The Soul

It is more than just a collection of memories and instincts, those things that exist within our physical brains that can be measured. It is consciousness, feelings, intuition, imagination, the ability to contemplate the meaning of our existence and our role in the universe. We can describe the soul in hundreds of different ways, but defining what it truly is, why do we have one, and where did it come from has been the focus of philosophers and theologians since we were able to ask the question "What am I?"

The Rise of Consciousness

Early pre-humans had little-to-no consciousness. No more so than the animals we are descended from really. Impulse and instinct alone guided our entire lives. Our brains excelled at sensory interpretation, memory, pattern recognition, etc. All the skills that helped us survive, but animals all over our planet had these skills too.

So when did we go from purely animals to creatures in possession of a soul, of true consciousness? Evolution and the fact that we live in a Multiverse. Our brains evolved the ability to form connections to "nearby" (dimensionally speaking, more on what nearby means in another post) copies of ourselves. Tuning in to the other universes like a subconscious radio.

This connection reinforced itself naturally over countless generations of evolution; those with stronger connections survived more often than those who had weaker connections. Once there were enough of our connected brains throughout the multiverseIn many-worlds, the subjective appearance of wavefunction collapse is explained by the mechanism of quantum decoherence, and this is supposed to resolve all of the correlation paradoxes of quantum theory, such as the EPR paradox and Schrödinger's cat, since every possible outcome of every event defines or exists in its own "history" or "world". (Click link for more details) More something wonderful started happening, we developed imagination, emotions, eventually, this interconnection gave rise to self-awareness, and then sentience was finally ours. This is what the soul is.

Imagine it like this: A radio is broadcasting and playing a specific song at the same time, but very very weakly. So weakly in fact that it is inaudible... not even noticeable. Now, if you put two of them together in the same room the volume of their playback increases ever so slightly because they are reinforcing each other. Pile enough of them together and you get a coherent stream of music.

There are of course variations in the signals that each radio receives or broadcasts, after all this is a biological fluke and not a digital system... but we will discuss those variations and their effects in future posts.

Given enough time all creatures in our reality might develop self-aware consciousness, in fact, there are likely numerous realities where we share our world with many sentient former animals.