I think when people talk about “soul” or sometimes “consciousness,” they are really referring to the phenomenon of the “first person view”-- the feeling that there’s something in us that’s doing the sensing and feeling. Descart, one of the first people to think of the mind as a machine, termed this “phanstasms.” He accepted that the mind worked by “motions,” yet he could not come to terms that moving particles could actually experience or feel anything. Instead, he proposed that phantasms existed alongside them and were the observers. Earlier in my philosophical life, I had in parallel come to a very similar conclusion. I believed in the concept of the “observescence,” which acted in many ways as what people would commonly understand as the soul or sometimes refer to as consciousness. This observescence would not partake in will (i do believe our minds are deterministic) and simply sit along side it, undetectable as cosciousness must be. Ie, it is the old truism that an AI can profess all it wants that it is conscious, yet you’ll never have one shred of evidence to believe.
Yet a year or two ago I realized the lethal fault of such a line of thought. I kept talking about this inner thing in me that feels, this consciousness that observes, and of course how the only one who could have direct observation of it be me. I knew that i was conscious, after all. I didn’t have to prove it to anyone. They could just take it on faith.
Yet… if this consciousness cannot be observed by any material means… and if the thinking in my mind is material… well, then I can have absolutely no evidence that i was conscious better than could anyone else.
Indeed, if we define consciousness as something whose presence we cannot determine in a machine… we can’t determine it in ourselves either.
I don’t know if my words have come out right, but I think that that is an incredibly profound thought, overthrowing nearly everything we knew about ourselves and providing the only window we have on that thing that we thought we could call consciousness. The thing is that examining our minds from the third person, everything makes sense. When i utter the words “I AM CONSCIOUS!,” one may dissect my mind and say, “well, you know, those neurons over there fired that and the body printed out a common message.” It would appear no different than if i were to write a program that put an error message on screen. The same goes for pain, as one may say that the shriveled expression on my face is nothing more than the reflex to some line of signals. I could make a program that winces the computer just as easily. Yet there cannot be anything beyond this. The first person cannot derive from anything different than the third. There cannot be phantasms that do any feeling, no soul that observes. It is motions themselves, by some strange means, that define and feel themselves.
If you make a machine that winces, its pain will be as real (or as non-real) as our own. That is what must be concluded. All other things are immaterial. It is as if consciousness (observescence) and causality itself are two sides of the same damn coin.
Frankly, I do not know too well how to ultimately understand this. You may gather as much from the confusion of my speech. Yet the ultimate truth of consciousness, I believe, is embedded in this line of reasoning.
P.S. and as for free will… it is a silly paradox. An action can only have precisely two sources: a cause or randomness (a lack of cause). Either something happens because of something else, or it happens just for the hell of it. Free will is defined as being rather removed from determinism, yet that means it cannot be anything other than randomness. Yet free will is also taken to be the very antithesis of randomness… so it’s just a paradox. However, generally our decisions have very clear causes anyway. As I like to say, we are free to do whatever we want, but we are not free in what we want. Just imagine if we had that power. And even if we were free to make ourselves want whatever we wanted… you can see how it all reduces to absurdity. Sorry, free will can’t exist. (Also, I must clarify that colloquially we often say we “want to exercise”, when in fact we actually don’t. If we really wanted to, we’d be doing it. What we mean is “we want to want to exercise.” Ha, that’s some free will right there.)
