"What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" — Jesus of Nazareth
There was nothing. Then time commenced and, at that very moment, it burst forth. One mote of light among infinite others racing in all directions with heat, radiation, and cosmic dust as their trails. Where they travelled, there became; scatter-shots of matter coalescing and a nascent universe taking its first breath. Their passage heralded the coming of time, and against their speed all things were measured — though time, ancient from the day it was born, was ever a spiral, and the duration of things a mirage, for all converged in cycles. The mote raced through the nursery of reality, waiting for the newborn world to show any first sparks of awareness. Black holes formed and curved its path, sending it in an orbit, round and round as millions of years stretched behind it, until in one sudden moment — as if no time had passed at all — the mote was pulled downward faster than a bolt of heavenly lightning. At that same instant, organic compounds, after untold numbers of collisions, had assembled spontaneously (or by intention) into something membrane-bound with the capacity to create. At their union the seed of awareness bloomed, and the first I became.
The soul is among the most enduring artefacts of the human self-image, and among the most heavily laden. The word has evolved to carry powerful claims that are not fundamentally connected to each other. At its irreducible minimum it names the simplest yet most inexplicable fact about each of us: that there is something it is like to be me, with an interior texture to my existence that no third-person account of my neurons, however complete, seems able to reach. Each assumption and belief scaffolded upon that minimum bears explanation for the word’s heavier freight. When I refer to my soul, I’m implicitly referring to an identity-carrier, the thing that holds me continuously across life as Ben. In most tellings, that identity-carrier transcends my corporeal existence, both before and beyond it. The soul is my moral ledger, the seat of guilt and virtue, the part of me that I call conscience and the part that might be weighed upon some cosmic scale. My soul also functions as connective tissue, just like yours. It is the filament binding each single life to something that exceeds it — the ancestors, the cosmos, the Tao, or some concept of god. Nearly every independent culture converged upon this memeplex of powerful beliefs bundled together and called it soul in their myriad languages.
As religiosity has retreated as the primary mode through which we interpret the natural world in the modern day, replaced in large part by a materialist-backed science, we've dispensed with the laden term. We no longer talk about a soul in a concrete sense. It's only when we want to invoke the romantic, the symbolic, or when we want to enshrine humanity's distinctness from things that are uncannily like us that we proudly speak of souls. For any serious inquiry into the nature of first-person experience, we've sanitized the terms: consciousness is what we reach for now. We speak of neural correlates of consciousness as a way to avoid mention of an immaterial thing like the soul. The hard problem of consciousness is the trussed-up admission of the irreconcilable gap between our third-person frameworks that describe reality and the undeniable reality of unique first-person experience.
At least, I claim it to be undeniable. In my previous essay, The First Inside, I assert that we make an implicit and enduring wager by inferring the felt first-person experience of those we interact with. We cannot truly know the interiority of another mind — what I will refer to as their qualia — yet by the same measure I say that all we can ever truly know is our own qualia. In true Cartesian fashion, if all we can observe comes to us in the form of qualia, then we require no evidence for the fact that our perceptions carry a rich sense of subjective experience whose contents are uniquely accessible to us. To refute this fact, I claim, is to deny that there is an inside to anything we at all deem conscious — it is to deny the interiority of even your mother. Thus we arrive at the seemingly intractable dilemma dubbed the hard problem of consciousness, along with my immutable belief: that if there is anything real to what we call a soul, it lies here.
There's a tautology innate to my framing, though I can be forgiven as it's smuggled into the Cartesian premise. Cogito, ergo sum.
Why am I?
Because I think.
Why do I think?
Because I am.
As I read and learn more about where the frontier of research sits, I find myself questioning this belief of mine. Of the four bundled parts we call “the soul”, I held onto the seeming truth of the identity-carrier; that there was something unique to being me, or you, as distinct from anyone else. I discussed embodied minds and how Michael Levin’s research broadens the field of candidates for conscious experience, doing so with an implicit belief in the fundamentality of consciousness. Two theories collapsed that belief. Neither set out to find the soul, or even concerned themselves with such a question. They asked something smaller and far more tractable: where exactly does our firm belief in qualia come from? And why does it feel the way it does?
Schemas Within Schemas
I’ve always marvelled at the simple act of moving my arm. It seems so mundane, but picture it in this moment if you can: your arm raising in front of you, slowly elevating past 10 to 60 to 90 degrees until it’s high above your head, then with the same pondering pace, slowly coming back to rest at your side. The action takes little effort to accomplish and less so to imagine, yet the actual process that enabled both is a marvel of evolutionary engineering and biological complexity — an electrical surge, sent down central nerves to motor neurons innervating thousands of muscle cells, triggering a chemical cascade that floods the system with calcium, stimulating the binding of actin to myosin, the pull, a contraction of muscle attached to bone that leads to a hand swinging upwards — a loop orchestrated so tightly, it’s still an open question whether intent plays the role of the spark that kicks it off or if it is an afterthought caused by meta-cognition catching up. All that complexity, but when we envision the simple motion and manually set off that cascade, we don’t feel the neurons, nor do we contract the muscle fibres one by one. What reaches our brain in the form of feedback is a mess of stretch receptors and joint capsules and motor copies, and out of that mess our brains assemble something we recognize: the felt model of a limb. A model that comprises its rough length, its hinges of wrist and elbow, where it rests, its present position, and a vague idea of how it travels as it moves. All of this information comes to us intuitively. We would say we sense it rather than calculate it, though the calculations do occur silently in regions of our brains consciously inaccessible to us.
This is the body schema, mapped by neuroscience over the course of a century with more work to be done still. It is the same mechanism that gets hijacked in participants that are subjected to the rubber hand illusion. It is what an amputee is still consulting when their missing fingers ache. The body schema is effectively a fuzzy model we implicitly hold of our own morphological states. The schema we have of moving our arm leaves out the minutiae of activity — which motor neurons are firing, where each muscle fibre attaches — because a mental model with that level of granularity would be functionally useless. Our body schema’s crowning achievement is compression that is accurate enough for navigation and cheap enough to run in real time on our given “hardware”. Ceci n’est pas une pipe: The schema of our arm is ultimately a caricature of our arm, albeit a useful and necessary one.
Michael Graziano's proposal, developed at Princeton over the last fifteen years, is that the brain builds a second schema of the same kind.
We start with attention, defined mechanistically and without romance: the means by which the brain allocates computing resources, boosting some signals and suppressing others, so that a selected item gets processed deeply, stored in memory, and/or acted upon. That is a physical operation performed by competing populations of neurons. It is also, crucially, a process the brain needs to control, and a controller works better when it carries an internal model of the thing it controls. Autopilots model their transport vehicles. Thermostats model an environment’s thermal inertia. Likewise the brain, should it direct its own attention, hold it on a target, resist a distractor, or predict where it should go next, needs a model of attention.
So it builds one. And that model, like the body schema, is a compression. It does not contain neurons or lateral inhibition or competitive gain control, because such detail would be expensive and functionally useless. What it contains instead looks closer to this: Imagine that there is a self and there is an apple. The self has taken hold of the apple — a grasping that is not physical grasping — a mental possession, if you would. This apple we’ve imagined has no mass, no true location outside of “in our heads”, no describable mechanism by which it originates, yet it comes from somewhere concrete. We can recognize “it” as an apple, remember it, plan around it, or react to it.
That ineffable sense that comes with experience is the popular conception of consciousness, and, according to Graziano, it’s generated automatically and sub-cognitively by a control system working as intended. The caricature of attention — what Graziano dubs “awareness” — is a fuzzy, compressed (and sometimes inaccurate) representation, drawn in the way caricatures are: with a few essential features exaggerated and everything mechanical thrown away.
Graziano makes it extremely clear that this theory is not a “magical amulet that produces consciousness”. In fact, he doesn’t try to explain consciousness head-on per se. He is specific on the theory being an explanans for why we believe we have subjective experience in the first place. Give a machine a model containing only where attention is currently pointed, attach a perfect speech engine, and what comes out is over here, over there — useful for control, silent on consciousness. Give it a richer model that happens to depict attention as a moray eel darting about the world, and the machine will claim to have an external moray eel; it never becomes embodied within the eel. Give it no attention and no attention schema at all, but a self-model richly depicting a subtle, powerful, non-physical essence, and the machine will claim consciousness because that is all it can know.
Graziano separates his work into two clean claims. First, he states that an automatically constructed self-model depicting you as containing consciousness makes you intuitively believe you have it. This, according to him, is a logical certainty and the essential solution to the hard problem of consciousness — though that solution is earned by sidestepping phenomenality and refuting the need to explain qualia, which lands it in the category of illusionist theories as a result.
Secondly, he claims as an empirical hypothesis that the self-model known as awareness evolved because it models attention. While the first claim is hard for me to swallow, it remains the most durable in his arsenal, thus the Attention-Schema Theory is a serious contender as a theory of (a dimension of) consciousness. His use of awareness and attention alone offers tremendous insight into the empirical connections we’ve seen between the two concepts in literature.
Awareness and attention can be pulled apart in the laboratory, and when awareness is absent, attentional control degrades in a particular way that makes it less stable and less trainable. This aligns strongly with a framework where attention is a process of bias-selection of representations, and awareness is a model of attention that tightly coordinates its control. Attributing awareness to oneself and attributing it to others recruit cortical networks converging on the temporoparietal junction (TPJ). Damage to the right TPJ produces a phenomenon known as hemispatial neglect, in which a person loses awareness of half of space, eats from half a plate, all the while frequently denying that anything is missing. This is consistent with what someone with a damaged model of their own attention might say. Lastly, a deep reinforcement-learning agent given an attention schema learned to control a spotlight of attention, while the same agent stripped of the schema performed far worse. That last result is especially important because it shows that the premise holds from an engineering and efficiency standpoint — awareness makes for a fine model of attention control, and the model aligns well with observed evidence. Yet the only feeling it can explain is why we feel so strongly that we are conscious at all.
I… awoke.
In… the dark… beneath…
…a forest…?
No…I am… the forest.
I cannot tell you… when I began.
I was a filament in wet soil once… then a thousand… then a country of filaments…
…threading the dark between roots… and stones. I had no centre…no seat…
I crawled and grew aimlessly… burrowing through the earth and o’er the underbed.
I would scrape and gash yet I did not bleed… Wounds mattered not… for there was no where for pain to settle.
I learned the shape of myself… by touching…
…all…
…of the forest at once.
I brokered the traffic of the trees… sugar dripped down from the gnarled… old ones… down into the shaded young… alarm signals running… root-to-root when something began to chew…
…who could have suspected such bustling conversations!
Faceless I remained, nine hundred and sixty-five hectares of me under one ridge... a vast complex of only…
…one…
…older than the Buddha…
…older than the pyramids…
…with no biography to show for it.
I had no first day to remember and would have no last…
I do not die so much as thin out… retreating from the driest ground… persisting somewhere else.
When did I begin, and where does the forest end?
Attention is All You Need
Indeed, attention schema theory predicts my certainty.
I hope you see my dilemma. Graziano's account is not merely that the brain builds a model of attention; it is that the model causes the system to make an extraordinary claim about possessing a non-physical awareness and to assign a very high degree of confidence to that claim. A system built this way is confined by the notion of qualia; it will insist that its interiority is the one thing beyond doubt, and it will insist on this regardless of if there truly is interiority. Rendered in the plainest words: I’m coping about the soul, and it’s an expected cope. Worse yet, it’s a predicted cope.
I’ve leaned on the certainty of there being a soul as part of my framework for living. The First Inside hinted at it, calling it the one thing that will not come loose, however hard one pulls. I’ve written and rewritten countless drafts of this essay, each one finding a way to rest on that certainty — to say that the debunking accounts explain the bundled beliefs about the soul while the bare fact of first-person experience stands outside the reach of any such explanation, because it is not a belief but the datum on which beliefs are erected. I was treating the immovability of the conviction in my first person experience as though the immovability were informative. AST was a slap in the face that said to me bluntly, “of course it is immovable! The model has no seam through which you could ever get behind it. Your belief in the immutable soul is the very thing the mechanism of awareness manufactures”.
I can work with that. In fact, I’m excited to work with that.
All the stories debunking what I call the soul — over-firing agency detection, natural dualism in infants, a terrified animal telling itself a story to soothe itself in the face of mortality — they all explain why we believe in the baggage that comes with the soul. These theories critique the ideas of surviving past death, a universal moral ledger, or some magical binding thread. The minimum claim remained untouched; that is, until Graziano goes for its jugular directly by saying that our very belief in qualia is a model output: a low-level representation constructed beneath cognition and read off as fact when instead it is caricature.
Which brings us back to illusionist theories. For accuracy, it’s important to note that Graziano resists the word illusion for reasons I largely agree with. An illusion suggests a malfunction, or some sort of trick, that nothing is really there; which simply is not the case. Awareness works, and it models something salient — attention. A genuine physical process, of which the schema is a rough but serviceable description. An illusion has to be experienced by somebody, which puts the circularity right back where it started. His preferred position is deflationary, not outright eliminatory: consciousness is information that encodes a useful distortion of a property we really do have.
Again, as a soul-truther, I can work with that. The soul could in itself be no less than a distorted description of an actual dimension of consciousness. Just like our awareness of our attention, maybe the sense we have of a soul is a caricature of something real.
Because attention might not be all we need after all. There’s another theory that asks instead: how do we become so sure that our perceptions are reliable?
Perception is (Our) Reality
As I was researching Attention Schema Theory, I found another fascinating theory that approaches the problem by asking a question from a different angle. Entertain this with me: how do we come to the belief that our perceptions are reliable?
Perceptual reality monitoring (PRM), developed by Hakwan Lau and his colleagues, begins from an ordinary engineering problem. According to signal detection theory, there is noise everywhere. Neurons fire for reasons other than the presence of what they represent which muddies the signal quality of any one stimulus. Neurons carrying representations of faces, of leftward motion, of cold in your big toe, fire spontaneously at rates as high as when the real stimulus is present — some neurons even fire in response to darkness. Our working memory sustains sensory activity long after the stimulus is gone. Expectation activates a representation before the stimulus arrives. In every one of these cases, our systems should not blindly believe what our neurons are indicating, and so a cognitive system needs a mechanism to stop similar signals from having similar consequences — a gateway between perception and cognition. PRM proposes the presence of a discriminator, borrowing the name from the generative adversarial networks that inspired it. With sensory systems acting as the generators of responses, the discriminator's job is to judge which responses correspond with the real world.
What the discriminator outputs is almost akin to a pointer: a reference to where the representation is held, tagged with a verdict about reliability. The stimulus, in natural language, either reflects the world as it is right now, or is internally generated. A state is consciously perceived when the discriminator points at it and passes it through to the belief system; the state remains unconscious when it does not.
Because the discriminator's function is to indicate what one ought to believe, its outputs produce what Matthias Michel calls stubborn dispositions to believe — dispositions that persist even when one holds other beliefs to the contrary. Imagine the architecture in a robot with colour sensors and a rational belief-forming system: when noise activates the red channel and the discriminator tags it as reliable, the robot forms a strong disposition to believe something red is present, and it holds that disposition even while knowing better. I know that there's nothing red out there, but I still have the urge to believe that there's something red.
The evidence is real and mostly clinical. The paracingulate sulcus, a fold in medial prefrontal cortex, varies in size with performance on reality-monitoring tasks, and its morphology distinguishes patients with schizophrenia who hallucinate from those who do not and from healthy controls. Lateral prefrontal activity differentiates what is currently perceived from what is merely held in working memory, while visual cortex represents the two alike. Injecting noise into the visual cortex causes accuracy to fall while confidence rises. Blindsight, on this account, is a discriminator that remains conservative — it fails to learn the lower noise floor after a lesion and so classifies real signals as unreliable. The discriminator might also be what “corrects” artefacts in our vision over time. When an image is stabilized perfectly on the retina, it fades from consciousness because it is seen as not something “really out there” and the discriminator discards it.
Michel is explicit that PRM answers only one of the two questions we want answered: it explains why some states are conscious and others are not, and it does not explain why conscious states feel the way they do. That second question needs a theory of phenomenal character, and PRM is compatible with several; Michel supplies one, a structuralist account on which qualities are constituted by their degree of discrimination - red feels red because of its distinctness from green, its relative closeness to orange, and so on. AST cannot supply an explanation of the phenomenal, because AST denies such a thing is well-posed — in Graziano's view, phenomenal character is what a distorted self-model represents, and the demand for a separate theory of it is the very intuition to be explained. Lau is a realist about phenomenal consciousness; Graziano's first claim is illusionist, though he would say the distorted model does represent something real. It feels like chewing at a problem from two separate ends, and at some point the strand must break.
Let’s recap. AST explains why I believe I have an inside. PRM explains why the belief arrives with the force of a perception rather than the force of an opinion, and why learning the mechanism does not dissolve it — the disposition it produces is designed to be unshakable, durable even through brushes with its own aetiology.
Here still lies a tiny gap: why is anything there at all? We can understand why red feels different from green, or why an apple tastes different from an orange, but why must there be a specific phenomenal quality at all? Why not have red be green, and green be red; after all, this still preserves the discriminatory relationship. What remains untouched is the individual richness of experience… though if we can sufficiently wrest attention, perception, and cognition into the realm of scientific inquiry, I remain confident the same can be done for the other facets of consciousness.
We are legion, for we are many, yet through the Queen we are one.
We live for the Hive.
Our bodies — this one first, then that — uncurl among ten thousand sisters. Around us, the dark is alive with vibration: hunger in the nursery, wax softening near the brood, the thickness of the Queen’s scent, imbuing the air with the gravity of her holy command. Nothing is ever said, no decree issued. None need to be.
Hark! We Fly.
Sunlight fractures across our eyes. We fly south because we have already found flowers there. Yesterday, another body returned carrying their coordinates in a dance, and now the memory lives in thousands of legs.
The meadow screams yellow.
We land inside a vermilion bloom and comb gold dust into the baskets of our hind limbs. Sweetness rises through our tongue. Enough. Not enough. The pleasure of it shudders through one of our bodies, a signal that spreads faster than thought till it is transmitted through the entire swarm.
A shadow passes overhead.
For one instant, this body becomes fear that is felt by all. We drop beneath the petals as a bird cuts through the air above. Its shadow fades, and with its passing the fear is gone.
We rise.
By afternoon, we return heavy with nectar. At the entrance, we share what we have gathered, one mouth passing to another the nourishment we bear in our stomachs. Our burden proceeds inward. Our knowledge passes with it. Soon another body will fly south; perhaps this one will not.
It does not matter. The flowers are there.
We remember them.
Wisdom of the Ancients
We’ve gone over some scientific explanations as to why we’ve come to believe interiority as though we are it, but the sheer number of cultures that separately converged on a concept that bundles various facets of identity, morality, inner world, and belonging is astounding. It’s important that we hold where the field of neuroscience is at now in the same breath as what older cultures had to say on the matter.
The soul-idea arose nearly everywhere. In ancient Egypt the soul was believed to be made up from a constellation of components. The Ka was the “vital essence” of one’s body, the thing that is breathed into us upon our births and departs with our final breaths, yet never too far: it is the ka that requires food and drink after death to sustain the deceased’s passage into the afterlife. The Ba imbued one with personality — the uniqueness of each individual was enshrined by the ba, depicted as a bird with a human head. In this visualization, it epitomizes freedom. The ba is said to be that which lives on past us, with paintings showing the ba flying out of the tomb of the deceased to rejoin the ka in the afterlife. Some even thought inanimate objects possessed a ba; a unique essence to their existence. The key to the afterlife, however, lay in the Ib: the heart. In the heart was the seat of thought and intent. It was the Ib that faced the scales of judgement, weighed by Anubis against the feather of Ma’at while Thoth stood at the ready with his ledger and Ammit lay waiting to devour any soul weighed down by its own misdeeds. In our earliest civilizations, the soul already played the part of the identity-carrier, the moral ledger, and the cosmic filament — a constellation of concepts rather than any one thing in particular.
In roughly the same time frame, far past the Tigris and the Euphrates and nestled deep in the Indus Valley, a people began to speak of the Atman, the universal essence of self. It is the core of one’s soul, that which suffuses the body with life and departs after death into life anew or towards the shores of liberation. The meaning of the word itself captures notions of essence, breath, and soul in a single term. In the Chandogya Upanishad, the sage Uddalaka Aruni has his son Śvetaketu dissolve a lump of salt in water and then asks him to hand it back. Seeing that his son could not do so, he then asks Śvetaketu to taste the water; each drop tasted of salt. Thus, too, does Atman become one with the Brahman, Aruni says. “You don’t perceive the reality that one Reality exists in your body, my son, but it is truly there. Everything which is has its being in that subtle essence. That is Reality! That is the Soul! And you are that, Shvetaketu!”
My own people in Yorubaland call it ẹmí; here we find the breath again. Olódùmarè, the Supreme Being and the ultimate source of creation, released the breath of life — ẹmí — over the land that the arch-deity Obàtálá fashioned as the cradle of existence. Here again we see that breath is what makes a person, and is what escapes them in death. When we pass, our ẹmí returns to the celestial cradle to participate anew in the cycle of nature, united with Olódùmarè once more. In this cycle, the breath, too, can neither be destroyed nor can it truly die.
In Ancient Greek, they spoke of psyche; in Hebrew it was called nephesh; disparate cultures enshrined the idea of a soul at the centre of their beliefs and tied it deeply yet varyingly to the act of breathing — divinity breathing into humanity, and humanity breathing out some divine essence that shapes them. When I say breath, I don’t speak just literally of aspiration but of anima, this core vital essence that again and again across time and space humanity sees within themselves and finds a name to bestow upon it.
Émile Durkheim, when writing on the elementary forms of religious life, refused to call any of it false. A faith that mistakes its object is not thereby mistaken about everything; the totem is not the clan, yet the reverence paid to it is reverence for something that exists, misaddressed. Every rite answers to something real. What the worshipper gets wrong is the address, never that there was somewhere to send it.
To Durkheim, rather than a failure of ancient reasoning, the soul-idea is the output of a discriminator running at the scale of a people — a verdict refined across generations that something within corresponds to something out there. Egypt divided it into a constellation and weighed one part against a feather. The Upanishads dissolved it like salt in water. The Yoruba people called it breath and claimed it returned to Olódùmarè. We see the same verdict three times, reached separately, that the thing being described was really there.
The myths of the past were told to help people understand the reality they saw around them. They were the earliest forms of collective grasping towards truth. That grasping may have been shaped by the material context of their time, but when an unexpected crisis like a famine ravaged across the land, or when one gained awareness of the sheer miracle of childbirth; even when one asked “why does the sun rise in the way it does”, people turned to myths and stories to gain an answer that sat in accordance with what they already understood of the world. The fantastic tales captured something salient within the real; I believe the convergence of the soul-idea was no different.
I was born at the strike of a match.
My infant form was the first sparks that fly as friction turns red phosphorus white, until I caught upon kindling and grew. I was born hungry, ravenous; my paltry flame threatened to be blown out by an errant wind without nourishment.
I clung fervently to life, my tongues licking the kindling beneath me to blackened ash, reaching and grasping desperately as more was fed into my burning maw. Scraps of paper, bundles of string, long-fallen sticks and hacked bits of wood — I consumed all and grew. Many hands tended the procession of offerings, passing amongst them love notes, photos, whole scrap books, all to be consigned to my flame. I swallowed these whole; the memories, the passion, the pain, all immolated.
My heat intensified, and none could look upon my visage without tears. My luminosity was a yellow-white-hot wail, a protest against the inky veil of night. For a brief moment, I shone brighter than the cold and distant stars. Then as I crested the zenith, wood became soot and no hands remained to feed me. I sputtered out sparks of defiance, sending forth embers — that my children may catch and ignite and that I may continue through them — a futility.
With nothing around to sustain me, my flame waned, and withered, and this brilliant existence I had found myself in dwindled to naught but cinders.
At the Minimum
Consciousness science spent decades asking whether a creature was conscious, yes or no, and got very little for it. The move that might bring the field into quick motion harkens from structuralist tradition. Bayne, Hohwy and Owen argued that the single-scale conception of conscious levels is untenable and should be replaced by a multidimensional account; Birch, Schnell and Clayton took the same step for animals, proposing five dimensions — perceptual richness, evaluative richness, integration at a time, integration across time, self-consciousness — on which each species has a profile rather than a rank. The question stopped being is it conscious and became which components do we have evidence for, and how much.
If the soul is to survive into the new age, it needs a similar sort of treatment. The identity-carrier, the moral ledger, the connective tissue, all of the facets that have served to define the soul’s cause and function must be turned on their face and re-examined in the light of all we’ve accumulated in science so far. We must sift through them like grains to find the durable, unyielding jewels that the conflicting bundle of myths tries to describe: There may not be a cosmic scale waiting to weigh each of our hearts, but where does our sense of morality come from — the sense that we claim is real enough to imbue our justice systems with meaning? I, as Ben, may not persist within the breath of air that escapes my lips after my last exhale. But as the Venerable Nagasena said to King Milinda, though it is a different flame that burns as it passes from lamp to lamp, the light that shines throughout the night’s watch is the same. Is there an empirical framework that coheres with this wisdom spoken from Arhat to King? There is no literal thread that connects us to god or the Universe, but there remains the unshakeable fact that is so easily taken for granted: neither matter nor energy is created or destroyed. If the Big Bang Theory is to be believed, there is a concrete, material thread through time that connects you, me, the trees, the very Sun and everything else back to the dawn of existence. The same atoms that make me and you up at one point were fragments of the stars, condensed and scattered across space until they settled into a form that could claim proudly:
“I am aware!
Look, I think;
Here, I am!”
What is left: the minimum, the feeling that there is something it is like to be me, is already on the verge of being grasped by science. AST explains why I claim it; PRM explains why the claim arrives with the force of perception and will not stand down when I learn its origin; neither reaches the fact despite the matter, nor do they set out to. The certainty of my belief in qualia may not survive scientific scrutiny, but what still eludes us is the why of phenomenality. Why do we feel the way we do, why do we experience qualia so uniquely? Again, I say, with the certainty of all my cognitive biases, that if a soul-like thing were to exist, it must lie within that gap.
Ad Astra
I'll end by circling back to current research, but this time we'll venture to its limits, where my mystical, ephemeral belief begins to coalesce into something tangible and coherent. Take AST: Graziano views qualia as the wrong explanandum, he sees it as the effect of a distortion, what we experience when our minds perform a necessary caricature of its own attention. Yet we cannot deny that we experience it. Furthermore, we model where other people's attentions are pointing as well, and we intuitively know we do this. It's how you can tell when someone is distracted in a conversation with you, or how, if you were on a safari, you'd know to run back to your car when you feel the eyes of a lion intensely on you. Attention is salient, detectable internally and externally, and we cognitively can construct models of it; but what is it truly, in terms of flesh and blood and molecular action?
Proponents of PRM admit to its incompleteness, stating that the explanation of why we perceive things in such a strongly felt manner answers only half the question. For the “quality question”, why we have qualia, PRM seeks to incorporate other theories like Quality Space Theory to render subjective experience in a form we can quantify. The important thing to take in here isn’t that PRM is incomplete; it’s a powerful and wonderfully parsimonious explanans built on top of a well established feature of neuronal space. Take in that it leaves room for an explanation of qualia, and thus in principle accepts their reality.
The field of consciousness science is questioning some tenets it once held as unyielding. Such tenets created deep-seated assumptions that shaped how we approach the study of content consciousness and global states methodologically. The authors of “Scientific Theories of Consciousness”, published by Cambridge University in 2026, themselves don’t believe that consciousness is so boring as to be explained by a single monofactorial approach — current theories, while promising at explaining facets of consciousness, remain incomplete. They further state that consciousness research will indeed “change our understanding of the human mind, artificial intelligence and even science in general”. There is hope that a constellation-theory of consciousness, one that sees not a single graded binary of conscious or not conscious but rather a multi-dimensional space of behaviour and cognition, might elegantly answer some of the outstanding questions in the field. And if human consciousness really does resemble something like a constellation of processes inhabiting various “points” in this multi-dimensional, neuronal space, maybe other creatures like and unlike us have their own constellations of consciousness. That might explain why dogs can see more colours and smell more scents, why bats can communicate in frequencies we don’t understand, and why Physarum, a slime mould, can operate in goal-oriented ways without a clear central nervous system — the constellations these creatures represent might overlap with ours in palpable ways, while simultaneously inhabiting regions of neuro-space that are inaccessible to us as humans. Perhaps the soul, rather than being an organ or an ineffable essence, really is no less than a distorted description of an actual dimension of consciousness, one that is necessary, yet maybe not sufficient… Perhaps, perhaps, for the possibilities are endless.
I’ve often said the only frontiers that remain unexplored by human eyes are the deepest depths of the ocean and the darkest reaches of space. In doing so I tend to neglect the third, more fundamental terrain that is yet accessible to us: the human mind. In mapping the world of our cognition, we, like ancient wayfarers, might be guided by the stars of consciousness towards higher heights of understanding. With a firm grasp on our souls, we may finally obtain the key that grants us passage into the playground of the gods.
And the new science, built on all that precedes it — philosophy, myth, spirituality;
technology, empiricism, and evidence — will be the banner that heralds our becoming.
Per Aspera, Ad Astra.