A Theory of Soul Consistent with Scripture and Neuroscience - Part 10: A Personal Example of Soul and Body in Action

[See here for introductory comments.]

 

             In this entry, I want to use a personal example to bring together a few of the ideas presented so far.  This example will combine the "noodles for reins" analogy [here] with the fundamental principle that most of what we do follows the pattern of "dog activity" [see discussion here].  When you put these two things together, you realize that the soul's influence might be pretty rare and is certainly weak.  The question that arises then is "when is the soul ever active?"  I want to provide an initial answer to that question using the following personal example.

 

Personal example of soul in action

             As an undergraduate, I was always on the thin border of being able to afford college.  In order to make ends meet, I needed to get scholarships, grants, work study jobs, and regular jobs.  I was constantly worried about whether I was going to be able to make the next tuition and room & board payment.  My dad worked, but my parents were not in position to help me substantially with college and, in fact, they lost their house during my freshman year of college. 

             After my first year of college, I gained a better understanding of how the federal financial aid system worked.  In my first year, the financial aid package included some amount that was supposed to come from my parents, but they were not able to do that.  During that year I learned that if I could qualify to be an "independent" on my taxes, then my parent's income would not factor into the financial aid calculation.  That seemed like a good plan to me, but I had to meet all of the criteria.  I don't remember all the details, but I recall there were three criteria and I met two of them easily.  But the third criterion was something like "you can't live with your parents for more than six weeks during the past year."  I had attended summer classes, so I hadn't lived at home during most of the year.  But when I added up the total time I had lived at home, it was something like eight weeks - just exceeding the official limit to qualify to be an independent.

             At the time, I was trying to "live by faith" and believe that God would provide sufficient funding for school.  I had already experienced a couple of miracles in that regard - someday I will have to relate that story.  But, miracles or no, I was constantly worried that I was not going to be able to pay the next bill and I'd have to take whatever money I had left and take the 48-hour Greyhound bus ride back home. 

             When it came to doing my taxes that second year, I struggled.  I almost met the criteria to be an independent.  Two out of three I easily met.  The third I was sooo close.  And if I could be an independent, I would get so much more aid.  I could pay for school.

             So...I lied on my taxes that year.  I claimed I met all three criteria and was an independent.

             What I want to do in this entry is relate my actions to the different components of my theory of the soul.  The decision to lie on my taxes was a moral decision, but driven strongly by the rational and emotional aspects of my mind.  There was an emotional component of the decision:  fear and anxiety.  I was certainly fearful about not being able to pay for school and fearful that if I wasn't declared an independent, I wouldn't get enough financial aid to pay for school.  And there was a rational component to the decision:  it seemed like a small thing because I was really close to qualifying.  And, besides, how could the IRS ever find out anyway?  There was no track record of where I lived during the past year (this was long before cell phones with GPS), so how could it ever be proven?  And what were the odds that the IRS would ever audit a poor college student?

             I used the term "mind" in the previous paragraph because I wanted to be vague.  Now let me break this down into the spiritual and physical realms - soul and body.  First, let me say this:  although I certainly believe the soul and physical body are different and distinct things, I think it is very hard for us to discern where one ends and the other begins.  The soul and body are intricately linked and I think it is hard to separate some of our actions into physical and spiritual categories.  I'll dive into this more when I talk about anger, which is certainly one of those characteristics of humans that resides in both the body and the soul.  But despite the difficulty in separating our actions into soul and body, I'm going to give some general thoughts regarding this situation that I hope will shed light on my theory of the soul.

             First, there are plenty of aspects to my decision to lie on my taxes that were purely physiologically-based.  But, since I don't think dogs lie on their taxes, there must be some aspect of my actions that was soul-based.  The fear of not being able to pay for college was strongly physiological.  We know that there are areas of the brain that are active when we are afraid or anxious.  There are also general physiological responses to fear that, to a greater or lesser extent, further heighten our sense of fear.  There is a positive feedback loop that can sometimes be detrimental to us.  I think the desire to extract ourselves from any situation that produces fear or anxiety - the "flight" of the autonomic nervous system - is nearly all driven by our physiology and can happen without the intervention of our soul.  Dogs avoid fear.  The things that cause human beings fear, such as not being able to pay for college, are certainly more abstract than what dogs fear, but that doesn't change the fundamental fact.  I think our physical brains are capable of extensive abstraction, allowing us to respond in fear to all sorts of rational and irrational concepts.  I think the drive to avoid fearful situations and find a place of calm and comfort is a very strong physiological drive.  Going back to the "noodle reins" analogy, trying to keep the horse from jumping when it hears a rattlesnake rattle is an almost impossible task for the jockey. 

             But fear alone was not sufficient to cause me to lie on my taxes.  I also needed the rationalization that 1) I was very close to qualifying and 2) I wouldn't be caught.  Our ability to rationalize must be one of those things that requires both the physical brain (mostly frontal cortex, I'm assuming) and the soul.  The ability to rationalize seems to me to require a broad, unified view of the situation we are in.  Specifically, it seems that rationalizing requires consciousness.  Since consciousness resides in the soul, then the soul must be involved in rationalization.  But I also think there is a lot of "computation" to rationalization which probably takes place in the physical brain.  Where does "thinking" lie?  In the physical brain or in the soul?  At the very least, our awareness of our thinking lies in our soul.  But the thinking itself?  I don't know for sure.  I think it could be that most of our thinking takes place in our brain and our conscious awareness of it is mostly in the sense of a spectator.  We are aware of our brain thinking.

             So, coupled with my fear, I rationalized that lying on my taxes was not that big of a deal.  It was "not that bad" I reasoned.  But, of course, I'm not the only one to lie on my taxes.  There are some who intentionally don't even pay their taxes.  I could have just not filed taxes, or any of a number of other equally wrong actions.  Where is the "setting" for how much of a lie on my taxes was "not that bad"?  I believe it is within the soul - the will - where these kinds of personal standards are established.  With my soul I decided to go ahead with filling out my taxes in a way that was not true.  Actually, "decided" is too strong of a word here.  In reality, based on my fears and rationalizations, I was fully prepared to claim I was an independent.  But ultimately my soul did not put the brakes on that action.  My soul let it happen.  But, even further, it's not like my soul was strongly opposed to proceeding.  My character, embodied in my soul, is pretty typical of most people, I think.  I generally want to do the right thing, but I also place a bit of a limit about doing the right thing and I have a very fuzzy border between right and wrong.  So, in the case of this particular action, my soul was complicit.  I didn't work that hard trying to keep myself from proceeding!

             So, I filed my taxes, claiming I qualified to be an independent.  And, it worked.  I was declared an independent.  My college financial aid was calculated based on my income alone and my college aid was maximized.  To be honest, I'd like to say I felt bad for doing it.  I'd like to say that I felt guilt over being dishonest on my taxes.  But I didn't really.  I felt uneasy, but it was the unease that you feel when you think you might get "caught".  That was it.  I made the same claim in the remaining years of my undergraduate schooling, but in later years I hadn't lived with my parents in excess of the maximum number of weeks, so I really did qualify.

             Let me just note here, before I go on, that when you ask the question "so, what part of you is responsible for lying on your taxes?  Your body?  Your brain?  Your soul?  Your will?"  I think there is only one good answer:  "I was responsible."  Though I am a dualist at heart, and therefore I think there really is a difference between body and soul, physical and spiritual, I also see each human being as a cohesive whole.  I'm not two separate people, i.e. a body-self and a soul-self that just happen to hang out together.  I'm one person.  We can't use the concept of dualism to start justifying any concept that "you" can separate from the guilt of your physical self.  Sorry - it's not that easy.

             Well, quite a few years later, when I was in graduate school, something happened that caused me to face my guilt about lying on my taxes.  I say "something happened" because I actually can't remember.  It may have been my own personal study of the Bible.  Or it might have been something someone said to me about living a life pleasing to God.  Regardless, I saw clearly that lying on my taxes was just plain wrong, regardless of whether it was "not that bad."  I was guilty.

             I rebelled against this idea with every fiber of my being.  But it didn't change the facts.  I had to admit guilt and make it right.  How could I do that?  I had no idea, but I had to try.  So, you may laugh, but what I did was to write a letter to the IRS, explain exactly what I had done on the specific year of taxes in question.  I didn't know if the IRS even had a mechanism to receive and act on a letter like that.  I can't imagine they get many letters from people admitting they lied on their taxes!  But they actually did read the letter because I received a response from the IRS in which they asked for some additional documents, which included a copy of my parent's taxes for that year.  It was rather embarrassing for me to have to ask my parents for a copy of their taxes from a few years earlier.  Although, come to think of it, why did the IRS need a copy of anyone's taxes - don't they have copies???  Anyway, I sent the required documents and never heard anything further.  That was more than 30 years ago.

             So why do I relate this "Part II" to this story?  Because I believe it illustrates a deeper component of my theory of the soul.  My action to admit my guilt and write a letter, while carried out by my physical body, was driven by my soul.  Actually, not even my soul.  I believe it was driven by the Holy Spirit.  If I use the horse and jockey analogy, this was one time when I let go of my "noodle reins" and let the Holy Spirit use his "steel reins."  As I said at the beginning of the previous paragraph, I "rebelled against this idea with every fiber of my being."  By that I mean that my body and my soul were united in rebellion against any suggestion that I should make this situation right or even that I was really guilty.  This situation was not just a physical response to inputs or past memories.  This was years after the event.  It was certainly not something I obsessed about in the intervening years.  In my opinion, this was purely an act of the Spirit.  If you don't believe in a spiritual realm, then of course you will claim there was a physical explanation for why I suddenly felt guilt and took steps to do something that I really didn't want to do.  Good luck with that!

             I don't expect it will ever be possible to do this experiment, but this is a case where, if you could read the entire set of neural activity in my brain, you would have found at least one neuron acting in a way that was not entirely consistent with all of its inputs.  This would be the influence of the Spirit via the soul upon my physical brain.  That is one of the fundamental claims I make in my theory of the soul, and I believe it has to be a fundamental claim any dualist (or similar) must make.  But these events are rare and can't be prescribed.  As I look back over my life, the event I relate here, where the soul and Spirit are clearly involved, seems to be pretty rare.  That is why it is so difficult to do an experiment to demonstrate this basic principle.