanks mike sometimes you guys ask me questions that um are totally reasonable but are problematic and this is a problematic question because we have a very limited understanding of how memory works in science today i tell people sometimes that in terms of our understanding of the brain kind of in the age of um galileo and astronomy we've just made telescopes for the first time and we're able to get far more detail than we've ever had a much closer look but that lurk is still very limited and very grainy compared to the intricacy of a human brain memory is really complex and we understand how memory is coded across neurons at a functional level like we get exactly how at the neurological single neuron level memories are wired but how that structure works across the brain is almost a complete mystery and so much of what we know about memory doesn't come from looking at the brain but from looking at experiments in psychology and making conclusions from human behavior and so i want to be clear that right now i'm i'm exiting neuroscience and moving more toward neuropsychology or even just psychology to talk about different models or understanding of memories and i'm going to hybridize a couple of approaches just to make it more accessible and basically there's two big dividers and what we call long term memory you have explicit memory which is under your conscious control and you have implicit memory which stores skills now implicit memory is simple enough get on a bicycle or brush your teeth you're using implicit memory muscle memory automatic memory physical memory whatever you want to call it explicit memory is our ability to recall events or ideas or spatial things so explicit memory has three major categories one is episodic memory and episodic memory is how you remember a specific event tied to a specific time and place semantic memory stores kind of a symbolic understanding of how the world works so whenever you contemplate or learn ideas in science you're using semantic memory and spatial memory places objects in our map of the world and interestingly enough when you use more than one type of memory your recollection goes up so if i'm learning an idea in science one trick i use to remember it is i will not only use my semantic memory to review the idea i'll use my episodic memory to remember when i learned that idea the setting and the place and if it's a book i'll use my spatial memory to place that idea on a page in a book on a shelf so i can find it later so i use all three types of explicit memory to maximize my long-term memory recall now emotional memory links your episodic memory to feelings and frankly neurologists and psychologists are nurse scientists and psychologists aren't entirely clear if emotional memory is implicit or explicit and that's our long-term memory now we also have working memory and your working memory holds three to five pieces of information you need to complete tasks that face you now so when you repeat a phone number over and over as you walk to your phone to dial that's working memory if you're remembering what number you're going to carry doing long division in your head that's working memory you remember it just long enough to use it and then the brain let's go so for example when i say my memory is terrible if i were to say that more precisely i would probably say i have a poor episodic spatial and working memory and not all of my memory is terrible my episodic memory is pretty bad my spatial memory is horrible and my working memory is pretty much non-existent but my semantic memory is great i mean that's why i'm science mike i can recall science almost effortlessly and my implicit memory is probably below average but not awful now interestingly enough intelligence is often linked to poor memory isn't that crazy because intelligent brains aren't any better at remembering than normal brains what intelligent brains are good at is for getting extraneous information now the problem for intelligent people and why the absent minor professor idea is so popular and so frequently used as a colloquialism is that my brain will often consider the four fundamental forces of physics as vital information but the location of my car keys as extraneous so i go to sleep i wake up and i have no idea where my keys are if i don't put them in the exact same spot every day so that's normal if you're a creative person if you're an intelligent person poor working memory maybe associated poor episodic memory may be associated we all have different memory specializations okay now are there ways to improve memory absolutely the mayo clinic offers seven suggestions one is to say mentally active reading crossword puzzles logic puzzles those kinds of things just work your mental machinery that's how neurons work neurons that fire together wire together and that improves your memory number two socialize regularly we're a social species and the act of interacting with other people stimulates the brain on a wide level number three getting organized actually helps memory i tend to be very organized because my working memory is so poor and by keeping my physical environment in a predictable state i free my brain from having to keep track of objects because i know they exist in a system that's predictable number four and this is huge sleep well we're asleep to bribe people and sleep is essential to the functioning of your brain especially memory formation number five eat a healthy diet what you eat affects how well your brain works number six be physically active every single day unfortunately there are few things better for your brain than physical exercise believe me as a nerd i hate that number seven would be to manage any chronic medical conditions you have because the resources you spend fighting a chronic health condition will detract from your ability to focus and form memory and then i would add a bonus based on my you know chosen life research essentially is prayer and meditation every all the research i've seen is that frequent prayer meditation does increase focus concentration and even memory recall so stay mentally active socialize regularly get organized sleep well eat a healthy diet be active every day manage chronic conditions and as a bonus from science mike pray and meditate every single day [Music] our last question came in via email and it reads mike i really enjoy your program but struggle a bit with what seems to be a premise that religious beliefs should have scientific basis i'm not anti-science or saying it should never have scientific basis but why should we assume god is subject to the scientific method if god operates both in and outside of creation then looking at everything through the lens of science seems overly fixated on one plane of things and might suggest that scientifically unprovable things are most likely untrue in other words i feel like there's an inherent bias intentional or not in evaluating god scientifically for me i would frankly be disappointed if god could always be measured and graphed that's not very transcendent so what can science really tell us about god and faith thanks jay well jay i don't think you could have made a better question for this program that is a science faith in life perfect uh all three and i certainly don't mind you questioning my assumptions i hope i don't know if you'll like my answer but here goes i agree i don't think god has to measure up to standards of science i think it's entirely possible that god operates in ways that are beyond the ability for science to measure especially anything happening as you said outside of the observable universe and here's the problem with that we can't weigh in on what's happening outside of the observable universe it's a complete mystery to us so if one person says there is a god named yahweh who exists outside of the universe who loves us and was incarnated as the form of a man as soon as they make that claim there's an action inside the physical universe that we can test incarnated in a man did that man exist what evidence do we have that this man was divine you just entered the realm of what can be measured with science if we extract that we simply speak of yahweh as a god who created everything and someone else says no a god named bob created the universe accidentally as part of a science experiment how do we evaluate those two claims well how do we evaluate any two conflicting claims in life today we look at evidence when we are in a court of law and we're trying to figure out is this person innocent as they claim or guilty as the prosecution claims what do we do we gather evidence and make a conclusion and so i certainly agree that if there's anything like god god is in some ways beyond our understanding and beyond our ability to measure but if god never interacts with the observable universe god's irrelevant to us you see what i mean like we have no way of knowing or interacting with or understanding things that happen outside of the observable universe and most people who believe in god aren't deists they're they're theists of some variety or pantheist or panethius and they believe that god is active in creation and if god is active in creation then god is doing things that can be measured it's that simple so i have all sorts of beliefs about god that aren't especially scientific i believe that god loves us i have very little physical evidence to back up that belief so i just admit that when i have non-scientific beliefs like god loves me those aren't beliefs i'm going to try to convince other people to hold i spend very very little energy trying to convince someone who doesn't believe in god that they should believe in god instead i let my belief that god loves me transform my life in the way that i treat other people i believe unscientifically that a man named jesus rose from the grave i spend very little energy trying to convince people who think that's absurd that it happened instead i try to embody the teachings of jesus and in so best demonstrate what i believe is the reality of resurrection it's a division in thinking in other words if i'm going to make a case for example that human activity is harming climate in a way that will affect human civilization i can make a scientific case and i can lobby people that they should change their behaviors using science it's something i'm comfortable making uh corporate calls to action about but when i have religious beliefs those are things that give me meaning and are most relevant to other people who also have had an experience that caused them to put confidence in that belief they've had their own form of personal revelation personal experience with god and i think that's the tension you're catching and i often say that science gives us facts and nothing no other form of human knowledge acquisition is as effective as science giving us facts about reality but faith and indeed my faith in god through jesus christ gives me meaning to those facts it lets me know what to do with it so the facts may tell me that poverty is a problem on the globe today but it's my faith that calls me to action in the face of that poverty it's my faith that tells me that i am to serve the poor the orphan and the widow so of course god is transcendent of course god even in what i see in physics is beyond not only our understanding in our language but even beyond our mathematical models when we talk about the beginning of all things we speak of an unknowable unspeakable oneness where all the forces of physics matter energy space and time where one and causality probably didn't even exist right that sounds like mysticism and it's just physics that's transcendent but i can't i can't make fact claims about singularity i can't make fact claims about a god beyond the observable universe i can only share with others who are interested the experiences i've had that made me feel connected to that great mystery and in doing so perhaps they might meet that mystery themselves i'm not traveling near as much in october and it's actually it's been nice because i had time to talk to my patrons on patreon and this week's show all the questions were selected by my patrons on patreon so if you'd like to be a part of putting the show together not only making it possible financially but actually contributing and deciding what questions are part of the show every week go to asksciencemike.com and you can be a part of the listeners that support this show through donations it's not seed money i'm not promising god will bless you because you give to my show i'm promising you i'll be thankful and will be able to pay for my health insurance that's it um now every dollar helps so you can give it any level and you can change or cancel a pledge on patreon anytime so no worries if money's tight go ahead and lower your pledge or cancel it all together people do it all the time it works out other people kick in the other thing we need on the show is your questions so you go to ask sciencemike.com you can submit a question you can also use ask science mike on social media and i'll find that especially if it's on twitter soundcloud or youtube i do have some events coming up later in october i'm going to be in denver with saint andrews united methodist church in november i'll be in london for belonging with the liturgists you can learn more about that at the liturgist.com belong and i'll also be doing a story line with don miller and bob goff and some other friends in chicago in november as well i'd love to see you at one of those events you can go to sciencemic.com and click on events to learn more the show is produced by the amazing canadian greg nordin but of course our theme song is by jeff bodafort if you do any kind of media and you need original music recorded composed arranged whatever jeb can do it he's a genius you can find links to greg and jeb on my website as well as resources for almost every single question that's been asked in the history of the show thanks for listening everybody and i'll see you next week [Music]