I Am a Camera

In Whither the "Magic" of Mind?, my latest addition to this blog, I extended a long string of prior posts about the subject of consciousness. I listed in that post some links to many of those earlier posts. Now, more on consciousness.

By consciousness I mean what philosophers of mind sometimes call "phenomenal consciousness" — not "access consciousness," which is "the global availability of information to processing systems in the brain." I gather that access consciousness is, to philosophers, roughly what psychologists mean by "cognition" or the "cognitive states" of the brain. Phenomenal consciousness or "subjective experience," as it is also called, accompanies access consciousness, but — at least to those philosophers who believe that it, in addition to mere cognition, truly exists — it is not the same thing.

Rather, consciousness (I'll henceforth omit the "phenomenal") is a sensation or impression of "what it is like" to be something to which we direct our attention. That "something" is an event which we are witness to ... say, the color red, for example, when we see a red tricycle. Accordingly, when we are cognitively aware of a thing or event that we sense in the external world, these philosophers say, our awareness is typically accompanied by a "qualitative feel." The color of the red tricycle, for instance, evokes in us a certain intangible feel that is different from the one associated with the color of, say, a yellow school bus.

Philosophers who ponder such things do not often say "qualitative feel," though. Instead, they say quale (KWAH-lay), the plural of which is qualia (KWAH-lee-uh). The cognitive awareness that we gain when we witness a passing yellow school bus gives rise, typically, to the experience of particular qualia. These qualia are the ones we associate with the color yellow, with the hulking size of the bus, with the sound it makes as it drives by our open window, etc. By virtue of these qualia, we form a subjective impression of "what it is like" to be a moving yellow school bus.

Every observable event is, in philosophy, a phenomenon. It will typically have in our subjective experience certain qualia associated with it. The qualia-laden phenomenon can be, but does not have to be, a sensory event based on stimuli received from the external world. It also can be something like a pain in the neck, or a sensation of hunger. It can be a thought. It can be a symbolic representation within the mind — as, for instance, the one psychologists call the "self," whenever it comes into mental focus during the course of our cognitive activity.

Any such phenomenal event can (or must) evoke a subjective experience above and beyond our immediate cognitive state or states. For example, when any of us thinks of his or her "self," each of us summons up his or her own private, inner impression of "what it is like to be me."


Many philosophers of mind who speak of phenomena and qualia are "dualists" who say the conscious mind, so described, is an entity distinct from all the brain states and activities that underlie consciousness. True, consciousness arises from the brain and its internal states, but it is more than just another functional state of the brain. It isn't physical, in the way that all the other aspects of the brain's functioning are physical. Hence, the physical activity of the neurons of the brain are not sufficient to explain why we are conscious in the first place.

These philosophical dualists are fond of talking about hypothetical alternative worlds in which each of us possesses a "zombie twin." My zombie twin — I'll call him Z.T. — looks and acts just like me in every respect ... including his ability to report in detail on his inner "conscious" experiences. But Z.T. isn't actually conscious! He's under the illusion that he has subjective inner experiences involving phenomenal events' qualities or qualia, but he really doesn't!

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

According to David J. Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, there must be psychophysical laws of nature in our universe by virtue of which immaterial, nonphysical conscious experiences arise in our brains, but not in those of our zombie twins in the "universe next door." These laws come into force in response to the sheer complexity of our brains' functional organization. In a hypothetical zombie world, however, these "psychophysical" laws would be wholly absent, even though the denizens' brains share the same functional organization as our own. Z.T. would lack conscious experience ... but he would still give the same reports about his conscious internal states as I do!

This anomaly makes sense to Chalmers and others with like takes on the conscious mind; after all, Z.T. and all the other zombie twins in the next universe over behave just like us. Behavior is seemingly a function of the brain's cognitive, information-processing capabilities, which in our zombie twins, by hypothesis, mimic perfectly our own. For us and for our zombie twins, reporting on one's interior states, including one's (illusory, in the case of Z.T.) consciousness, is, after all, no more than a matter of behavior.


Chalmers characterizes himself as a mind-body dualist, but this does not mean he believes that anything supernatural, such as God or the soul, exists. To him, the conscious mind is entirely a natural thing. It arises by virtue of laws of nature: physical laws such as human physicists study, amplified by psychophysical laws yet to be discovered.

My own inclination is to go one step further, and to look for ways in which the immaterial aspect of the mind called consciousness, or subjective experience, can be related to another putative immaterial aspect of our being: the soul.


Historically in Christian thought, there has been a fair amount of disagreement as to what the soul actually is. The standard view today is that the soul is one component of yet another sort of dualism, that of "body/soul."

Part of the reason for the historical disagreement is that the words used in the Old and New Testaments for these concepts vary from passage to passage. The Old Testament, written in Hebrew, uses certain Hebrew words for "body" and "soul," while the New Testament, translated from the Greek, uses others. Within a given Testament, different books and different passages within books employ different words for "body" and "soul."

In some cases in the New Testament, these words form not just a dualism but a triptych: "body," "soul," and "spirit." "Soul" and "spirit" seem, in many of these passages, to be distinct concepts. In other passages, the biblical ideas of "soul" and "spirit" seem interchangeable. Moreover, a word translated as "soul" and/or "spirit" sometimes seems to be better rendered in English as, for example, "life."

It has been claimed that part of the confusion comes from different notions of such matters among the Hebrew-speaking Israelites who wrote down the books Christians call the Old Testament, as opposed to those of the later Jewish and gentile writers of the New Testament, steeped as they were in the Hellenistic world of classical Greek ideas.


Over the course of early and medieval Christian history, luminaries such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas applied their intellects to these biblical concepts. Their ideas about the soul are still with us today. And there have been modern attempts to come to grips with the soul, with diverse results which vary among (for instance) Catholics who adhere to the Roman Church's catechetical teachings, conservative Protestants, theologically "liberal" Protestants, neoorthodox Protestants, and so forth and so on.

As a result of this historical and linguistic mishmash concerning the soul, my attempts to research the theology of the soul in preparation for what I am about to say have resulted in quite a bit of frustration. I am now, I admit, no more certain as to what the soul supposedly "is" from a theological point of view than I was when I started.


All the same, I think I can say with some confidence that we each have a soul, created by God. (I am of course assuming God and the soul both exist.) The body and the soul are compounded together in such a way as to make for the essential unity of who we each are as human individuals — a compound whose form or type is different than it would be otherwise.

An apt analogy is with the chemical compound table salt, or NaCl, which has an entire different nature than sodium (Na), chlorine (Cl), or a physical mixture of the two elements. Without their molecular bonds, the atoms of NaCl would not, for example, taste salty. Likewise, without a soul, we could not be said to be made in the "image of God" or to be the "salt of the earth."

That brief discussion represents at least a down payment on speaking theologically about what the soul is. What about what — if anything — the soul does?


One of the main things many theologians say a soul does is ferry our unique individual identities, after we die, into the afterlife. Different Christian denominations and theologians have different takes on the afterlife, in accordance with two promises we seem to have been given in scripture: first, that we immediately, upon dying, join God in some disembodied state of pure spirit or soul ... but, second, that one day in the indeterminate future we will also experience a bodily resurrection, in which each soul will be united with its body once more.

Some theologians have historically put more emphasis on the disembodied life of the soul following death, others on the resurrection. But all pretty much agree that, either way, we will still be who we always were, once we reach the afterlife. All our memories, for example, will be intact. The people we loved on this earth, we will still love. The knowledge we gained, we will not lose.

So my attempt to unify the idea of immaterial mental consciousness with the idea of an immaterial soul begins with trying to see how the soul could possibly ferry the identities we develop in this world into the next.


Start with memory. There is probably no aspect of the functioning of our brains that is more responsible for stabilizing our individual identities over the days and years of our lives than the fact that we remember what has happened to us in the past. Our personal history remains part of us forever — at least until we die.

Modern neuroscience has been able to discover quite a bit about how the neurons that make up our brains store memories. It is pretty clear that memory in the ordinary sense of the word is 100 percent physical. When, say, due to the ravages of a degenerative affliction such as Alzheimer's disease, we lose our ability to form memories, it is because our brain tissue isn't what it used to be. It is accordingly plausible to suppose that when our bodies decay fully after our death, our memories as such are simply gone.

But the soul is said to be able to violate that limitation. It is capable of ferrying our identities, including our memories, into the afterlife with us. How can this be?


Imagine, if you will, that the soul acts as a sort of camera. It contains the wherewithal to record the subjective impressions that we form in our minds when we direct our conscious attention to the various phenomenal events and qualia we bear witness to during our lives.

In terms of its ability to record our subjective experiences, the soul may accordingly be like a digital camera whose onboard memory capacity is very large, in terms of the number of megabytes of storage it contains — large, because it has to contain records of all the countless experiences that shape us during our lifetimes. These "photographic" records of our lifetime experiences are destined to accompany our soul into the afterlife and to form the basis for our continuing identities beyond the grave.

Suppose, also, that the conscious mind functions as sort of an optical mirror, like the ones found in the huge reflecting telescopes that gather light from stars and other objects in the heavens and focus it on photographic plates or human retinas. Such a mirror creates, at its focal point, an image of a scene. The image is wholly insubstantial, but it is nonetheless real.

To extend this admittedly speculative analogy of cameras and optical mirrors, suppose the soul receives from the conscious mind an image not of a pattern of light but a composite of the qualia of an event or phenomenon. It is this "optical" image which embodies the conscious, subjective experience that the soul "photographically" records.

If this extended analogy is correct, then consciousness exists to form phenomenal "images" which the soul somehow records. On this view, consciousness, like the soul, is immaterial, just as philosophers like David Chalmers claim it to be. It may well arise out of brain activity according to psychophysical laws such as Chalmers seeks. But it has a purpose which Chalmers does not entertain: to feed the soul with experiences to be ferried along with our basic identities into the afterlife. It is for this reason that I title this post, not all that tongue in cheek, "I Am a Camera."