Care of the Soul

Soul
In light of our increased knowledge about who we are as human beings, we have a real need to grapple with the question of ultimate human identity, or in other words, with the questions of self and soul. Do humans have a “soul” beyond their body? And if so, what do we mean by this? I would propose that a starting point for exploration of “soul” is to observe a profound paradox of identity, which I will call “the body/self paradox.”

The Body/Self Paradox:
1) Your body creates “you”…
In the twentieth century, neuroscience discovered that the brain and mind are a unified entity. Indeed, the physical brain is what creates the experience of mind. The understanding that brain creates mind was necessary for dispelling superstitious notions about the mind, and produced an era of accelerated progress in understanding human behavior and cognition. No longer, for example, are epileptic fits seen as signs of demonic possession, and no more do we drill holes in the heads of schizophrenics to release evil spirits trapped therein.

2) “You” are not your body.
The triumphs of neural monism (i.e., the understanding that brain creates mind) are wonderful. However, further scientific investigation informs us of a startling reality; namely, you are not your body. Your concept of who you are is not accurately captured by the idea that you are your body or your brain. The self you think of as you is not an entity in the way our brains are naturally wired to think. In fact, the you in you is not an entity at all.

So here we are with a paradox: your body creates you, but “you” are not your body. If this is vexing to you, it should be. For a very long time in human history, the self has been put into a blackbox and called soul. The simple designation of self as soul has done little to help us unpack the contents of the mysterious ultimate human identity. However, this is not to say that the notion of soul is empty. On the contrary, the concept of soul is like a zip file that we are still trying to unzip: it is so data rich, that we still aren’t sure what it means. It is no wonder, then, that the human mind has fallen into error and superstition in efforts to conceptualize the true meaning of human identity, or soul.

Why does soul matter?
The modern philosopher Thomas Moore has remarked the following:

I like to think that it was the theology of soul worked out so painstakingly and so concretely in Renaissance Italy that gave rise to the extraordinary art of that period…Care of the soul is an appreciation of the paradoxical mysteries that blend light and darkness into the grandeur of what human life and culture can be.

The act of entering into the mysteries of the soul, without sentimentality or pessimism, encourages life to blossom forth according to its own designs and with its own unpredictable beauty. (Care of the Soul)

By wrestling with the paradox of body and self and probing deeply into each of the tenets in this paradox, I believe we are in a position to discover a new, refined concept of humanity and soul. What opportunities might we encounter both personally and culturally as we redirect this ambitious aim to know ourselves?

What’s happening in New York?

Last night I checked out a group here in New York called The Interdependence Project (abbreviated as The ID Project). The ID Project is a group based out of the East Village that focuses on building community through meditation, activism, and the arts. As a happy coincidence, the group’s discussion topic for the night was inspired by Daniel Goleman’s book Destructive Emotions, which looks at some of the intersections of neuroscience and Buddhist practice. I’m enthusiastic about pursuing this convergence of ideas (i.e., neuroscience and Eastern philosophy). Certainly the Dalai Lama has been an avid spokesman for unifying the fields of Eastern philosophy and Western science.

What makes this a particularly nice complementarity is 1) the detailed roadmap of cognitive and inner development that has evolved over thousands of years of Eastern contemplative traditions, and 2) the falsifiability of the claims put forward by the practitioners of Eastern modalities. In other words, there is a natural give and take between the structure and description of internal life Buddhism and its sister philosophies assert, and the capabilities of Western science for probing and objectively confirming or challenging the ideas from these traditions. I am optimistic that, over time, this convergence of approaches will provide both guidance and refinement for understanding the inner self, and will indeed produce broader acceptance of means for the transformative phenomena so badly needed at both the individual and the societal level. Look for more details to come as I flesh out my own understanding of Eastern traditions and my ideas about the potential complementarity between Eastern and Western approaches.

In the more proximal timescale, The ID Project hosts a number of activism efforts for anyone interested in personally contributing to positive social change. This coming Sunday (April 26th) the group is meeting to work on an outreach project that encourages prison convicts to pursue college-level education. My initial impression of The ID Project is one of idealism and seriousness. Check out their website to learn more about their initiatives:

http://theidproject.com

The Quantized Mind, part 2: Connectomics and Blue Brain

Hi, guys. A few weeks ago I wrote the first post in a series that I am calling “The Quantized Mind.” You can read part 1 under the February 23rd, 2009 entry on this blog. In part 1, I lay out an argument that there will eventually be an opportunity for human beings to measure phenomena such as cognition in quantifiable terms. Making the argument is the easy part. Making it happen is where the heavy lifting begins.

In this post, I want to introduce the concept of connectomics. Like all body organs, the brain is made up of individual cells. This realization that the brain was composed of cells was actually a radical breakthrough that occurred early in the 20th century. The neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal deserves a generous portion of the credit for advancing our current understanding of the cellular components in the brain for his outstanding work in characterizing neurons and their types.

The number of brain cells, i.e., neurons, that make up the brain is absolutely staggering. It is estimated that there are 10 billion brain cells (10,000,000,000), each of which has thousands of connections to other brain cells. To do a mental experiment with this number, imagine that the each person in the entire population of China has a thousand pieces of string in his or her hands. Now imagine that every person holds on to one end of each piece of string, and then gives the other end of each of the thousand pieces of string to a thousand other individual people. The massive web of people and pieces of string is orders and orders and orders of magnitude beyond what our human minds can really imagine. Now take this unimaginably huge and complex web of people and string, multiply it by about ten, and you will have a conservative estimate for how complex the human brain is.

When we talk about quantifying phenomena such as cognition, we need to employ some realistic humility to acknowledge that we are itsby-bitsy teeny-weeny neonates in understanding our own brains. Winfried Denk, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck institute, has estimated that it would take three billion person years to map out just one narrow functional unit in the brain known as a cortical column—to say nothing of completing the project to map out the brain in its entirety. Hardly something to hold our breath for!

The good news, though, is that it is not just one person doing all the work, and that it’s certainly not just humans doing all the work, either. We are benefiting from exponentially increasing capabilities to resolve these problems computationally, both in terms of the exponentially increasing computer power at our disposal, and also in terms of the exponentially increasing understanding of brain connection dynamics (i.e., the more we understand, the more that this understanding allows us to understand). Predicting timescales for the convergent effects of multiple exponential factors is tricky, to say the very least, and I don’t know of any good paradigms that convincingly argue an estimated time of arrival for our ultimate understanding of brain wiring. Ray Kurzweil, the famous and infamous technology forecaster, has made bold prediction that humanity will have successfully reverse-engineered the human brain by the 2040s. Don’t get me wrong—I think that would be amazing. 30 more years is a heckuvalot shorter than three billion person years hacking away at cortical columns. But I guess the best that I can say is let’s see what happens.

Probably one of the most serious efforts to rigorously decode the mystery of the human brain is the Blue Brain Project at École Polytechnique (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2005, the project team successfully completed a ten year endeavor to map the cortical column of a rat. As reported in the June 2005 New Scientist, the current goals of the Blue Brain Project are:

1. construction of a simulation on the molecular level, which is desirable since it allows to study effects of gene expression;
2. simplification of the column simulation to allow for parallel simulation of large numbers of connected columns, with the ultimate goal of simulating a whole neocortex.

Before we get too cozy in our seats, let’s consider that the whole human neocortex is estimated to contain 1 million cortical columns. In other words, once we complete the first goal to construct a molecular simulation of a single cortical column, it’s not exactly a hop, skip, and a jump to simulating our entire brain. Nonetheless, we have many factors working in our favor: not only are our computer technologies rapidly augmenting our power to handle some of these computational problems, but the general public interest in our brain is a very good thing for the work of neuroscientists. Strong international cultural leaders such as the Dalai Lama are openly publicizing the humanitarian good that could potentially come from better understanding our inner workings in high-resolution detail. Combined with recent sociopolitical forces to renew the emphasis on science research and funding, there are strong reasons for optimism about the path that lies ahead.