On the Seat of the Soul 


As digital technology begins to approach the information density of DNA, individuals will record their entire lifetime experience and pass that down to their descendants, along with their written interpretations of it and their learned lessons. 

Evidently, surgeons wonder as they slice us up, about where the "soul" resides in the human body. Many of us have wondered about the soul and what it is, where it resides, what happens to it when we die.

I take the religious concept of soul to be the pre-technological sense of the information written in living DNA. This is certainly immortal, or close enough for practical purposes under Darwinian evolution. Apart from an individual's peculiar experience, which cannot be anticipated, it is what defines that individual. What else could be meant by the term "soul"?

Uniquely among Earth's species, humans add to this molecular DNA soul the new information that they write in other media, then pass down from generation to generation. As digital technology begins to approach the information density of DNA, individuals will record their entire lifetime experience and pass that down to their descendants, along with their written interpretations of it and their learned lessons. Our automobiles already capture their service histories in onboard chips. Soon we'll capture our health records that way. Then everything we want, including a readable copy of our own genome, will be captured.

It's information that will "come in handy even if we never use it." But the DNA will still be the irreducible essence of every individual and the true soul, in my view. 

Posted: Sat - June 4, 2005 at 09:40 a.m.         | |

©