by Zeev Nitsan
People are used to telling stories to themselves and to others, and some believe that the self is the core story, a narrative whose plot is woven like a braid from the threads of our memories, our memes, and senses’ impressions and secondary plots branch out from it.
The philosopher Daniel Dennett emphasized language as a tool in the service of the “continuous self” due to its ability to grant narrative consistency to our life. Some might say that, more than we tell the story, the story tells us.
Among those who have a deterministic approach regarding the human soul, some believe that, just as one should not be upset with a falling stone, since it is doomed to fall due to gravity, we behave in the shadow of certain behavioral motivation laws that allow only limited maneuvering toward free choice. Thus, when we judge people’s conduct, we must take into account that their behavior derives from coercion.
It seems that the circumstances that are formed under the influence of randomality are the invisible forces that motivate many of our decisions. “Free will” is often a secondary motivation at best. It seems that we are often the victim of the oppression of random circumstances, which lead to a behavioral outcome that is preordained by means of various psychological biases that are invisible to the eye of our consciousness.
Are We Biochemical Marionettes?
The belief in the existence of the soul is a top psychological tool in the service of survival. According to this view, our consciousness invents the soul, like Baron Munchausen manages to get out of a boggy swamp by holding on to his braids.
According to an approach that is becoming popular among many mind researchers of various disciplines, our brain builds in an automatic manner, and hidden from our consciousness, a model of the self that relies on self-mapping of the systems and processes within our body. The activity of the neural network of the default system greatly contributes to the formation of this model. The processes of building the model are invisible, like transparent windows that are piled on top of each other on the computer screen while a software is running. Our perception penetrates them unnoticeably, and we only get to know the final virtual outcome of the process. This is the process of inner mapping, from which the model of the self is created in a manner that is invisible to our consciousness’s eyes. The self-model, which is perceived as the “self,” is a delusional entity in nature, since it does not constitute an entity in itself but, rather, an inclusive representation of the condition of our body. The abstract term “soul” loses its mysterious aura and is referred to as flesh and blood that must obey the rules of time and space. Thus, we end up with an essence that is not metaphysical.
When a researcher looks into the skull cave of another person, all he sees are brain cells and a dance of information (a dance that is reflected in the pattern of shooting potentials along the axons) that takes place between them. In this spirit, some might say that the brain cells and the dance of information that is formed between them are like the props used by the brain, the master of illusion, and the “self” is the illusion itself.
Some compare the “self” to an (automatic?) pilot who sits in the cockpit and flies the bird of our soul. Others might claim, in a nihilistic tone, that there is nothing at the cockpit and that all of us are passengers captured in a ghost flight that is headed nowhere. The ones who believe that the model of the self is a genetic dictate ascribe a teleological explanation to it. According to them, the model of the self serves the organism and grants it a survival-related advantage by creating distinction, which enables the collection of genes that is the “self” to manage itself as an autonomic unit. This reductive, gloomy approach might suggest that we are nothing but a passive vessel that contains genes, soulless couriers who row and carry the genes through the waterfall of generations.
Others see the model of the self as a reflection of the excessive ability of the human brain, which derives from its complexity, without any “agenda” on the part of the genes. On the other hand, some might claim that interpreting the brain in Darwinian terms is biological determinism, a charged concept that sometimes triggers negative connotations.
In modern human history there have been a number of “insight decrees” that challenged the unique charm of our species; thus, for instance, Copernicus “stole” the centrality of our home planet in the solar system; Charles Darwin “removed” the crown of divine creation from our head and discovered our relatives among the monkeys. Some see the materialistic decree related to body–soul (whose validity is yet to be confirmed) as the cruelest one—one that “banishes” our souls from us.
The “Self” Avatar?
The word avatar comes from Sanskrit. In Hindi religious literature it means the embodiment of God on Earth. In today’s virtual world, the term refers to a virtual image that represents a human user in the cyberspace universe.
Is our sense of self also a type of avatar—a virtual entity that our brain fabricates and grants an aura of real materialism to? For instance, brain researcher Michael Gazzaniga believes that the left hemisphere is the one that creates the narrative of the one consistent “self,” irons the wrinkles in the fabric of our reality perception and unfurls it as smooth and coherent, and, in fact, is the producer of the mirage of the unified self in practice, as Gazzaniga sees it.[55]
Is our “self” the producer of thoughts or is it our thoughts that produce it? Is the “self” a mere lingual creature rather than a realistic being?
Like a flourishing oasis that looms as a fata morgana when we explore its nature, so is the soul, in the eyes of the skeptics, the “desert of the actual”—a desolate sand dune rather than the magical oasis we tend to perceive. This view is the result of the de-mythologization of the mythological concept of soul.
The “self” represents, as a common human convention, our essence as unique and independent human beings. But there are people who are forced to deviate from the course of the consolidated “self,” such as those who suffer from psychotic episodes or neurological diseases that crumble the “self.” In the absence of a control agent within us, which demands control over our emotions, the self dissolves, but still we will not claim that these patients are not human beings.
It seems that many brain researchers assume that we are watching a play during which a disheveled scientist is about to approach the front of the stage, in the role of a little boy who will declare that the royal garments of the soul are nothing but an illusion, and just after him the temporary similitude of Nietzsche will step forward and pronounce the death of the soul.
Knowing the self thoroughly might turn out to be very disappointing in the emotional sense. It is difficult to desert the comforting view related to the existence of the soul, just as the Copernican world slapped the ones who believed in the centrality of Earth.
Moreover, the intellectual killing of the self might shake the foundations of our moral perception. The core of ethics and the principles of the good and worthy are based on viewing human society as a collection of autonomic agents with unique characteristics who enjoy freedom of choice and the ability to build railways for the train of their destiny. As a result of that, we are all responsible for our choices, and out of this basic hypothesis, the layers of personal responsibility, and morality- as a whole, sprout.
If we pronounce that the “self” that is related to the ability of understanding and freedom of choice is nothing but an illusion, we endanger ourselves with a chain reaction that might lead to the splitting of social atom and activating forces that are invisible to the contemporary horizon of our vision.
Up and Down
The nesting nature of phenomena enables us to go up and down the scale of resolution and abolishes the need to start each thorough discussion with the “story of genesis” in which the developer of the idea believes.
The nesting nature of things is well known, and it is possible to start from a reasonable point in the middle of the scale, assuming that the more accurate levels of detail it contains are already known to th
e addressee of information.
Due to the nesting pattern of knowledge, according to which old knowledge nests within newer knowledge and the latter finds its nest in the most up-to-date knowledge, we tend to prefer new information to old information due to the implicit supposition according to which new information contains old information and adds to it, or processes it in a pattern that elaborates on the conclusions that can be derived from it.
The direction of the arrow of reductionism is opposite to the direction of the arrow of holism and might reach the end of the conceptual horizon.
A familiar claim that opposes reductional explanations is that, in the interspace that is created between the level of reducing and simplifying explanation and the phenomenon as it is perceived in our daily life, essential characteristics of the phenomenon trickle out of the mental field of vision.
Like a divine fata morgana, a rainbow looks spectacular and colorful from a distance. As we come closer to it, however, its image starts to vanish gradually. The level of resolution, according to which we observe a phenomenon, dictates the way we perceive it, which means that a phenomenon that is perceived as a certain entity at a certain level of resolution might be perceived as a totally different entity when the level of resolution is changed.
Some claim that we cannot use reductionism with respect to subjective situations because substantial aspects of the interpreted experience tend to evaporate during the reduction.
Reductionist explanations have always stirred up resentment. For example, the nineteenth-century English poet John Keats claimed that Isaac Newton “destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by unweaving it to the prismatic colors.”
The difficulty in applying a reductive approach in the interface between matter and spirit has led to the implementation of the softer approaches of “supervenience” and “emergence.” The supervenience approach is applied when we do not have enough knowledge to reduce a single discipline and contain it, as a whole, in another discipline. An example is the claim that mental conditions rely on the structural, functional infrastructure of our brain. A relation of supervenience is common in assumptions regarding the type of correlation between the material infrastructure of the brain and its function and the sphere of our mental life.
When there is difficulty in translating concepts from a certain discipline into another discipline in a way that no substantial feature of the described manifestation is lost in translation, the “emergence” approach is implemented. Thus, for example, the quality of wetness, which is essential to the essence of water, derives from the pattern of molecular joining of water molecules to each other (a chemical bonding pattern called “hydrogen bond”), which results in a liquid state of aggregation. The wetness feature, which does not exist when the components of water are separated, as separate molecules of water, emerges from this state of aggregation.
An additional example of emergence is the temperature that emerges out of the average of kinetic energy of a certain substance, or the weather, which is also formed as a result of changes in the movement of molecules and the changes in temperature that follow that.
Emergence relations seem suitable to the description of the reciprocal relations between the biological bedding of our brain and the spiritual life that results from it. The thoughts sprout from the material infrastructure of the brain according to its unique pattern of organization. Organization is not a material quality; thus it constitutes an additional possible explanation for supervenience and emergence of spirit out of substance.
Freudian Mind
The relationship between brain scientists and Freud’s ideas were bipolar. On one pole, there were those who adapted Freud’s theory wholeheartedly, and, on the other end, there were those who rejected the theory and claimed it was anachronistic and lacking solid factual basis. The biological approach has been acquiring a foothold (and hearts) among many contemporary mental doctors, however, at the same time, the pendulum that tilted in the past toward Freud’s supporters, and later moved sharply toward the other end, has become more moderated in its tilt recently. The moderation of the dichotomous tendency of the pendulum derives from the forming recognition that Freud was, indeed, responsible for significant conceptual revolutions, even if some of his hypotheses were incorrect.
Interdoctrine Conceptualization
Some compare the terms “id,” “ego,” and “superego,” created in Freud’s conceptual mint, to the terms “unconscious,” “conscious,” and “preconscious.”
According to Freud, the ego is the servant of two masters—the superego and the id—and, by means of possible extrapolation, the conscious serves the unconscious layers.
An additional correlation between terms taken from Feud’s theory and terms taken from another conceptual doctrine about the brain is the one that matches terms of phylogenetic evolution of the brain with Freud’s doctrine; the topographic correlation to the structure of the mind in Freud’s doctrine is embodied in the model that conceptualized the human brain as a hierarchic, multilayered model. This model, proposed by brain researcher Paul McLean, is based on the assumption that the brain develops from lower core structures toward higher structures of the brain. It may be applied both in the functional sense and the topographic sense. The brain stem (the reptilian brain), as the basic phase in the evolution of our brain, can be correlated to the id (the generator of raw urges). The next stage, which represents the transition from reptile brain to mammal brain, is the development of the limbic system (whose main structures are the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the hypothalamus), which can be correlated to the ego (the main pathways of emotional motivation). An additional stage in development is the transition from the mammal brain to the primate brain, which is characterized by the development of the cortex, and the “transition-to-human” stage is characterized by the “excessive” development of the frontal lobes, and their front areas in particular, where the superego—the main generator of judgment and ethical perception—resides.
The Language of the Land and the Language of the Sky—Materialism Versus Idealism
Some believe that the body is the temporary residence of the mind (a very temporary residence—more like a motel), while others think that the destruction of the body equals the destruction of the mind.
By means of an aphorism that may oversimplify the complexity of the subject matter, we could say that there are three main approaches related to the question of body–soul, from which numerous subapproaches derive.
Materialism: According to this approach, the entire universe, including human beings’ consciousness, is composed only from matter.
Idealism: According to this approach, the entire universe, including human beings’ consciousness, is composed only from spirit.
Dualism: This is the “mediating approach,” according to which the world is composed of materialistic aspects and spiritual aspects and both reside side by side.
The concept of the separate, existence of the soul has deep evolutional roots. The natural sense of many of us is that we carry within us a mental core that cannot be minimized.
The view regarding the separate existence of the soul was the only show in town during various periods in history (in the sense of the ruling meme).
According to the view of the philosopher Rene Descartes, which was dominant for many years, the body has a material manifestation—flesh and blood—that obeys the rules of physics, and, at the same time, it is also the residence of the mind. According to Descartes’ theory, the mind is not material, does not take up space, and does not obey the rules of physics and the principle of causality. A human being is the junction in which materialism meets nonmaterialism, and from this combination the human being is formed.
“I think, therefore I am,” said Descartes. The question is, who is this “I” that “think”?
It seems that the tendency to adapt the concept of separate entities of body and soul is built into our brain in a pattern similar to the collective unconscious. Descartes re
lated to this heart’s wish and built his philosophical theory around it.
The failures that are typical of this dualistic view derive from the difficulty in explaining the way in which nonmaterial thought makes the neurons that are imbedded in the material world operate.
Is Our Mind the Result of Physical Rules?
According to a contradictory approach called the “physicalism approach,” or “reducing materialism,” all aspects of our soul life can be reduced and explained in terms of material and energy. The effect vector is unidirectional: the body influences the spirit and not the other way around. The spirit is activated by the matter but does not affect it.
Consciousness resides in the thick forest of neurons and, more specifically, among them. The spirit is formed out of an interactive process. In this sense, the self as the creature of the spirit exists in the gap between the things.
The mind is formed out of the “discourse of neurons,” and cognition, as a main aspect of it, derives from this activity.
The technical specification of the human mind was written throughout ages of evolution. The daily challenges in the survival journey of life have brought about more updated versions.
“Complexity that is formed out of simplicity” is a known phenomenon in our world. Fractals and other recursive processes are an example. Some claim that it is also true for the brain, which is composed of about a hundred billion similar “simple” cells and produces products of great complexity, the most amazing of which is the human mind.
According to an approach that sees the manifestation of the mind as an aspect that derives from pure material processes, the mind is a huge production of brain models that have different fields of expertise.
