Table of Contents

Introduction

What is a soul?

What about uploading?

Why this topic?

A biological aside: vitalism (separate document)

to Part 2, Where do new souls come from? Is the soul separate from the body? The mind-body question.

to Part 3, What about the brain and computers? Computer consciousness? Conclusion

Introduction

The first, and most important question, when dealing with a difficult or controversial subject, is "What is it?" or "What are you talking about?" I'm talking about soul uploading--storing the essence of yourself in a computer. (There have been other proposed means of storing yourself.)

Now for some more detailed definitions and discussions of terms--what is it?

Table of contents

What is a soul?

So, what is a soul?

An excellent article, "The Salvation of Your Souls: But What is a Soul?" by Ben M. Carter, appeared in the December, 2000, issue of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (52:242-254), the organ of the American Scientific Affiliation. After a linguistic, philosophical, and historical examination, Carter concludes that there is not a clear picture of the meaning of soul in Scripture. He concludes: "It is not our concept of the soul that saves us, it is our faith in the incarnate and risen Lord. This is not to say that we cannot teach some things about the soul: that it is not divine, that it is created, that it needs to be saved, and so forth. But it is to say that we should be less than dogmatic about many of its particulars." (p. 251) Other authors agree that there is not a clear Scriptural picture of what a soul is. John Wilson, in Christianity Today Online, complains that ". . . everyone but the church is talking about the soul," and that theology hasn't given clear answers as to what a soul is.

Dallas Willard has written an excellent response to a query about the relationship between soul and brain. Here is part of what he says:

The soul is one nonphysical dimension of the person. A human person is a nonphysical (spiritual) entity that has an essential involvement with a particular physical body. The brain, then—a piece of meat that is of more than usual interest—is one part of the embodied dimension of the human person. It too is integrated by the soul into one life, along with all of the dimensions of the person (at least when all is well).

The soul is not some separable part of us that eventually gets to go to heaven while everything else about us is left out.

Harper's Bible Dictionary (New York: Harper & Row, 1973, Madeleine S. Miller and J. Lane Miller, editors) says this: 

"Soul" is used in so many senses in Scripture that it should be rendered by even more Eng. words than are used in the various translations. Sometimes nepesh is used in connection with animals, e. g., Gen. 2:19. Both nepesh and psyche are used also in the sense of persons, or men (Gen 2:7; I Chron. 5:21; Acts 2:41). It is apparent that N. T. concern for the saving of "souls" (often "life" in the R. S. V., e.g., Matt. 16:26) is something different from what many O. T. passages suggest by "soul." Yet even in many O. T. passages the word translated "soul" usually means something living, something which could be "cut off" from the Congregation Israel (Num 15:30)--something which seeks God with all its might (Deut. 10:12); which is humbled by fasting (Ps. 35:13); and which is healed of sin (41:4) or cast down in despair (42:5). The soul was recognized as having a faculty for friendship (I Sam. 18:1).

The Jews after their return from Exile definitely believed that the soul was man's immortal part. Jesus taught that human forces are unable to kill the soul (Matt 10:28), and that it is wiser to retain the soul's integrity than to gain the whole material world (Matt. 16:26).

The entry on "Soul" in Baker's Evangelical Dictionary of Theology is in basic agreement. It points out that the KJV uses no less than 42 English words to translate one Old Testament Hebrew word. It also says that there are many meanings attached to the Greek word used in the New Testament.

In Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998) edited by Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy and H. Newton Malony, Murphy makes the following statement:

It would be reasonable to begin . . . with an account of scriptural teaching on the nature of the person. However, this is one of the most vexing issues in the discussion, in part because our current questions were not the questions of the writers of Scripture, but also because of a long history of projecting onto the texts interpretations and even translations that reflect later writers' concerns and assumptions. (p. 4) 

In other words, Scripture isn't crystal clear on the matter of the meaning of soul, in part because we can't be sure of what Scripture means on this topic, in part because it is such a complex topic, and, in part, because we often read our own ideas into Scripture.

Murphy goes further in Religion and Science: God, Evolution and the Soul, published lectures by Murphy, edited by Carl S. Helrich (Kitchener, Ont: Pandora Press, 2002). She claims that the early church taught the resurrection of the body (p. 13), and that "if we recognize that the concept of the soul was originally introduced into Western thought as an explanation for capacities that appeared not to be explainable in biological terms, then we can certainly say that for scientific purposes the hypothesis has been shown to be unnecessary." (p. 20) She calls her view physicalism (warning--there may  be lots of pop-ups from this link), by which, as I understand it, is meant a belief that the soul and the body are inseparable, and that we are basically physical beings. (She does not deny our immortality, but says that scripture teaches that our bodies will be resurrected.) Ian Barbour, in When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2000--see parts of Chapter 5) has come to the same conclusions, apparently independently. As to the doctrine of the soul, a belief in an entity separate from the body seems to have been a part of pre-Christian Greek philosophy, hence is not necessarily a belief that Christians must embrace. Pythagoras, some 500 years before Christ, apparently believed that the soul could be separated from the body, and in the transmigration of souls from one body to another, not necessarily human body. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Here's a web page, written by nonreductive physicalist)

Joseph A. Bracken, S. J., takes issue with Murphy's position in "Reconsidering Fundamental Issues: Emergent Monism and the Classical Doctrine of the Soul" (Zygon 39:161-174, 2004) As he puts it, ". . . I am uneasy that they appeal simply to the power of God to resurrect the human person somehow in altered form after death. . . . There is no philosophical common ground here with the nonbeliever in arguing for the plausibility of life after death." (p. 162) His view, emergent monism, holds that there is, indeed, some spirit found in material creation, even non-living material creation, and that spirit and matter are somehow dependent on each other. He draws heavily on the philosophy of Whitehead. Bracken writes, ". . . we can understand the emergence of the rational soul in human beings out of the developing infrastructure of the brain and central nervous system. It is not inserted into the organism by direct divine intervention but is, so to speak, a further development of the organism's own process of self-development . . ." (p. 169) This may provide philosophical common ground with some nonbelievers. Bracken's belief suggests that non-human organisms, perhaps even computers, also have souls. Bracken's paper does not deal with these possibilities, but I questioned him on them, and he graciously replied, stating that he does, indeed, believe that "there is a 'soul' or central subsociety of Whiteheadian actual occasions in every animal organism facilitating its ontological oneness and continuity of existence and activity from moment to moment." (Bracken, personal communication, March 27, 2004) He says that, to him, the issue of souls in inanimate objects is more complex. Although Bracken may be communicating with Whiteheadian philosophers, I am not sure how well his doctrine of emergent monism communicates with others. I do no know what he meant by "animal organism," but would be amazed if, say, amoebas or hydras had souls. Dogs and squids, maybe. Scripture seems not to explicitly exclude such a possibility, but it seems to teach that there is something special about the consciousness of humans.

Psalm 6:2-3 says "Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am faint; O Lord, heal me, for my bones are in agony. My soul is in anguish. How long, O Lord, how long?" The writer of a note to this passage, in the NIV Study Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1985) seems to agree with Murphy's view:

soul. Not a spiritual aspect in distinction from the physical, nor the psalmist's "inner" being in distinction from his "outer" being, but his very self as a living, conscious, personal being. Its use in conjunction with "bones" . . . did not for the Hebrew writer involve reference to two distinct entities but constituted for him two ways of referring to himself, as is the case also in the combination "soul" and "body" (31:9; 63:1). (p. 791)

Not everyone agrees with Murphy. J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae, in their Body and Soul: Human Nature & the Crisis in Ethics, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002) argue for a dualistic view--to them the soul is not just a function of the body. They call this a Thomist view:

. . . the Thomist will insist on a . . . deep, intimate relationship between soul and body . . .. For the Thomist there is a modal distinction between soul and body: the soul could exist without the body but not vice versa. Thus our version of Thomistic substance dualism of two separable substances. There is only one substance, thogh we do not identify it with the body-soul composite. In our view, the one substance is the soul, and the body is an ensouled biological and physical structure that depends on the soul for its existence. (p. 201)

One reason why they hold this view is that they believe that scripture teaches that scripture describes God as a personal being without a body, and that we are, in some measure, created in God's image. (Genesis 1:26)

John Polkinghorne, physicist and theologian, says: "I accept that humans are psychosomatic unities and I do not anticipate that a separable spiritual component (soul or entelechy) is part of our make-up. Hence my approach to the perplexity of mind and matter will be to seek to embrace a dual-aspect monism." John C. Polkinghorne, "The Laws of Nature and the Laws of Physics," pp. 429-440 in Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, 2nd edition, ed. by Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy and C. J. Isham. (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory, 1996) Quote is from pp. 429-30.

Palmyre M. F. Oomen, writing in the June, 2003, issue of Zygon, says that:

The notion of the soul has a variegated tradition of meanings, which, roughly speaking, follow two main avenues. One views the soul as something immaterial, with an independent existence apart from the body--an idea supported by Plato, Descartes, and many others.
The second sees the soul not as an immaterial substance separate from the body but as something that reflects the deepest core of living entities as living beings. ("On Brain, Soul, Self, and Freedom: an Essay in Bridging Neuroscience and Faith," 38:377-392. Quote is from p. 380.)

There may, indeed, be confusion or disagreement about what a soul is, or whether a soul is different than the emotions, the will, the personality or the mind. However, in spite of this confusion, one fact is clear: Scripture teaches that there is something about humans that has an eternal destiny, something that can be lost, in fact is by nature lost, but something that can be saved. (Matthew 16:26, John 3:16, Romans 6:20-23; 8:6-11) James W. Sire  in Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994) agrees that it is impossible to know what happens at death with certainty. However:

 . . . if--as many religions teach--my life on earth has something to do with my happiness (or lack thereof) beyond death, than I cannot escape the issue. I may not know as I wish I could know. But whatever I believe or think I know is either the case or not. My agnosticism--my refusal to wrestle with my doubt until it is resolved--may cost me dearly in the future. (pp. 21-22)

Owen Flanagan has written a book on The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them. New York: Basic Books, 2002. He writes that

"The problem of the soul" is a shorthand way of referring to a cluster of philosophical concepts that are central components of the dominant humanistic image. These concepts include, for starters, a nonphysical mind, free will, and a permanent, abiding, and immutable self or soul. (p. xi)

Although Flanagan goes on to demonstrate beyond doubt that he does not believe any of these concepts, at least not in the sense that most people have claimed to believe in them throughout Western history, he clearly does understand these concepts.

One of the few books I have found on the important subject of what a soul is is Keith Ward's In Defence of the Soul. (Oxford, UK: OneWorld, 1998.) Ward argues strongly that there is such a thing as a soul, that the development of a soul depends on something physical, but that a soul is transcendent -- it can survive without the material necessary to produce one in the first place:

The most important characteristic of a soul is its capacity for transcendence. It has the capacity to 'exist', to stand outside the physical processes that generate it, and of which it is part. We might see the soul, the subject of awareness, deliberation and intention, as one part of a vast web of interacting processes, at various degrees of complexity, coming to conscious perception of the actions of other forces upon it, and realizing its own capacities in accordance with more or less clearly formulated principles. It is distinguished not by bering quite different in kind from its material environment, but by reflecting and acting in that environment in a more conscious, goal-oriented way. In other words, the soul is not an alien intrusion into a mechanistic world. It is the culmination and realization of the principles that dimly inform what we call 'matter' at every stage of its existence. Yet, in that culmination, it is able to transcend the material. The material is limited by a particular location in space and time. It is contained by that location. But the soul by nature 'transcends', it is orientated away from itself, to what is beyond itself. (pp. 142-3)

Ward does not rule out the possibility of a computer having a soul. He doesn't seem to think that computers of today have such.

I have consulted other sources, including Merriam-Webster Online and HyperDictionary, and thought about the matter. For the purposes of this document, a soul is the essence of an individual's life, the part of us that makes our most important choices, and our immortal part. This definition is not meant to imply that the soul is separate from the body, or that it is not.

Ric Machuga, in In Defense of the Soul (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2002) argues that the classical position of Christians, Jews and Moslems, and of Aristotle before them, is that "Our nature is an essential unity of both the material and the immaterial." (p. 16) 

Sue Short, in her "The Measure of a Man?: Asimov's Bicentennial Man, Star Trek's Data, and Being Human" (Extrapolation 44:209-223, Summer 2003) comments on the ethics of dealing with robots, and on what makes one a human. (For any who may not know, Data was an android--a robot created to mimic humans as closely as possible--and a major character on the "Star Trek: the Next Generation" series.) Although not directly pertinent to the present paper, the article certainly is relevant. Short is writing a book about "Star Trek," and I await it with interest.

Table of contents

What about uploading?

For an introduction, see the Wikipedia article on Mind transfer. There are also articles at BrainyEncyclopedia article on Mind Transfer, and at Ask.com article on Mind Uploading

Some thinkers see uploading a soul, or consciousness, is possible, and should, and will, happen. Here's Paul Davies, an important science writer, writing in Nature, perhaps the most important scientific journal in the world:

My favourite fantasy . . . is the idea of uploading the contents of my brain on to a supercomputer, to serve both as a back-up in case something horrible happens to the original and as a gateway to a universe of simulated reality, offering potentially limitless fun. Although technically challenging, to say the least, it is hard to see any obstacles of principle to this procedure, and it raises the unsettling question of how I can be sure that the reality I experience is the 'real' reality or just a simulation. Or indeed, whether there is any meaningful distinction between them. - Paul Davies, "Smart underwear for time travels," review of How to Clone the Perfect Blonde: Using Science to Make Your Wildest Dreams Come True, Nature 432:675, December 9, 2004

Uploading means transferring information from one medium, or location, to another. Therefore, my topic is approximately "Transferring 'the immaterial essence of an individual's life, the individual's total self, and immortal part' of an individual to some digital format." The FTP program I used to place this file on the Web has an upload icon. When I use it, a file is placed into storage on the Web, from where it can be accessed from anywhere in the world, without fundamental change. There are people who are thinking seriously about placing their souls into some sort of accessible storage, and, you may be sure, are hoping to accomplish that without fundamental change to their immaterial essence. If our soul is, indeed, a program, soul uploading may be possible.

Alan Jacobs writes about the dream of a computer-based existence with little or no normal physical life:
Interestingly, fictional dreams of "virtual reality"—starting, perhaps, with Vernor Vinge's 1981 story "True Names" and proceeding through William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992)—imagine realms of purely mental experience: one lives in a digitally generated world, possessing an equally digital "body." One's real, material corpus lies motionless at some insignificant point in "meatspace" while one's mind explores the Metaverse (Stephenson) or the Other Plane (Vinge).

Such fantasies enact, as many commentators have noted, a classically Gnostic longing for liberation from the body. And even for those of us who have no interest in experiential games of that particular kind, if we feel that our most important work is done at our computers, then our bodies' needs—food, sleep, exercise, urination, defecation—can seem irritatingly distracting or even embarrassing. As though bodily functions were signs of weakness; as though thought alone dignifies us.
"Computer Control, part 3: The Virtues of Resistance," Books and Culture, September/October 2002.

Gibson's Neuromancer, referred to in the paragraphs above, was a significant work of science fiction. It won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, as well as the Philip K. Dick award. There is a "character" in the book who is dead--flatlined--and preserved in computer-stored form. Another significant work of science fiction is David Brin's Kiln People, which supposes that consciousness can be uploaded into a temporary "ditto," a clay "human" that can go out and do tasks at the same time that the original person is dong something else, then, if the original desires it, can download her experiences back into the original.

Christopher Locke, writing in the June, 2002, issue of Wired, says that "the prototypical upload is the Moravec Transfer, proposed by Dr. Hans Moravec in the book Mind Children." (p. 95) (See page by Moravec)

A good introduction to this very hypothetical procedure was "An Introduction to Mind Uploading and its Concepts," by Randal Koene. Koene has replaced that document with a web site named Whole Brain Emulation. As of April 2, 2003, this site is preliminary, at best.

Ray Kurzweil has described a possible process for uploading consciousness, involving duplicating the connections in a brain. However, he expresses doubts as to whether, if this procedure succeeds, it actually would transfer personality.

Entering uploading soul in Google generated over 4,700 responses in November 2000. In July, 2002, the number was over 9,000, in April, 2003, over 13,000, and in March, 2006, over 1,400,000, which indicates increasing interest, greater efficiency by Google, or both. Many of these web pages were produced by people who take the prospect of uploading a soul absolutely seriously. One example is Joe Strout's Mind Uploading home page. Another example is Eric Charles Steinhart's page, leading to several short articles by him on the topic.

Why would anyone want to do this with a soul, assuming it were possible? The most obvious answer is that this is one of our many misguided attempts to achieve immortality. Desiring immortality has overtones of selfishness, and of putting ourselves in the place of God. As Timothy C. Morgan put it:

A handful of leading postmodernists, New Agers, cyber-utopians, and others aspire to . . . goals that seem straight out of a Star Trek episode:

• •Developing computer systems to accept an upload of a dying individual's intelligence and personality.
• •Creating a worldwide-linked computer system that would operate as a global mind.
• •Reproducing computer-generated virtual realities that would operate with the same legitimacy as everyday reality.

If you set aside the scientific improbability of achieving such goals, these aspirations reveal a deeply spiritual agenda. When technology functions as a religion, as savior and liberator, we begin to project divine attributes onto it. Timothy C. Morgan, "A Cyber-Pilgrim's Progress" Books & Culture: A Christian Review, 4, Jan/Feb 1998, pp. 24-25.

(Donna Haraway claims that we are already cyborgs, human-machine hybrids, a development which she welcomes, if I understand her aright.)

This "deeply spiritual" agenda is parallel to that of the builders of the Tower of Babel. (Genesis 11:1-9) These folk wanted to make a name for themselves, to prove their own importance. God was not pleased. Another current technique with implications similar to uploading is cloning. There are, it seems, legitimate scientific and even economic reasons to copy an animal's DNA into new animals. I'm not sure that there are any such reasons for copying a human's DNA into a new human, should that be possible. One illegitimate reason is to allow egotistical people to perpetuate themselves personally, again, to make a perpetual name for themselves.

Supposing it were possible to upload the soul? What would happen to the soul? If it were possible to copy, say, Michael Jordan's soul to a computer, presumably this wouldn't destroy Jordan's own personality, soul, memories, or self-awareness. So there would then be two Michael Jordans, one in a computer, one in an aging body. I don't see how that would help the soul/personality/mind in the aging body--it would still be in a body that would grow old and die, and, for a while, at least, be aware of the process. Even if there were another soul in a computer, even if that soul in a computer could be implanted into an android, a robot, or a human body (where would this come from?), or if the computer itself could achieve consciousness, the first Michael Jordan would not become personally immortal. He would merely look on as another entity began living some sort of separate existence or other. So, I argue, even if uploading your soul were achieved, you wouldn't experience it. Some new soul would.

Leaving aside the fate of the original soul, and leaving aside the eternal fate of anybody, a newly created soul that was a copy of another one would start (?) life with some serious expectations. He/she/it would be expected to interact with the family and friends of the original, and would be expected to carry out some of the unfulfilled dreams of the original, and might not want to do so. Would you want to be the second coming of Michael Jordan, or Elvis, even in a computer?

Perhaps some consideration of less cosmic concerns is in order. Suppose your soul could be uploaded to a computer. Where would it be stored? With current computers, the answer would be in RAM, or in some sort of long-term storage, most likely the hard disk, or in both. If it were only in RAM, then what would happen when the computer was turned off? If it were only on disk, who, or what, would issue the commands needed to place the consciousness into RAM? Would your soul be called up only occasionally, as some now call up, say, Access occasionally? What would happen if there were two copies of the soul called up in the same computer?

Suppose you could be stored somehow, and that there was a mechanism for activating you. How would you interface with the hardware? For example, how would you manipulate the computer's monitor? Current application programs rely on drivers built in to the operating system. No such drivers exist for interfacing a soul with the monitor, or the printer, or the speakers. How would they be developed? Would you want to be sitting in RAM, waiting for someone to figure out how to interface you?

So, even if soul uploading turns out to be possible, and leaving aside the "playing God" implications, I don't see the point. Leave a legacy--do some lasting good work, or have children, or teach, or write your autobiography, or have lots of pictures taken, instead.

Before closing this section, I must point out that there is one case of downloading in Scripture, and two in current life. Jesus, the Son of God, became a human being. (Philippians 2:5-11) God the Holy Spirit deigns to live in us, somehow coexisting in our bodies with our own souls. Evil spirits can also coexist in bodies with souls.

Table of contents

Why this topic?

The main reason I chose this topic is that I ran into some Web pages on it, and thought I'd like to pursue the matter. A chapel talk seemed to be a good excuse and motivation for such a pursuit.

There is another reason why this topic, confused as it is, is important. As several thinkers, among them Pamela McCorduck (Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1979. p. 328.) have said, the advent of computers, and their increasing capability, are causing us to re-think what it means to be human, just as previous changes, like the realization that the earth is not the center of the solar system or the universe, have done.

There are people who believe that it is possible to capture the immaterial essence of an individual's life, the individual's total self, and immortal part to some format. Such ideas are rather widespread in many of the manifestations of popular culture.

A great deal of science fiction assumes or proposes such ideas as:

intelligent computers (For example, HAL, in Arthur C. Clarke/Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

intelligent robots (machines that do tasks that have been done by humans) or androids (machines or machine/living tissue hybrids which resemble humans closely, even replacing humans in some roles) or cyborgs (humans which are partly machines) which will interact with humans in various ways. (See Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics," and the later versions of Star Trek.)

that the goal of humanity is or should be to become a pure mind, an intelligence without a body (for example, much of Clarke's writing. For you youngsters, Clarke has arguably been the most influential s-f author.)

that given enough speed and capacity, computer networks will develop super-intelligent beings living in them, sort of like cockroaches live in the cracks in kitchens (the Dan Simmons Hyperion books, Orson Scott Card's Ender books)

Vernor Vinge, who is both a scientist and an important science fiction author, has proposed that there will be computers that are more intelligent than humans by A. D. 2020. He was writing as a scientist, in 1993.

to Part 2, Where do new souls come from? Is the soul separate from the body? The mind-body question.

to Part 3, What about the brain and computers? Computer consciousness? Conclusion

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. The purpose of this is NOT to prevent use by others, but to prevent other users from restricting free use. I claim no ownership of materials in the above material which are quotations from other sources.