Is the human soul a non-physical energy field?
by Nick van der Leek
Nobel Laureate, Francis Crick, has made some of the most penetrating discoveries regarding the workings of the brain (at a neural level). And, in collaboration with James D. Watson, Crick first discovered the molecular structure of DNA (in 1962). The focus of this article is on Crick’s ‘scientific search’ for the soul.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t recall having anything resembling a personal life before I was born. I didn’t exist on another plane; I didn’t fly through the universe in search of home planets as Superman did. I don’t remember being a snail, or a frog, or a Japanese princess. Perhaps I did exist as disparate cells floating in other people’s bodies, but I didn’t exist with my current identity and integrity until, I suppose, the moment of my conception. Hands up anyone who had a different experience?
Consciousness is the alternative description for the ‘soul’. It’s not an exact synonym, of course – certainly not in the same way that words like ‘essence’ and ‘spirit’ are interchangeable for the word ‘soul’. But I am not interested in a vague definition of the word ‘soul’. I am concerned with Crick’s more scientific approach.
The best place to start when attempting to unravel, to demystify the soul, is to start at the source. Where then, is the seat of the soul? According to Crick, it is not in the heart, not in any of its chambers. Specifically then, where is it?
Consciousness, what some refer somewhat mystically to as the soul, resides – wait for it – in the brain. The brain, says Crick, ‘does a fantastic job in a small space… [using] relatively little energy to do it.’ I can hear you asking: What? Are we nothing more than a pack of neurons? Crick’s book ‘The Astonishing Hypothesis’ presents this case with persuasive eloquence. And that’s exactly what I believe to be the case. Knowing that the seat of the soul (or consciousness) merely resides in the brain is not to be dismissive either of the nature of consciousness, nor of the brain. In fact, both are enormously complex, and both, especially the latter, have evaded most of our efforts to develop even a simple understanding of it.
Yes, with our brains as instrument, we have penetrated the universe with our understanding, but the most complicated of all things appears to be the physical machine of the mind that we must use to measure and interpret everything. I am sure that even the keenest minds, though they may whiz through rocket science and swirl effortlessly through the complicated convolutions of chemistry and astrophysics, or nimbly skip through the machinations of molecular biology, all our best minds stumble and fall in the minefield that is neuroscience.
Crick’s approach is astonishing because it is a ‘reductionist approach’. This means that a complex system (like the ability to see, or word processing) can be explained by the behavior of underlying parts and their processes. In a system with more than a single level of interactivity, we may see processes that repeat. In the same way that a single electronic bit (a one or a zero) is quite dumb, so is the individual neuron (or firing of it) in our brains. It is when we consider the whole system, the parallel networks at play, that this dumb unit begins to flourish and thrive and sing and become all that it can be in a streaming symphony of energy.
Now let’s refer to our question again: Is the human soul a non-physical energy field? If we consider that our brains are filled with swarms of energy firing in interactive patterns, then the statement is not as unrelated to the brain as we may have first supposed. Imbedded in the brain are in fact deep residues of information. Much of the brain comes into the world with all its parts assembled. But as we all know, it takes time (experience) to tune the brain into doing a ‘precision job’. Consider Jane Austen, who required a superior intellect to produce her excellent novels. All 6 novels were only produced in the last few years of her life, once she’d achieved the pinnacle of her intellectual ability (to process our deep emotional subtleties in the structures of language).
In the same way that weavers have an imbedded knowledge of how to weave nests, and swallows can fly around the world without a map or an air traffic controller, and salmon can swim to the exact spot where they were spawned, we humans have a different gift. The gift of language. It may seem unexceptional to us, but apes do not even come close to acquiring the basics of language acquisition, no matter how intensive their training.
Language in itself is an interesting aspect to consider when approaching the concept of consciousness. A language system, Crick suggests, ‘is not essential for consciousness [but] this is not to say that language may not considerably enrich consciousness.’ And further, Crick points out that ‘Self consciousness…the self-referential aspect of consciousness is probably a special case of consciousness.’
Also interesting is that the structure of our brains has developed in indirect pieces, with evolution promoting structures that work with the most ease more likely to be selected. The final design, Crick suggests, might not be a clean one, but this accumulation of gadgetry appears to work better (in all the complex situations of life that we find ourselves in) than would what Crick calls ‘a more straightforward mechanism…designed to do a job in a more straightforward manner’. Interesting, isn’t it?
Crick then goes on to pursue the implications of our visual awareness on consciousness. That is far too complicated for me to even attempt to reveal here (and I doubt if I could). What I would like to illustrate is this: when you draw a magnet under iron filings, they rise up, and flow according to the fields of stimulus. This magic-seeming reaction is the perfect metaphor for the neural fireworks going on in the brain. Imagine an internal city with its lights off, galaxies of unlit stars. And beyond the rim of the cornea, all images that pass across our pearly sensors draw these galaxies into illuminated clockworks of spinning fireworks. And this is only the beginning of it. Comets stream and icicles melt into sensations and sensibilities.
And somewhere in this firing of neurons, correlating to whichever stimulus in which ever quadrant of the brain, are the trains of our thoughts. Imagine them, spinning snakes of electric light, flashing over DNA-like tracks networking all the spheres and structures within our skulls.
I took apart the tower of my computer once. I was surprised at how little was inside: a thick tangle of wires, a small fan, a wafer card with its circuits, the microprocessor and two small black boxes with their silver mercury disks inside. The hard drives spin as they write their data. In the end, all this amounts to is flashes on a screen, words, and letters, like this word. In comparison, the brain and our consciousness is a far more magnificent expression of the universe, and all of its charming intensity. The universe, I believe, has been re-engineered over millennia, in the stars and networks that swim in our heads.
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