A discussion about that point in our evolutionary journey when humans acquired the abilities to experience … “a soul”?

At this point in our unfolding story, life has appeared on earth and produced countless different species of increasing complexity, a few of whom are beginning to exhibit characteristics and abilities that would make them good candidates for the endpoint we’ve been anticipating all along: beings capable of abstract thought, a sense of the Divine, and agape-love. One step in this evolution involves the acquisition of something some people call “a soul”.

We talked to Dr. Warren Brown, a clinical psychologist and Director of the Travis Research Institute, about how the complex interconnectedness of the human brain sets the stage for the emergence of what he calls “soulishness.” He prefers this term over “soul” in order to avoid endorsing a world view referred to as Substance Dualism: the idea that the soul is an immaterial “thing” that rides in our material bodies. We’ve talked at length about this worldview and its limitations in a previous episode (#10), and won’t repeat that here.

Dr. Brown first defines soulishness as the property of experiencing relatedness to other people, to ourselves, to our pets … even to God. He then tells us about the neural mechanisms which enable that experience of connectedness, how infants grow naturally into this experience, how we develop tools and resources which extend that sense of connectedness beyond our own bodies, and describes a variety of brain injuries and diseases that he’s studied which interfere with this ability or property of feeling connected.

All of this discussion sets the stage for a little bit of wild speculation about what might have needed to happen in our evolutionary history to open up the possibility for our hominid ancestors to begin to experience soulishness.

Others might say this is the point in our journey when humans acquired a soul.

As always, tell us what you think …

To find more about Dr Warren Brown, see his faculty web-page, and at the Travis Research Institute.

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