Souls as Patterns

Souls are often depicted as energy in literature and movies, points of flickering light or human-shaped shimmering luminescence. A lot of people have embraced this depiction, but it doesn’t really conclude from human experience. If you look at the world around us, energy is used up in the process of things fulfilling some function or by creatures to survive and act. Energy is just a resource. If there is a soul that exists beyond our bodies, then perhaps this soul requires some sort of energy source, but it makes no sense to think of the soul itself as energy, something that gets used and converted into a different form in the process, approaching entropy.

I’ve heard said that our bodies are composed of a few dollars worth of common chemicals, as if to trivialize a human being, but it’s how we’re put together that makes up our value. That’s like valuing a sculpture based on how much cheap clay it’s composed of and ignoring that it perhaps took hundreds of person-hours to shape. Meanwhile the human body took millions of years to become the many forms it takes on today. What’s meaningful about us is our patterns– our DNA, our memories, our personalities, the many decisions we have made throughout our lives. So whether our souls exist separately or strictly as one with our bodies or parts thereof, such as in our memories via the patterns of our brain’s neuron pathways, they are still patterns. Our bodies merely use energy to function.

If you actually make the effort to think about these things, then you may find it has an impact on whatever other views you have about the nature of yourself and the universe around you. If the soul is a pattern, what does that mean about the persistence of said soul? Are our patterns not ever-changing? Is that not the nature of life and all of existence? The pattern that described your personality and memories a year ago no longer matches the pattern that describes you now. For that matter, neither does the pattern of five minutes ago before you started reading this post. Are those specific patterns lost forever and “dead”? In that particular sense, our souls cannot be eternal, for if we were not constantly interacting with our environment, learning new things, making decisions that changed our souls, we would be no different from inanimate objects. We’d be dead.

The nature of the soul affects how you view things like choices, and the choices we make have an impact on who we become and the choices we make in the future. What did you choose to eat tonight for dinner? If you were stranded on an island, your choices for food would be limited. You may be able to go left, right, forward, or backward, but you likely cannot go up because you are at the moment incapable of flight. The choice to kill someone might never occur to a person without someone committing an act severe enough to anger them to the point of considering murder. Your pattern has been altered by incorporating these thoughts I’m now conveying to you. My pattern has encroached upon yours whether you agree with anything I’m saying or not. Your choice to agree or disagree was made possible by reading my words. If I hadn’t written this article, you would be a slightly different person than you are now. The choice to read my article would not exist for you. The world around you seems to some extent a type of container, shaping your soul the way a vase shapes the water within it, by presenting only so many choices to us. What choices were you exposed to while growing up? Were you raised by farmers? Industrialists? Programmers? Christians? Muslims? Jews? Alcoholics? Hippies?

A problem with that is it raises another important question. Where does “you” end and the rest of the universe begin? Where do you draw the boundary?

Do you believe there is an eternal version of you, a soul, that exists on another plane of existence? Is your body just a shell for that ever-evolving pattern? Does your body describe any part of what is your soul? If your body is male, does that affect the choices you make about who you might spend your life with? Does your soul really have a true choice for your mate or mates or did your body do some of the deciding? How much of you continues on when your body dies? It seems obvious to me that my memories are part of my brain and therefore probably decay after my death, but I admit to speculating occasionally and reluctantly whether or not some other part of what defines me might continue into some form of afterlife or reincarnation. It might carry something of me on, wisdom perhaps or the capacity to empathize, but certainly absent memories of this life. Do your memories exist in your brain or in your soul? Have you considered that at least some of what you now think of as “you” might end with your body even as another part, your soul, moves on?

If you’re a strict materialist, what parts of your body would you consider “you”? Is it just your brain? Maybe it’s not even your whole brain. Much of the brain just runs autonomic systems like your heart and digestion. Do you include the subconscious? What part of your brain is deciding what you dream? Is that part of you or not? Do you count the body? Your hormonal processes affect your choices and actions. Your reflexes and athletic ability surely have an impact on your recreational choices and whether you become a professional athlete, for instance. If your hand is chopped off, you probably don’t consider it part of you anymore. The detached and decaying limb no longer has much affect on your choices. For that matter, if the nerves to your legs are damaged beyond use making you a paraplegic, are they still part of you? Is “you” defined by the extent of your senses? Does that mean “you” extends out to your fingertips and toes, essentially as far as you can feel? If we’re basing it on your senses, why consider only sense of touch? What about as far out as you can see or hear? Watch on television? Read about?

You might say none of that is “you” because, while you can sense it, you can’t control it. You can only control your body. But you’re only doing that by sending electric signals out from your brain. Considering that, can you not relay signals further out through other mediums? You can throw a ball and knock something over. You can blow out a candle. If you kindly ask someone standing next to a light switch to flip on the light, they’re fairly likely to comply.

And recall that your pattern and your choices were affected by me deciding to write this article. The lines get really blurry the more you think about it. The thoughts that inspired this article are certainly a small but important part of what I think defines me. I’m sharing my pattern with you right now. I’m impressing upon you a small part of who I am. You are tainted by the essence of me! You can choose to repeat these thoughts and propagate them to other living things, keeping part of my soul alive, or you can stifle them within your brain, which will one day decay, and let them die. Better yet, you can keep parts or even elaborate on those and discard others, or even refute parts in hopes of stifling those thoughts in others as well. Our mortal lives are a sort of selection process. However, if you believe that all of what exists in your mind now will continue after your death in an eternal soul, then you will carry my tainted thoughts with you into the afterlife, including all the parts that you firmly disagree with.

That’s all I’ll say for now. I just want to ask questions that some may not have given much thought to. I just ask that you think about the merit of the notion of souls as patterns, and if it makes sense to you, begin to pay attention to other places where you sense ever-shifting patterns that also seem to grow in complexity, but that deserves its own article.

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Mike Barskey won the auction for a guest appearance in an Anarchy In Your Head comic strip. Mike, I thought this one fit your personality. Not sure what you’ll think of my caricature of you.

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