#27 – Quantum Soul: What about you survives for a lifetime?

In episode 27 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle discusses the proposal of a quantum soul. The soul is the part of you that survives your entire lifetime. In this episode, we discuss three properties of quantum mechanics that might provide a novel solution to this age-old mystery. First of all, we discuss the curious discovery of Bose-Einstein Condensation. This state of matter was observed in the laboratory when supercooling liquid helium down to two degrees above absolute zero. The liquid helium underwent a mysteries transformation where all of the individual atoms began to share a single wave function and move together coherently. In this carefully constructed scenario, we can witness quantum properties at the macroscopic scale. Bose-Einstein Condensation is relevant to theories of mind because it is the creation of a macroscopic unification of many parts – this might be what it is like to be a single person extended throughout a physical body. What if there was a network of Bose-Einstein Condensation that was quite literally YOU? Alternatively, your mind could be a conceptualized as a “conscious pilot,” a model proposed by Stuart Hameroff, where you move around in your brain shifting between different cognitive streams of information. But this begs the question, how could the conscious pilot survive for your entire lifetime? Even in quantum computer models of the mind, the wave function that is you undergoes a series of collapse events. These collapse events destroy the wave function and then a new wave function is created. What, if anything, could survive the repeated collapse of the wave function? We fall back to the null model wherein the continuity of your life is created through the information stored in the digital aspects of your brain. Each moment is a new experience and you are forever stuck in the present moment. Perhaps there is no soul and this moment is the first and last moment of your life? The continuity of your experience is created through digital storage mechanisms, but nothing beyond this digital information survives past a given moment of experience. The episode wraps up comparing these different quantum theories of the soul. Do you think you have a soul? Which theory best explains the continuity of our lives?