[See here for introductory comments.]
In this
entry, I want to discuss another key assumption that underlies my thinking
about the soul in a manner similar to the idea that the soul is a complex organism. This key assumption is that humans are the only creatures in the
universe that have souls. I
discussed this issue from a scriptural standpoint previously [here]. I acknowledge that there is probably
considerable disagreement about this assumption. For me, the concept of the soul is strongly
tied to the concept of "responsibility for one's own actions." I actually haven't met anyone who believes
that any non-human animals are responsible for their actions in the sense that
they should be praised and punished for their actions even if there is no
useful outcome of the praise or punishment (i.e. no training effect, protective
effect, etc.). Instead, I think those
who would put humans and at least some other animals (non-human primates for
starters) on the same level, do so by reducing the responsibility of
humans. That's a wrong approach, in my
opinion, but I'm not arguing the point here.
For the purposes of this entry, the uniqueness of the human soul will be
considered a given.
I think
that if past thinkers had started with the principle that dogs and monkeys do
not have souls, but humans do, they would have come to some different
conclusions about the soul. In my view,
past theories of the soul should have anticipated some of the significant
arguments that have been levied against the existence of the soul that have
arisen from the study of the brain, neuroscience, and medicine in the past
century or so. For example, a major
reason people give for rejecting the concept of the soul is the observed change
in behavior of humans who have some kind of brain damage. "If the soul is responsible for our
behavior, then why would damaging the brain cause any change?" they
ask. If the earliest theories of the
soul had taken into account that "dogs don't have souls", the whole
issue of brain damage would have been addressed from the beginning. I hope you can start to see why I say this by
the end of this entry.
Here's the
biggest point I want to make: if dogs
don't have souls, then everything that dogs do is a result of material, natural
forces. By implication, human activity that follows the pattern of
"dog activity" should not be attributed or allocated to the soul. It does not make sense to me that every
non-human animal does an action through natural ("non-soul") means,
like seeking food for example, but humans would do these same actions through a
different means. I suppose there could
be exceptions with respect to certain actions, but as a fundamental principle,
I don't think it makes sense to attribute anything to the human soul that is clearly observable in a dog (or any other non-human animal[1]).
This is a
very important principle. Dogs can be
trained to respond to commands. Dogs
learn to avoid certain activities. The
actions that dogs take can be very
complicated. Humans also have these
characteristics. Humans respond to
training. Humans remember things and
avoid activities that caused pain in the past and seek activities that caused
pleasure in the past. Thus, as a simple
first pass, it should be clear to even the most staunch dualist (I count myself
in that group) that the soul is not necessary for activities as advanced as
memory and learning. Even emotions like
anger and fear, which dogs clearly exhibit, must not require the soul (although
it will be necessary to dive deeper into an emotion like anger in a future
entry).
If you
start to think this through and compare your own daily activities to a dog's
daily activities, you'll realize that your "uniquely human" activity
shrinks down to very few things. In
fact, I believe we have phrases for those cases where we are simply acting as a
complex living organism without the need for the involvement of our soul. When we say things like "I was just
going through the motions" or "I've just been on autopilot" or
"I know I drove in to work this morning but I really don't remember anything
about the trip," I think that indicates a whole series of actions that
were "dog-like" and lived purely through natural, material,
brain-driven means. We don't need a soul
for those actions. I think we could go a
whole day and only do and respond in a manner identical to a dog. For such days, I suggest that our soul was
never engaged. In fact, I expect there
are times in our lives where we go for long periods of time essentially going
through the motions and, for all intents and purposes, we are soul-less humans. Maybe another way to think of it is that if
dogs looked like humans and could learn to speak a few phrases like "How's
your day?" and "I'm fine", I'll bet you could work next to a dog
and not know they weren't human. Could a
dog pass the Turing Test if there was a bark-to-English translator?
OK. By now many of you are saying "then what
in the world does the soul do?" In
my theory of the soul, the soul is responsible for everything that makes humans
unique from all other animals, but probably nothing more than that. What are those things? There are at least two things that I identify
as unique to humans: 1) moral decision-making
influencing the actions of the will, and 2) creativity when it can be
classified as a true creative action [an introduction to this concept is described here]. In short, humans are
responsible for their own actions and they are capable of true creation. Dogs are not.
Therefore, it is the human soul that is responsible for those two
activities. We obviously will have to
delve into this idea much more deeply as we go forward, but I wanted to get
this idea out there now because it is so fundamental.
Here's an
interesting implication of this fundamental principle: consciousness could be an epiphenomenon in
the material realm. I'm talking about
real consciousness - the awareness of being aware and the unified stream of
consciousness that is so difficult for science and philosophers to grapple
with. I don't think dogs are conscious
in this way and therefore, by further implication, consciousness is not
necessary for all of the kinds of actions that dogs and humans have in common. Again, I go back to the common phrases we
use. When we say we acted "on
autopilot", I think we are implying that we did the action unconsciously
or, at the very least, we didn't engage our consciousness in that
activity. Thus, I say that consciousness
could be an epiphenomenon because it is not necessary for us in order to live
the "dog's life."
What is
the point of consciousness then? In my
theory of the soul, the purpose of consciousness is to inform our moral
decision-making process. I will come
back to this point again and again, but for now I will say that most of our
actions could be rightly classified as "reactions." We respond to inputs and act according to our
learned patterns in the brain. These
don't require consciousness. Thus, even
though I think that the "Libet-style" experiments don't show what
they are often claimed to show, it doesn't matter to my theory of the soul if
our conscious perception actually occurs after
our decision-making. I would say
"dogs make decisions all the time without consciousness at all, so why
would it be necessary for similar decisions when made by humans?" But dogs don't make moral decisions. And,
frankly, I don't think humans make many moral decisions either. But the key thing is that humans make at
least some moral decisions, and that
makes all the difference in the world.
In fact, if you only make one moral decision over your entire life, that
separates you from every other being or object or thing or stuff in the entire physical
universe.
Don't think
that just because we only make a few moral decisions that therefore these
decisions are not that important.
Importance is not measured by number or volume in this case. A
single moral decision made by a single human is of more value than all the
decisions made by all the dogs, monkeys, cats, pigs, cows, etc. that ever lived or ever will live.
The last
point I will introduce is the idea that proper moral decision-making and
free-will decision making is the one human quality that requires the awareness
of the global context that our consciousness provides to us. Neural networks don't need an awareness of
the global context. Each neuron only
knows what its own inputs are and knows what to output. No neuron in the brain ever sees the broad
picture. Every neuron sees a very, very narrow picture of what is happening and
can only respond in a very constrained manner.
Complex behavioral responses are accomplished because there is a huge
network of individual neurons each taking care of their own little part of the
overall response. That's how a dog's
brain works and that's how a human brain works.
My contention is that the reason consciousness is necessary is because
of our need to make moral decisions and decisions of the will. These kind of decisions uniquely require the
global, unified awareness of our current situation in the context of our
knowledge of the past. In short, they
require consciousness.
I think
I've given enough food for thought in this entry, so I'm going to stop
here. I've introduced many concepts that
are going to require a deeper dive in the future. Hopefully I've piqued your interest in this
topic.
[1]
I'm using dogs just as an example. Dogs
seem to the be most human-like of all of the animals that humans have regular interaction with. Non-human primates are probably even more
human-like, but most people don't have personal experience with them on a daily
basis. A lot of people treat dogs as if
they were humans, but that really is a topic for another day! And sorry cat-lovers, cats aren't human
either.
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