One of the concepts I find myself poring over the most is the role of the soul. With our ever increasing scientific knowledge, many are tempted to yield the whole of the human being to empirical science and purely biological process. One particular area I’m interested in is memory. I think many nowadays assume, given the incredible leaps in our biological understanding, particularly neuroscience, that memory is stored in the brain. This seems not to be the case. Now, this particular researcher approaches the topic from a Jungian, “collective unconscious” philosophy, but the implications could very easily, I think, be neatly transferred to a theistic one. Read:
Could these “morphogenic fields,” should his theory be correct, be a link between the spiritual and material realms? Discuss!
PS
Excellent OP. You must realize that you’ve opened a large and wide ranging topic which would be difficult to deal with if confined to the purely biological realm. By inviting insights as to how some neurological concepts might apply to the spiritual world, you are inviting those who know nothing about either to add what passes in them for thought.
Perhaps you can appreciate the notion that the subject you’ve broached cannot be dealt with by either conventional science or conventional religious dogma. If so you may find alternative ideas interesting. Otherwise, skip the rest of this post.
Back in 1964 an electrical engineer, A.C. Scott, built a simple brain model from a linear grid of 16 transistor circuits, each designed to mimic the then-known behavior of neurons. This experiment demonstrated that digital stimulation of neurons produced a standing-wave pattern in the phase space surrounding the circuits.
Electromagnetic circuits commonly produce such patterns, but they are treated as electronic “noise” and generally avoided. The back panel of your computer will have a small print statement indicating that it meets FCC standards for noise emission. But Scott showed that the geometric pattern produced by specific stimulations of his “neuristor circuits” was a symmetrical function that carried stable information.
Of course his work was ignored by neurological researchers because they were not intelligent enough to comprehend it.
More recently (about a decade ago) a team of neurological researchers performed a mid-surgery experiment on a human brain (with permission, of course) which demonstrated that waveform information generated in one section of the brain was reproduced in another section of the brain
without the benefit of intermediate neural connections! Of course this information was also ignored. (My ladyfriend’s brother, Charles Gray, was one of the researchers, else I’d not know about this. I lost track of the title, date, and journal name where their paper was published, but it could be found by someone who thought it relevant by simply getting a list of Charlie’s papers.)
This says to me that the notion of a mysterious
morphogenic field is just simpleminded hogwash, like the silly Higgs field of particle physics, and phlogiston from back in the post-Newton years of confused thermodynamics research.
A simple e/m (electromagnetic) field is all that is necessary to incorporate the notion of holographic memory as well as the possibility of an empirically verifiable connection to “soul.”
Somewhat trickier is the matter of the soul/brain interface. Under the terms of current religious beliefs, which confine the “soul” to a mystical non-physical spirit realm, it is impossible to discuss such a thing. Yet, anyone with a 3-digit I.Q. ought to be able to recognize that since, by definition, anything that interacts with matter or any other component of the physical universe must also be “physical” in nature (not necessarily material), if there is a soul and if it interacts somehow with the physical human brain-body system, the soul
must itself be physical.
Anyone who recognizes the obvious sense of that statement is then prepared to think about and research the nature of the soul-brain interface, antennas, tuners, modulators, attenuators and all the stuff a good telemetry engineer would know about, Of course this first requires a sensible definition of the “soul,” because the current understanding of it is too inadequate to support anything beyond childhood-level beliefs.
Furtherance of this thread requires a physics-compatible definition of soul. I’ve tried these years ago on CAF, but all my threads were sandbagged by dogmatists. No point in trying that again, because the dogmatists have not gone away. The main point of this reply is to let you know that your thinking is on the right track (IMO of course) and encourage you to pursue it as best you can. This will not be easy. Both religious and scientific establishments are against it. And thanks for the reference. I will definitely study Sheldrake— which will take some work (the Epoch article’s link to his paper did not work.) His ideas are wrong, but on the right track, and he may prove to be a helpful collaborator. Then there’s my book, which sits in the translation limbo between my HTML computer files and the printer’s PDF queue.
