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The Paradise Perspective: Commentary from a Free and Compassionate Alternate Reality Volume 1, Number 29 The Soul Is Software by Glen Allport Exclusive to STR August 13, 2007 -
1 - What
is the soul? The
soul is not a supernatural construct. I see the soul as one's personality,
including deeper levels that are typically beyond conscious awareness. The
soul is embodied within us as
software, running on the hardware of our brains and bodies. That
last is difficult for some to accept, but we have to be some type of thing, and the type of thing we are is software. This
does not negate or diminish characteristics that make us human, such as
compassion, love, wonder, or deep feeling generally, any more than other
knowledge about ourselves diminishes us. Knowing that we are software
merely provides another level of understanding about human nature. Given
the present dire
circumstances of the human condition, we need all the understanding we
can get. -
2 - Science
fiction and science itself both tell us that we are software entities. A
half-century ago, SF writers and a few scientists were talking about the
possibility of someday downloading human personalities into computers.
This understanding of the soul as software (or, if you prefer, as an ongoing
result of the running of software) is more entrenched and even better
supported today. It
doesn't take modern science to see that the soul, the inner person, the
personality – call it what you will – is a process of some kind running on the hardware of the brain and body. Software is
what makes that process possible. The soul comes into being as a process
enabled and guided by software, with:
To
use a modern and simplified analogy, you – as a person, meaning as both a body and a soul – are the MP3 Player,
the MP3 music files, and the programs that handle and play the music
files. -
3 - Regardless
of the platform, programming language, and other variables involved,
stored and retrievable information,
including stored data and/or instructions for various actions, is the
essence of software. Examples of software in this broad sense include
music on an analog 33 rpm record; the same music digitally encoded on a CD
or Note
that the purpose of software is ultimately to create
an action or an experience; neither software itself
nor the hardware it runs on is the essence of what is wanted. Software, as
opposed to its physical manifestation on (say) a hard drive, has no
location in space and cannot be seen, touched, heard, or otherwise
detected directly; like the mental image of a flower, software is in
essence conceptual, not
physical. The ineffable nature of software is tellingly similar to the
nature of consciousness or the soul – difficult to describe or define
because, once again, both consciousness and the soul are merely specific effects
of the software within a living creature such as a human being – or
perhaps, at some point, within a machine. -
4 - Little
is yet known about the software involved in creating the soul, and clearly
this software, including the software utilized by We
seem far less advanced in our
understanding of the software that operates consciousness, especially
given that the system must incorporate several levels of software, from
DNA on up, utilizing different languages and different methods of data
storage and manipulation (chemical, electrical, and probably others,
including perhaps quantum-mechanical
and holographic).
This complexity will, I believe, make "downloading a
personality" into a computer or creating human-equivalent artificial
intelligence more difficult than some think it will be, and I am concerned
that elements necessary for emotional health will go missing in attempts
to create such virtual humans. In
real humans, integration between the soul and the body is extremely tight.
For one example, "gut
feelings" can include important elements of our consciousness;
nerve cells in the gut actually contain most of the serotonin in the body
and cells in the gut use serotonin receptors no different from those in
the brain. Serotonin
is a hugely important neurotransmitter involved in our sense of well-being
and in other psychological states, including anger and mood generally.
Modeling a virtual personality in ways that miss such contributions from
the body outside the brain would create something less human-like than it
might be, and perhaps actually inhuman.
Feelings
are the guideposts to appropriate behavior
in humans and in the animal kingdom generally. Without healthy access
to feeling, people can behave in shockingly horrible ways, as history and
current events show only too well. How will hyper-intelligent and perhaps
conscious machines without
human feeling behave? It appears that we will know soon enough, for better
or worse. -
5 - There
are dozens of excellent books on consciousness from widely differing
perspectives. For those interested in the topic, starting points I can
suggest include Julian Jaynes' The
Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (mostly
for its startling discussion of the many things we can do without bringing consciousness to bear, such as driving a car while
daydreaming, and for the idea that consciousness itself, or at least one's
style of consciousness, may be learned rather than innate), Daniel C.
Dennett's classic Consciousness
Explained, and Douglas Hofstadter's recent I
Am a Strange Loop. I
find Dennett and Hofstadter too quick to deny consciousness to non-human
animals (although both seem maddeningly vague and even contradictory on
this topic). In particular, I believe they largely mistake
"thinking" for "consciousness;" Hofstadter's Strange
Loop includes a chapter actually titled "Consciousness =
Thinking." Nicholas
Humphrey, in A
History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness,
describes a model of consciousness that is in some ways similar to
Hofstadter's reverberating loops but grounded in the notion that other
animals are conscious. I
believe the triune
brain theory, described by Paul MacLean in the early 1950s and
expanded upon 20 years later by psychologist Arthur Janov and neurologist
E. Michael Holden, is a good tool for understanding the evolutionary
underpinnings and the characteristics of different levels of
consciousness, from the ancient reptilian brain to the limbic system as
expanded in mammals, to the neocortex, which has become bizarrely
oversized in humans. Each of these brain systems has its own style of
consciousness; in humans, all three are present and (in an emotionally
healthy person) smoothly communicate with each other. For a fuller
description, as well as for an excellent discussion of how emotional and
physical trauma create neurosis, see Arthur Janov's The
Biology of Love. One
further note on the physical underpinnings of consciousness: even tiny
physical structures in the brain can create sweeping changes in the form
and reach of consciousness. Spindle
cells – which so far have been found only in humans, some species of
whales, and in tiny numbers in a few other primate species – are among
the clearest example of this, although the effects of spindle cells on
consciousness are far from clear. For example, spindle cells are sometimes
said to allow us to feel love and emotional suffering, which seems a
dramatic overstatement given that dogs and other animals so clearly
express love and emotional suffering. To assume these animals do not also feel
love or suffering is to make a needless and unsupported leap into human
chauvinism. Spindle cells may contribute to the complexity
and texture of human love and suffering, but that is no reason to deny the
reality and intensity of such feeling in other animals. An appreciation
for music, on the other hand,
may be one of the gifts that spindle cells confer upon us, and on the few
other animals that have them. This is my own conjecture, but given that
these very long cells move information rapidly between distant areas of
the brain, and that they tap into emotional centers in the brain, it seems
reasonable. To the best of my knowledge, no animals without spindle cells
seem to appreciate music in the way humans do. -
6 - If
the soul is software, then our needs for love and freedom are what
programmers would call hard-coded
into the system. That is, the programming for those needs is built into
the hardware (this is often called firmware) in a manner that cannot be
changed. People
can learn to deny their needs for love and for freedom, just as they can
learn to deny most other needs (even for something as basic as food;
consider the anorexic). But denying needs is not the same as not having
them: Our needs for love and freedom are real and unchanging, no matter
how strongly we deny them. These needs are fundamental to the human
condition. The
connected human duality of love and freedom cannot be denied without
consequence, and we see those consequences all around us. The good news is
that this truth has not been lost, and cannot
be lost, for it is engraved within us. The
soul is software; software is information. The most important information
about the human condition is that love
and freedom together are the environment every person is born for. -
- - - - Robert
Klassen's STR column this past Friday, Taboo,
sparked thoughts for a column of my own on the topic of the soul. Portions
of this column appeared
previously in my Dogs
and Love, Part I. Glen Allport is the author of The Paradise Paradigm: On Creating A World of Compassion, Freedom, and Prosperity and maintains paradise-paradigm.net. This is one in a series of columns on the human condition.
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