The human soul. It is a meme that for centuries has driven philosophy, spirituality and religion. In science, along with the concept of quantum uncertainty has entered the concept of a human consciousness that collapses probability into a state of existence. And if human consciousness has entered science, the soul in all probability will follow.
Is the soul explainable in terms of our everyday reality? In the Bhagwad Gita, the soul is the indestructible entity that incarnates in various forms. Advait Vedanta goes a step further. There is just one soul that incarnates into all things.
On the other hand religions like Christianity and Islam believe that every individual in this world remains a distinct entity. That is I will remain I and will be rewarded with heaven or punished with purgatory or hell. In perpetuity, one has to suppose, in the absence of the possibility of reincarnation.
I believe in the power of the metaphor to explain the seemingly inexpiable. And here is, I think, a neat metaphor for the concept of the soul that could tie everything together.
Think of the soul as a piece of code - a digital entity so to speak.
Now think of this digital entity that is the soul as an operating system that supports the creation of various applications. You are just an application created on top of the operating system that is your soul.
Simple enough. But the metaphor goes far, I think, in resolving seemingly conflicting requirements.
The essence of being digital is that a digital entity can be copied endlessly and there is no distinction between the original and the copies.
For the Advaitists, the original digital entity is the Brahman, manifesting endlessly as the operating system of the collection of countless applications that is the universe.
When a person dies, a
"copy" of the application that he was goes into heaven, purgatory or hell satisfying one sort of theology while to satisfy another theological conception, another copy of the application system undergoes a transformation, governed by the "karma" (the accumulated usage history of the application), into another application sitting on top of the same operating system.
And for believers in the Matrix, that entirely digital Universe as conceived by the Wachowski Brothers,the concept of the soul as a piece of code is digital manna for a digital heaven. I strongly suspect that the metaphor of the digital soul can explain, without contradiction, all existing theological or metaphysical stream of thought. Try me.
Happy new year. Remember humanity's way of accounting for time - seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years are essentially digital. Does that indicate that deep down time itself is just a digital stream? Now that is another thought.
