If by “soul” we refer to that part of a being that extends before birth or after death, then science has already discovered the soul. And nobody noticed.

An Overview of Some Evidence

There’s lots of evidence. For example:

Researchers Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler discovered that mice have memories of their parents’ lives. They demonstrate convincingly that mice can fear a smell simply because one of their parents had a bad experience with it, even if the offspring have no other reason to fear the scent, and even if they had no contact with the parent. (The experiment involved fathers, to rule out the possibility that the information was transmitted in utero.) Read details in Nature here. There’s also a short video you can watch:

Similarly, a retrospective study on the children of prisoners of war from the US Civil War reveals that people, too, respond to their parents’ experience: Children can have PTSD if their father experienced trauma, even if the children never met the father. The researchers, Dora Costa, Noelle Yetter, and Heather DeSomer clarify: “Socioeconomic effects, family structure, father-specific survival traits, and maternal effects, including quality of paternal marriages, cannot explain” why children respond to their parents’ experiences.

And observationally, the University of Virginia School of Medicine has documented over 2,000 children who remember things from before they were born. The Washington Post details one such case here.

You may be skeptical. I certainly was.

By temperament, I doubted the reliability of the case studies at the University of Virginia — though not for any particularly justified reason. You may, too. You may similarly doubt the reliability of retrospective studies in general. But the results from the mice are clear and extraordinarily persuasive, and confirmed by other research (see below).

In light of the data on the mice, there’s really no reason to doubt the other experiments that point in the same direction. A wide body of evidence suggests the same thing: We respond to experiences from before we were born.

More Evidence

Lots of other observations align:

• Parental memories extend at least four generations in mice.1

• The way female rats raise their offspring influences future generations.2

• In humans: The children of Holocaust survivors have altered behavior and altered genes that relate to stress response.3

• Similar changes in humans are documented in the children of: a Dutch famine,4 both food scarcity5 and smoking6 in Sweden, violence in Rwanda,7 and many more.

• Human memories from past lives have been reported in at least 20 scientific journals8 representing observations from all over the world,9 according to a recent survey study.10

Details

So the question has been answered as definitively as possible: Our experience of life begins before our birth and extends beyond our death. What remains is to discover the extent of those experiences, and the mechanisms — the latter both out of scientific curiosity and because the mechanisms may offer insight into the extent.

The clearest evidence we have is from animals and specific stressors, probably because that’s the easiest to find and measure. Scientists permit themselves to afflict animals with stress in order to observe the results. And animals like mice reproduce every few months, so it’s easy to study more than one generation.

We cannot do the same with humans. So we are limited to looking back to see what happened (the children of prisoners of war, for example), and looking around with the goal of reconstructing the past (past-life memories in children). And this evidence is murkier.

I am by nature dubious in particular of past-life memories (again, though, not for any particularly valid reason). And I can see some more principled reasons to doubt the case reports, even though they are so numerous. If enough children invent random stories, perhaps a few will eventually match real past lives, purely by chance. Additionally, no past-life memory is a perfect match, and it’s not clear how much of a match should be counted as evidence of a memory. So even hundreds of documented cases in dozens of journals are not conclusive.

Still, I think the animal studies give us the proper framework here. We know for sure that information can be transmitted across generations. Instead of arbitrarily ruling out the possibility that humans can transmit memories, I think we should investigate with an open mind. (I’ll admit again that I’m not particularly good at this.) We should ask two questions.

The first question is what can be transmitted. Stress? (Yes.) Parenting technique? (Yes.) Recognition and fear of a specific smell? (Yes.) Recognition and fear of a specific person? A language? Other memories? Attitudes? A soul mate? We don’t know yet.

The second question is, how?

How?

The most widely proposed mechanism for this cross-generational memory is something called epigenetics, which the CDC defines as “how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work.” In other words, experiences actually change our DNA in subtle ways, and then that experience-altered DNA is passed to the next generation. In this way, the next generation is influenced by the previous generations' experiences.

This is well-established science at this point, as clear as inheriting eye color. Researchers have already amply documented subtle changes in DNA that result from experiences. (To put it in 7th grade Earth-science terms, both Darwin and Lamarck were right.)

So epigenetics is an important piece of this complex puzzle.

But the details remain elusive. How do the mice encode the particular scents? Can any experience be encoded in DNA? If so, how? What about the over 2,000 children who have memories of people who are not their immediate ancestors?

In light of these questions and many more like them, the epigenetics explanation must be considered both tentative and incomplete. Still, our incomplete understanding of the mechanism should not block our recognition of the facts. (By comparison, we don’t fully understand how herding instincts and other complex behaviors are transmitted in dogs, but we know that they are.)

The Soul

All of the available scientific evidence suggests that our experience on earth consists of more than the time between our birth and death. We remember and react to events from before we were born. And our experiences live on after we die.

What is the soul if not that?

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At its core, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave presents people who see only part of reality, and mistake that part for the entirety of reality. What they see are shadows of objects. Because they cannot see the objects, they think the world consists only of shadows. The shadows are real. Nothing else is.

All of us are like those people.

Plato writes of adults, imprisoned since childhood, in a cave. Because their legs and necks are bound, they can only stare straight ahead. In particular, there's a fire behind them that they cannot see. Between the fire and the prisoners, also unseen by them, is a walkway behind a low wall, where people acting as puppeteers carry various puppets of people and other living things. Because of the wall, only the puppets cast shadows. The prisoners see only the shadows of the puppets, hear only the sounds that bounce off the wall of the cave. Having no idea that reality extends beyond the shadows, the prisoners reasonably if wrongly assume that the shadows are the full extent of reality.

In short, the prisoners assume that reality is limited to what they can see.

All of us are limited to what we can see — either directly with our eyes, or, in this modern era of science, indirectly with detectors of various sorts. But the point remains the same. The sum total of what we can detect is nothing but shadows. We cannot detect reality.

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This insight — surprising, disturbing, fascinating — should guide everything we do. Science is the study of shadows, not the study of what casts them.

It seems to me that even if this were all Plato wrote, he would still deserve a top spot among the promulgators of great ideas.

As it happens, Plato manages to include more in his allegory. By referring to the people as “prisoners,” he suggests they might escape.

Indeed, he suggests that a prisoner who did manage to escape from the dark cave to daylight might, once his eyes adjusted to the light, see reality. He would see that the shadows aren’t real.

Additionally, if he returned to the cave after his escape, he would no longer see the shadows, because he would have lost his night vision. He would no longer see the “reality” of the prisoners, just as the prisoners could never see (his?) reality. The prisoners would think him mad.

Plato seems to suggest that it’s possible to break free of illusion and see reality.

I don’t think so.

[Originally published 2019 here.]

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In Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, people see only shadows, mistaking those shadows for reality because they cannot see what casts them. I’ve already explained why I think we are all like those people, our world full of shadows we think are real.

In a new twist, every time I join a video call [I wrote this during lockdown in COVID] those shadows now dance on my screen — screen-people, choppy two-dimensional LCD images cast digitally by distant people I cannot see. Yet I call it seeing.

I talk to the screen-people, who, for all the sophistication that brings them to me, are no more real than the shadows in Plato’s cave. The screen-people talk back. Sometimes they talk to each other. Once I even enjoyed a festive dinner in the company of some screen-people (though an observer has claimed that I dined with only my iPad).

This experience gives me, for the first time, some direct if tiny insight into the tremendous gap between reality and shadows, and it highlights what gets lost when shadows substitute for reality.

I know that a video call masks the depth of the human being, just as any Platonic shadow masks the depth of what casts it, but in this case I also know the person — the real thing, as it were. So I can compare the shadow to what casts it, compare the screen-people to the real people.

This interests me because “real” people are shadows too. That’s the whole point. On a video call I’m missing out on the real person, but, equally, when I’m with a person I’m missing out on...

What? I don’t know what I’m missing, of course. And I can’t.

But I can wonder.

What could cast the shadows that we call people? What majestic mystery lies behind a human being in the same way that a human being lies behind an image on a screen?

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My screen-people vanish and then return. Is the same true for “real” people?

The screen-people make it possible for me and my “real” friends to stay in touch when we’re apart. Do in-person encounters do the same thing for whatever casts us as shadows? When a friend and I visit in person, do we bring together beings who would otherwise be apart? Or perhaps our in-person encounters are only one way the unseen beings communicate. This might explain why I sometimes meet someone “for the first time” yet feel as though we’ve met before.

(And what about the other way around: Do screen-people wonder what real people are like?)

Additionally, I find myself drawn in to my video chats, my life reduced to the screen as I forget about the fullness of the people beyond, even forget about my own self beyond the screen.

Could my reality ever vanish so completely that all I’d have left is screen-people and my screen-self?

Has that already happened?

[Originally published in 2020 here.]

While watching a dragonfly fly once, I wondered whether the little creature’s little brain had enough computational power to execute the complicated maneuvers that I saw: flying, of course; even harder, landing; harder in a different way, returning time and again to the same spot; mating while flying seems particularly tricky; and eating, for that matter; and more.

The simplistic answer is that, yes, of course the dragonfly’s brain has enough computational power to do these things, because otherwise the dragonfly couldn’t do them. But we know from other realms that that reasoning is flawed.

I have a cellphone that understands my voice (often) even though the device doesn’t have enough computational power to do so. It achieves this trick by sending information wirelessly to a much more powerful computer — “the cloud” — for the heavy computational lifting.

So I wonder: Is there a cosmic computational cloud — something to which our brains connect, and to which the brains of other creatures connect? And how would we know?

Two ways of identifying this cosmic computational cloud come to mind: (1) we can observe it directly; (2) we can demonstrate its necessity by observing phenomena that would be impossible without it.

So far (1) hasn’t happened. We haven’t observed a cosmic computational cloud. (Though on the other hand, no one has been looking for it.)

And (2) is more nuanced.

If we can demonstrate that the dragonfly doesn’t have enough computational power to do what it does — or if any creature does anything that it doesn’t have the computational power for — that would be pretty convincing evidence. Even this approach is hard, because computational power depends on hardware as much as software. The dragonfly’s wing structure and other bodily apparatus might have evolved in such a way that even a lowly dragonfly could use them to fly. But, though hard, this line of inquiry isn’t impossible. Equally, once again no one has been looking into it.

A variation on (2) may be easier.

A cosmic computational cloud may offer a solution to a conundrum I first encountered in the engrossing book The Mind’s I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett: A neuron performs a mechanistic function, taking one or more inputs and converting them in some (perhaps complex) mechanistic way into an output. A machine could do this job. Certainly replacing one neuron of the 100 billion or so in a human’s brain would have no effect on the brain, and, in particular, on consciousness. What about replacing two neurons with machines? What about replacing all of them?

One of two conclusions seems inevitable: Either a machine can be conscious, or consciousness stems from more than the mechanisms of the body — that is, consciousness comes from outside the body.

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I’m not willing to rule out the former conclusion (though I am terrified by it, because, if it’s right, turning off my computer might be murder). But for now I’m more interested in the latter.

Perhaps there’s a cosmic computational cloud, and perhaps it helps explain what it means to be alive.

[Originally published in 2019 here.]

At its core, AI only does two related things: it finds patterns and it applies those patterns.

Here’s an example:

Suppose you have some pairs of numbers: 1 and 2, 2 and 4, 3 and 6, and 4 and 8. AI is a kind of computer program that can look at those pairs and figure out the pattern —in this case that the second number in each pair is double the first number. This is the pattern-finding phase.

Then you can give the AI program a new first number, like 5. It will apply the pattern (doubling) and tell you that the corresponding second number is 10. This is the pattern-application phase.

Or you could provide a new second number, like 7. Again, the AI program will apply the pattern. This time it will tell you that the first number is halfway between 3 and 4, that is, 3.5. This is also pattern application.

This second example (deducing 3.5 from 7) works even if there are no decimals or fractions in the original data. In this way, AI can discover halfway points that no one has thought of before.

Finding the pattern seems trivial in this example, because we already know about multiplication and division. And finding the halfway point also seems trivial, because we also already know about fractions and decimals. But for a long time, people didn’t know that there was anything between 3 and 4. (Think of the Romans who didn’t have a number between III and IV.) They would have been astonished.

Here’s the real magic: AI can find halfway points between things where even today we don’t think it’s possible: for example, something halfway between “tomorrow” and “sincerity.” You might at this point reasonably object that there is no halfway point between those two, but that’s only because we are like the Romans in this regard. AI knows it’s there even though we can’t imagine it.

In other words, there are patterns in the world and in data that we as humans simply cannot understand. But AI can.

Here’s a more complex example of AI: Instead of pairs of numbers, we can give AI pairs of an image and a description, such as a photo of New York City and “New York City,” and a painting by Renoir and “Renoir.” Then we can ask AI to create a Renoir painting of New York City!

Similarly, from essays and summaries of those essays, AI can create new essays from new summaries. From pairs of faces that are either the same or different, AI can tell you if two new faces are the same or not. From pairs of faces that are in focus and out of focus, AI can put out-of-focus faces back in focus. From law books and cases and legal conclusions, AI can generate new legal conclusions for new cases. And so it goes.

In principle these patterns are just like multiplication, but they are so complex that no human can understand them. Still, even if you can’t understand the patterns themselves (no one can), you can understand that there is a pattern.

That’s how AI works. Simple. And counterintuitive and astonishing.

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