A while ago, I wrote about being spiritual and talking about a belief in the soul. I promised that I would explain that someday. Today is that day!
The reason the concept of a soul exists is no doubt tied to the psychological need of a human being for a predictable, comprehensible universe. There is also the concept of the “immortality” of the soul, no doubt to help us with our ultimate existential enemy, death itself. It is sensible that humanity created the concept of the soul given our situation. But when we transition – individually or as a group – into a naturalistic, atheist worldview, what good is the concept of the soul?
Firstly, the soul seems existent as a big brother of the phenomena we call “identity.” People are mostly creatures of habit and repeated behavior. They are of persistent appearance and voice. People have speech patterns, behavior patterns and em0tional patterns. It is our intellectual nature to assume all of this is informed by a single source. We might call that source their mind or their identity or possibly their soul. I would call those three different and distinct things (each a subset of the next, actually).
However, people ultimately change many many times over their life (a thing that is too often looked at negatively when it can often be a positive thing). For instance, the entity that we call “Chuck” and who I call “me” was, at one time, a person of no confidence, wild depressive mood swings and poor social acumen. But I’ve changed drastically on those points. More simply, at one point, I was 3 feet tall and now I am six feet tall.
For the most part, we basically ignore those changes where it regards “identity” and we say that I am Chuck, and I am the same Chuck that was once 3 feet tall. And yet, a portion of my identity – what I consider are the important qualities that define who I am – is confidence, an even mood that tilts towards positivity and a great deal of skill in social situations. That describes a different person than who I was. While we can say, “Chuck as changed,” what does it mean to be Chuck? Who is Chuck? Which Chuck – past or present – was the better representative of Chuck-ness? These are ultimately questions of identity, and identity changes. But identity must then be a quality of a larger whole, and that whole is Chuck.
It sounds like whimsical banter, but I think it becomes a real question of concern when we speak about the dead. Some remember the dead in their youth, some remember the dead as a public persona, some remember the dead as a private persona… but ultimately, who can define their identity? No one was with them in the secret moments in their mind when private feelings were felt, and that represents a whole other equally (if not more) valid part of who they were.
People of my age can also see this in the groups of friends they’ve had or kept over the years. How would my high school friends describe me? How would my college friends describe me? How would my post-college friends describe me? And, perhaps most interesting of all, how would those friends who I have kept since high school compare and contrast me with the friends who have only known me a year?
Further, some people decide at certain points in their life that a stark change in identity is necessary. Some people will move to a new city, make new friends and try to redefine themselves, no doubt to varying degrees of success. Certain people feel that certain aspects of their identity – their gender identity, for instance – is not properly represented, and they initiate life-changing events – like gender reassignment surgery – as a way of making them more comfortable with how their identity matches their appearance, or vice-versa.
Through all of these changes, what remains constant? Are we simply assigning a name to a composition of constantly-changing animate molecules housing a roving intelligence? Is there more to it than that?
I propose that there is more to it than that, although not materially.
Certainly, dash the old definitions of the soul. Forget the immortality and the life after death. There is no evidence, there is no proof and that means there is no reason to believe in it.
Embrace a naturalistic worldview, and evolve the definition of the soul. The “soul” is that consistent element which defines the consistent concept of personhood – of being – from birth to death. It is not just the thoughts and feelings they have, though. It is the projections of all their friends and relations on that animated band of molecules housing that roving intelligence.
This “soul” has many identities attached to it, perhaps a continuous stream of them, but it only ever has one person attached to it. While Joe and Jane might see different sides of Jill, both of them can agree that all of those qualities belong to Jill. So, the “soul” becomes the gestalt of many qualities, many memories, many events and incidents and relationships, all of which orbit a single person.
Surely, when someone dies, then, the soul continues to exist immaterially (in the way that memories and concepts exist). It is not wispy trails of gray fog, nor a see-through apparition of their idealized self. It is nothing but the construct of them that continues to exist to everyone who thinks about them. Jill may die, but Joe and Jane can still talk about her. In fact, they might even talk to her, addressing the concept of her in their mind. They might talk about what she would do if she were here, or who she would like or dislike. They might be wrong, surely, but the person never stops existing as a range of not only memories, but also possibilities.
Why bother with this term at all? Because there ought to be a term for it. We ought to understand that identity is a fleeting and subjective quality, that people ultimately change many times, but no matter how radically they change, they exist as a “super set” of all those things “that are themselves,” if you will. The “soul” is all of those things attached to the flesh and bone which house the phenomena of intelligence. And as surely as all the molecules of that flesh and bone are replaced time and time again, that “soul” never leaves the resulting organic matter.
There ought to be a term because abstraction is vital to our thinking and communicating.
Ultimately, those who embrace naturalism (which I do) must understand abstraction is still incredibly important to the human experience and our ability to preserve psychological well-being. Our great intellects have been built on a foundation of animal instincts and faulty logic, all of which is run by an organic machine that was developed but not designed. I find that abstraction is a great tool for addressing the resulting ghost in the machine.
The puzzling result for me is, ultimately, the “soul” would not be well-described by any words or notions. Rather, it can only be defined by all of the things which it encompasses, ultimately making it an indescribable mystery. I don’t really have a problem with that – it describes, somewhat, the enormous complexity of a human being. In that way, we can say “Brevity is the soul of wit,” but we’ll never quite have a word that defines the soul of Chuck, for instance.