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I have a religion midterm tomorrow, and also a neuroscience midterm. I had a computer science exam today. Also, Joe has just posted an expanded version of his essay about his personal experiences with religion. These four things sparked some thoughts again for me, and I want to write them down before they fade away.

What’s always interesting to me about religion is the notion of a soul — a thing that is created, but not destroyed; a thing that is not as transient as a human. The idea is that the soul endows the body with life, and that the soul is the essence of the being, not the body. The mind and the consciousness are reflections of the soul.

This stance is in contrast with the fundamental assumption of psychology, medicine, and neuroscience: that all human behavior is generated internally. It’s not that all neuroscientists are athiests; in fact, my experience is that most of them believe in a god of some sort. It’s just that it is nearly impossible to make scientific progress towards understanding the brain if we assume that there is some outside force altering its state. So, neuroscientists operate on this assumption, regardless of what they individually believe.

It’s an interesting assumption though, once you consider the amazing ability of the brain. Let’s view the mind, in sterile medical fashion, as an input-output machine. It receives input from the peripheral nervous system, which essentially means our senses. From that input (and from previous inputs) it generates output, which is the whole of human behavior. This is the way that I view the mind.

I’m always thinking about evolution. When we talk about a feature of the nervous system in neuroscience, I always want to know why it evolved that way. For example — in the back of our eyes, on the retina, there are rods and cones. They turn the light into electrical signals. This gets passed to some more cells, which invert that signal, and that gets passed to ganglion cells, which make some adjustments to the signal, and then it gets sent to the optic nerve, and into the brain.

What’s interesting is that those other cells are actually in front. The rods and cones point towards the back of the eye. Why is that? The light is in the other direction. Also, why do those cells so nearly duplicate an electrical inversion, then an analog-to-digital conversion? It’s just like how our digital cameras and recording devices work. Is it because fundamental laws of nature dictate that optical machinery needs to work that way, or is it because we subconsciously created our digital audio and video equipment in the image of the human body? Or is it because that design is the most efficient way to solve the problem of vision—and our bodies are that way because the most efficient form survives evolution, and electronics are that way because the most efficient form saves money?

My neuroscience professor calls these “god questions.” I used to ask questions like that a lot, but the truth is that he can’t answer them any better than I can, so I stopped asking.

There are a lot of important questions to answer, like: if the soul is just an internal representation, then why does the notion exist? What is consciousness? How does this define the importance of a single human life on the universe?

More later, right now I really need to study. #