Saeid Bagheri Moghaddam
Written by Saeid Bagheri Moghaddam
As a person who lived in a religious environment, a question that kept re-emerging was: where do I get my soul or spirit, which shapes my character, creates a zest for life, and gives energy to my moral existence? I was told that these can’t be done merely with non-conscious molecules and neurons; there must be something “indivisible” and “nonmaterial” in me or with me. Religion offers a short answer to this mystery--soul. When I was very young, I was fascinated by one of the most influential Islamic theologians, Al-Ghazzali, and one of his books, “Incoherence of the Philosop
hers.” In it he denied any connection between soul and body for a good reason—to refute any causality between them. He believed that our soul is “incorporeal” and “is not the cause of our body.” Al-Ghazzali himself did not believe that his claim can be proved by rational arguments. He thought that the scope of philosophy is limited in the realm of causality, despite the fact that there is no cause in the natural course of events; “it is because God has created them in that fashion.” He believed that the position of philosophers in proving the existence of soul and Supreme Being is untenable because the quiddity of soul and Supreme Being can not be understood by mundane means—those are off the map of creation where no cause is at all. He writes, “[I]f [body] can be eternal, it will have no cause at all.” The problem that I have with this argument is that if the causality of an event were an absurd product of human imagination, then the punishments and rewards that, they believe, are dispensed in the hereafter would be meaningless; because its very premise is based on the notion of causality. Al-Ghazzali’s thoughts seemingly changed the direction of the course of history in the Islamic world because he rejected the notion of causality and reasoning. He promoted the idea of submission and Taqlid (Taqlid is a term used in Islamic theology for the acceptance of religious concepts and rules without evidence). His beliefs were disastrous for a most flourishing period of the Islamic era. Although Ibn Rushd in his book, “the Incoherence of the Incoherence”, tried to confine the damage done by Al-Ghazzali, Al-Ghazzali’s beliefs had prevailed over rational voices such as Ibn Sina and Farabi.
When I came to America in 1998, I had no answer to that legitimate question: where do I get my soul or spirit? To grasp the theological argument about soul in the Christian faith, I read one of Augustine’s books, De Animae Quantitate. In it he explicitly defined the soul as “a special substance, endowed with reason, adapted to rule the body.” In a logical way of 
thinking about his definition, one may ponder that if we supposed that the proposition of nonmaterial and indivisible entity, as Augustine and even Descartes put it, were right, then we would encounter a logical difficulty of understanding how a wraithlike “substance”, as Augustine called it, has a material locus--the brain. For instance, anyone who has witnessed the significant changes in personality and character of a stroke survivor would admit that the damaged part of the brain has severely disturbed the soul and in some cases caused irreversible harm to it. Therefore, there must be a necessary connection between the cause, brain damage, and the effect, changed character and personality. As David Hume put it, the cause necessitates its effect. From this, one can easily understand that the soul can’t be indivisible or immortal in Augustine’s sense. Ironically, the doctrine of the immortal soul has recently been ruled out by a Christian theologian, Frederick Buechner, in the light of considerable evidence about how the brain functions. Buechner referred to a part of the Apostles Creed, “resurrection of the body,” concluding “we go to our graves as dead as a doornail and are given our lives back again by God (i.e., resurrected) just as we were given them by God in the first place." The idea is still maddeningly obscure because the notion of the “resurrection of the body” creates a huge desire in some of its followers to die young. William James in one of his essays, “Does Consciousness Exist?”, pointed out a very important historical development of how the meaning of the soul has gradually been changing from “transcendental entity” to “transcendental ego.” He wrote, “"[the soul] attenuates itself to a thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a name for the fact that the 'content' of experience IS KNOWN."(p. 2).
Drifting inexorably from one school of thought to another, I found out that there must be a mechanism for consciousness from which we can answer that legitimate question of our existence, understand what we are and what we can be, rethink our perceptions of humanity, and ultimately reformulate the whole structure of our civilization based on that new philosophy of human nature. I realized that consciousness is an important key available to us whereby we are able to make sense of “self” and “I.” Consciousness is a vital ingredient of our being--without it we would be in some form of vegetative state, delirium, or mutism. Oddly, this very salient phenomenon in us has remained a mystery, partly because of its subjective nature. So one may ask, “Why is there any problem at all”? I must admit that the mysteriousness of consciousness has to do with experiences that we have of the outside world. Many believe that every individual may have qualitatively different subjective experiences of a particular event or stimulus, which creates two severe puzzles. On the one hand, there are activities in the brain, which we are unconscious of, such as the activities of the spinal, cerebellar and vestibular reflexes; and there are some activities in the brain, which we are conscious of, such as joy and sadness, pleasure and pain. A scientific question arises from this: how does the brain distinguish between our conscious experiences and unconscious activities of the body? How can the brain marshal the body for action? For example, when we reach out for a cup of tea, the brain sends only discriminated data to appropriate organs. Or when the traffic light turns red, we immediately say, “that is a red light.” How can the brain contain those data and their correlates? How is the brain able to coordinate our conscious and unconscious activities? The philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed this as the “Easy Problem,” because science will eventually unravel this mystery one way or another. On the other hand, we encounter an insurmountable difficulty when Chalmers challenges us to tackle the “Hard Problem.” The Hard Problem seems to me a similar question to that I had been asking myself for years: where do I get my own soul and spirit? What is it that causes me to have my own private sensations and experiences? How can conscious, subjective experiences arise from over a trillion non-conscious neurons? Chalmers himself asks, “Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?”
In this documentary, I am trying to answer these questions, or to put it more conservatively, to explore some of the answers to those questions that been given to us by neuroscientists. It seems to me, neuroscience, at its very best, tries not to reject the idea of soul, but to refine the concept in mechanical terms, exorcising the ghostly substance in the genuine, subjective feelings that we have, which we don't really know whether it is real or illusion. But Thomas Nagel and a few other philosophers believe that it is almost impossible for science to address the Hard Problem; he writes, “If we acknowledge that a physical theory of mind must account for the subjective character of experience, we must admit that no presently available conception gives us a clue how this could be done.” I argue that this is not the case; there must be a way or ways, directly or indirectly, to study this very obvious phenomenon in the human brain; otherwise the ghost in the body remains the only viable answer to the question of consciousness. Eric Kandel, an American neuroscientist and a winner of the Nobel Prize, believes that neuroscientists have made “considerable progress in understanding the neurobiology of perception and memory without having to account for individual experience. For example, cognitive neural scientists have made advances in understanding the neural basis of the perception of the color blue without addressing the question of how each of us responds to the same blue (p., 382).” In this documentary, I am trying to convince my audience to pass beyond that ghostly image and to think of consciousness as a process rather than imagining a “headquarters” inside the brain and a little observer that sits down there and runs the “show.” I believe that because consciousness is a biological phenomenon, there must be a scientific explanation(s) for it.
Mahyar Alahyari is an undergraduate student in Film at Cal State University, Fullerton. He is our assistant director. We are very grateful to have him on our team because of his dedication to his responsiblities. His talent in this field is limitless. 
