The Birth of Soul
The "soul" is perhaps the poster child example of a "meme". What is essentially "us" survives death. Stripped to its fundamentals, this is the idea that the "mind" exists in some kind of parallel universe, independent of the physical world we all inhabit on a daily basis.
Modern versions of this idea set aside the parallel universe and assume that we can somehow "upload" ourselves into computers. This preposterous idea flies in the face of anything we know about the brain, but it has roots in the ancient lore of the soul. We just can't let go of the idea that we are ghosts that can be somehow set free.
"Idealism" takes the view that we can know only the world of the mind - indeed reality itself is the illusion. This is simply another variant of the concept that mind and world are fundamentally disconnected.
Where did this idea come from?
I think there is a simple answer. Imagine yourself to be a hunter-gatherer way back tens of thousands of years ago. Somebody dies. What do you make of this? What do you think has happened? Reasoning as humans do, you look for something similar. The only similar state of affairs that would occur to you is sleep. The person must be asleep but can't wake up. You know from personal experience that, during sleep, you dream. You do all kinds of normal things in your dreams, like hunt and avoid dangerous animals. You do strange things too, like fly and talk with the dead. It is perfectly logical to assume that your dead companion is dreaming but can't wake up. In fact, he is stuck in an alternate universe - a "dream world". From time to time, you may even visit this person in the dream world and chat with him. Conclusion: the essential nature of the person survives and does not depend on the physical body. Everyone has a "soul".
This is all very logical and not, as some would claim, "superstitious". It is not, as many assume, simply the result of wishful thinking or denial of mortality. It was a good theory based on a available evidence.
Over thousands of years and hundreds of civilizations, this meme has morphed into a myriad of religions, all based on the fundamental assumption that death is like sleep and we go on after death to live in a realm eventually populated by dead people and gods. Eventually, the oldest profession (the priesthood) arose, providing a living for those who claim to have special knowledge of he alternate universe and a unique ability to communicate with the spirits who inhabit that world. By the time we arrive in historical times, religions have become competing unwieldy tangles of mythology and guesswork. People are willing to kill over the precise details of religious theories. It's good to remember the assumption they all make: the existence of the soul. Imagine a world where all of a sudden people stopped believing in the "soul". To cite just one example, Islam would vanish like a popped party balloon. The attitude we characterize as "extremism" absolutely depends on belief in the immortal soul.
Even the minority of us who reject the idea of the immortal soul are still stuck with the idea that the "mind" (the modern word for soul) is a rather small, personal thing, rattling around in our brains. Our "mind" is something that mysteriously arises in the brain. Something to do with "consciousness". But this is just the soul stripped of its immortal qualities and trapped in our heads.
Many of the posts in this blog and the sister blog "Programmable Ape" explore the idea that "mind" is only partly a private thing. For example, you cannot understand the "mind" of any person without taking into the account language of his "inner voice" or the "programming" provided by his culture. It's also true that one evolutionary purpose of the mind is to accurately model the real world [1]. While it is true that this model is imperfect, it must also be admitted that the "real word" plays a large part it our experience - the "contents" of our minds. It almost seems that we don't learn a lot of useful information about "mind" from the fact that we seem to need a brain to have a mind. This is why we have entire branches of Science devoted to the study of how minds work in general without any specific reference to how the brain works. On the other hand, we see a million papers published every year in neuroscience but few that shed any light on how the mind actually works and none that tell us why it feels the way it does to have a mind (or does it feel this way to have a part of a mind?)
I conclude that we need to seek analogies and models for the mind that don't rely on the "trapped soul" metaphor. The mind is not an "epiphenomenon" arising out of the complex neural structure of the brain, nor are our minds some kind of ultra-sophisticated computer. While it is far from the whole story, we can start by imagining the mind to be an active subset of the incredibly subtle and powerful "software" of human language [2]. If we imagine a brain that lacks this capability, we wind up with brains that lacks language - the brains possessed by the rest of the animal kingdom. The vast gap between the mind of a human and the smartest non-human animal gives a hint of the importance of this single capability. The example of language hints at the fact that "mind" is something shared among many humans and ultimately bound to the universe humans inhabit (what language is about). This is very far from the "dream world" theory of the mind. If there is to be an "alternate universe", it must be the world of the mind itself, which we all understand (in non-mystical terms) to differ from the "real world" in specific ways revealed in laboratory experiments and everyday experience. If we reject idealism, we must accept that both realms (mind and the real world) are real and in intimate communication with each other. Neither is "imaginary".
This view of "mind" also takes us away from the fashionable assumption that the mind is somehow identical to the brain. No amount of billion-dollar brain initiatives will uncover the secrets of the mind. The mind is not to be discovered in a "wiring diagram" (the "connectome"). It is more likely to be discovered in studies that reveal he structure of language, human society and reality itself. The brain is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of "mind", although in humans, it seems to be necessary but not sufficient. Accordingly, the wiring diagram of the human brain will not tell us much about what mind is.
In parallel to our efforts to re-imagine the "mind", it makes sense to reconsider what we mean by "self". How are these two ideas related? Modern psychology and experimental philosophy is teaching us a lot about the "self". For example, we learn that our sense of continuity with the past is very fallible (which is not the same thing as an "illusion"). We learn that our concept of free will is elusive in the laboratory. We learn that "personality" depends as much on context as on some innate attribute of the soul. In general, the "self" is subject to exploration from the "outside". In fact a case may be made for the view that the "self" is the way we explain our behavior to others and even to "ourselves". Behind all this data gathering is the unstated question: What is it like to be X? What is i like to be me? That is a question that endlessly fascinates us and drives many forms of art. In all our investigations, we find that the "self", like the "mind"often seems like a small wave in a vast ocean of real people in the real world.
It is difficult to accept the Zen contention that the self is an illusion. It is illusive, dynamic and ephemeral, but this does not make it "unreal". It is, in fact, the mysterious foundation of all experience.
[1] It is always dangerous to assume that evolution has a "purpose". To me, such claims don't pass the sniff test. It is equally possible that the primary job of the mind is to support society by, for example, supporting face recognition and fidelity of communication.
[2] While we use the term "language" for the way we instruct computers, computer languages differ from human languages in many respects, the most important being that a speaker of a human language knows (or thinks he knows) what he is talking about. Computers don't "know" the information they manipulate any more than a car knows about internal combustion.
Modern versions of this idea set aside the parallel universe and assume that we can somehow "upload" ourselves into computers. This preposterous idea flies in the face of anything we know about the brain, but it has roots in the ancient lore of the soul. We just can't let go of the idea that we are ghosts that can be somehow set free.
"Idealism" takes the view that we can know only the world of the mind - indeed reality itself is the illusion. This is simply another variant of the concept that mind and world are fundamentally disconnected.
Where did this idea come from?
I think there is a simple answer. Imagine yourself to be a hunter-gatherer way back tens of thousands of years ago. Somebody dies. What do you make of this? What do you think has happened? Reasoning as humans do, you look for something similar. The only similar state of affairs that would occur to you is sleep. The person must be asleep but can't wake up. You know from personal experience that, during sleep, you dream. You do all kinds of normal things in your dreams, like hunt and avoid dangerous animals. You do strange things too, like fly and talk with the dead. It is perfectly logical to assume that your dead companion is dreaming but can't wake up. In fact, he is stuck in an alternate universe - a "dream world". From time to time, you may even visit this person in the dream world and chat with him. Conclusion: the essential nature of the person survives and does not depend on the physical body. Everyone has a "soul".
This is all very logical and not, as some would claim, "superstitious". It is not, as many assume, simply the result of wishful thinking or denial of mortality. It was a good theory based on a available evidence.
Over thousands of years and hundreds of civilizations, this meme has morphed into a myriad of religions, all based on the fundamental assumption that death is like sleep and we go on after death to live in a realm eventually populated by dead people and gods. Eventually, the oldest profession (the priesthood) arose, providing a living for those who claim to have special knowledge of he alternate universe and a unique ability to communicate with the spirits who inhabit that world. By the time we arrive in historical times, religions have become competing unwieldy tangles of mythology and guesswork. People are willing to kill over the precise details of religious theories. It's good to remember the assumption they all make: the existence of the soul. Imagine a world where all of a sudden people stopped believing in the "soul". To cite just one example, Islam would vanish like a popped party balloon. The attitude we characterize as "extremism" absolutely depends on belief in the immortal soul.
Even the minority of us who reject the idea of the immortal soul are still stuck with the idea that the "mind" (the modern word for soul) is a rather small, personal thing, rattling around in our brains. Our "mind" is something that mysteriously arises in the brain. Something to do with "consciousness". But this is just the soul stripped of its immortal qualities and trapped in our heads.
Many of the posts in this blog and the sister blog "Programmable Ape" explore the idea that "mind" is only partly a private thing. For example, you cannot understand the "mind" of any person without taking into the account language of his "inner voice" or the "programming" provided by his culture. It's also true that one evolutionary purpose of the mind is to accurately model the real world [1]. While it is true that this model is imperfect, it must also be admitted that the "real word" plays a large part it our experience - the "contents" of our minds. It almost seems that we don't learn a lot of useful information about "mind" from the fact that we seem to need a brain to have a mind. This is why we have entire branches of Science devoted to the study of how minds work in general without any specific reference to how the brain works. On the other hand, we see a million papers published every year in neuroscience but few that shed any light on how the mind actually works and none that tell us why it feels the way it does to have a mind (or does it feel this way to have a part of a mind?)
I conclude that we need to seek analogies and models for the mind that don't rely on the "trapped soul" metaphor. The mind is not an "epiphenomenon" arising out of the complex neural structure of the brain, nor are our minds some kind of ultra-sophisticated computer. While it is far from the whole story, we can start by imagining the mind to be an active subset of the incredibly subtle and powerful "software" of human language [2]. If we imagine a brain that lacks this capability, we wind up with brains that lacks language - the brains possessed by the rest of the animal kingdom. The vast gap between the mind of a human and the smartest non-human animal gives a hint of the importance of this single capability. The example of language hints at the fact that "mind" is something shared among many humans and ultimately bound to the universe humans inhabit (what language is about). This is very far from the "dream world" theory of the mind. If there is to be an "alternate universe", it must be the world of the mind itself, which we all understand (in non-mystical terms) to differ from the "real world" in specific ways revealed in laboratory experiments and everyday experience. If we reject idealism, we must accept that both realms (mind and the real world) are real and in intimate communication with each other. Neither is "imaginary".
This view of "mind" also takes us away from the fashionable assumption that the mind is somehow identical to the brain. No amount of billion-dollar brain initiatives will uncover the secrets of the mind. The mind is not to be discovered in a "wiring diagram" (the "connectome"). It is more likely to be discovered in studies that reveal he structure of language, human society and reality itself. The brain is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of "mind", although in humans, it seems to be necessary but not sufficient. Accordingly, the wiring diagram of the human brain will not tell us much about what mind is.
In parallel to our efforts to re-imagine the "mind", it makes sense to reconsider what we mean by "self". How are these two ideas related? Modern psychology and experimental philosophy is teaching us a lot about the "self". For example, we learn that our sense of continuity with the past is very fallible (which is not the same thing as an "illusion"). We learn that our concept of free will is elusive in the laboratory. We learn that "personality" depends as much on context as on some innate attribute of the soul. In general, the "self" is subject to exploration from the "outside". In fact a case may be made for the view that the "self" is the way we explain our behavior to others and even to "ourselves". Behind all this data gathering is the unstated question: What is it like to be X? What is i like to be me? That is a question that endlessly fascinates us and drives many forms of art. In all our investigations, we find that the "self", like the "mind"often seems like a small wave in a vast ocean of real people in the real world.
It is difficult to accept the Zen contention that the self is an illusion. It is illusive, dynamic and ephemeral, but this does not make it "unreal". It is, in fact, the mysterious foundation of all experience.
[1] It is always dangerous to assume that evolution has a "purpose". To me, such claims don't pass the sniff test. It is equally possible that the primary job of the mind is to support society by, for example, supporting face recognition and fidelity of communication.
[2] While we use the term "language" for the way we instruct computers, computer languages differ from human languages in many respects, the most important being that a speaker of a human language knows (or thinks he knows) what he is talking about. Computers don't "know" the information they manipulate any more than a car knows about internal combustion.
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