After reading Dan Brown’s book Origin where he tries (but does not succeed IMHO) to solve two eternal problems: “where did we come” from and “where are we going”, I though of solving the third problem in this set: “what are we”. As far as I understand, in the classical form this question means asking if there is a soul or not, that is, are we just dust from the ground or do we have inside of us a heavenly sparkle felt as self.
There are brain researchers and other scientists who claim that there is no soul, but they must follow the ideological agenda of today’s science to get their works published as science. Descartes is still quite correct in his observation that the existence of our wondering mind is the only thing we can be sure of because it is immediate experience. We can doubt the existence of the world – it could be an illusion – but not that we have a mind that can doubt it. Descartes felt sure enough to extend his observation to other men (for sure, only to Western men), but not to women and dogs, who he suspected being automatons like a clock machine. To be fair, he almost certainly did not think women and dogs really were automatons, he simply did not feel justified in extending his personal observations to beings that were different from him. We can safely assume that women and dogs are quite similar to men in this respect, and even extend the same conclusions to all mammals and even to birds.
However, extending the doubting mind – or feeling of self – to reptiles, fish, invertebrates, plants, bacteria or viruses is clearly unjustified. Viruses are alive but they in fact seem to be replication machines, like clock machines in Descartes’ division of live beings to those with a mind and those without. I have a reason for believing that this division is between birds and mammals as one group and reptiles as the most advanced of the other group. Reptiles show only two feelings: fear and anger, but it is not clear that they feel these feelings. They show physiological and behavioral responses associated with these feelings, but that does not mean that reptiles experience the feelings.
Why so? For one thing (but there are more reasons) because I once tried to learn of the association of amygdale to fear and found this web-page:
The author of the post states that he has studied amygdale for 30 years (I still respect long research as a way to gain insight on complicated matters) and that in his opinion amygdale is not the origin of the feeling of fear. It is the origin of physiological reactions for fear. It extracts hormones, which give the fear response and behavior, but a person whose amygdale has been removed can still feel fear under special circumstances. Amygdale is responsible for the fight-fear-freeze reaction. Sex hormones, associated with hypothalamus, are connected with aggression, dominance and sexual behavior. Again there is no direct tie to “feeling” any feelings, only to expressing them physiologically and behaviorally.
Your pet snake does not and cannot love you while your pet dog loves you. Your pet cat probably does not love you, as cats are not so attacked to humans as dogs, but one look at its vertical eyes shows that it has a doubting mind. A pet bird may quite well be attached to you. But a reptile will not have such feelings, that is, those reptiles that we still have. At some point in the prehistory mammals and birds developed from reptiles and there were mammal-reptiles and dinosaurs. There must have been some stage when these two developed from a predecessor which had feelings more or less as we do now.
Any argument that accepts Descartes’ conclusion that he had a doubting mind and could not doubt doubting must draw the same corollary as Descartes did: there is a division of life to those who have a mind and to those who do not. This division can be pushed further than Descartes dared to do at his time and it does not need to go so far as to divide viruses from other life. I think present reptiles are the highest life form without a mind. Consequently, an octopus does not have feelings, though it is a fairly intelligent creature and expresses fear and aggression. Plants also do not have feelings despite that there are books explaining plants’ secret life and that Tolkien wrote tales where trees are full of anger.
There is an animistic view, like in Theosophy, that all life has a soul of some kind. I do not think this is warranted. It is an idea that is related to all material having a soul. Then a society has a soul and history has a spirit of time. These kinds of ideas go too far from what can be empirically or otherwise deduced. It is quite a different thing to claim that a woman is similar to a man in this respect than to claim that a bacterium has a very small soul of its own. There is much evidence of the former, none of the latter.
So, what is this doubting mind of Descartes that I expect to find from men, women, dogs and all mammals and birds. Fortunately people can now build more complex clock machines called computers. Computers do not have feelings, free will or sense of self and they will not get these properties by getting faster processors, large memories and bigger and better programs. It is because zero times anything is still zero. It is very easy to become convinced that computers do not have these properties after trying to invent some way to give a computer these properties. Something essential is missing. Ipso, mammals and birds are not alive computers. They have a soul, which is something totally different.
Where is this soul and why brain researchers have not found it? It is exactly this way: the existence of a doubting mind of Descartes or consciousness and the feeling of a free will cannot be denied, it is just a question why brain researchers have not found it and probably will not find it in the future – there is enough research already to say so.
Let us reason with an analogy. If we can only investigate program code, where is the place that accesses input/output devices, like writes on a screen? There is only code. We cannot find in this way any input/output devices, as they are hardware and not software. We can only find calls to those devices, but the calls are not the device. The calls look just the same as all other code. In a computer you may get the impression of being in contact with a real person, for instance, you can create a Skype conversation. Is this impression caused by being connected to a real person or is it an illusion created by a complicated program? It is a connection to a real person, but what would a computer researcher say if being able to see the code only. He would correctly deduce that if this phenomenon is caused by a connection to a real person in some faraway place that he cannot see, then he should find input/output devices: screen, network card, microphone and loudspeaker, but he sees no trace of them. All, he sees is code, code and more code. The feeling of communicating with a real person must be just an illusion created by the complicated program. How does this differ from a brain researcher who cannot find any part of the brain connecting to another world?
If there is a soul, then it must be in another world, since in this world all we can see in living beings is an automaton. A cell is an automaton. Neurons in a brain form a computer. All of this must be software and we cannot see the hardware. This world is an illusion, Maya, just like Plato and many others claimed.
Did I make any logical mistake? Existence of a soul cannot be doubted. We do not find the soul or any devices that connect to the soul, yet the connection must be through the brain rather than e.g. through blood or the heart. Feelings are associated with the middle brain, but we can cut off parts of the middle brain and still evoke the feelings in some special cases, like we can remove amygdale and still under special conditions have the feeling of fear. There must be a connection from the brain to something that can have feelings, but we cannot see this connection. It must be in a world that we cannot see. I do not think I made any mistake here.
Life is born out of life and mammals seem to have this feeling of self as soon as their brain starts to work. Do they inherit the soul from their parents? Probably not, then there would be a small invisible soul encapsulated in the brain. We could ask what happens to this soul in death: does it fly away or hang around the body or what. A more simple explanation is that the new being connects to something that has a soul and the soul is never inside the brain. It does not die when the being dies, like the other end point of transmission does not die if a receiver is destroyed in the other end point. I think a communication paradigm is quite good here because then we do not need to assume a small soul inside each brain. That would assume that new souls are created when a new being is born, and there might be mistakes. A being could be born without a soul or with more than on soul in one brain. This gets too complicated and it is relatively easy to create problematic situations. Let us say the soul is not inside the brain and that there actually is only one soul, in a programming language it forks new instances of a soul when a new being is born because a new brain connects to the soul when it is mature enough for it. (This implies that an abortion does not kill a being with a soul. The soul is not killed anyway but could be denied life, this is not the case if the brain has not yet connected with the soul and got a soul.)
When a live being dies, nothing much happens. The soul is still there, it is the same one and apparently eternal at least in out time scales. Is there a reward or punishment after death? Sometimes we all wonder of what happens after death. Is a dead family member or a friend still alive in some way? If this what I wrote should be correct, there could be a rebirth of a kind or punishment of a kind, but nothing to be worried about. Assume that the deeds of a being were recorded somewhere in the other (the real) world ignoring the question why and who would keep such a record, just noting that many religions assume so. Later there is a choice of deleting this record, meaning that this being is permanently removed, or allowing it to be born again. As the soul is the same all the time, deleting the record is not death of a soul.
Being reborn cannot be done without cloning in a way that the DNA would be the same. Soon we can clone humans if it is allowed. Being reborn with a different DNA would be a very approximate “rebirth”. If there once was a prophet, a king or a revolutionary and there is born a similar prophet, a king or a revolutionary, it is a kind of a rebirth, the biblical one. The reborn being necessarily has the same soul, as there is only one, and that’s what matters. It has different DNA and no recollection of old memories, but it is similar in a way and can be more similar if it tries to imitate the early model.
In the Bible, rebirth is of this kind. Jesus was reborn Moses and Adam. The two last were probably not real characters, but it does not matter. Jesus was a real person. Jesus came from the sky as the comet of 66 AD. It was just Halley’s Comet. That was not the only predicted rebirth of the messiah. The king messiah was supposed to be reborn, and it could have been a role for Herod Agrippa I and later for Josephus Flavius, who naturally had no Jesus’ DNA, but a task of a king messiah. The soul was naturally the same.
Maybe I made some logical mistake here? Are there other solutions? There is the solution with a small invisible soul in each brain, or blood if you wish. Many religions take this alternative but it is a messy one in the logical sense. If we agree that there is a soul and it cannot be seen in this world, there are only the possibilities that there are many unique souls (like fermions) or one soul, where the last includes the case that souls are not unique (like bosons or forked processes). I cannot see and error, but I admit that using analogies from the present time makes this deduction seem very pseudo-scientific.
Is there any evidence that this world would be an illusion? I remind again that the argument is based on the feeling of self, which is undeniable. It is not based on an apriory assumption that the world is illusionary. That is a corollary to the existence of self and inability to find the soul from this world. However, there is one proof that I have though for over 30 years and still have found only one satisfactory solution and it is that this world is an illusion. It is the quantum physics experiment where two particles that were together at some time are still connected though no mediating particles are sent between them. I cannot see any other possibility than that they are connected through history. The simplest solution is that the history is recalculated if a new experiment would contradict a logical law. Logical laws cannot be broken. If a particle for logical reasons does not have a precise value for both of a pair of properties, then no experiment can measure both properties precisely, and this seems to be the case here. History must change in order for the logic to remain correct. You can recalculate history in a simulation as simulation time is not real. You cannot change real history as what happened has already happened. As a conclusion, the physical time is not the real time, but there is the real time. Einstein was wrong in removing the ether time as the measurable time is not the real time. Poincare, who actually invented the core of special relativity, wanted to keep the ether time. If the time is not real, neither is the space.
I have tried other ways, like to have some kind of particles diffuse backward in time to form this connection through history, but so far I have not managed to get it to work. That is, there are other possible solution approaches, only they do not seem to work. Maybe I will get them working in equations one day. The main stream explanation of course is nothing but it is illogical but do not think, calculations work.
The essence of religion is thus true with a soul and the other world. Then we add the old myths, which describe star constellations close to the heavenly Northern Pole and are simply origin myths. For the origin of life, the evolution theory is a part of the correct answer, but not the whole explanation of life as there is external influence from the real world. There was an ideological effort to deny the necessity of such influence, but as the existence of a soul and the other world comes through other deduction, there is no need to try to explain everything in the origin of life by evolution. Such an explanation is in odds with the existence of a soul and most probably wrong. That is, why would we have a doubting mind which cannot be explained by properties of an automaton if life is just an automaton? And if life includes more than just the evolving automaton, why should we assume this something did not play a role in the origin of life?
That was a short solution to “what are we”, and not worse than those Dan Brown gave to the two other eternal questions. It took just half an hour to solve it. Let’s have more of these easy questions! Why is it so easy? That is no mystery. This problem has been solved thousands of years ago and the differences between alternative solutions are mainly if each human has a unique soul or there is one world soul. That is something one cannot definitely decide. The time this eternal problem was solved the peak of mathematics was proving the Pythagoras Theorem, easy for modern people by every estimation. Additionally we have all results of science they did not have. It should be a very easy question.
Why then it is not solved? It is solved, but the existence of a solution is denied because there is an ideological effort to hide some truths. If you do not believe in such an effort, then why the scientifically sound WTC demolition theory is claimed to be a crazy conspiracy theory? There are some people, who have some agenda and who propagate this agenda. It has nothing to do with truth.