A Scientific Journey into the Soul

When one thinks of a soul, it tends to be associated with religion and spirituality, but if we define our soul as the observer of our experiences let's see what we find.

It's well established that our brains collect sensory information from the outer world as well as from inside our bodies using wires that we call neurons, and they integrate that information through complex circuits that we call neural pathways. The sensory information that is collected from the world is always riding on the back of some type of energy that we catch with our eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin, which is then translated into electrical energy. Whether that be the electromagnetic energy of light, the thermal energy of heat, the mechanical energy of sound and touch, or the chemical energy of taste and smell – it's all just some type of energy being translated into electrical energy so our brain can make sense of the information riding on it. The information along with the electrical energy flowing through our most complex neural pathways allows us to become consciously aware of what's happening around around us and to us.

Numerous studies correlate electrical activity in the areas of our brain that have more complex information, with more conscious awareness. These are the areas that combine the most information from all of our senses, as well as memories of past sensory experiences, into bundles of wires that tend to fire from around 8 times per second, to upwards of 200 times per second. That's a lot of energy, carrying a lot of information. If we put this correlation into context, what is exactly happening here? The chemical energy we get from food – which we call calories – is used to power the electrical impulses that our neurons make, and these impulses are amplified in response to environmental energy. This means we use the energy from our food (which is also environmental energy) to amplify the other types of energy in the environment as electricity in our brain. We basically take energy from the world and organize it all in our brains as dense, coherent, electrical energy to shape our thoughts.

Our brains can then, without conscious input, convert more food to electricity and send that electricity into our muscles in specific sequences, based on the information it gathered from the energy of the outside world. This is what allows our bodies to either phyiscally move, or move the muscles of our lungs and mouth in order to talk, and respond to our environment. This creates a situation in which our bodies automatically convert and amplify environmental energy through predetermined neural pathways (which are basically just complex arrangements of wires), in order to release energy back into the universe as the mechanical energy of motion or vibrations in the air. These decisions have been shown to fly through our brains before we can consciously percieve that there is any choice to be made, meaning these decisions aren't being influenced by our conscious awareness. Instead, the feeling of making a decision is usually just our conscious awareness justifying why our brain made that decision, based on the ideas we already have in our heads. So consciousness doesn't actually explain our actions, the flow of energy through the pre-made pathways in our body does.

In his own words, Einstein said that energy and mass (as in the stuff that makes up every atom and molecule) "are but different manifestations of the same thing," and that they may be converted between each other. Particles are just very dense points of energy compared to the rest of the universe, they aren't actually "things." This is what is implied by his equation E = mc^2. Basically, what that means is that an atom is made of the same "stuff" as the electricity that makes up our thoughts, which is made of the same "stuff" as heat. Basically everything is just energy, but our thoughts that make up our conscious awareness are the most complex arrangement of that energy into coherent ideas, while the energy that makes up an atom doesn't have enough complexity to form a full idea.

So we know that our brains amplify and organize the energy and information from the universe, but what observes it? Where is the soul? For this question we could stop here and just say the brain is what observes our experiences, but there's reason to believe this isn't true. Namely, when one dies and is resuscitated, the electrical activity of their brain stops while they are technically dead, but often these people report a type of conscious awareness that isnt associated with their body – out of body experiences. What can explain this? For this we must turn to the physics of the universe.

Looking at the electromagnetic field, humans have learned that moving electricity creates magnetic fields, and moving magnetic fields creates electric fields. This concept is actually how humans create electricity for the power grids around the world right now. If we look at the same concept in relation to our thoughts, every thought we have is creating waves of magnetic fields, in and around our brains. We can (and do) actually measure these waves. The electromagnetic field itself pervades the entire universe, and when our brains become active, the magnetic waves disturb the magnetic field in the same organized shapes of energy and information that our neurons produce. We could argue that the electromagnetic field might be the observer we've been looking for. In this instance, we would all be using the same ocean of conscious awareness in the electromagnetic field, but while we're alive, our brain is organizing different parts of it at different times with our own unique electrical activity of our thought patterns. When we die, our conscious awareness might slowly fade into the expansive ocean of the entire electromagnetic field, explaining out of body experiences of people when they die. This could be the essence of our soul, but I think there's more.

Here's where things get interesting though. Einstein's theories are really good at predicting everything on a large scale – bigger than atoms – but they start to break down when explaining things about anything smaller, like subatomic particles. So in order to try to piece the puzzle together, what modern scientists have resorted to, is adding multiple extra dimensions of space to their equations in order to allow the math to work.

What does that even mean? You're probably familiar with the 3 dimensions of space and the dimension of time, but let's walk through them to understand what an extra dimension might be like. If we have a vertical line, that would be considered a one dimensional object – in the vertical dimension. If we take that line, and we copy and paste it outside of it's single dimension, offset somewhere in the horizontal direction, and connect the ends, we get a 2 dimensional square – taking advantage of the vertical and horizontal dimensions. Now if we do the same thing with that square, copy and paste it somewhere in the depth direction and connect the edges, we get a 3 dimensional cube – taking advantage of the vertical, horizontal, and depth dimensions. This is where we live. So what would an extra spatial dimension look like? We would have to take that cube, and copy and paste it, offset somewhere outside of our 3D space in the new direction, and then connect the edges... how does that even make sense?

If a 2D Mario character was inside the 2D universe of his TV screen, he can't look in the directions out of the screen. He can only look vertically and horizontally, he has no idea that the depth dimension even exists. You could put a whole extra 2D universe next to him, and he wouldn't have the slightest clue that it's there. If we used a magnet to mess with the pixels of his universe, and make shapes that look like words, he would have no understanding that a human being (an alien to him) could be the one trying to talk to him. Even if we took him out of the screen so he could look at us, his field of view is still only a single line, so he wouldn't even be able to understand that we are 3 dimensional humans, because his vision is restricted to his 2 dimensional eyes.

Applying that concept to us 3D humans, even if we could look in this mysterious 4th direction, our eyes could still only perceive three dimensions in that direction. The best we can do to visualize the fourth dimension with our eyes is by making a hypercube – two cubes with their corners connected – but that doesn't do the 4th dimension of space justice. Let's take the dimension of time as an example since Einstein's theories already view time as another dimension, and it already has directions associated with it – the future and the past. Although it isn't a direction we can point to, we know it's there, and we're actually moving through that dimension at all times. We can remember ourselves in the past, and imagine ourselves in the future, but can we see the 4D object of ourselves? We can kind of imagine what that might look like, our body stretching through time always connected to itself, but we can't see it with our 3D eyes. So if we can imagine a 4th dimension like time, a 5th dimension would be similar to this concept, in which we can never physically see it with our eyes, but it's actually there. The craziest part, is that with modern physics they estimate upwards of 10 dimensions of space!

Ok, lets bring this back to what this means for our soul. A man named Theodore Kaluza decided to add a fifth dimension (on top of the 3 dimensions of space and one of time) to Einstein's equations to see what would happen. Amazingly, the electromagnetic equations, which were already discovered at the time, spontaneously arose from Einstein's paradigm. This definitely gives weight to the idea that electromagnetism can function through these extra mysterious dimensions of space that we can't see. Now if our physical body in 3D space functions automatically, with no conscious input necessary, is it possible that the observer of our experiences – our soul – could be located somewhere in these extra spatial dimensions, and somehow uses electromagnetism to observe us?

If we take the idea of a soul being made of the "light" like Jesus as he ascended, or the concept of the light body from other esoteric and mystical teachings, let's see what we can come up with. If we think of how the brightest light we can see, the sun, literally gives Earth and all of it's organisms the energy necessary for survival, and the fact that it was the original god that humans worshipped, it makes sense to me that our light bodies would be made of the same stuff. Plasma. Plasma is also what lightning is made of, and it is very magnetically active. If we had light bodies made of plasma, and they were hanging out right beside us in the 4th spatial dimension, they could observe everthing we experience and might even be affected by the magnetic fields created by our thoughts. Think about how we can hang out beside a 2D Mario and see everything he's doing without him even having any idea that we even exist.

What makes this even more weirdly realistic, is that humans have even figured out how to use coils of electricity to induce magnetic fields that can activate or inhibit the electrical circuits inside of our brains, without any physical contact! This technology is called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and there are some awesome youtube videos demonstrating the way it works. If our light bodies are made of plasma, which means they're magnetically active, and if they have the ability to swirl around in the 4th dimension an inch away from our brains, then they would have the ability to start or stop our thoughts. They would have the ability to make us see visions, or stop us from acting impulsively like our subconscious body might otherwise do. Regardless of if you believe a soul does exist, based on the current science of the day it becomes quite clear that a soul can exist.