A Question for Christians

[hmkpoker]

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Interesting question.

Here's an analogy that's helped me understandit:

The soul is like a radio broadcast.

The brain is the radio. Just as a broadcast animates a radio, so too the soul animates the brain. Seeing as your brain is an essential component to your consciousness, I venture the soul would change bodies.

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I like the analogy.

I think that the idea of a soul is useful if the brain is understood as a nebulous, foggy processing device that makes decisions that are seemingly unpredictable. However, when you examine the smaller, more comprehensible components of the brain, the idea of a soul seems unnecessary.

I decide that I want to go get a sandwich. Hunger signals connect to neurons in one part of the brain which activate food-related activities, which connect to the frontal cortex which decides where to go (the dominant signal amongst the activities provoked wins, as is the modern understanding), which connects to the memory of getting your shoes, coat and wallet and go to the car, etc.

The individual nuerons are like tiny little wires filled with different chemicals. The transmission of the chemicals operates in a straightforward, predictable fashion. However, we have so many of these messages going off at once, and we completely lack the technology to observe them all and integrate them in a manner useful enough to predict the behavior.

Neurons, as we know them, behave more digitally than analogically (that is, they send out yes/no signals rather than gradient signals...but because many neurons are involved in each action, the number of neurons' signals determines the intensity).


So here's the thing: the soul, if it exists, must assert an influence over the observable nuerotransmission in each neuron. And if its influence is observable, it must behave in a manner that would contradict an otherwise mundane, causal explanation. If nueron n fires just because neuron n-1 fired, just because n-2 fired, just because n-3 fired, etc, there is no reason for a soul to exist; neurons are simply governed by cause and effect.

But if neuron n doesn't fire, despite getting firing input from n-1, then we've got something.

I only have a BA in psych and I can't argue this on a level much deeper than this, but I think those principles are pretty straightforward. And to be fair, science still has an awful lot to learn about the brain and human behavior [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]