[See here for introductory comments to this series.]
In my earlier entries on the theory of the soul, I have put forward some foundational principles about the general concept. Now it is time to actually start presenting my theory. I'm going to start with some broad brush strokes to provide an overall view of the concept, but there will be much more digging into the details of this theory as we go forward. Remember that the goal of this theory is to show that a Christian view can be reasonable in light of neuroscience and still consistent with scripture. The concept of the soul comes from scripture, but the details of my theory generally do not.
I theorize
that the soul is composed of at least three major components. These three components are very much
analogous to three components you might ascribe to the human nervous system,
or, for that matter, even to a computer.
Specifically, I am talking about how the nervous system has: 1) an
"afferent" or sensory system, which is composed of all of the inputs
going into the brain, 2) an "efferent" or motor system, which is
composed of all of the outputs going out to the muscles and organs to cause
action of some sort, and 3) processing and memory, where the sensory inputs are
combined with internal inputs and memory to influence or produce the
output. I am not suggesting that the
soul has "neurons" like our nervous system, nor am I suggesting that
the soul can be mimicked by a computer in an artificial intelligence kind of
way. What I am suggesting is a point I
made earlier: the soul is complex, not homogenous. All I am really doing is
putting forward the general application of that concept. Thus, I'm not claiming that the idea that the
soul is composed of at least three components is particularly insightful,
because any system, living or otherwise, that "does something" almost
always has an "input", "output", and "some control
system in the middle." However,
what I think might be more enlightening is to dig one level deeper and consider
how each of these three components might be described when considered as part
of the soul. In this entry I'm going to
introduce the "Afferent System of the Soul."
The Afferent System
of the Soul: Consciousness
The first component
of the soul is the afferent, or "sensory system", of the soul. In my view, the sensory system of the soul is
human consciousness. When I use the term
"human consciousness", I'm talking about the sense of being aware of
what is around us and also being "aware of being aware." I theorize that this awareness
"resides" in the soul, not in the physical brain. In my theory, consciousness is the combined
summation of the soul's sensory information that it receives from the brain
(and possibly other organs as well). Thus,
consciousness itself does not "do" anything - it is only the bringing
together - unifying - of what it senses from the activity in the brain.
All
analogies become circular when it comes to the soul, but I will give an analogy
nonetheless. Functional Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is a means of imaging the brain that shows areas in
the brain with high activity and areas with low activity, and so on. The brain of someone can be imaged using fMRI
while they are doing various tasks and the resulting fMRI image will show the areas
of the brain that were more active during that task. I'm guessing that experienced researchers who
examine fMRI images of a lot of people's brains doing a lot of different tasks
can make a pretty good guess about what a person is doing just by looking at
the image. For example, I'm pretty sure
they could tell the difference between an fMRI image when someone is moving
their hand vs. when they are watching a movie.
But the important thing for this analogy is that fMRI doesn't cause
anything to happen in the brain. fMRI
just scans or "observes" the whole brain and, ultimately, produces a
complete image or series of images that show us what is happening. In the same way, consciousness senses what is
going on in the brain in great detail, but it does not affect the brain in any
way. That is why there is no way to
"observe" consciousness in the physical brain of an individual. It is exactly like someone asking you to open
up someone's brain and show them where the fMRI image is. There is no image in the brain - it is
created from the "sensing" of the MRI machine and is totally separate
from the brain. I say that consciousness
is like that. There is more detail, of
course, but, for starters, let's just say that consciousness has the capacity
to sense the status of every synapse in the entire nervous system and combine
that information into a single image, presented continuously as long as you are
awake and aware. That is
consciousness. More to come on that.
As a brief
aside, I call these analogies circular because, ultimately, it is not the fMRI
machine that combines the sensed brain activity into a single image. All it does is
produce an image that is composed of many many pixels of colored spots. The combining of the image comes together
into a unified picture only when we look at
the organized collection of pixels. The
picture is not a unified thing - it is just a bunch of pixels - it is only our
visual perception of the picture that is unified. And, actually, our visual perception is just
a large parallel set of impulses from the retina that are sent to our visual
cortex. And, further, in the visual
cortex they don't get combined into a single image. They get processed and combined into more
parallel signals in complex neural networks, but there is never a place in the brain where one neuron sees the whole picture. So how do we see the fMRI image as a
whole? That's our consciousness! ...and that's why I call the analogy
circular. We're trying to describe
consciousness, but we end up forcing consciousness into our description. I challenge you to come up with an analogy of
consciousness that does not, at its very core, include consciousness within the
analogy.
So, back
to my original purpose: is the concept of consciousness as an
afferent system of the soul consistent with neuroscience? I will use the analogy of a radio
receiver. The receiver senses the radio
waves and produces an output, and therefore is analogous to consciousness. But, as far as the radio station that
generates the original signal, it has no way of detecting whether there is a
receiver out there listening to it. So,
in the same way, if you assume that consciousness, in the act of sensing the
status of the brain, doesn't leave any physical trace behind, then I think it
is consistent with neuroscience. If
these conditions are an appropriate description, then there is nothing physical
to measure with respect to consciousness.
Of course, those who reject the existence of the soul will say that this
concept is unnecessary and conveniently "creates" a soul out of
nothing that leaves no trace behind, and therefore is not scientific. I would agree with that statement: the soul is not scientific (although wait
until we get to the efferent system!).
As I have stated before, the theory is not developed with the goal of
creating a scientific proof. The soul is
a given from Christian belief and the
question is, can a theory of soul be developed that is consistent with
neuroscience findings. As far as an
efferent consciousness, I suggest this part of my theory does not violate any
principles of neuroscience, and therefore meets the criteria. I think it can go deeper than that when we
consider the concept of unity of perception (i.e. the binding problem), but
that is for a future discussion.
Does this theory of consciousness as the
afferent system of the soul violate Scripture? In my reading of Scripture, it is pretty vague
about the composition of the soul and, as far as I can tell, consciousness is
assumed but never described in Scripture.
So, when it comes to these kinds of underlying details, I think there is
a lot of room for "creative" thinking. As far as I can ascertain, this concept is
consistent with Scripture.
Well, on
to the "efferent" system of the soul, which is going to be much more
difficult to explain. As I have mentioned
before, neuroscience refers to the "hard problem of consciousness",
but I consider the efferent system of the soul to be diamond compared to the afferent system's talc. That's next.
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