Letter: Quantum theory may explain the soul

Religions are just a way for organizations to compete for the explanations of existence, being, nature, purpose, reality of human existence and experience. From Wikipedia comes the fact that there appears to be around 4,200 religions on the planet.

The question I have is: What is the soul? The exploration of the neuroscience of the soul has a few problems, one of them being that there is no consensus on the definition of what a soul actually is, as it is usually a patchwork from one belief to another. Another problem, according to Deepak Chopra, M.D., is that “science deals in visible, concrete things using objective data, but since the era of quantum physics, invisible things and fleeting events have entered science, so subtly that the true realm from which they emerge is almost a matter of faith.”

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What exactly is a soul? Where does it dwell in us? Is it just another word for “divine essence?” Is there a relationship between the soul and the brain/mind or the soul and the human body?

Merriam-Webster defines soul as “the spiritual part of a person that is believed to give life to the body and in many religions is believed to live forever, the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life, the spiritual principle embodied in human beings, all rational and spiritual beings, or the universe.”

Biologist Cyrille Barrette, wrote: “The soul is a word to designate an idea we invented to represent the sensation of being inhabited by an existence, by a conscience. The soul is a property emerging from the complex organization of matter in the brain.”

The scientific quest to explore what exactly the soul is began in 1901, with Duncan MacDougall, M.D., a physician whose notoriety stems from his attempts to determine how much a soul weighs by measuring the weight of individuals at the time of death & compared with the weight prior to death (21 grams!). His essay, “Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of The Existence of Such Substance,” can be read on the internet. It has been disproven.

A new quantum theory of consciousness called “Orch OR” — orchestrated objective reduction — states that the recent discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons gives rise to consciousness. Microtubules (protein polymers) govern neuronal and synaptic function, and connect brain processes to self-organizing processes at the quantum level. Scientists believe that the Orch OR theory can account for the afterlife.

One corresponding scientist is Stuart Hameroff, M.D., professor emeritus at the Department of Anesthesiology and Psychology and the director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. He and Sir Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at the Mathematical Institute and University of Oxford, propose that overall brain function derives from quantum level microtubule vibrations. They believe that from a practical medical perspective, treating brain microtubule vibrations could benefit a host of mental and neurological conditions.

Hameroff and Penrose, according to the Huffington Post, state that “the connection to space-time geometry also raises the intriguing possibility that Orch OR allows consciousness apart from the brain and body, distributed and entangled in space-time geometry. It’s possible that the quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.”

Thus it is held that our souls are greater than the interaction of neurons in the brain. They are in fact created from the very fabric of the holoverse and may have been present since the genesis of time.

Chris Curran Dombrowski is a resident of Tumon.

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This article originally appeared on Pacific Daily News: Letter: Quantum theory may explain the soul