Conclusive Proof of the Soul
(image of Obatala priests in a temple, from Wikipedia)
I’m going to prove that the soul exists. You ready?
Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines the soul as: “the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life.”
According to this definition, there are three potential components as to what constitutes a soul:
1) It is immaterial
2) Is the animating principle
3) It is the actuating cause of an individual life
Now, obviously, we could look through a thousand microscopes, we could take a thousand tissue samples and we could even look through every telescope in existence and still never find anything that would meet even one of these requirements. That does not mean, however, that we do not have proof that such a thing exists. What is this proof? Well, I present exhibit one: the mind.
What is the mind?
Again, according to Webster, the mind is the “complex” of “elements” in “an individual that feels, perceives, thinks, wills, and especially reasons.” Emotions, perceptions, thoughts: these are what make up the mind. Notably, none of these are physical. You cannot “hold” a thought. You could perhaps see the electrochemical signals within the nervous system that correlate to it, but thoughts, perceptions, and feelings essentially exist as subjective experiences. The mind is certainly correlated to the brain, but it importantly is also not the brain. Consciousness is the medium through which we perceive the material world- but no self respecting scientist would claim that consciousness is material itself. It has no mass, volume, location or velocity; it lacks all physical properties. It is immaterial.
Right now, for example, I’m listening to the track “Ice Cream” by Raekwon of the Wu-Tang Clan. You could find the electrochemical signals and patterns in my brain that correlate to that experience, but they would not be equivalent to that experience. My personal experience itself cannot be “found” anywhere, nor could it be seen or experienced by anyone but me, regardless of how powerful of a microscope they use. This is because all the subjective experiences which make up my mental life are fully immaterial.
Further, our minds are our animating principle. Without consciousness there is no individual. Without consciousness, my body may be alive but I would not be present. I could lose an arm or a leg and my fundamental sense of identity would remain intact; the same could not be said of consciousness. Even my brain, which feels so essential, would be rendered irrelevant if my mind could be “uploaded” onto some futuristic software or program. The mind is the animating principle and the cause of the individual.
So, already, we have an entity that is totally immaterial and is both the animating principle and cause of an individual’s life. Why then do we not commonly equate the mind with the soul, and continue to search the depths of heaven and earth looking for one? Perhaps we are looking not just for a soul, but an immortal soul. Well, it is important to note that souls weren’t always held to be immortal: the immortality of the soul is a relatively recent philosophical and theological innovation. The Egyptians, for example, believed that souls were not inherently immortal and that immortality required complex rituals and ethical conduct (lest your soul was to be devoured in the afterlife). There are even subsets of the Abrahamic faiths that hold (or at least held) that the soul is attached to the body and that the paradise of scripture denotes the perfected world after God enacts the bodily resurrection of all beings at the end of time.
I don’t want to stop there, though. How do we know that the mind ends with the death of the body (or at least the physical brain)? Such a claim would require that the mind comes from and relies on the physical brain for its existence. Yet, it is an accepted issue within science and philosophy (known as the “hard problem”) that there is no known theory or mechanism by which a material brain could create an immaterial mind.
In all of the universe, science has only been ever to explain how matter interacts with other forms of matter. Matter is defined as anything that takes up space and has mass. Mass, importantly, is a measurement of energy (specifically a measure of its inertia, according to Webster). So matter and energy, really, do not refer to two separate things. All of physics and biology primarily revolve around some forms of matter/energy interacting with other forms of matter/energy and producing new combinations of matter/energy. There is no known process by which any form of matter or energy can suddenly become “immaterial” and disappear from the physical plane. Further, matter and energy are never created or destroyed and do not create or destroy anything, they merely interact, separate and combine. So how does the matter in the brain “create” a separate, immaterial reality? Outside of “magic”, there really isn’t an answer.
And yet, we cannot deny that the brain is correlated with our consciousness. Mess with the brain and you mess with my mind. How is that possible? The problem becomes less of a problem when you try to understand what the brain is. I do not know you or anything about you, but I know you have never directly witnessed a physical brain. That is because the only thing a human mind can ever directly experience are the perceptions contained within that mind. Any time you look at a neuron under a microscope, what you are actually witnessing is a representation of a neuron within your conscious awareness. Outside of our mental perceptions, nothing can be said to exist for sure.
So, really, we never witness a physical brain interacting with an immaterial consciousness. Actually, what we witness are perceptions of a brain within consciousness interacting with our conscious thoughts. The fundamental nature of our perceptions of a brain and of our thoughts is the same: they are both impressions within our conscious awareness. One impression affects another; this all we ever experience.
When we stop extrapolating a “physical” world and inserting it into our actual lived realities (where there is no definite proof of its existence), the “hard problem” of consciousness disappears into thin air. Further, the question: “where does the mind go when the body dies?” becomes a nonquestion. The “body” is within consciousness, and not the other way around, so it makes little sense to ask where the mind goes when we stop perceiving the body. It would be like asking where a pond “goes” when the reflections that dance upon it vanish with the coming of night.
What about the external world, however? Doesn’t this view promote the belief that we exist, and nothing outside of “our” mind is real? Importantly, this is not the case. We can posit that the brain is real, it is just real as consciousness. Moving forward, we can then say that if the fundamental nature of the “matter” within our brain is consciousness, there is no reason to believe that this is untrue for matter anywhere else. Perhaps the fundamental nature of all matter is consciousness. The sun and moon may exist, but they may not exist as physical realities- rather, they would exists as mental realities (they themselves could be loci of awareness or of subjective experience). Instead of the universe being composed of physical objects interacting with one another, it could just as easily be composed of mental objects interacting with one another (with fundamental particles actually being very simple forms of consciousness that can, such as in the brain, combine into increasing forms of complexity). This view is known as panpsychism and is wonderfully elaborated in Philip Goff’s book “Galileo’s Error”.
Back to the soul though. If we know that consciousness = matter, and that matter is never created or destroyed (merely transformed), well we have proved the immortality of consciousness. And since consciousness = the soul, we have also proved the immortality of the soul.
And well, that’s like neat right?