soul

I spent the afternoon of Friday, October 8, 2010, on the Mall in Washington D.C. I visited some of the places that had touched me exactly nine years ago when I wrote:

http://jim-maher.blogspot.com/2001/10/she-was-shy-little-girl.html

This visit also gave me a chance to think.

It’s strange. During this business trip I’ve been thinking about peculiar questions. I guess it is because I am a scientist and also a Christian believer.

Are souls real? What are they? Where do they come from? Where do they go? Are they locked in time or do they escape time? Do souls pre-exist?

The world’s great religions and thinkers have weighed in. If time does not forever trap existence and consciousness, then perhaps souls could exist on both sides of this life. Maybe that is where Hinduism finds itself.

I am a scientist. That means my professional life is about studying things I can reproducibly measure with tools.

I was once fascinated by my discussion with a believer who stated opposition to the potential generation of cloned human life because such cloned individuals would not have received souls from God.

Wow.

The lady feared that cloning would result in soul-less zombies.

So I’ve been thinking about it. As a scientist I believe in the extreme complexity of the human brain. The brain is built from a few chemicals, but its complexity defies our understanding.

The brain points to the important scientific concept of emergent phenomena. The concept of emergent phenomena is exemplified by an ant colony. An ant colony is sophisticated and reproduces, defends itself, migrates. An ant colony does things that individual ants do not. The complex behavior of the colony is an emergent phenomenon, greater than the sum of its parts.

The human brain is built from neurons and accessory cells. It is a complex electrical machine filled with circuits. It is (perhaps) the most complex electrical machine of its type among all living things.

Christian believers see in the human an image of God, created by God for the purpose of communication, rescue, and eventually, co-existence and intimacy. Deity has created a persistent attribute in humanity in order to love it. That persistent attribute is evidently the soul.

Given that I am built from machinery, but with the purpose of knowing God, could it be that God perceives my soul as an emergent property of my complex human brain?

A brain has its roots in neurons, but just as the study of individual ants does not prepare us for an encounter with an ant colony, so the soul exceeds the machinery of the brain.

Maybe the soul is an emergent property of the brain. Maybe the soul consists of something immaterial, unlike the brain.

Maybe the soul is to the brain as a love song is to the vocal cords. The one emerges from the other, but the one is carried in a different medium. The song conveys something unimaginably different from the muscle and stretched membranes that created it through moist oscillations.

The song travels. It echoes. It is perceived. It changes lives. It can change history. It can be recorded. It can inspire.

It embodies love.

Maybe the soul is an emergent phenomenon, an ant colony from the billions of ant-like neurons of the brain.

Maybe the soul is the song that is carried as compression waves through air molecules, arising from the vocal cords to be a pilgrim in a different world.

Maybe that is why humans are a little different. Maybe their emergent souls are uniquely God-like. Maybe their souls are songs that are, like his, mutually audible, linking created and creator as the created learns to both sing and listen.

Maybe.