Do animals have souls?

I’m reading a book by Douglas Hofstadter called “I am a Strange Loop.” The book shows a lot of promise and I can use some of the concepts in the book as a jumping-off point for discussion.

Hofstadter has a chatty, informal style which I can forgive him for because his points are clearer for the use of it. But sometimes the reader feels as if personal information is getting in the way of the ideas…

In Chapter 1, Hofstadter explains some of his rationale for vegetarianism, and it’s worth exploring some of the points he makes. An important concept for Hofstadter is the “soul”, although he is unable (or at least unwilling) in the first chapter to provide a definition of what the soul is.

Citing the likeness between mammals and human beings, he considers it immoral to kill and eat higher forms of life. He contends that all mammals have souls, and then touches on the question of where to draw the line between higher forms of life and lower forms. Why is it OK to slap a mosquito, but not OK to kill a fellow human being?

The answer for Hofstadter is that there are higher and lower levels of “soul”, just as there are higher and lower levels of consciousness.

Let me return to a point I believe I made earlier in this blog series – in my view, humans beings can be seen as a sort of recording device. What we are recording is experience. What experience is is a record of the interaction between the being and reality, between the internal and the external world.

One way we can view “soul” therefore is as a record of experience. Some beings keep only a very short record of their experience – these would fall into Hofstadter’s category of creatures with small souls. Others keep a vast and extensive record, such as human beings.

Hofstadter specifically brings up the issue of the fetus as a creature with only a small soul, suggesting to me that whether he has consciously made the connection or not, Hofstadter is implying that the degree of soul a being possesses is a factor of the degree of experience it has recorded or is capable of recording.

I’ve made the point in earlier entries that our experience is recorded in our memories, but DNA and other genetic material is a form of very long-term memory, storing the experience of our millions of generations of ancestors. The only sense in which the soul is immortal is that the experience it records is capable of being transmitted to subsequent generations.

The animals, plants, and primitive life-forms that Hofstadter characterizes as being “small of soul” are those animals whose experience is recorded primarily in their DNA and genetic material. Animals such as human beings, dogs, and so on that he characterizes as being larger of soul are creatures whose individual life experiences form as large a part of their souls as the species-experience recorded in their DNA.

When we speak of the soul of a mosquito, we are referring to the semi-automatic behaviour patterns the species has learned over countless millions of generations. Animals such as mosquitoes show little individual deviation in behaviour and there is little evidence that they are capable of individual learning, or even that such learning would help them reproduce more efficiently.

When we speak of the soul of a human being, we are surely referring to the special life experiences that have shaped the consciousness of that person. When we speak of the soul of a city or the soul of a nation, we are speaking of the collective experience as recorded in the brains of the citizens of that city or nation. When we speak of the Soul of Humanity, we are referring more to the inherited learning and behaviour patterns of our species.

One of the goals of this blog is to discover plausible, rational definitions of religious metaphors, not in order to dismiss them but to decode them.

Learning

I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that matter “learns” how to survive by the simple means that behaviours that don’t serve survival through time do not persist.

But there can be no “learning” without memory, because there can be no knowledge without memory. There has to be a persistent record of experience to learn from.

In a sense, life itself is all about maintaining a record of experiences that result in persistence, that result in survival.

But where does that record reside? We know that human beings (indeed all forms of life, but let’s discuss human beings) keep a record of experience in various short-and long-term memory systems. But there are some human behaviours that are clearly not learned. A child will focus on its mother’s face from the moment its little eyes are capable of focusing. No one taught the child to stare at its mother, or to say “bababa”, or to suckle at the breast. These things are instinctual.

The idea that some forms of knowledge seem to be innate has confused philosophers from at least the time of Plato. Fortunately, science has solved it. Every living creature carries a record of the sorts of behaviours that work for its species in a longer-term “memory” system – DNA.

Experience is the fount of all knowledge. One of the arguments against this position has been that some knowledge appears to be innate. How can it therefore be founded on experience? An infant has no experience to draw upon!

The answer is that in DNA and other genetic material is recorded the experience of generations of living creatures, who passed on their knowledge to the new generations.

This innate, instinctual knowledge is a record of the sorts of behaviours that result in survival. Behaviours not only of the baby as a whole, but of its eyes, ears, and other organs, of its brain, of its digestive system, of the hair on its head, all of which through the millennia have served the survival of its kind.

Persistence

One way to look at evolution is as the product of persistence through time. I don't mean persistence in the common sense of "keeping on trying", although there's plenty of that in evolution - I mean that some things persist through time, they last, and some things don't.
Back when the world was a chemical soup, certain of these chemicals dissolved, while others showed a tendency to stabilize and to persist as time went on. They bound with other chemicals to form even longer-lasting compounds, and over time, given the sorts of conditions that existed on earth in its earliest days, they formed the very complex molecular structures known as proteins.

This process is not speculative - it has been reproduced in the laboratory under conditions similar to conditions on Earth in its earliest days.

A fuller discussion of the transition from chemicals to complex molecules to proteins can be found at: http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/e41/41.htm

But really evolution is about what persists and what doesn't. If something does not persist through time, we don't see it. It went. It's gone. It's extinct. If something does persist, it lasts, it's not gone, it carries on, it survives. The battle for survival is really a testing of what works to allow an entity to persist and not to dissolve or vanish.

So some things have come down to us from the dawn of the Earth because they have solved the riddle of persistence. They have "learned" how to survive. Even the smallest molecule can "learn" in the sense that it will do the things that permit it to persist, because if it doesn't, it ceases. This is not to argue that elements and atoms and molecules are intelligent and make decisions to survive. It just means that if they do not do the things that allow them to persist, they just don't persist and are gone.

It's important to understand this somewhat mindless process of chemical elements stewing about for millions of years, and eventually forming increasingly complex compounds that are different because they persist. The building blocks of life are elements like carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. From these there evolved sugars, amino acids, nucleotides, fatty acids, phospholipids, vitamins and coenzymes. From these evolved proteins, lipids, carbohydrates and nucleic acids. Eventually, the process produced very complex proteins like RNA and DNA, that persist because they have "learned" how to reproduce themselves. They behave in ways that result in their persistence.

The evolution of proteins is discussed here: http://www.utdallas.edu/~cirillo/nats/day18.htm
Again, remember that "learning" here is just doing the "right" thing to survive, and surviving is more than just existing, it is also a set of behaviours that will result in the chemical compound or molecule or whatever, the entity that displays such behaviour, persisting through time.

So to this point I hope I've shown that even chemicals can "learn" in the sense that they will do the sorts of things that result in their persistence. They do this unconsciously, but if they don't do the "right" sorts of things to survive - they don't.

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