Where Does the Soul Fit?

Abstract: The concepts of the "Soul" and "Free Will" are tightly coupled and are misunderstandings of emergent properties of complex biological systems due to fallacious causal oversimplifications and are, in effect, a phenomena analogous to a rainbow. In the case of a soul that is separate from the self it would be judged by God for actions it did not condone. In the case of the soul as the self, the soul is locked into the body every night during REM sleep and is catastrophically impaired by malfunctions of the body it resides in. While religions are divided on whether animals have souls and/or spirits, with or without them, animals have some of the same types of cognitive abilities as humans and they get along well within their biological limitations. The philosophical soulless zombie as the null hypothesis for souls fits with established knowledge better than the "soul" described in unauthenticated bronze age "divinely revealed" texts.

Dream Killer

The prosecution said that at 0349 the next morning, Mr Thomas made a 999 call, which was later played to the court, in which he said he had killed his wife because he had mistaken her for an intruder in a dream.
...
The court heard that tests commissioned by both the prosecution and the defence were carried out on Mr Thomas as he slept following his claims of a sleep disorder.


Both sleep experts agreed his behaviour was consistent with automatism, which meant at the time he killed his wife, his mind had no control over what his body was doing.

Scientific
American, "The Will to Power--Is Free Will All in Your Head?"
[Figure 1. I made the diagram on the right to go with the SciAm article as a visual aid. It is a simplified functional block diagram made to represent the complex system of processes that result in a movement. Click on the image to enlarge.]

The take-home lesson is that the brain has specific cortical circuits that, when triggered, are associated with sensations that arise in the course of wanting to initiate and then carry out a voluntary action. Once these circuits are delimited and their molecular and synaptic signatures identified, they constitute the neuronal correlates of consciousness for intention and agency. If these circuits are destroyed by a stroke or some other calamity, the patient might act without feeling that it is she who is willing the acting!

So, Who's Driving?
We think we are in control of our actions. We have intent and we act.
When we have intent and act we are considered responsible.

What is it We Have Intent About?
Where does that initial idea that we have intent about come from? Sometimes ideas come after careful deliberation, or a bit of consideration, and those are the ones we focus on but the majority of our ideas "just pop into our head" don't they?

Where do Our Dreams Come From?
The way dreams appear to us, the process is analogous to a loosely organized data retrieval and presentation, but whatever it is, it is automatic. It happens whether we want it to or not. And to ensure we are a captive audience, some areas of the brain are supposed to be deactivated to prohibit voluntary movement, but a disease called automatism (aka sleep walking) is caused by the areas remaining active. So, in effect, every time we go to sleep, our self is locked into our body until we awake.

Where Does Intention "Fit" in the Mental Process?
In Figure 1, intention seems to fit between "desire/need" and "decision".
However, the SciAm article above shows us that by manipulating brain tissue, "intention" can be bypassed and an action can be caused.  Additionally, an intention can be artificially generated and the rest of the mental process will continue as normal. The brain can be fooled about its own intentions, and it can be made to do things that it had no intention about.

But Who is Doing the Fooling?
If a person is not undergoing brain surgery, how could someone perform some act against their free will?
There are thought experiments in Philosophy of Mind and Epistemology that depend on being fooled by someone or being fooled by a demon. The Dream Killer seems to have been fooled by a demon, someone else, or by something inside his brain. The court is convinced it is a disorder, which means it must be a faulty biological process going on in his brain that he is unaware of. He dreamed he was attacking intruders, his voluntary movements were not paralyzed as they should be during sleep and he killed his wife instead.  The idea to fight the intruders was not based in reality, it just "popped into his head" and he carried it out like he was a Zombie, or an automaton. It was automatic. It happened whether he wanted it to or not, and the court found him not guilty.

Where Do "I" "Get" "My" Ideas?
Do they have minds of their own?
Are they given to me?
If they are given to me, who gives them to me, a homunculus?
Who could give them to the homunculus?
Are they auto-generated in my brain?
Are any of them caused by signals coming from areas within my brain or any of my other organs?

Humans are Only Aware of a Small Percentage of What is Going on in Their Body and Their Brain. 
The brain has many other automatic background process going on besides consciousness such as synchronizing and communicating with the organs, intuition, unconscious decision making, bias, prejudice, emotion, mood, too many to mention in fact. Like dreams, the way thoughts appear to us is analogous to a loosely organized data retrieval and presentation system, but whatever it is, it is automatic.  It happens whether we want it to or not even if "we" can guide the process and even if "we" can't explain how "we" are guiding the process.

The problem of controlling thoughts was recognized 2500 years ago and a solution was proposed by the Buddha using the then ancient method of Meditation.  Meditation is used as a way to gain more control of those "wild" thoughts "running" around in our head.  Typically, "we" are only partially in control. In economic terms, we feel as though we have a controlling interest, but just like in finance, a change in the context of circumstances will erode that interest.  Some of "us" with "mental disorders" don't have a controlling interest and can't effectively guide the process. There is something wrong either biologically or in HOW "we" GUIDE the PROCESS. Lately, Psychiatry and Psychology address these issues which have been traditionally been handled by Religious leaders, Shamans and such.

Was it Intentional?
Typically, historically and traditionally, society thinks that once an idea appears, and we take action then we are culpable, but there is a missing qualifier in that sentence. Was it an intended action? In Law, (in the "west" anyway [whatever that means]) there is a concept of "intent". If "intent" to commit a crime can be shown then the defendant is culpable. In other cases if negligence can be shown on the part of the defendant, then the defendant can be culpable to a lesser degree.

Naturally Occurring Process Deviance, aka Mistakes

[Figure 2. Click on the image to enlarge]
Well, why would we need a distinction like "intent" if it were not possible to carry out a harmful act against our will? Sure accidents happen, but accidents are usually thought of as "things that happen to us" which are out of our control. But mistakes related to how we perform (such as errors in judgement, decision making or physical "malfunctions") also happen. So in law, "intention" can be used as a defining criteria of culpability in cases such as accidental shootings.  But something that is not recognized, at least in my culture, is that the majority of the day, we do things that we don't intend.  Yet my culture insists that we are reasonably accountable for EVERYTHING that we do.  I don't know how many times a day I have to remind people that "We don't intend to make mistakes". Using terminology borrowed from complexity science, "mistakes" are naturally occurring deviance in processes. Figure 2 is an even more simplified functional block diagram encompassing Figure 1. It is a diagram of a complex system within a complex system. Living things are autonomous complex systems made up of complex systems of which every component has the potential to perform poorly or malfunction.

Nothing is Perfect, Neither is this Rough Method of Estimating Reliability In A System
All the elements in figure 1 and 2 are functioning less than perfectly to some degree.  This deviance from perfect performance accumulates throughout the system leading to less reliability.  While the math involved in assessing the reliability of a system is beyond the scope of this article, we can get a rough idea for the purpose of illustrating the interdependence of components if we assign a value of 10 to each element when it is working perfectly and a value of nine when it is working normally.  Not all the elements in Figure 1 should get a value, so without listing the elements, I have chosen 14 of them, which gives the cumulative value of a perfectly operating system in figure 1 of 140. But in our "virtual reality" each element is going to be operating at 90% so in normal operation we have 9 * 14 elements = 126. Now the reliability value of our normally operating system is 126. So at 126/140, the system as a whole is operating at 90% of perfection.

So How Tolerant is the System? How Well can it Resist a Catastrophic Failure?
If one of the elements stops working it gets a zero, then our operating value becomes 9 * 13 = 117. 117/140 is 83.5% so the value at which we reach a catastrophic failure is likely to be around 83.5%. So if the average value of all the elements reaches 83.5% of perfection, we can expect a catastrophic failure.  So now, in the case of a mistake, we can say that something or group of somethings in the process caused the system to go below 83.5% tolerance resulting in the accident or mistake.  [On the other hand, an accident or mistake can lead to a result that is not a catastrophic failure but is beneficial. This is known as "serendipity" or a "happy accident" and is one of the mechanisms underlying evolution.]

Reality is a web of systems within systems each an input and an output to something else.

How can One Justifiably be Held Absolutely Responsible for Anything?
How can the causes and effects of mistakes and accidents be differentiated from the causes and effects of intentional actions when they are interconnected causally?  How is it justified to hold one accountable after death for their actions on this earth when the actions were outcomes of a mesh of interconnected events some of which are out of ones control? Since actions are cumulative and a persons intentional actions and mistakes make up a network of causes and effects, no one is completely responsible for their actions and it is unjustifiable to be held accountable as the religions of the world propose.  Remediation, instead of punishment is the only rationally justifiable outcome for  "the afterlife". Hinduism comes close to this idea. But the idea that fits best with established knowledge is that the self ceases to exist when the body dies because its existence depends on the functional quality of the body.

I Don't Know How I Breathe, I Just Do
[Click on the image to enlarge]
I don't know how I raise my arm, I just do.
I breathe whether I want to or not.
I jump when I'm startled with no intent whatsoever.
I blink my eyes when something comes at them with no intent whatsoever.
I put my arms out in front of me when I fall with no thought whatsoever.
Maybe "intuition" plays a role. It seems like sometimes we can learn something, and then we have unconscious, instantaneous, automatic access to it.

But there are somethings we don't have to learn. A baby doesn't learn how to reach out, it just does.
When I want to lift my arm, it lifts, but who does the work in the background to get it to go up? Is there a little crane operator in my head working the controls taking orders from "me" when I want him to lift my arm?

"...And There's A Little Yellow Man In My Head." (The Kinks, "Destroyer")
No. Its a process that happens that I can't describe because I don't know anything about it, and once it gets started, the only way I can stop it is to "issue" the order to stop. I can't interrupt the electrochemical interactions that enable it. It SEEMS as though there is an intelligence outside our consciousness built into our bodies that takes care of operating the "controls" analogous to the crane operator. So does that "intelligence" have consciousness? Does it think about where the commands to reach out come from? Does it wonder why it has to manage the position of the hand and strength of grip so precisely? Does it wonder if there is some intelligence that is guiding it? It seems as though there are two intelligences at work here in addition to naturally occurring deviance (aka mistakes).

The Mind Body Problem
Rene Descartes wrote about this concept in his Passions of the Soul and The Description of the Human Body. Basically he said the body and the mind were distinct from each other, leading to the affirmation that when the body dies, the mind can continue just as some Theists says it does. This supports the Judeo-Christian concept of Justice, punishment and culpability. Fortunately over time, the justice system has recognized some exceptions to that rule and included the qualifier of "intent".  The Justice system realized that "dualism" was an oversimplification, it was a faulty model, it was a faulty analogy, it was ignoring disqualifying facts.

A Principle of High Reliability Organization is A Reluctance to Simplify Interpretations.
Oversimplification results in a model that is no longer analogous to the situation.  Trying to use a faulty analogy increases the likelihood of mistakes whether its in engineering or discussions. In my view, many philosophical problems suffer from oversimplifications and "The Mind Body Problem" is one of them.  There comes a time when one should just admit that they don't have enough information to make a decision, and set about looking for the missing information.  Free Will, Consciousness and Epistemology are some other philosophical problems that I think suffer from oversimplification. 

The Zombie Problem
The Philosophical Zombie is a concept used in thought experiments in the Philosophy of Mind.  Zombies are used in rejoinders to Physicalist and Behaviorist arguments that mental states such as consciousness, thoughts, beliefs, intent, etc are certain types of behavior. According to Physicalist arguments a human being with no consciousness that is indistinguishable from a human being with consciousness should not be possible. I think that the Zombie problem generally is a problem of a faulty analogy. It presumes to make claims in argumentation about consciousness when consciousness doesn't have any clear scope and definition, however, the concept of Zombies does seem to have some merit.  In some cases the body acts outside the scope of the self's free will, such as in the case of reflexive actions (the processes handled by the autonomous nervous system) and some aspects of thinking. Clearly the phenomena of Automatism supports the concept of "Zombies".

What We Know About Behavior from Brain Surgeries
Two areas of the brain have been identified that have a relationship to our behavior, perception, and memory.  [Refer back to Figure 1.] When manipulated by a surgeon, the posterior parietal cortex can cause a person to feel a desire and/or a need.  A higher degree of electrical stimulation can cause the ILLUSION of movement. The presupplementary motor area, when stimulated by a surgeon can cause a person to feel a desire or a need and cause an ACTUAL movement. Additionally we know that faulty brain matter will cause various degrees of reduced capability and involuntary movement such as seizures.  It seems that now we have a mechanism for getting the person to want or need to do something, to actually do something or believe they've done something. 

"Locked-in" Syndrome
Locked-in syndrome is similar to dreaming with respect to inhibition of voluntary movement.  When there is a malfunction somewhere in the brain, voluntary movement in the body (most of the time with the exception of the eyes) is inhibited. The consciousness becomes  a "prisoner" of the body.

Consciousness is tightly coupled to the body. When the interface between consciousness and the body fails, consciousness gets "locked in" and any "free will" previously enjoyed by that consciousness is inhibited.  It would be as if we removed the posterior parietal cortex and the presupplementary motor area cortex blocks in Figure 1 preventing the consciousness or soul from having access to them.  These patients are at risk of having life support removed if it cannot be determined that they are not brain dead.

Am I and My Soul the Same Thing?
We can see how the consciousness can be prevented from access to the body, but the soul?  How can the soul be prevented from doing anything? Can damage to brain tissue prevent the soul from having access to the body?  With regard to traditional religious understanding of the concept of the soul, that seems absurd, so my soul and I must be two different things. 

What Does the Soul Do; Inform about Morality?
Does the soul inform the consciousness? What sorts of things could it inform consciousness about?  Moral Questions? But a lot of moral questions fit nicely into economic game theory models, are quite rational and follow logical principles when all things are considered.  But supposedly humans get judged on their moral behavior during their time on the earth. Do they get judged by how well they follow economic game theory decisions? If a soul "informs" it must not make decisions for us, it must simply present options.  That's all well and good in a properly functioning biological system, but what purpose does a soul have in a "locked-in" person, or even a naturally aborted fetus for that matter? If I don't listen to my souls moral advice, does it pay the price for me in the afterlife? Since animals make decisions, do they have souls too? Some religions say they do, or at least have "spirits" but as far as I know, the terms "soul" and "spirit" are so ambiguous they are indistinguishable.

In the Case "Locked-in" People Doubt God, Is It Justified?
I wonder if someone "locked-in" ever has doubts about the existence of a loving caring God and if its justified? If a soul informs, how would it inform the consciousness and would it be compelling?  I am sure locked-in people obsess over "why" it happened and what the "meaning" and "purpose" is. If someone is locked-in, and the care-givers are allowed to remove life support, and the person is aware of it, if they have a soul, and if they happen to be exceedingly angry and desperate, are they responsible for any doubts they experience as they die?

Since We Know This Much About Human Behavior, Where Does the Soul or Free Will Fit In?
Where does the soul fit in a functional block diagram like Figure 1? Assuming that "we" and "our souls" are the same thing, It seems like the soul would fit where the blocks for the surgeon or seizure are or would be connected laterally so as to at least have some influence. If that's the case, since we can see how important a physiological interface between consciousness and the body is, then the souls function must be to present options and ideas by manipulating the biological material that makes up the brain. But its not justifiable to punish the soul for our actions unless it is responsible to some degree.

But then Where does Automatism (aka Sleep Walking) fit into that? 
It would mean that the "soul" or "we" do not have complete control over the body and therefore in some cases not responsible. But does the body have any sort of control over "us" or "our soul"? Why, yes it does. As we have seen it can be catastrophic in the case of locked-in patients, and to a lesser degree aggressive behavior has undeniable biological causes (monoamine oxidase A, MAOA gene). So if our consciousness can be manipulated by the body, and our soul is coupled to our consciousness then the soul can be culpable for UNINTENTIONAL acts and it would be crippled when the body dies, so that flies in the face of most religious texts. So, again, the soul must be independent of the Body.

The Concept of the Soul is Incoherent, not "A Mystery".
If it is absurd that the soul as the self is affected by the body, and if it is absurd that the soul is independent of the self yet gets punished for what the self does, then the concept of the soul is incoherent.  Refer to Figure 2. In reality what we have is is the appearance of two intelligences (the mind and the body) reacting to environment and chance events with religion claiming that based on the end result we will get a reward or be punished.  However, since we can see that the mind influences the body, and the body influences the mind, and environment affects them both, the appearance of two intelligences is an illusion in human perception caused by a misunderstanding of the complex system that makes up a human. "Dualism" is an illusion.

The Idea the People Continue to Exist After They Die Seems to be Hundreds of Thousands of Years Old.
There is evidence that at least two of the early human lineages (Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens) believed that people continued to exist after they died (Evolutionary Origins of Religions). There are paleolithic burial sites with flowers, the bodies placed in a fetal position and tools.  This recognition of other minds and speculation about what happens to them after they die can be shown to exist as early as 500,000 years ago. Obviously this is an idea that developed in the youth of our species, but as we can see, we are hard pressed to see where the soul fits into all this. Similarly we are hard pressed to find anything frightening in our childrens rooms when they ask us to look under the bed.  These undetectable "other minds" are a fundamental misconception caused by immaturity, lack of knowledge, inability to comprehend complexity and/or willful ignorance.

"Souls" are Poorly Defined, Weakly Supported, Weakly Justified, Weakly Persuasive and Weakly Relevant.
Stipulating for a moment that souls exist, they must be loosely coupled to consciousness and the body somehow. I say loosely coupled because it can be easily demonstrated that the body operates outside of consciousness but consciousness working outside the body cannot be so easily shown.  Like it or not, the facts supporting the claim for consciousness without a body are ambiguous, equivocal and few. So if we say that the support for "out of body" consciousness is weakly supported, then we can say it is weakly justified, and weakly justified arguments are only weakly persuasive, and therefore only weakly relevant. In fact, if we look at the history of belief in souls, we can see that people believe that animals and even rivers have "spirits" which should equate to souls.  How is the spirit of a river is relevant to anything?

Who's "Driving" Animals or Rivers?
Animism is the term for the belief that objects other than humans have spirits or souls.  But if souls are uniquely human, then animals must not have them. Yet we can see that they seem to get along fine within their capabilities without them.  They can reason according to logical principles and communicate in a rudimentary fashion and recognize human language to a small degree. If animals don't have souls, then that makes them analogous to the Soulless Zombie of Philosophy of the Mind.

The Soulless Zombie as a Null Hypothesis
If the claim is that souls operate outside of physical parameters and it does not manipulate the brain physically, then this type of claim desperately needs support outside of the realm of possibility, speculation and allegedly divinely revealed information to be taken seriously.  If Theist A claims the soul exists because its written about in their sacred texts, then Theist B of another religion is quite justified in not accepting Theist A's claim on the grounds that the authenticity and authority of Theist A's sacred text hasn't been established.

The fact that humans have inferred the existence of souls in humans, animals and the environment is irrefutable, as is the fact that humans have yet to agree on a the scope and definition of the soul or spirit even though "divinely revealed" texts depend on their existence. However, the soul cannot be detected, only inferred and indirectly perceived, that's what makes it so hard to define.  But if we were to say that the soul is a misunderstanding of a natural phenomena that emerges from complexity, then all of the above would make sense.  Usually things that can not be detected, measured or defined don't exist.  Since souls are imperceptible, we must all be soulless Zombies.

The Soul Like The Rainbow

The rainbow exists, of that there is no doubt. But the rainbow exists only as a perception of the complex interaction of sunlight and water droplets in the atmosphere.  When the physical components that it depends on go away, the rainbow goes away.  Under certain, reproducible conditions a rainbow "happens".  As we can see from the various examples above, animation in rivers, animals and humans "happens". It "happens" with or without a soul. And since no "divinely revealed" text has posited as compelling an explanation for a rainbow as science has given us, then the principle of emergence as the cause of the rainbow should be considered the leading hypothesis for "who's driving" our bodies as well.  Our bodies are driving themselves around, and our consciousness emerges from interaction of the various processes that enable that to happen.  The soul, like the rainbow is a misunderstanding of an emergent property of a complex system of components.