The Narrative and Biological Foundations of the Soul
Image credits belong to: DanielHannah | Pixabay
Introduction
This blog post is about how the non-physical, narrative world can touch the objective, physical world of human biology. Though physical biology can correlate with every thought and experience imaginable, this does not prove that your thoughts, experiences, and personal narratives all are identical to physical biological parts. Physical biology does not inform you on the type of narrative that is necessary for you to have. In humanity’s historical timeline, narrative and storytelling originated with religion that predated the rise of secularism, and the narrative of Jesus Christ is the one promoted by this blog post.
I want you to think of your favorite physical object. Maybe it is a juicy, scrumptious apple. Maybe it is a smooth, warm blanket. Maybe it is the sentimental touch of your mother, father, or spouse. Maybe your loved one in general is your favorite physical object.
Or does it feel strange to think of another human as entirely a physical object?
Well, that is going to be part of my argument here.
Physical baggage comes with our cognitive systems, nerve cell firings, and specific brain structures that can be correlated with every thought and experience we have at each passing second.
But are you identical to those cognitive systems? Are you reducible to those nerve cell firings and specific brain structures? Are you the mechanistic pieces? You certainly do not feel like machinery in the same way computers or hydraulics feel. Right?
What does it feel like to be a computer or hydraulics anyway? Well, obviously, there is the feeling of what it is like to be you, or to be me, or your loved one. And we only know that based on talking to each other about it.
Cognitive Theory
According to cognitive theory, your abilities to learn and retain knowledge are best explained in terms of cognitive systems and specific brain structures. That is true, even though a 2014 National Library of Medicine article reported that we then did not know why each brain function has its particular place or loci to really concretize the neuronal circuits carrying thoughts and meaning.
That is quite fine. I hope for science to identify all their positions and circuits so we can increasingly understand our human nature.
However…
I have often witnessed proponents of physicalism and materialism dismiss humanity’s spiritual definition by making appeals to the context of brain structures, by stating how a faculty can be lost with damage to the particular loci responsible for whatever said faculty.
For instance, we can say that language abilities can be impacted by lesions to the superior-temporal cortex and decision-making can be impacted by damage to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Perhaps the ability to process concepts and meaning can be affected by damage to various “semantic binding sites or hubs” in the distribution areas integrating information from many senses. Some prefrontal, parietal, and temporal areas were mentioned in the 2014 article, but no single area was identified as the sole source. You may lose your sense of meaning with the affected areas/loci, but this does NOT prove that all meaning, in general, depends on those brain structures, and that without them, meaning is completely illusory or non-existent in the universe.
That kind of materialistic/physicalist thinking is intended to persuade us that the brain produces consciousness. On the contrary, it produces some kind of fallacy of confusing cause with effect. Messing with the neural circuitry and assuming that the brain produces consciousness is like messing with the electronic circuitry of a cellphone and assuming it produces its own service while ignoring that it gets signals from a tower.
No winning points were given to religion and no losing points were given to science in 2014 when science had to admit that “we did not yet understand why specific higher cognitive functions are ‘bound’ to their specific brain loci.”
I do not even see an inherent war between science and religion anyway.
So furthermore…
This blog post is NOT intended to put science on trial for making explanatory gaps nor to replace science with some mysterious non-answer. I simply want to keep science in its proper place. The neural mechanistic models help to clarify how we function and move in the world, but they still do not explain ‘who we are’ or what it means to be human.
This is a complaint, not against science, but against scientism that weaponizes reductionism to see meaning and personal identity only in terms of neural mechanisms.
The DNA and TC do not define you
The 2014 article addresses the perspective of “distributed neuronal assembly (DNA) and thought circuit (TC)” as a system of parts working together to accomplish all the events of vision, audition, olfaction, perception, action, language, attention, memory, decision, and conceptual thought that we all enjoy but take for granted at each moment.
That is a great insight into neural mechanics. God bless us all!
But as these physical substrates correlate with every thought and experience imaginable, that landscape is still not identical nor reducible to your thoughts and experiences, in of themselves. It is not identical nor reducible to you, overall.
Your physical and biological substrates are NOT coterminous (i.e., not equal in boundaries and extent of meaning, time, and space) with the individual contents of your thoughts and experiences.
Why?
Within a first-person perspective, your inner monologue or private speech cannot recognize coterminous patterns between itself and your biological underpinnings. Even if your inner monologue is “the result of certain brain mechanisms” allowing you to inaudibly “hear” yourself, we should not get the effect confused with the cause, here. Your inner monologue must depend on a narrative structure or a story about itself that uses non-biological and non-technical terms as its foundation and means of communication with peers.
What is the biology and thoughtful content occurring simultaneously with eating something scrumptious and yummy such as an apple?
Everyone’s thoughts and feelings are different in the event of eating. And it is not because there are a handful of basic taste groupings (e.g., sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and yummy or umami that is said to be linked to a taste for monosodium glutamate).
You will not have the same thoughts every time you taste the yummy apple.
Why?
Chemical changes within the sensory cell are caused by the taste molecules binding to receptors resulting in the transmission of impulses to the brain through different nerves. The location of the receptor also plays a determining role.
Perhaps the difference of thought is determined by the receptor’s location?
The average adult has between 2,000 and 10,000 taste buds, with 50 to 150 receptor cells on each taste bud, as taste buds are replaced roughly every 10 days.
Perhaps the repeated biological change can determine the fact that your thoughts change with each event of eating an apple, or eating in general?
How many variations of thought can we estimate to exactly match and co-occur with all varied arrangements of receptor cells and taste buds on your tongue, exclusively? Such an estimation is probably impossible, or just an assumption, at best.
Taste information is first sent to the medulla, then to the thalamus, and eventually to the gustatory cortex. Scent signals will also get processed in the temporal lobe’s cortical center that is crucial to the autobiographical memory that constructs your personal history into a coherent story. Olfaction is also processed in areas responsible for emotions and reproduction, which could explain why you may become sappy, happy, or sad in response to a memory triggered by a scent, or why you may feel sexually titillated by someone’s scent.
Is every thought, emotion, memory, and narrative completely determined by the olfactory signals you receive? I want to say ‘no’ because all the subcomponents of those events differ for each person, and we decide how we perceive them and how we allow our personal narrative to be written.
Does taste always follow the same road of travel to deterministic thought? Even if the answer is ‘yes’, the biology must be quantitative according to science, but the quality of the experience will give rise to thoughts that are describable in a story of un-empirical terminology and worth that is measurable only according to the one telling his/her personal story.
Again, the string of numerous thoughts resulting from taste information can never be coterminous (i.e., NOT equal in boundary and scope of time, space, and meaning) with the taste information.
Jordan Peterson’s Objective-Narrative World
This reminds me of what Jordan Peterson says about the objective world touching the narrative world. Peterson is discussing it within the context of Jungian synchronicity, which is intended “to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection.”
However, this is what it means to me:
Regardless of the degree to which you believe Jesus Christ is historical or mythical, His character in His stories connects with our “narrative sense of the world” and our “world of morality” that “tells us how to act.” Men and women throughout the past 2,000 years have allowed their whole lives to be impacted and directed by Christ to a degree which no movie or fable or fictional story has ever replicated. So, the power of Christ’s moral-narrative structure is real to us Christians, no matter how much secularism disputes it.
Somewhere in the progression of time that appears linear to us, everything you say and do is somehow traceable to morality and how you should act in the world. Even if you arrive at that point indirectly or ignorantly.
How did you get the delicious apple? Did you still pay for it even though you were malnourished, and you feel you should not be obligated to spend your last dime on such a basic need? Whatever the case, your moral narrative, or lack thereof, had some role in your decision and outcome.
The aroma compounds, fatty and amino acids, and metabolic pathways involved with eating the apple will also lead to giving an account that relates to your goals, ambitions, hopes, and dreams, etc. that include no biological, chemical, nor physicalist terms.
Maybe you want to help others have this same delicious experience with an apple. Maybe you want to improve your health. Maybe you want to grow an apple garden and start an apple business. Maybe the eating of the apple reminds you that you want to decrease the temptation to steal an apple the next time you are hungry for it. Maybe you will recall the story of Adam and Eve eating of the forbidden fruit, against God’s command.
Whatever the case, your thoughts must take place in story form, not only when you sell it to others, but also when you sell it to yourself. The flow feels linear, like a stream flowing in a direction not coterminous or overlapping with your biological dimensions, yet, somehow, your storied thoughts and physical biology both seem to still coexist enough to keep you stable on your two feet in this Earthly 3 dimensional plane. It leads you to the next phase of your life where you try to align your story with another like-minded person or people.
Here, we transcend biology even further, because personal narratives that emerge from brains want to join something that is bigger than themselves. These personal narratives will find other like-minded people and stories upon which to build a community that fulfills a purpose or goal outside of an individual person. The goal is characterized in terms of servitude to others, and in serving others, you feel like you serve a purpose as you play your role in a kind of storytelling that is unique to homo sapiens.
All the reductionistic and mechanistic pieces to the community’s puzzle can be discussed in isolation from each other, but summarizing the whole project requires seeing them in terms of how they add up. The adding up leads to a bigger picture. The bigger picture is always beyond us, and we cannot derive meaning and potential without being a part of it.
A person who isolates in a bedroom, refusing to ever come out, is, in a way, choosing to be aimless and purposeless. That is a situation of no human contact/support, and its excess can potentially lead to self-harm and suicide. The mental health field recommends against excessive self-isolation, and for a very good, observable reason.
So, we must come out of our bedrooms and face a cruel world by joining forces with those we trust. Figuring that out involves aligning ourselves with a healthy narrative in a world of competing narratives. Does it ever feel spiritual to you even if you cannot prove it to be such?
I choose to align myself with the narrative of Jesus Christ that perhaps can be briefly expressed in Matthew 22:36-40:
“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
The author of this blog post is Matthew Sabatine, who was born in the United States and raised as a Christian but left the faith in his early twenties. He returned to the faith midway through 2022. Matthew has some experience in the mental health field as a direct support professional, caring for people with intellectual and development disabilities and people who were in long-term residency/rehabilitation programs. Though Matthew has no formal undergraduate or graduate degree, he has experience co-facilitating therapy groups under the supervision of licensed counselors. Matthew currently works in sales/marketing by day and blogs on his free time at night.
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