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Spirituality

If We Have a Soul, Where Does it Live?

David Langness | Updated Jun 7, 2019

PART 1 IN SERIES The Existence of the Human Soul

The views expressed in our content reflect individual perspectives and do not represent the official views of the Baha'i Faith.

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David Langness | Jun 7, 2019

PART 1 IN SERIES The Existence of the Human Soul

The views expressed in our content reflect individual perspectives and do not represent the official views of the Baha'i Faith.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine said, after the news reported another terrible act of human savagery, “How can people do things like this and still have souls?”

Then, a couple of days later, another friend told me that she was going through a real crisis of faith, and wondered aloud “If we all have some level of consciousness, why does mine seem so shriveled and atrophied? I feel like my soul is sick.”

To top off that recurring theme, yesterday I read through an interesting online discussion about the existence of the soul, human consciousness and an afterlife. One person weighed in by saying: “There is no God, no life after death, and no soul! When we die that’s it! When will you superstitious religious people understand that dead is dead? You close your eyes, you’re buried in the dirt, and it’s over!”

So I pondered, after all of these questions, doubts and strident opinions, about the existence of the human soul. More and more, it seems, people question whether we have souls. That questioning, it seems to me, lies at the root of the increasing post-modern rejection of faith. How can anyone believe in a Creator if they can’t believe in a personal soul? So I thought that it might be a good idea to take a look at this important issue from both the scientific and spiritual perspectives, starting with the science.

RELATED: 5 Reasons Why Spiritual and Material Progress Must Go Together

Before we do that, though, I want to make my own beliefs clear. I’m a Baha’i, and Baha’is believe in the existence of the human soul. My experiences in life have firmly convinced me that I have one — and that everyone else does, too. Baha’u’llah, the prophet and founder of the Baha’i Faith, explicitly said that every human being possesses a soul:

The first life, which pertaineth to the elemental body, will come to an end… But the second life, which ariseth from the knowledge of God, knoweth no death … – Baha’u’llah, Gems of Divine Mysteries

Know, verily, that the soul is a sign of God, a heavenly gem whose reality the most learned of men hath failed to grasp, and whose mystery no mind, however acute, can ever hope to unravel. – Baha’u’llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah.

But oh! how strange and pitiful! Behold, all the people are imprisoned within the tomb of self, and lie buried beneath the nethermost depths of worldly desire! Wert thou to attain to but a dewdrop of the crystal waters of divine knowledge, thou wouldst readily realize that true life is not the life of the flesh but the life of the spirit. For the life of the flesh is common to both men and animals, whereas the life of the spirit is possessed only by the pure in heart who have quaffed from the ocean of faith and partaken of the fruit of certitude. This life knoweth no death, and this existence is crowned by immortality. … If by “life” be meant this earthly life, it is evident that death must needs overtake it. – Baha’u’llah, The Book of Certitude

So let’s kick this discussion off with a hotly-debated scientific, neurological and philosophical question, one still unresolved and unanswered by modern science: Where is the seat of human consciousness? If we have a soul, where does it live? In other words, Where does “I” reside?

If you’re a philosopher or a student of contemporary thought, you’re already very familiar with this critical line of inquiry as “the Hard Problem of Consciousness,” so long debated and ruminated over that it has achieved capital-letter status in philosophy. Essentially, the Hard Problem asks: “Why is there a subjective component to our experience?” or “Why does our inner awareness exist?”

David Chalmers, the New York University professor and modern philosopher who initially posed the question, wrote in a 1995 paper, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”:

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. …

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive there is a whir of information processing, but there is also a subjective aspect.

Chalmers asks why we feel things so deeply — basically, why we all seem to have something inside us that responds profoundly to beauty, to the higher emotions like love, to the mysterious and mystical aspects of life. Alternatively, you could summarize the Hard Problem this way: “What makes us thinking, feeling entities, and not just sophisticated information-processing robots?” Presumably, evolution could have left out our consciousness and our ability to be self-aware — but it didn’t. Why?

We normally think of the center of our consciousness as our “mind,” and in the Western traditions we typically associate the mind with the brain. Many of us believe that our awareness, our thoughts and feelings originate from someplace in our brains — that the physical three-pound organ between our ears produces everything we normally would define as human consciousness. Consciousness, in other words, comes solely from the electrical impulses our neurons generate.

RELATED: What Is Reality – and Can Our Senses Understand it?

But it might surprise you to learn that neuroscience, the study of the human brain, has begun to question that basic premise, as seen in “The Unity of Consciousness” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

No medical procedure to do with consciousness has received as much philosophical attention in recent times as commissurotomies, more commonly known as brain bisection operations. … In these operations, the corpus callosum is cut. The corpus callosum is a large strand of about 200,000,000 neurons running from one [brain] hemisphere to the other. When present, it is the chief channel of communication between the hemispheres. These operations, done mainly in the 1960s but recently reintroduced in a somewhat modified form, are a last-ditch effort to control certain kinds of severe epilepsy by stopping the spread of seizures from one lobe of the cerebral cortex to the other.

In normal life, patients show little effect of the operation. In particular, their consciousness of their world and themselves appears to remain as unified as it was prior to the operation. 

So even radical surgery which physically separates the two hemispheres of the biological brain does not have the ability to displace the unity of human consciousness. This phenomena has also been extensively documented in traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients, whose consciousness often remains intact despite the loss of brain matter and cognitive or physical function.

All of this raises the issue of human consciousness and where it comes from to another plane, and potentially into the lofty regions of the metaphysical: can everything ultimately be explained by the physical sciences, or do some explanations, by necessity, go beyond the purely material and into the realm of the spiritual?

This question separates those who study it into two distinct camps:

  • materialists (or, as some would say, physicalists) who believe that nothing exists beyond the physical; or that all things have a physical cause
  • and those who think of consciousness as something over and above our physical being, as Alan Watts put it.

In this series of essays we’ll explore those two positions, examine how the Baha’i teachings address them both, and see if we can come to some conclusions about the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

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Comments

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  • Dave Holloway
    Dec 13, 2020
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    What a deep and complex question. The soul and consciousness must be one and the same ? Therefore it must be the mechanism designed to trigger a response that enables us to determine right from wrong. So being the human species can with that understanding sort out what is necessary to survive, evolve and mature as the circumstances around them change.Call it emotions, call it concietiousness, it's the inner being that compensates what is lacking from the outer being.
  • Alan Hunter
    Nov 4, 2019
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    It's possible that our soul is simply our memories recreated by our creator in a new body in the next life. He is capable.
    • Erik Kringle
      Oct 16, 2020
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      Tammie Zediker, Is it then, "To live in the hearts of others is to never die"
    • Tammie Zediker
      Nov 8, 2019
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      My belief is your soul lives on by others left behind you die you are not Bob anymore you are gone no body cause bob is dead no mind cause bob is dead but if there are family friends left behind your soul will live on through them play talking about him remembering them I also believe that there was something out there that did somehow make us but God is a reason for people to have something to live for and they can hypnotize ourselves into believing you the way it should be but the way it should be ...we all should know that alread
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  • Jerald Jackson
    Oct 6, 2019
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    Think the soul is really partially outside of this dimension, when outside of the holographic universe it is perceived as a ghost.The soul is real ,the universe is generated , with the free soul existing outside of the projection
  • Jena Khadem Khodadad
    Sep 27, 2019
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    Wonderful theme in which I am invested and have thus far written an article published in vol 20 of Lights of Irfan. I will be continuing my writing focused on Consciousness based on the thinking of those in my field of neuroscience and molecular biology.
  • Rosslyn and Steven Osborne
    Jun 8, 2019
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    You have hooked me well too David. I am seriously awaiting on the next part of this question. Thank you.
  • Stephen Kent Gray
    Jun 7, 2019
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    The hard problem of consciousness is very interesting to read about. The Wikipedia article was a springboard to so many other article via references and other Wikipedia articles and their references. People either propose solutions (weak reductionism, dualism, panpsychism/neutral monism), reject the problem (strong reductionism, eliminativism), or accept is as unsolvable (mysterianism). Dualism is sometimes further divided into Interactionism and Epiphenomenalism in some references. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's and Wikipedia's page on Neutral Monism and Panpysychism are good further reading I found. I will also be looking forward to your future posts and this series while searching everywhere for reading. ...
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  • Phil Walker
    Jun 7, 2019
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    I'm looking forward to this series! "Evolution could have left out our consciousness and our ability to be self-aware—but it didn’t. Why?" To be selected for, consciousness would must affect "fitness" to the environment, a problem if consciousness is caused by physical neural processes, having no causal effects on it's own. A conscious being is infinitely more marvelous than a zombie. A zombie would seem likely to be relatively less complex and therefore more likely to occur by chance, so how did conscious beings appear?
    • Maureen Weber
      May 20, 2020
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      I am confused as to what a soul is compared to sub conscience, your heart as it too has feeling as well as your gut has feelings.. could your soul be all of these inside us, that makes up our soul? This really interests me to find what is the soul? Is it what defines us? Or defines us to God? It’s all soo confusing yet I want to know if people say he’s a gentle soul? What do they mean by that? I once was with someone famous and he looked right at you but yet into ...your soul with his stare. It was very uncomfortable.as I think he really saw who I was. I never ever had that experience before. But he didn’t say one word and it was just this stare he was looking right through me.I Broke it by saying something stupid .
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  • Thomas Tai-Seale
    Jun 7, 2019
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    Oh David, I'm really looking forward to this series. :)
    • Jun 7, 2019
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      Dr Joe Dispenza’s workshops and videos are well worth delving into David if you haven’t already as he is well researched and approaches this important subject in a very scientific way.
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