| SOUL SEARCH (what is this?) A Scientist Explores the Afterlife David Darling 
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Neither a man nor a nation can live without a higher idea, and there is only one such idea on earth, that of an immortal human soul; all the other higher ideas by which men live follow from that.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
By 3000 BC, the whole issue of life after death and the preservation of the soul had become of paramount concern for early pre-Western civilizations. In fact, with the emphasis now shifted to the individual and to the inescapable fact of personal death, these questions turned into an obsession. How else can we explain the astounding scale and extravagance of the Great Pyramid of Cheops? Built in 2720 B.C. from more than 2 million quarried limestone blocks with an average weight of two and a half tons, it soared 480 feet from the desert sands – a mighty challenge both to time and to death itself.
Central to the Egyptians' cult of the afterlife was the part played by mummification. Yet this process was so costly that it was not until the second millennium B.C. that the practice began to spread beyond the royal household. Since the pharoah was the intermediary between the gods and the earth in a society where survival depended on organized agriculture, the cult was the key not only to social order but also to fertility. Therefore when the Egyptians connected their pharoah's immortality with the cult of the god of vegetation, Osiris, they were symbolizing death and resurrection in the annual cycle of the very food they ate.
During the second millennium, the Osirian cult gained strength, and people's views on the afterlife tended to change. While mummification implied physical immortality for the body in this world, Osiris came to be thought of as the ruler of the dead in another realm. So, increasingly, the soul was thought of as having a separate existence from the body.
According to Egyptian theology a person had not just one but two or more souls, different in nature from each other. Principally, there was the ka, or "guardian spirit," shown in tomb paintings as hovering over the mummy in the guise of a small bird with a human face. And there was the ba, or "breath," which gave animation to the body. Both the ka and the ba were thought to leave the body at death – but only temporarily. In the strange ceremony known as the Opening of the Mouth, the mouth and eyes of the corpse were pried open by means of a special instrument held by a priest. This supposedly allowed the breath soul back into the mummy and commemorated the myth that Osiris, after the god Seth had killed and dismembered him, was brought back to life in the same way by his son Horus. With the ba restored to its rightful owner, it was left only for the ka to fly back and reunite with its companion. This was thought to take place in a second, parallel ceremony in the next world. Recognition of the body by the ka being all-important, it was essential for the dead person's appearance to be faithfully preserved by embalming.
Of course, we foster all kinds of romantic myths about what the mortician-priests of Egypt did in the cool depths of pharaonic tombs. So perhaps the truth is bound to seem a little prosaic. Magical incantations aside, the process of mummification was really quite straightforward – in fact, in chemical terms, relatively crude. The Egyptians basically salted their dead with natron, a natural deposit found in the Nile Valley consisting chiefly of sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), and varying amounts of other substances, including sodium sulphate and sodium chloride (table salt). This mixture dehydrated the corpse and so inhibited the enzymatic activity that normally causes decay.
At the same time, most of the internal organs were removed, starting with the brain, which was drawn out piecemeal through the nostrils with an iron hook and then discarded. Viscera such as the lungs, liver, and intestines were taken out whole and stored separately in sealed canopic jars, each bearing the likeness of a particular patron god. The stomach was either removed in the same way or else flushed out with wine and filled with aromatics, while the heart was either left untouched (since it was believed to be the seat of intelligence and consciousness) or replaced with a sacred scarab. Preliminaries seen to, there followed the careful swathing of the body with bandages soaked in resins and the sprinkling with scents.
It was a lengthy procedure – in more ways than one: a mummy unwrapped in 1940 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York yielded more than 850 square yards of linen. It was also a painstakingly elaborate ritual. The bandage of Nekhebt had to be placed on the well-oiled forehead, the bandage of Hathor on the face, and an impressive array of precious objects (143 in the case of Tutankhamen) at strategic positions between the wrappings. The nails were gilded, a crystal hung to lighten the face and special material applied to strengthen the steps of the deceased in the underworld. Finally, after seventy days of exhaustive preparation, the priests climaxed their work with the Opening of the Mouth.
Thus the pharaoh was made ready for his transformation into a divine and incorruptible image. Mummification and its attendant ceremonies helped ensure reunion between body and soul in the hereafter. But even with these precautions, the dead king was not guaranteed immortality. For this he still needed the compliance of the major deities. Once inside the spirit world, the deceased would be led by the jackal-headed god, Anubis, to the judgment scales, where his heart would be weighed against a feather symbolizing Maat, the goddess of justice and truth. If the scales balanced, Osiris would rule that the man had led a blameless life and so deserved to be made immortal. Conversely, if his heart proved too heavy, a less attractive fate lay in store: the unfortunate sinner would be fed to the permanently ravenous dog-monster Amemait, which lurked nearby.
It is just as well that the priests who labored so long to preserve their dead could never know what would eventually become of so many of their carefully prepared cadavers. The relatively few well-preserved mummies that have come down to us are exceptions; a great many were either burgled or bungled and long ago decayed to insect-swarming filth. Thousands of others were torn apart over the centuries to make quack cures for various ailments (the very word mummy comes from the Persian mumiai, for "pitch" or "asphalt," once thought to be a curative and for which the blackened resin of the wrappings was mistaken). Some of the ancient corpses were pulverized to produce "mummy brown" pigment for watercolor paint. And, most extraordinarily, huge numbers of mummies were used as fuel on the first Egyptian railways, their layers of resin-impregnated bandages apparently serving as an excellent substitute for coal.
Today, embalming remains a skilled and well-practiced art. In the United States, more than 90 percent of the newly deceased go through the process. Yet now it has come to serve a very different purpose. Whereas in ancient Egypt the dead were preserved exclusively for the sake of the dead and their well-being in the hereafter, in the modern world embalming is done nearly always for the benefit of the living. The only exception is in the case of those individuals who choose (and can pay in advance) to be put in a deep freeze for possible future resuscitation or, alternatively, to be mummified by the latest technology, which involves, in the final stages, being coated with an airtight seal of polyurethane.
For those today who believe in an afterlife, there is a tendency to link the notion of life after death with that of a particular god. But theology and conjectures about the human soul have not always gone hand in hand. In ancient Greece, where many people eventually grew tired of the all-too-human antics of Zeus and his cronies, philosophers started to argue about the nature of the soul from a purely academic and secular point of view. Their approach was to travel about, look at the world in a detached, almost arrogant sort of way, and then theorize. The word theory, in fact, comes from the Greek for "sight-seeing."
Pythagoras, in the late sixth century B.C., was the first to establish an entire school of thought based on this method of enquiry. He was struck by the way that the physical world seemed to be underpinned by relationships between pure numbers. Nature, apparently, had a mathematical infrastructure. At the same time, Pythagoras pointed out that mathematical entities are somehow subtler than their counterparts in the "real" world of the senses. A circle drawn in the sand may seem from a distance to be exactly circular but, on closer inspection, always turns out to have little bumps and dimples. A mathematical circle, on the other hand, is perfect in every way and can therefore only be pictured in the mind. From this line of thinking stemmed the theory of ideas (idea is Greek for "picture"), or Forms, which was developed by Socrates, Plato, and others.
Pythagoras was both a mathematician and an incurable mystic. Among his many discoveries, he found that harmonious notes on a vibrating string always occur at lengths that are in simple numerical ratios to the fundamental (that is, the note made by the open vibrating string). To others this may have seemed a mere curiosity, a pleasing happenstance of nature. But to Pythagoras it was the expression of a deep mystical truth. From it, he concluded that the soul was an attunement of the body. A properly balanced body will carry a harmonious soul, just as a properly tuned string will emit a harmonious sound.
Socrates (c. 470-399 B.C.) took a different line. His theory of the soul had its roots in an earlier Pythagorean doctrine that there are three ways of life. This was exemplified by the three kinds of men who attended the Pythian games at Delphi: the athletes, the spectators, and those who bought and sold. By analogy, Socrates argued that the soul has, in descending order, a rational part, an emotional part, and an acquisitive part. In the just soul these are properly ordered, each minding its own business and obeying the parts ranked above. Reason, at the top, rules emotion. Emotion, in turn, helps to inspire the actions that reason dictates.
Because the just soul is ruled by reason, Socrates linked it to the realm of Forms. A Form was held to be a perfect, unchanging counterpart of something real. Socrates taught that a "particular," for example a cup is what it is by virtue of participating in the Form, or picture, of the cup – the constant and unique prototype of cups that exists in the realm of ideas. The point is echoed in the way we use language: there are many cups of many shapes, sizes, textures, and colors, but there is only one word cup, which we use to refer to them all. Though a cup might break, the Form remains intact, as does the word.
The realm of Forms was believed to have a definite structure and hierarchy. At the top was the Form of the Good, under which all other Forms were arranged. From this, Socrates deduced that the knowledgeable soul is bound to be good; its existence will consist in contemplating the Form of the Good. Evil, therefore, springs from ignorance, which arises when the soul is ruled by the body. Since the good soul is connected to the Forms, whereas the body belongs to the world of particulars, the soul lasts but the body does not.
Unfortunately, Socrates' conjectures about the nature of the soul scarcely outlived the man himself – thanks to Plato. Having originally championed the theory of Forms, Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.) went on to demolish it completely in a dialogue called the Parmenides. The setting is a meeting between the philosophers Socrates, Parmenides, and Zeno, in Athens, in about 450 B.C. By then, Parmenides, one of the fathers of Greek philosophy, was an old man, his disciple Zeno was at the height of his powers, and Socrates was young and (conveniently for Plato) still somewhat inexperienced. In the dialogue, Parmenides points out that the Forms fail to account for what we see because there is no way of linking them with particulars. The link would have to be either another Form or another particular, and therefore would itself have to be linked, and so on forever without resolution.
Having thus logically disposed of Forms, Plato went on to develop his idea of the soul as a prime mover. In other words, the soul is what produces motion, both of itself and of other objects. Since this happens only in living things, it must be their basic principle, so that the soul comes before the body and the feelings of the soul before the material qualities of the body. Ethical qualities – those that determine conduct – therefore spring from the soul. This holds not only for positive ethical qualities but also for their opposites; evil, as much as good, has its origins in the soul.
With Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) the basis for speculation at last shifted away from pure theory to biological observation. Aristotle was not exactly a scientist in the modern sense because he never went to the trouble of testing his ideas by experiment. But he was undoubtedly a great observer and encyclopedist. From his studies of fauna and flora he, like Socrates, saw the need for three different types of soul – in his case known as the nutritive, the sensitive, and the rational. All living things require nourishment, so plants, animals, and men alike must have a nutritive soul. Animals and men have both nutritive and sensitive functions. But man alone is rational. The Aristotlean relation between body and soul is the same as that between matter and form. The soul makes a man what he is but has no existence independent of the body. It is like a hallmark stamped on a bar of metal. When the body disintegrates, so does the soul. Only the rational function is not completely lost. It goes back to where it came from – a kind of reservoir of rationality, a common sea of intellectual consciousness.
Personal gods find no special place in the philosophies of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Yet there are clear implications for morality. Socrates considered that a good life was one spent in the pursuit of the Form of the Good. For Aristotle, goodness was directly linked with the proper and consistent use of reason – always choosing the appropriate middle ground between extremes of action. The good soul is balanced, harmonious and, above all, rational.
Strange as it may seem now, the great thinkers of the Golden Age of Greece had very confused ideas about the role of the brain. Aristotle, the most influential of them all, never considered the brain to be a possible seat of the soul or of the mind. He believed it was just a cooling system, filled with phlegm – the mucus of a runny nose offering proof. Thought, intellect and the soul, he maintained, resided in the heart – a belief we still whimsically recall today with our "heartfelt" emotions and, symbolically, with a heart-shaped love sign. (The Egyptians also held this view, which is why they discarded the brain yet preserved or substituted the heart so that it could be weighed before Osiris on the judgement scales.)
It was only in the second century A.D. that the Greek-born physician Galen (c. 130-200 A.D.) pointed indisputably to the brain as the site of mental activity. Galen, who rose to fame after his successful treatment of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, would publicly dissect the nerves in the neck of a live pig. As these were severed, one by one, the pig would continue to squeal; however, when Galen cut one of the laryngeal nerves (now also known as "Galen's nerve"), the squealing abruptly stopped, to the awe of the crowd. In this gruesome manner, Galen showed beyond doubt that it was the brain, via a network of nerves, that was in charge of the rest of the body.
Although disagreeing with Aristotle on the role of the brain, Galen did accept Aristotle's theory of the tripartite soul – indeed, he embellished it. To the three basic elements, he added imagination and memory, as well as all motor and sensory functions. Later, the Roman Catholic Church appropriated Galen's ideas (along with many other off-the-shelf classical views about the universe), even going so far as to suggest specific sites in the brain where the various functions of the soul might reside. And there the matter lay. For more than a thousand years, no one cared to hazard an alternative theory, such was the all-pervasive and intimidating power of the Church in Europe.
Then came the Renaissance and, with it, the renewal of the spirit of enquiry, Giordano Bruno, an outspoken Dominican monk, was burned at the stake. Galileo was threatened with torture. But the tidal wave of new ideas was unstoppable and soon the Church was forced to abandon its long-held grip on the material cosmos.
Galileo himself staked out the future territory for science in 1623. Science, he asserted, was concerned only with "primary" qualities, in other words, those aspects of the external world that can be weighed and measured. "Secondary" qualities, such as beauty, love, meaning and value, were by implication of lesser importance and could be left in the hands of the artist and the theologian.
Frenchman René Descartes (1596-1650) expressed a similar sentiment. There were, he said, two radically different kinds of stuff in the universe. The first, consisting of physical, or extended, substance (res extensa), has length, breadth, and depth, and can therefore be measured and divided. The second, or purely mental substance (res cogitans), is both intangible and indivisible. The outside world, including the human body, belongs to the first category, while the internal world of the mind belongs to the second.
These new, clear-cut distinctions between primary and secondary qualities, matter and mind, objective and subjective, had the effect of excluding human consciousness from the scientific picture of the world. As the historian E. A. Burtt has remarked, in the eyes of post-Renaissance science, "man was hardly more than a bundle of secondary qualities" and "not a subject suitable to mathematical study."
Insofar as man was now anything at all, he was a biological machine. The only remaining point to debate was whether, connected in some way with this flesh-and-blood machine, there was an immaterial spirit or soul.
Descartes had very definite ideas about this. Having received the best education his time could offer, Descartes rejected most of the Scholastic dogma served up by his Jesuit teachers and set out to rebuild knowledge on what he considered a firmer basis. His efforts led him to become one of the recognized founders of modern philosophy.
In the synopsis of his Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641, Descartes wrote: "What I have said is sufficient to show clearly enough that the extinction of the mind does not follow from the corruption of the body, and also to give men the hope of another life after death."
In order to reach this bold conclusion, Descartes had spent many hours in seclusion – simply thinking (a habit he acquired as a child since frail health allowed him to stay in bed on many school mornings.) He thought of what he could, and could not, be positively sure about. He could not possibly doubt that he was thinking, and therefore that he was. Cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"): that simple, memorable phrase has come down to us as the philosophical equivalent of Newton's laws of motion, the seemingly secure springboard for further conjecture. Even an omnipotent deceiver could not have deluded Descartes about his own existence. But such a deceiver, he realized, if sufficiently malicious, could well have deluded him about everything else! There was nothing in the indubitable fact of his thinking to guarantee that a world existed out there or that he even had a body (a sentiment that finds a curious echo in the modern quantum mechanical view of the world). The only safe conclusion was that he was a purely mental being, and that his mind was completely distinct from his body. This being so, then his mind ought to be able to continue to exist independently after his body was dead and buried. Hence, man had a soul.
It hardly seems like a revolutionary idea. After all, Descartes's "dualism," or theory of two substances, has some obvious features in common with the Church's traditional view of the body and the soul. But Descartes broke sharply with religious orthodoxy in at least one important respect – his belief that logic could unlock the secrets of the soul.
Philosophers of all persuasions now joined in the debate, unfettered (if not entirely uninfluenced) by the teachings of the Church. Do we, as Descartes maintained, have a soul that is distinct and separate from the brain? If so, then corporeal death may not be the end but simply a phase transition, a metamorphic event in which we break free of materiality as a prelude to moving on. Or, are the soul and the mind truly ephemeral – artifacts of the living brain, doomed to die when the brain dies?
One of the dualist's main problems is to come up with a mechanism – any mechanism – by which the soul and the brain can interact. This is like Plato's dilemma in trying to link Forms with particulars. It is the actual coupling that is the tricky aspect. If the soul is immaterial and the brain is made of ordinary matter, then how can the two possibly establish contact and influence each other?
Descartes had an ingenious answer to this. He accepted the earlier discovery by William Harvey, physician to Elizabeth the First, about the circulation of the blood but rejected Harvey's idea that the heart was a pump. Instead he went along with Aristotle's belief that the heart was like a hearth where the blood was heated. This heating produced a vapor (the so-called "animal spirits") that dilated the brain and put it in a state ready to receive impressions from the senses and the soul. For his organ of interaction – the physical seat of the soul – Descartes chose the pineal gland. This tiny structure, he concluded, was ideally placed (at the base of the skull) to be able to regulate the flow of vapor to and from the brain.
Descartes may have been wrong about the pineal gand, but he opened the floodgates to rational debate on the subject of the soul. The English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) pondered long and hard over the dualism issue and was not convinced by Descartes's explanation of how the soul and the brain communicate. Perhaps, he argued, mind is material and God endows matter, in man's case, with the power to think and know.
Locke remained a dualist – just. But not so his compatriot Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Hobbes was an out-and-out determinist, a man who had been powerfully influenced in his youth by the new "mechanical philosophy" of Galileo. All things to Hobbes could be explained as if they were machines. To him, the soul was no more than the thinking body. It is a sentiment that has been echoed many times since, most memorably in 1949 by the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who derided Descartes's notion of the mind as a "ghost in the machine."
Has that ghost finally been exorcised by scientific reductionism? Among the ranks of biologists and philosophers today, there is no doubt that materialists hold sway. The brain is under the microscope as never before, and the hope of many researchers seems to be that all of its functions – all that our minds are capable of – will someday be understandable in purely physical terms.
And yet, the voice of the dissidents is insistent and perhaps, once again, becoming hard to ignore. As Lewis Thomas, the distinguished cancer research administrator and writer, eloquently put it:
There is still that permanent vanishing of consciousness to be accounted for. Are we to be stuck forever with this problem? Where on Earth does it go? Is it simply stopped dead in its tracks, lost in humus, wasted? Considering the tendency of nature to find uses for complex and intricate mechanisms, this seems to me unnatural. I prefer to think of it somehow as separated off at the filaments of its attachment, and then drawn like an easy breath back into the membrane of its origin, a fresh memory for a biospherical nervous system...The great question remains, after millennia of debate: Can mind survive in some form without its neural hardware – and, if so, in what form? Is mind just our subjective experience of the brain at work or do mind and brain have a separate, parallel existence?