The Human Soul - What is it and does it Exist?

The ability to create life on ever grander levels will bring to the fore that timeless quandary of what defines a unique individual, a unique mind and a unique consciousness—for lack of a better word, what defines a soul. 

A developing field of inquiry known as neurotheology seeks to solve this mystery. “If the soul is the immaterial part of who we are, then at this point in time, science can only evaluate what happens within a person when they experience their soul in some way,” says Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist and author of the recent book Principles of Neurotheology. 

To this end, Newberg and his colleagues have scanned the brains of Tibetan monks, Franciscan nuns and Pentecostal Christians while engaged in spiritual exercises such as meditation and speaking in tongues. In the 10 years since PM first spoke with Newberg, he and his colleagues have looked at activity in the brains of 130 people. The researchers continue to see that “a relatively extensive network of brain structures is involved with religious and spiritual states,” Newberg says. By illuminating what the brain is up to in the throes of religious rapture, Newberg thinks neurotheology “can try to determine what brain and body functions appear to be associated with activities pertaining to the soul.” 

It might be that finding the wellspring of consciousness and the soul, as it were, will result from delving still deeper—into the quantum-mechanical realm. Conventional constructs of consciousness are based on classical physics, with our mind emerging from a network of billions of neurons electrically firing away in the three pounds of mush in our skulls. “Most views assume consciousness arises strictly from synaptic computation among brain neurons,” says Stuart Hameroff, director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.

Along with Roger Penrose­—who will be mentioned again below—Hameroff co-created Orch OR (orchestrated objective reduction), a theory of quantum consciousness. Orch OR proposes an additional, major role for tiny cellular structures called microtubules. These hollow tubes partially compose the cytoskeleton that helps structure our cells’ interiors. According to Orch OR, “consciousness also depends on quantum computations in microtubules inside brain neurons,” Hameroff says. 

At first blush, such a mechanism sounds unlikely; after all, the rudimentary quantum computers we’ve made in labs operate at extremely cold temperatures, not the toasty environment of upper 90s found in our brains. But results in the past five years point to quantum mechanics’ involvement in a number of nonfrigid biological processes, including photosynthesis, Hameroff notes. And intriguing preliminary findings from Anirban Bandyopadhyay, a physicist at the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, imply that bits of quantum information, dubbed qubits, can maintain their coherence in single, warm microtubules in cells. Future work could assess whether certain gases used for anesthesia can scramble this coherence—a powerful demonstration of a basic on/off switch for consciousness. 

The details of Orch OR are dense and provocative. That “objective reduction” part refers to the boiling down of the range of possible positions a particle could have to just one position. This follows as a natural result of a universe governed by the twin titans of physics—relativity and quantum mechanics—interlinking at an incomprehensibly small, yet mathematically valid, scale called the Planck length (1.6 x 10–35 meters, for those keeping count). 

Therefore, Hameroff says, Orch OR, if true, would “connect the brain directly to the most basic level of the universe from which consciousness is said to arise.” Such a link could have some profound ramifications, especially for believers in a soul. “The connection to space–time geometry also raises the intriguing possibility that Orch OR allows consciousness apart from the brain and body, distributed and entangled in space–time geometry,” Hameroff says. This could perhaps account “for so-called out-of-body experiences and afterlife—the ‘quantum soul.’”

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