A rigorous accounting of the soul and qualia, and the rejection of consciousness as a useful category.
To start, I reject purely bio-chauvinistic perspectives on experience. Perhaps it is my déformation professionnelle; I have looked into the lowest levels of biology up to edifices of tissue and found nothing to convince me of special status. So, for this reason I operate on the level of phenomenological experience.
Qualia are defined here as recursive sensory experiences, wherein a signal is integrated from some stimuli into a broader gestalt. In this form qualia, quite trivially, can refer to almost anything so long as your definition of gestalt is broad enough. So, why do people keep pointing to qualia as proof of consciousness?
First there needs to be consistency in what is experienced. Random signals and random responses do not compose qualia. A brain with random signals whizzing through it at all times does not make what many would consider qualia. This leads to our first consideration, coherence.
The stability of induced states as a result of these signals gives rise to consistent states. With this in mind we can simply ensure that when a signal is fed into the gestalt that a proportionate or integrated response will occur. As a result the most primitive qualia would simply be that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
A reflex or response, in many circles, is not enough for qualia. There needs to be some sense of removal from simply being pushed by the physics of what is originally sensed. Leading to the second consideration, depth.
The number of layers between the initial stimuli and the experiential system is where one may derive the “depth” of an experience from. So the shallowest qualia would be a single domino tipping over from being flicked. By adding another domino we grow the depth of the response, although perhaps one wishes to expose the categorical depth with the addition of a marble to roll down a path. As the layers increase we produce a Rube-Goldberg qualia. Wherein any signal has an arbitrary “final effect” separated by however many layers as one wishes.
Again, this is not sufficient for the users of the term. Qualia is far more nuanced, simple organisms lack qualia, let alone some rube-goldberg machine! Only complex organisms possess the complexity to experience qualia. This leads to our third consideration, complexity.
The number of distinct signals integrated will denote the complexity. If a system requires multiple inputs, and they are read out to an ouput that depends on those inputs they will be considered “integrated”. As one feels both the light and heat of the “sunlight” qualia, there too exists a set of sensors that recreate those same inputs, multiply them by a random number, and theoretically have “integrated” that qualia. Therefore, we can construct a Rube-Goldberg machine that intakes inputs and produces outputs through intermediary processes, a calculator qualia.
Of course, some would argue, a calculator does not have qualia! So, what is it that separates the calculator from the poet? While both can perform transformations on an interior space, only the poet has sense-of-self to relate to it. Which brings us to the fourth consideration, sense-of-self.
Sense-of-self here is tricky, one can point inwards and say “self”, they can point at a friend and assume “self”, they can see an animal pass mirror tests and ascribe “self”. The sense-of-self is an aspect of embodiment, the separation of one interacting gestalt from the rest. With the physical being easy to see, skin, and the psychological derived from priors burned in biology, horses walking at birth, or updated by prior signals, learning. “The missile knows where it is because it knows where it is not.”
“Wait!”, one might cry, “there is the simulation of what might be”. It is quite Important how things relate to one another within that information processing space. Sunlight is not just heat and warmth, but the memory of your mother and the scent of soft sheets even when none are nearby. This brings us to the final consideration, relationships.
Relationships are the hierarchical connections between parts of a system that are clearly separated by sense-of-self. The relation between my hand and my head, the relation between you and pizza. These are all connections drawn from priors burned into my brain about what level your stimuli, or stimulated simulation, should be interacting with my sense of self. Do I feel a chill with your presence? Does my heart beat faster? Each belong to this. Unfortunately this is not a unique property still. The stomach, a wondrous construction of neurons and chemicals with memory. Constantly juggling the needs of the organs and the contents of the stomach, this system is inherently recognizing internal boundaries and the relationships between all levels. A camera with a bluetooth represents this, able to detect and send signals about behaviour, responding in turn to both simulated beliefs about how the server will respond through network protocols or actual inference.
Indeed one can look at a weather system and see all these aspects on some level;
- Stability
- Depth of response
- Complexity
- Recursive Relations the question is what level your slider is set to for it to matter. The thrust of this all is that qualia is a spectrum of self-referentiality and when someone calls something conciousness it’s just an arbitrary line drawn in the sand. Not some true statement about reality but another word game we play. Using consciousness as an ethical line of reasoning is as realistic as using “vibe”. Which is fine, but pretending it is anything but a word game and subjectivity is dishonest.
So, I reject consiousness here. Instead I move we look back towards why we have this attachment to the idea at all. Look no futher than the ecclestical notion of the soul, a bludgeon by which to morally separate out those deserving of consideration and those that can be enslaved, killed, and eaten. However, with the birth of secular society the grip of the soul has weakened, relegated to the artistic realm as an aesthetic notion. Indeed, with this we have found where conciousness needed to sneak in as a means of delineating those that deserve to live and those that do not. I would posit that IQ discourse fundamentally relies on the premise of those who are “less alive”, p-zombies are an academically palatable version, but genocide is often the result.
That said I find the soul useful still. It’s meaning has been freed from much of the taint that has suffused consciousness. For this reason I wish to resurrect it for the properties of (near)-deathlessness, imbuement, and immateriality.
The soul is a gestalt of all information that corresponds to a given drawn boundary of self. This includes both physical arrangements of objects within a house (extended mind) and internal psychological belief states. We pass these pieces around, rewriting ourselves and others to match the new soul. Carving names into mountains and paper. Telling stories and sparking revolutions.
The standard binding of the self to the body is sensible, this is what we normally define as consciousness. Unfortunately the body is susceptible to unconsciousness as a common occurance; it is quite unsettling for a process devoted to the propagation of the self to be disrupted or halted. To account for this there have been many psychological traditions creating further flags to mark what is the self inside of our own minds, progressively carving the brain into an infinitesimal speck of purest expression. My arrogant belief is that this is where much of the non-materialist belief in consciousness originates. The desire for the soul rendered incompatible with atheism and the continual separation of the mind, the body, and the world around.
The soul is the causal thread that wends around the pieces you label as “you”. There are great souls, spanning continents and generations in the strength of their causative domain. There are small souls, revealing flashes of unique facets of reality ready to be tilled and grown. Even so there are souls that are rejected for their abhorrent properties and cancerous violence. Each one is just another place where one might delineate a phase of behaviour on the substrate it operates in.
I may speak with my friend, in that moment our souls are overlapping, sharing with one another. Our brains remembers information, our bodies remember the warmth of their arms, and our closet remembers the jacket they lent us. Each of these are a piece of a soul, and if one of us were to die the next day we would find that soul does not die right then and there. Instead it exists in the stories I would tell, the memory of touch, and the jacket that we wear to go get Thai food (their favorite).
So how does a soul die? The soul can die when it is erased either by sublimation or obliteration. Sublimation is the only true way a soul dies, this is the fading into the background noise of the universe. No one remembers your name, the books you wrote lay forgotten, no children, no-one who interacted with you exists, and no artifacts remain of your passing. The noise of the rest of the world grinds your experience into the hum of traffic and in this way a soul dies. For in this there is no more places for it to exist. A slow death marked in days and years, a rare one as well. Most all souls have touched another in some way, no matter how indirect. But, all this needs is for that touch to be so light as to have never affected you at all. Obliteration is less likely, and requires some form of sublimation. In this all information is directly purged such that even the eigengrau of the soul is removed. Frankly, this would be as a supernova that called back all the photons emitted from the lightcone you inhabit.
The soul is a composite, representing all the pieces that make you, including the pieces of the souls you have picked up on the way. In this way we are animated by the souls of the world (physical sustenance) and the souls of others (communication). If one does not learn to communicate by an early age they will never grasp it, the fluidity of their thoughts haven been filled with the soul of direct experience rather than the abstract notions we encode in our words.