Where science meets the soul

In health­care, we don’t declare some­one dead until they are “brain dead”. Until there is con­sis­tent evi­dence that a per­son no longer has brain func­tion (and pret­ty spe­cif­ic brain func­tion at that), they aren’t gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered dead. 

If you have ever had a friend or loved one in a coma or under seda­tion, you know they breathe, their hearts beat, their bow­els go on digest­ing food. But dur­ing their time in that altered state, they can’t inter­act with you in any human way. It is almost like they aren’t there. 

When some­one suf­fers a brain injury, they often pass away. If they do recov­er, their per­son­al­i­ty may change dras­ti­cal­ly, even to the point of seem­ing like a total­ly dif­fer­ent per­son. The very essence of “who they are” may alter in pro­found ways. 

But injury to oth­er parts of the body doesn’t have this impact on who we are. People live out their com­plex, beau­ti­ful, chaot­ic lives even when they have suf­fered extreme alter­ations to their bod­ies. Think of those you know who have suf­fered heart attacks, frac­tured limbs, kid­ney dis­ease, or ampu­ta­tions. They remain “them­selves” in spite of major changes to their phys­i­cal selves. But injuries to the brain often have dras­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­ent outcomes. 

So, is the thing that we tie our notion of who a per­son is to sim­ply the cells liv­ing inside their skull? 

For much of human his­to­ry, var­i­ous peo­ples around the globe devel­oped unique (and yet strik­ing­ly sim­i­lar) con­cepts of what most Americans would call the soul. The essen­tial self. Who we are as a per­son. Though those notions have some dif­fer­ences, they all share a basic con­cept, that who a per­son is (what they think, what they believe, their essence) can be iden­ti­fied and labeled. 

They also share the idea that when that essen­tial part of a per­son is no longer present, the soul has left the body and the per­son has died. 

In our mod­ern world, we under­stand that the things we asso­ciate with the soul (self, “oth­er,” iden­ti­ty) are com­plex inter­ac­tions between cells in our brains. Neurons through­out parts of our brains com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er (and with dis­tant parts of the body), and that com­mu­ni­ca­tion leads to what we envi­sion when we hear the word “soul.” 

For some, the notion that who and what we are can be reduced to chem­i­cal inter­ac­tions is upset­ting. People may think that this means there is no pur­pose in the uni­verse. Others might see this as a pro­found­ly wrong, even sac­ri­le­gious idea. 

Maybe they are cor­rect. Maybe there is no way to rec­on­cile sci­en­tif­ic under­stand­ing and mat­ters of faith and reli­gion. Maybe under­stand­ing how the body works (or the uni­verse, for that mat­ter) dis­rupts us in a way that makes belief impossible. 

I am not so sure. 

We are all scientists

Does the under­stand­ing that our sun shines because hydro­gen atoms fuse into heli­um, releas­ing heat and light, make it any less reju­ve­nat­ing to bask in the sun’s warm embrace? 

Does know­ing that a rain­bow results from the bend­ing of light so that its indi­vid­ual wave­lengths become vis­i­ble to our eyes make it any less mag­i­cal to spot one after a sum­mer rain? 

Does learn­ing the com­plex biol­o­gy of fer­til­iza­tion, ges­ta­tion, and labor make it any less tran­scen­dent to hold your child for the first time? 

Why should grasp­ing a tiny frac­tion of under­stand­ing regard­ing the physics of how the soul works dimin­ish its miraculousness? 

The fact that noth­ing more than chem­i­cal inter­ac­tions between some of the tiny com­po­nents of us leads to Mozart, Angelou, Paul the Apostle, Shelley, Plato, and Salk seems to me to be far more mirac­u­lous than what most peo­ple asso­ciate with that word. Humans are incred­i­ble beings. While at our most basic cel­lu­lar lev­el we are ani­mals, we are also poets, archi­tects, sculp­tures, and dreamers. 

And we are scientists. 

Science is some­thing sacred to me. I believe that sci­ence and all of its com­plex­i­ties exist because we have a dri­ve to under­stand the world around us and our place in it. We have a hard­wired-into-our-brains-which-are-also-our-souls NEED to know. 

A need to know HOW? WHERE? WHY? 

Isn’t it log­i­cal to believe that this dri­ve, so unique to us, so essen­tial to our sep­a­ra­tion from oth­er liv­ing things, is divine? And if it is divine, why should uncov­er­ing glimpses of how mir­a­cles work make their exis­tence any less miraculous? 

Why should the fact that we now under­stand some por­tion of where (and when and how) in the body the soul resides make its exis­tence any less amazing?