Tag: consciousness

The Human Soul

The text explores the concept of consciousness, discussing its relationship with the body, spirit, and soul from both scientific and biblical perspectives. It argues that while natural materialism reduces humanity to the body, biblical teachings emphasize a multi-faceted existence. Death is viewed as unnatural, separating spirit and body, necessitating a heavenly counterpart.

From a scientific standpoint, we speak of such things as consciousness as being the mysterious part of the human experience. Is consciousness an illusion? Is it just the chemical and electrical activity among our neurons or is there something more?

The Bible talks about our spirit, soul and body. Natural materialism wants to reduce us to one thing–a body. The Bible speaks of three. The body is easy to identify. The spirit seems to be something not of this three-dimensional space, but rather something connected to the body during our lifetime. The “soul” is sometimes used as a synonym for the spirit like here:

28 And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

Matthew 10:28 (ESV)

This passage is interesting because it speaks of destruction, which apparently doesn’t refer to elimination. It also speaks of a body in Hell. Even the lost get a resurrected body, but it seems to be turned to ash according to Malachi 4. This must be a body for the space of Hell, the counterpart to a Heavenly body for the redeemed. The necessity of an accompanying body to our spiritual component is what is relevant to my blog today.

Paul says,

23 Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

1 Thessalonians 5:23 (ESV)

Here Paul is either being redundant or he is making a distinction between soul and spirit. The soul seems to be the interaction of spirit and body. It may be what you see when you image a brain. The soul could include our consciousness or just be an element of it. Where do such things as cognition, memory, self-awareness reside? When we are as we are created to be, a body and spirit united, then the answer is all of the above. Our memories are stored in our brain (a part of the body). The soul is the functioning of spirit and body together.

Death is an unnatural thing when compared to how God designed us. It is because of God’s sentence on sin that spirit and body are torn apart. Cognition, memory, consciousness go with the spirit. Be we are not whole without a body. We are “found naked” .

5 For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, 3 if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. 4 For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.

2 Corinthians 5:1-4 (ESV)

“Unclothed” must be a ghost-like state, lacking the benefits of spirit-soul-body. It is because of this passage that I am convinced we have a heavenly body. The idea that Heaven is a part of an other-dimensional space than Earth helps this to make sense. Our bodies that we possess now are constrained to occupy the three-dimensional space of this universe. A parallel universe, like Heaven could be, would require a different body. Perhaps Hell would require a different one yet.

With each body-spirit combination comes a soul. The interaction of body and spirit. The description of our resurrected, earthly body as being “spiritual” (1 Corinthians 15:44) may refer to the ability to unite them both–our spirit with both the resurrected, earthly body and the heavenly body.

How far can science probe this? Not very. It can measure the explosion of energy when the spirit and body disconnect-likely the temporary disappearance of the soul. But science is also constrained to examining these dimensions. It certainly points to the existence of others through quantum mechanics, but that is all.

Revelation from God, though sometimes cryptic, gives us a greater insight into ourselves–an exciting insight.

Life, Death and Consciousness

The post explores explanations for our complex universe, body, consciousness, and free will. It compares materialism and biocentrism, touching on consciousness, multiverse, and freewill. The author rejects the deterministic nature of materialism and embraces the spiritual dimension, referencing the Bible’s distinction between body, soul, and spirit. Jesus’ sacrifice offers hope for an eternal, heavenly existence.

What explains our experience of a complex and vast universe? What explains our complex body and the experience of being self-aware and having a free-will? Many religious, philosophical and scientific explanations have been advanced over the centuries. Do they work, do they have proof, and how did we arrive at these ideas?

The current scientific orthodoxy has a certain philosophical point of view. Materialism (not to be confused with the lust for money and property) is a philosophical point of view that says only the observable is real. Ironically, observation makes this philosophy doubtful.

One area of struggle for materialism is our consciousness. We can observe brain activity and even artificially create certain experiences within the brain, but the theory fails to explain our ability to choose in a satisfactory manner and seems somewhat desperate in its attempts to explain away Near-Death Experiences.

A more fringy and somewhat pseudo-scientific philosophy that has got a little attention is something called biocentrism. My take on what little I know about biocentrism is that it is trying to take some ideas (true or not) from the current mainstream of science and propose a largely unprovable theory of consciousness. I am interested, as well, as to how observable and tested ideas from science come into contact with information that we have by revelation from God. Consciousness obviously plays into the topic of this blog.

Biocentrism asserts that our consciousness is actually the energy within the brain. This is subtle difference from mainstream science which says that our consciousness is an illusion created by the interaction of our brain cells which is both chemical and electrical.

Where biocentrism rolls into the slightly more bizarre is how it uses the idea of a multiverse, which is strictly the desperate idea of theoretical physics to explain how we can have a fine-tuned universe that supports life. There isn’t great or any (to my knowledge) evidence for the multi-verse; especially not the version utilized by biocentrism. Their use of the multiverse is that we exist simultaneously in an infinite number of universes playing out an infinite number of choices at once. That idea tries to solve the freewill issue. We actually are not free, we are just playing out one set of possible circumstances. The odd conclusion is that since we may die in one universe, but death is an illusion since we must still live in others. The only thing unifying the multiple versions of ourselves is our brain energy. If we can train our brain energy to be more aware, we transcend the perceived problem of death.

Call me skeptical. I reject the idea that our choices are simply the product of inevitable brain chemistry. I also reject the idea that we are only an evolutionary product of the laws of nature. Getting at the true nature of what we are is hard if not impossible for scientific inquiry. At some point, we must be told what we are by someone who transcends creation–the Creator Himself.

The Bible speaks of our Earthly body, our Heavenly body (1 Corinthians 15:40, 2 Corinthians 5:1), our soul and our spirit. See https://afterdeathsite.com/2024/03/26/your-body-soul-and-spirit/ I think the Bible comes close to some of the ideas above, but remains significantly different. Our consciousness is not brain chemistry exactly. Our Spirit creates the consciousness which interfaces with the brain as chemistry and energy. Our Spirit is not limited to this universe, but is connected to it for now.

Death is a real thing, not an illusion. It is the consequence of being a sinful being that has rebelled and diverged from how God created us. That said, a human, is an eternal and potentially multi-dimensional thing. We are where God put us now, but we are created to be an eternal creature. Our life is not playing out in a different fashion in another universe, but we can have an existence in another universe. Which “universe” depends on our interaction with God, who wants us to have something good. If God can connect us by faith to Jesus, then our universe will be Heaven and eventually also a rehabilitated version of this universe.

Jesus’ death and resurrection were performed to give us that inheritance after death. Our body and spirit will separate but our soul will engage with another body in Heaven (probably another not a parallel universe). That is what completes the explanation of what we are, and that is a hope that we all can hang on to.

The Way That We Are Made

What makes a human being special, if anything? A Materialist would say that nothing is special. We are just a biological robot doing what chemistry is forcing us to do with no specific purpose. Materialism is a very disparaging philosophy that doesn’t fit our experience. I don’t believe it at all. I experience myself making choices, contemplating my existence, living with purpose; and even though I have not died and returned from the dead yet, I have a sense that I am not limited to my physical lifespan. That may lack scientific vigor, but the atheistic claims of a Materialist do as well, and are clearly rubbish.

Human beings are more than interesting chemistry. Complex chemistry is a part of our being, but not the whole of it. Most people have thought so. The dissenters have a clear bias–they don’t want God to exist.

The Bible says something different about humans. It says we were created in the “image of God”. What does that mean? I don’t think it is the common meaning of the term “image”. The Bible declares several times that God is a spirit or is spirit. While the meaning of “spirit” is also vague, I would gather from usage that it means that God is not set in his appearance by a defined physical form. Part of being created in the “image of God” is having a part of our being not connected to a defined physical form.

Our bodies are a “defined physical form” the way I am using the phrase. The Bible speaks of humans as also having a “spirit”. Our spirit may be what we experience as consciousness. But our spirit is not the whole of us. We are body, and possibly bodies, and spirit. Our spirit can be liberated from connection to our body. That is what death is. Our spirit can interact with our body. That is why we can control it and that is what is observed when mapping brain activity.

We know that our earthly body can die and decay. Our spirit cannot, which is another aspect of being made in the image of God. We are eternal. While I do not believe in reincarnation, I understand the Bible to say that we can have a heavenly body (1 Corinthians 15:40, 2 Corinthians 5:1). In that case, our spirit is interacting with a body made for the physical dimensions of Heaven. I also know from the Bible that we will have a “resurrected” body. In this case, our spirit is interacting with a recreated, indestructible body built for the physical dimensions of this universe. Being eternal, we will never lapse into non-existence.

Being created in the image of God means, among still other things, that we have an eternal, non-material part that can interact with material bodies that can exist within their respective physical realms. This is theorizing that Heaven is a parallel universe to this universe rather than a remote part of it. The same can be said for Hell. How we will spend eternity depends on our relationship with God.

Humans were not created by God to be in an antagonistic or forsaken relationship to Him. We were created for Him, to be with Him. But that relationship was broken a long time ago. When we come into being at our conception, we do not arrive with a good relationship and with an unblemished image of God. God creates us, but in the sense that He created the biological system of reproduction that makes us. We do not start from scratch. As such, we inherit physically a nature that is antagonistic to God and under God’s judgment. (Romans 7, Psalm 51:5 et al). The only fix for us is Jesus. Jesus’ actions created the opportunity to repair our relationship with God. God seeks us out to connect us to Jesus; and, if successful, to restore us to what we were originally intended to be.

Would we know this without being told about it by God? I doubt it. We would only experience a vague sense of something amiss. We would see a troubled and often ugly world made painful by human actions. We would walk blindly into our own deaths, perhaps expecting the end of our existence. Finding instead a far worse continued existence.

Created in the image of God is what we are for better or worse. Thank God, He did not abandon us to a hopeless fate.

Spirit, Soul and Consciousness

One critical question related to a discussion of life, death, and life after death is, “What exactly are we?”  For example, are we just a physical body whose chemical interactions create the illusion of thought, self-awareness and experience of an external world?  Or are we just a mind (whatever that is) that experiences an external world that is an illusion (Think the movie, “The Matrix” here).  Or does the external world really exist, our brains and their chemistry really exist and our conscious self is really something that is not formally part of this universe, but interacts with this universe via the brain.  The last theory is a dualism favored by scientists who are not wholesale devotees of materialism (the idea that the only real things are measurable things).

The Bible is dualistic.  Body and soul are mentioned many places.  While body and soul were not to be separated, they can be.  I am both my body and my soul.  Hence, the promise of the resurrection of the body and not just an eternal heavenly separation of the soul from this world.

In one passage, Hebrews 4:12, a third category is introduced.  It states, “(the Word of God is) Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even is dividing soul and spirit…”  The words soul and spirit are clearly not synonyms here.  To what do they refer?   “Soul” in Greek is psyche.  “Spirit” is pneuma.  We use these roots in many words, but do we understand what the writer meant, and do these words relate to what we have learned about the brain?

Materialists want us to believe that our whole experience of consciousness is merely brain chemistry.  They point to the fact that electrical stimulation of certain parts of the brain can give us sensory and emotional experiences.  They also refer to imaging from PET scans that show brain activity in certain parts of the brain for any conscious experience.  True materialist devotees then extend this connection to a form of fatalism, suggesting that we have no freewill of any form.  Our bodies simply do what our brain chemistry makes us do, and brain chemistry is strictly cause and effect according to the laws of physics.  It’s the perfect excuse.  “Was I speeding, officer?  I couldn’t help it my brain made me speed.”

Besides being morally absurd and not corresponding at all with our own experience of self, this theory doesn’t explain well the experience of people put in a medically induced coma and cooled down for brain surgery.  They have no PET activity nor access to either their senses or a scientist’s probe, still one Arizona woman experienced being out of her body and accurately described all the activity in the surgical suite.

I personally believe that our brains are the interface between our consciousness and body and not the source of our consciousness.  Our pneuma is something non-physical.  It can experience Heaven or Sheol.  It can even experience the Earth without our bodies in certain conditions.  Our spirit also interfaces with our brains to create chemical and electrical activity (our psyche) driving our body to interact with the world.

Physical death disconnects our pneuma and psyche.  Hebrews 4:12 says God’s Word is powerful enough to kill.  More importantly, it is powerful enough to make alive. We are more than interesting chemistry.  We are a created being with self-awareness for a reason.  We are meant to know ourselves and to know our Creator.  Despite the sin that results in a division of soul and spirit, we have a Savior that values body, soul and spirit and redeems them all.