Worth reading, this: The Evolution of the Soul: A Thought Experiment :: Paul E. Dinter :: Global Spiral: I'm particularly interested because he puts into words something I keep saying (indeed recently at the Summer School on Spirituality and Culture).
"we can then affirm that human consciousness (for which the “soul” is shorthand) arose in continuity with a whole spectrum of emergent phenomena across evolutionary time. But it emerged (and continues to do so) as more than the neuronal firings in the brain. For just as elementary particles of matter emerge through, but beyond, the waves of non-matter that give rise to them, so thinking subjects emerge through, but beyond, the electrical activity in their brains. As emergent, no later stages of becoming can be reduced to earlier, less collective phenomena. So just as we cannot understand atoms and their role in the cosmos by reducing them to the improbable actions of their underlying particles, so we cannot comprehend the subjective mind merely by tracing how the brain’s neurons fire. And if this is so, human consciousness is paradoxically transcendent because it is real, just as minerals are hard because their component parts occupy empty space!"
Nicely put.
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