Thoughts on Religion vs. Reality

For the moment, let me talk about the world of human experience as "E".

The world that Science investigates is assumed to exist apart from human experience, although we can only know it through human experience. Without really thinking about it, we imagine the "real world" to be about the shared experience: verifiable, consistent and augmented by what we call "reason". But we have long admitted that Universe, which I will call U, is not the same as "E". In fact, we assume that we can never know "U" entirely, directly or completely.

We all know that "E" is not the same for each of us. In fact, it is quite remarkably different between different cultures and different times or even for a single individual throughout his or her lifetime.

The question at hand is, is there anything "out there" apart from E and U?

In most religious traditions the answer is "yes".  Most religions postulate a universe in which the individual "soul" - the most important part of E  - exists apart from the individual physical body and survives death into a realm that may or may not is occupied by spirits, gods, occult forces and a whole world. Christianity specifically claims that the "soul" always exists apart from the body - an idea that appears in modern Science Fiction in many forms. Mystical traditions claim that some varieties of E (mystical experience) perceive alternate universes or perceive U directly, whatever that may mean. At least in the early days of the "drug culture", drugs like LSD were seen as a means of exploring that alternate reality - not just a way of bending the brain out of shape.

Religions also tend to assume that there is a moral universe that exists beyond the world of mere mortals but applies in some way to the moral choices we make. For example, the fate of our souls depends on the moral choices we make. In such a moral universe, the concept of "free will" is an essential attribute of the soul. If we have no free will, the entire idea of merit and reward beyond death (or even in this world) makes no sense. Religious apologists are well aware of this problem - frequently claiming that in a world without God (or their religion), morality cannot exist.

But if we stick to the evidence available, we are forced to conclude that our minds and therefore all of E are happening between our ears and are therefore embedded in U, like the rest of our bodies. There is no other Universe. Mind, like gravity, however mysterious, is a phenomenon within U.

One of the most impressive bits of evidence for this is the structure of the brain. Brain structure heavily contributes to "character" in the sense that lesions, injuries, tumors, and drugs can dramatically alter moral behavior. What we consider to be "moral" choices - the ones that supposedly chart the progress of the soul - are the work of identifiable brain structures.  If you break down "free will" into components, you wind up with faculties (brain structures, processes and systems) that may or may not work as expected. These faculties may fail individually or in combination as a consequence of specific injury to specific brain systems. For moral decisions to take place:

• You need to be aware of the alternatives for action;
• The alternatives need to be emotionally "tagged" - some "feel" better than others - otherwise you don't care;
• You need to access applicable memory and social "rules";
• You need to feel things like disgust, lust, shame, pride, and empathy;
• You need to be able to hold all this in working memory long enough to work out an action;
• You need to be able to act according to your mental "computation" (many people "know" what is right but behave in alarming, self-destructive ways anyway).

Drastic departures from "normal" capabilities in these areas are labeled with morally-tinged "disorders" such as psychopathy or even mild character judgments such as "laziness" or "impulsiveness". We are just beginning to understand the physical roots of these personality patterns. The field of psychological neurology is gradually stripping away our common sense idea that "bad" people are acting out of free choice - making "bad choices". What's left is a view that "normal" people make "normal" choices using "normal" brain structures. There is no room left for the idea that morality is something that exists outside of E (what we experience) and our bodies (part of U). We may need to toss wickedness onto the same scrap heap as demon possession.

Brain structures are stunningly complex in a way that shouts "design". Of course, we put aside the "Santa's Workshop" view of this "design". There is no "designer". But what then? We must say that our brain structures are a result of strong evolutionary pressure.

Our nervous systems extract an astonishing amount of detail from basic sensory information. To cite just one example, there are 20 different types of ganglia in the visual system. These nerve cells extract the "analog" information coming in from the retina. Each type of ganglion "speaks its own digital language" to the deeper structures of the brain. At the moment, we have a vague idea what five of these ganglion types are "talking about". What the others are "saying" remains mysterious. In no case are we in a position to decipher the language that each type speaks.*

There are hundreds of different cell types in the hippocampus - the brain area critical to memory. The complexity of this design is several orders of magnitude beyond anything that has come out of human design efforts. What is motivating this incredible process? It can be nothing but what we call R. The "real world". Our brains are embedded in R and they are a direct consequence of phenomena in R. Specifically, evolutionary "pressure" from events in R have consequences for even subtle differences in the design of our bodies - especially our brains. This applies to the way our brains make "moral" choices. There is no particular need for us to know what these "pressures" are. For example, we have been breathing for millennia before we discovered oxygen.

Evolutionary "pressure" is "adaptive", or "survival of the fittest". But for humans, survival depends on acting together with other humans. Great sections of the brain are specifically devoted to this job, including obvious things like speech but even more sophisticated "circuitry" that computes socially acceptable behavior - that's what we call "morality".

The main business of religion is to help us "compute" our behavior in socially acceptable ways. Religion is the result of many brains "computing" general solutions to the problems of existence, especially existence together with other humans.

We are left with a view of the world and our role in it that departs significantly from virtually all religions, but, at the same time, tells us why we have religions and why there is no particular reason for them to "make sense":

• There is no "soul" apart from the body. Consciousness - and all the mysteries of the self - are created by the brain. The "self" can be disassembled bit by bit or ultimately destroyed by injury to the brain. The fact that we can't "explain" this does not put the phenomenon in a special category. We have no ultimate explanation for anything at all - including gravity.
• "Free will", if it exists at all, is severely constrained by the details of our individual brain structure and health.  Wild departures from "normal" - such as psychopaths - have brain abnormalities not much different from being blind from birth. We must challenge our common-sense idea that others may be regarded as fundamentally "good" or "bad" in some absolute sense. 
• With no "soul" or independent realm that dictates moral choices outside of our minds, the need for anything like "heaven" or "god" vanishes. As Pascal famously noted: "We have no need for that hypothesis".

But does the need for religion itself vanish? Our brains are designed to depend heavily on the input from other brains. To cite a simple example, our courts could not function without laws. Laws could not exist without language and the deep history behind the moral "computations" performed by cultures over the centuries. The fact that different cultures compute different answers to the moral problems presented does not diminish the fact that individuals are not "designed" to make moral choices entirely on their own.

It does seem possible for these insights to inspire something that looks like "morality". For example, perhaps we should back off from our natural tendency to regard people with different moral standards as "evil". Perhaps we should be more skeptical of ideas like deliberation and willfulness in those who offend against our laws. Perhaps we need to re-think our ideas of "justice" entirely - especially when it comes to our systems of punishment and reward that supposedly motivate people to behave in the "right" way. It seems to me that people who accept compassion as a core religious belief are already close to accepting this attitude for simple "scientific" reasons. It is a simple, verifiable fact that E is a creation of the human mind in response to the "real" pressure from R plus our efforts to survive in partnership with others (also playing itself out on a stage in R).

The vast majority of the human race believes or acts "as if" their own cultural standards of morality are absolute and not "invented" by "mere" humans. We want to think that their worldview is not "merely" mythical but in some sense reflecting a special insight into the nature of reality, usually augmented by some kind of "supernatural" (not part of U) history. I don't think it is too much of a leap for such people to accept that their worldview is a special case of "E". Other worldviews - even conflicting worldviews - need to be understood as fundamentally human and not uniquely valid conclusions of the nature of reality. For the individual, morality boils down to what we should do - here and now, in this world. Practical experience tells us that it's quite possible for folks with utterly different worldviews to agree on a wide range of common action.

On the other hand, it should be possible for us to deny "supernatural" justifications for actions that cast others as "evil" - deserving suppression or even death.

It's not too much to ask.

* More on visual system ganglia and the "big picture" posed by the brain here.

The Hard Problem - Who Counts?

Stripped of philosophical rhetoric, the Hard Problem of Consciousness is: Why does it feel this way to be me? It's about the inner experience of being. I won't digress into the history and controversy of the issue except to say that I do indeed regard the problem as "hard". It seems to me that no amount of understanding of the "mind" as an epiphenomenon of physics can explain the feeling of being in the world. In fact, it is hard to imagine what such an "explanation" would look like.

For me, the first step in tackling a hard problem is to recognize that it is, indeed, hard. The most critical step in my Master's thesis research was to recognized that the problem I was trying to solve was provably impossible. The key was to ask the right question and to know that the question you'd really like to ask is unanswerable.

For the purposes of this discussion, I will use the term "soul" to refer to a (possibly hypothetical) entity that is capable of experiencing the world in some way similar to the way I do. I know I have a soul (but I may still be wrong). I'm less sure about you.

I love to collect impertinent questions about consciousness. Let me give you one that had my head spinning for awhile.

Sam Harris poses a thought experiment:

Suppose we could build a robot that perfectly mimicked human behavior with the ability to totally fool anyone as to its mechanical nature (passing the Turing Test with flying colours and then some). In philosophy, this entity is called a "philosophical zombie" which is identical to a human in all respects except lacking a "soul".  Typically, Sam sprinkles scientific fairy dust on an old problem by imagining the zombie to be a robot. This is just a modern spin on an old issue [2].

Harris claims (and I agree) that we would treat this robot as a "person" long before this high level of functionality was achieved. After all, people love their cars and pet spiders.

So Sam asks, What is the meaning of such a relationship? If you fall in love with a robot, are you not, in fact, alone in he universe and just fooling yourself about being "in love"? Good question.

Harris is famously capable of asking impertinent questions, but, like the rest of us, rather poor at coming up with pertinent answers [1]. What is it that is bothering Harris? One thing you will know about Harris if you listen 5 minutes into any of his podcasts is that he loves an audience. He would clearly not be doing what he's doing if he had only an audience of robots (I feel the same way about my blog, by the way). So it makes sense for him to be horrified by the notion that a person might have nothing but "relationships" with soulless machines [3].

Perhaps Sam needs to get over himself. Really, there is no way to know for sure if Sam himself is not a robot . At the core of his concern is his need to know that there is a soul-to-soul connection which, as a byproduct, validates that he himself has a soul.  Possibly a robot would falsely validate Sam's soul by acting in a programmed way like a human being but, inside, being nothing but millions of lines of code instructing the machine to act like a living being. How does Sam know that he is not a zombie? Impertinent question: why does it matter? Is it not annoying to as the Universe the ultimate question and get back the response: Why do you ask?

Is it possible that one of the key attributes of this hypothetical "soul" is simply the desperate need to contact other souls? Perhaps one preoccupation of "souls" is to prove their own existence - another form of the "hard problem"!

We can understand Sam's problem without invoking the idea of soul at all (this happens a lot with "soul" questions). Humans are social animals. Our evolutionary survival strategy gives us hard-wired brain functions that recognize faces, voices and social status. We have "mirror neurons" that allow us to experience the behavior of other people as our own - an ability that allows the great apes (and some birds) to learn by watching. The great evolutionary achievement of man is language, which makes no sense unless it's an excellent way to share experience. Thus, we can suspect that this hunger for connection arises out of human nature. Not necessarily anything to do with "souls".

Along with this "deep hunger" are two more notable human characteristics: curiosity and self-awareness. We can easily understand why humans would be aware and curious about their own need to connect with others "like themselves" and for some of them at least to ask, What do I mean by "like myself"? Damn. The hard question again.

Returning to Sam's concern, I'd say that it "feels good" to make connections with entities that feel like souls. It's more than just feeling. It's good for you - a way of behaving in a human way. Not feeling this way is "swimming upstream", bound to create unnecessary tension and suffering. Cutting to the chase, our lives will feel just fine even if we are living in a society of zombies. By definition, zombie relationships will fulfill all the inner needs of a human unless that human persists in asking unanswerable questions.

So Sam, If you can't find someone to love you, buy a dog. Or start a blog ...

But wait! Suppose Sam is, indeed, a zombie. This is an even more chilling scenario: a world consisting of nothing but robots - just machines pretending to interact in a human way. A world of intelligent cuckoo clocks. Since there is nobody left to fool, we can imagine that the robots fall far short of accurate human simulation. If we think about it for a second, this is worse than Sam's empty love affair. We can see that we don't need Sam at all to reach this horrifying dystopia. What if only our machines are left and there are no souls at all in the Universe?

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[1] Sam is also good at burying his ideas in a deep layer of scientific "fairy dust", making it seem like he's got a new spin on very old problems. By sleight of hand, it can seem that his new way of asking the old problem actually answers the old problem.

[2] In fact, Sam's problem may not even deserve treatment as a philosophical question at all. Is it not painful to be in a relationship with someone who "has no idea who I am?" Is that not a common complaint? Is that not a relationship that lacks "soul to soul" connection - like living with a zombie? Possibly even feeling yourself to be a zombie?

[3] The vast majority of "hits" on this blog come from Russia. I assume that these are "bots" crawling the web for nefarious purposes not including an interest in philosophy.

The Birth of Soul

The "soul" is perhaps the poster child example of a "meme". What is essentially "us" survives death. Stripped to its fundamentals, this is the idea that the "mind" exists in some kind of parallel universe, independent of the physical world we all inhabit on a daily basis.

Modern versions of this idea set aside the parallel universe and assume that we can somehow "upload" ourselves into computers. This preposterous idea flies in the face of anything we know about the brain, but it has roots in the ancient lore of the soul. We just can't let go of the idea that we are ghosts that can be somehow set free.

"Idealism" takes the view that we can know only the world of the mind - indeed reality itself is the illusion. This is simply another variant of the concept that mind and world are fundamentally disconnected.

Where did this idea come from?

I think there is a simple answer. Imagine yourself to be a hunter-gatherer way back tens of thousands of years ago. Somebody dies. What do you make of this? What do you think has happened? Reasoning as humans do, you look for something similar. The only similar state of affairs that would occur to you is sleep. The person must be asleep but can't wake up. You know from personal experience that, during sleep, you dream. You do all kinds of normal things in your dreams, like hunt and avoid dangerous animals. You do strange things too, like fly and talk with the dead. It is perfectly logical to assume that your dead companion is dreaming but can't wake up. In fact, he is stuck in an alternate universe - a "dream world". From time to time, you may even visit this person in the dream world and chat with him. Conclusion: the essential nature of the person survives and does not depend on the physical body. Everyone has a "soul".

This is all very logical and not, as some would claim, "superstitious". It is not, as many assume, simply the result of wishful thinking or denial of mortality. It was a good theory based on a available evidence.

Over thousands of years and hundreds of civilizations, this meme has morphed into a myriad of religions, all based on the fundamental assumption that death is like sleep and we go on after death to live in a realm eventually populated by dead people and gods. Eventually, the oldest profession (the priesthood) arose, providing a living for those who claim to have special knowledge of he alternate universe and a unique ability to communicate with the spirits who inhabit that world. By the time we arrive in historical times, religions have become competing unwieldy tangles of mythology and guesswork. People are willing to kill over the precise details of religious theories. It's good to remember the assumption they all make: the existence of the soul. Imagine a world where all of a sudden people stopped believing in the "soul". To cite just one example, Islam would vanish like a popped party balloon. The attitude we characterize as "extremism" absolutely depends on belief in the immortal soul.

Even the minority of us who reject the idea of the immortal soul are still stuck with the idea that the "mind" (the modern word for soul) is a rather small, personal thing, rattling around in our brains. Our "mind" is something that mysteriously arises in the brain. Something to do with "consciousness". But this is just the soul stripped of its immortal qualities and trapped in our heads.

Many of the posts in this blog and the sister blog "Programmable Ape" explore the idea that "mind" is only partly a private thing. For example, you cannot understand the "mind" of any person without taking into the account language of his "inner voice" or the "programming" provided by his culture. It's also true that one evolutionary purpose of the mind is to accurately model the real world [1]. While it is true that this model is imperfect, it must also be admitted that the "real word" plays a large part it our experience - the "contents" of our minds. It almost seems that we don't learn a lot of useful information about "mind" from the fact that we seem to need a brain to have a mind. This is why we have entire branches of Science devoted to the study of how minds work in general without any specific reference to how the brain works. On the other hand, we see a million papers published every year in neuroscience but few that shed any light on how the mind actually works and none that tell us why it feels the way it does to have a mind (or does it feel this way to have a part of a mind?)

I conclude that we need to seek analogies and models for the mind that don't rely on the "trapped soul" metaphor. The mind is not an "epiphenomenon" arising out of  the complex neural structure of the brain, nor are our minds some kind of ultra-sophisticated computer. While it is far from the whole story, we can start by imagining the mind to be an active subset of the incredibly subtle and powerful "software" of human language [2]. If we imagine a brain that lacks this capability, we wind up with brains that lacks language - the brains possessed by the rest of the animal kingdom. The vast gap between the mind of a human and the smartest non-human animal gives a hint of the importance of this single capability. The example of language hints at the fact that "mind" is something shared among many humans and ultimately bound to the universe humans inhabit (what language is about). This is very far from the "dream world" theory of the mind. If there is to be an "alternate universe", it must be the world of the mind itself, which we all understand (in non-mystical terms) to differ from the "real world" in specific ways revealed in laboratory experiments and everyday experience. If we reject idealism, we must accept that both realms (mind and the real world) are real and in intimate communication with each other. Neither is "imaginary".

This view of "mind" also takes us away from the fashionable assumption that the mind is somehow identical to the brain. No amount of billion-dollar brain initiatives will uncover the secrets of the mind. The mind is not to be discovered in a "wiring diagram" (the "connectome"). It is more likely to be discovered in studies that reveal he structure of language, human society and reality itself. The brain is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of "mind", although in humans, it seems to be necessary but not sufficient. Accordingly, the wiring diagram of the human brain will not tell us much about what mind is.

In parallel to our efforts to re-imagine the "mind", it makes sense to reconsider what we mean by "self". How are these two ideas related? Modern psychology and experimental philosophy is teaching us a lot about the "self". For example, we learn that our sense of continuity with the past is very fallible (which is not the same thing as an "illusion"). We learn that our concept of free will is elusive in the laboratory.  We learn that "personality" depends as much on context as on some innate attribute of the soul. In general, the "self" is subject to exploration from the "outside". In fact a case may be made for the view that the "self" is the way we explain our behavior to others and even to "ourselves". Behind all this data gathering is the unstated question: What is it like to be X? What is i like to be me? That is a question that endlessly fascinates us and drives many forms of art. In all our investigations, we find that the "self", like the "mind"often seems like a small wave in a vast ocean of real people in the real world.

It is difficult to accept the Zen contention that the self is an illusion. It is illusive, dynamic and ephemeral, but this does not make it "unreal". It is, in fact, the mysterious foundation of all experience.

[1] It is always dangerous to assume that evolution has a "purpose". To me, such claims don't pass the sniff test. It is equally possible that the primary job of the mind is to support society by, for example, supporting face recognition and fidelity of communication.

[2] While we use the term "language" for the way we instruct computers, computer languages differ from human languages in many respects, the most important being that a speaker of a human language knows (or thinks he knows) what he is talking about.  Computers don't "know" the information they manipulate any more than a car knows about internal combustion.

Near Death Experiences

If you are not familiar with this phenomenon, I refer you to that the breathless and uncritical treatment of the subject in near death experiences on CBC Ideas. It seems fairly common for people who are "near death" in the sense of having their heart stop to have a vivid memory of leaving their body, seeing themselves from the outside, perhaps hearing and/or seeing what's going on around them, seeing a wonderful light and feeling a great sense of peace and well-being. The classic treatment of the subject, "Life after Life" is cited with approval by the "expert" for the CBC audience.

"People have reported "near death experiences", or NDE's, over centuries and across cultures. The nature of them has historically been the territory of religion and philosophy. But now science has staked its claim in the discussion. And the questions are profound: where is consciousness produced, in the brain, or somewhere else? Can consciousness continue to exist even after the heart and brain have stopped working? Contributor Ashley Walters explores the science and the meaning of near death experiences. **This episode originally aired December 7, 2016"

Of course, one may listen closely to the episode and fail to find any mention of how"science" is "staking a claim" in the discussion. The piece is basically a book report.

The CBC program is a textbook case of the kind of muddle that surrounds the NDE issue. Time and again, the subject is claimed to have undergone "clinical death", yet somehow remembers something. The central paradox is, How can he remember anything when his brain has stopped functioning? It must be true that his "soul" somehow works without the brain.

This is all turns on a deliberate misuse of the term "clinical death", which does not involve cessation of brain function: merely cessation of heart beat and respiration.  In the cited cases, even this is far from certain, since the subject is usually revived before medical assistance arrives (otherwise real death is the likely outcome). Certainly in the ambulance and even on the operating table, the patient is rarely instrumented to detect (or not detect) brain function. In any case, I am not aware of any case where brain function has actually ceased and the patient has revived. Even in cases of deep coma, there is some brain function. To put the case clearly: we don't have anyone coming back to tell us what it's like to be brain dead. There's a good reason for that, I think.

This removes the central mystery. There is certainly nothing stopping a person undergoing "clinical death" from having (or at least remembering) some kind of experience.

An important element in the NDE mythology is the "fact" that so many of these experiences have so much in common. The problem with this claim is that the "journalists" that write about the experience actually go out looking for the people who have that exact experience. The vast majority of people with a different experience (especially no experience at all) are passed over. You would think this would be a serious problem for the theory that we all pass on to another reality upon death when obviously most of us don't. In a word, it's cherry picking.

So there goes the second source of wonder. Some people have similar experiences when their heart stops. It's starting to seem to be a somewhat weaker challenge to the "conventional" idea that we need a brain to "be".

For those who are unfamiliar with the phenomenon of consciousness itself, the fact that people can hear what's going on while "blacked out" is remarkable. However it is a well established fact that the brain's auditory systems are alive and working even under general anesthesia - we just can't normally remember what we hear. In the unusual brain state of the "NDE", it is not to much of a stretch to assume that what the subject is hearing will be woven into whatever visions are remembered.

So what about the sensation of leaving the body? Well, you can ask this a different way. Why is it that we usually have the feeling that we are in our body? The familiar exception to this experience is the dream. Why is this not relevant?

The sensation of being "in" the body can be knocked out of action by, for example, a shortage of oxygen to that part of the brain. Feelings of being outside the body can be triggered by a variety of situations - you don't need to be "clinically dead". Feelings of euphoria and heavenly visions can also be attributed to release of endorphin in the brain - akin to a big shot of morphine released as an automatic response to the trauma that stopped the heart in the first place. It makes more sense to ask how the brain creates a vivid "trippy" dream rather than ask how the experience happens without the brain. While the brain still holds many mysteries, we are quite sure what parts of the brain are active when an "experience" is going on and what parts are necessary for that experience to be remembered. Why is it that we so casually set aside all this knowledge and embrace the idea that all these brain functions happen without the brain? Where is the evidence that the brain is not responsible for these experiences?

It should be noted that these "trippy" experiences (known as "peak experiences") happen to people who are in perfect heath and do not require "clinical death". Peak experiences are also notorious for fitting into a matrix of mythological interpretation that is familiar to the subject - such as "seeing God" or being "saved". The subject needs to be "primed" to find the right words to describe the experience.

What we are left with is claims that the disembodied soul went wandering around and learned things that could not have been otherwise learned. This is essentially a claim of a telepathic experience. In these cases, we have more theories available than wandering souls. The wandering soul hypothesis is, after all, a rather radical one. Following Carl Sagan, we demand extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. (Skepticism 101). What must we assume in order to be left with the conclusion that of telepathy is the only possible explanation?

• The subject is not lying. Lying is an ordinary behavour and does not require supernatural explanation.
• The subject perfectly remembers the experience. This is an odd assumption to make since we know that none of us has perfect memory and these subjects are specifically selected to have been recovering from a near-fatal trauma.
• Third party testimony (the gold standard in these fables) is accurately reported. The "witnesses" also are credited with perfect memory even though they themselves have usually been part of an extremely traumatic experience.
• We must ignore powerful confirmation bias acting to confirm the subjects belief that he has proven that death is not the end. Confirmation bias is the bane of serious scientific investigation. Why not a problem with amateur interpretation of a once-in-a-life-time experience?

What we are left with is lots of strange tales. The plural of anecdote is not evidence. We can't toss aside everything we know about the brain without compelling evidence. That's Sagan's rule.

But then all this fits nicely into the religious mythology of the culture. As stated in the outset of the piece, "all" religions teach that there is a life beyond death. Even if the subject doesn't believe this, the experience in question will tend to convince him otherwise. It's an available "explanation". He is more likely to be familiar with Christian mythology than neuroscience.

None of these points are addressed in the CBC piece, which is really nothing more than a pitch for another "New Age" book helping the credible to deny death and put the whole issue on the back burner pending the next boozy discussion over the camp fire.

My personal opinion is that the brain is necessary but not sufficient for consciousness. Consciousness critically depends on a social setting. We experience the world together. This is starkly evident when the individual is placed in a situation that departs widely from everyday experience., It makes perfect sense for the "self" to dissolve finally into a drug-assisted and muddled dream set in a comfortable mythical world. The story is told not only by the "subject" whose heart stopped for awhile, but by those around him who cooperate to keep the myth alive and authors who sell books to the gullible. It is that social matrix of ideas - right, wrong, good and bad - that lives on. These ideas don't need to reside in any one particular brain. When one brain goes dark, the "memes" live on.

Re-thinking Mind and Soul

What am I?

In many religious traditions, the answer would be given in terms of the "soul" -- something that is fundamentally "me". Believers in this tradition imagine something inhabiting the body but separable from he body, especially at death. After death, the soul goes on to further adventures in Heaven, Hell, the Happy Hunting Ground or perhaps another body, human or not. In any case, the soul seems to inhabit an entirely different universe, immune from the laws of physics or, dare we say it, logic.

Outside of religious thinking, we generally use the term "mind" in place of "soul", but the common image is still something inhabiting the body, different from the body and somehow "looking out" on the real world. This way of thinking saddles us with the "mind-body" problem, in which we attempt deal with one of life's central mysteries: How is it that I can look out from "inside" my mind on to a material world? The "inside" (especially "consciousness") and the "outside" seem to inhabit utterly different universes.

I have recently undergone one of those special moments when many different threads of contemplation, investigation and experience come together to give a new perspective on perhaps the most fundamental question of all: What is Mind?

MOTORCYCLES

Much of what I have to say here will seem to be utterly incomprehensible to the average reader. For someone who wants to dip his toe in these waters before attempting to swim the channel with me, I recommend the best seller, "Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance". This book impressed me deeply when I first read it back in the early 70's. What I remember most clearly is the author's claim that a motor cycle is an idea. You cannot possibly understand, operate or maintain a motor cycle without entering into and sharing the designer's idea. Otherwise it's just a complex lump of metal.

It has taken me over 40 years to make the next baby step. If the motor cycle is an idea in the mind of its designer, then quite obviously, the mind of the designer (in some sense) contains the motor cycle. Zen claims that we are "nothing but" the thoughts that run through our brains. But if an actual, physical motor cycle is one of these "thoughts", we need to start thinking of our minds in a totally new way. The "Zen connection" is further explored in "Zen and the Outside-In Mind"

OVERCOMING FANTASIES ABOUT THE SOUL

Perhaps this perspective seems crazy mostly because we have been fed from birth on the religious or neo-religious idea that our minds are contained in our heads. Whatever our minds are, they are either inseparable from our brains (and therefore are destroyed when our brain die) or they are separable and act like "souls" which can wander on to other things once the body dies. There seems to be only two alternatives.

Like many religious ideas, the chief harm done by this fantasy world view is to block consideration of alternatives. Perhaps Mind, has been "out there" in the real, physical world all along.

BIOGRAPHY - KNOWING THE MIND OF ANOTHER PERSON

Let's take a step back from motor cycles and imagine a different scenario. Suppose I die and, for some strange reason, someone wants to write a biography of me. They want to know my "mind", even though my brain has presumably gone up in smoke or is feeing worms somewhere.

Such an individual would be well advised to spend a lot of time in my library, where I spent most of my time when alive. There are hundreds of books there which I "weeded out" from the normal clutter. Every remaining book was treasured and valued by me while I was alive. A patient investigator could enjoy a years-long tour of my mind by reading every one of those books. Someone obsessively determined to know my mind could go out and interview hundreds of my former clients to understand what I built for them (my equivalent of motor cycles) and why. The point of all this is to show that, even though "I" am gone from the scene, I leave a massive physical footprint of objects that were (or are?) the contents of my mind in the same sense that motor cycles are ideas in the mind of their designers. It's fair to say that such an intrepid biographer would wind up knowing my "mind" even better than I do now, which is a spooky conclusion. Even in life, my "mind" extends tendrils into the world and outside my skull. In life, I am well aware of many of these "tendrils" (I'm happy to recommend good books and I vaguely remember all the software I wrote, some of which is presumably still running). On the other hand, I must admit that I have put most of these "tendrils" on the burner behind the back burner. Perhaps they are irretrievably lost and forgotten.

THE STRUCTURE OF THOUGHT

Let's come at it from a different angle. Full disclosure: I am a systems analyst with a strong preference for "data structures". When I think of any "system", what I see in my head is a bunch of interconnected blobs representing "ideas" with the connections representing relationships between ideas.

So from a data structure point of view, I picture the ideas (thoughts) running through my head (this is  a Zen picture). They are connected to each other, so for example, the thought of the kitchen may lead me to the idea of fetching a glass of orange juice. But they are also connected to objects in the real world. For example, I remember where I left my car keys. That makes the car keys "ideas" like the motor cycle. The keys could be meaningless to someone else who found them.

Following this line of reasoning and picturing my "mind" as a data structure, I find that my mind extends outward from my skull to touch millions of objects in the real world.

THE SHARED MIND

I invite the reader to "try on" this way of thinking for awhile. It's a new idea to me as well, but it feels like the key to many related questions. For example, if our minds are "out there" in the world, they are obviously shared by others who share the same real world. This opens a new or perhaps simplified way of thinking about how we influence each other, simply by sharing the contents of our minds through the overlapping aspects of reality that are present in the minds of those around us.

Of course, the "stuff" in the real world means different things to different people. The "meaning" is the way ideas are connected with each other. We still read each other's minds imperfectly. Even so, it's a new experience to look at some object in the world and feel that we are connecting with the minds of others who know that object in some way. In the modern world, we are surrounded by objects designed, built and/or owned by others. Looking around, we pass through the minds of thousands of others. We are not unaware of this. We are endlessly curious about the people connected to the things we see: What were they thinking?

Enough for now. This idea connects all over the place to Zen of Value and Dragon Theory, for example. There is much "wiring up" to do ...