Richard Dawkins - Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist

I AM WRITING THIS two days after a breathtaking visit to Arizonas Grand Canyon (breathtaking still hasnt gone the way of awesome although I fear it may). To many Native American tribes the Grand Canyon is a sacred place: site of numerous origin myths from the Havasupai to the Zuni; hushed repose of the Hopi dead. If I were forced to choose a religion, thats the kind of religion I could go for. The Grand Canyon confers stature on a religion, outclassing the petty smallness of the Abrahamics, the three squabbling cults which, through historical accident, still afflict the world.

In the dark night I walked out along the south rim of the canyon, lay down on a low wall and gazed up at the Milky Way. I was looking back in time, witnessing a scene from a hundred thousand years ago for that is when the light set out on its long quest to dive through my pupils and spark my retinas. At dawn the following morning I returned to the spot, shuddered with vertigo as I realized where I had been lying in the dark, and looked down towards the canyons floor. Again I was gazing into the past, two billion years in this case, back to a time when only microbes stirred sightless beneath the Milky Way. If Hopi souls were sleeping in that majestic hush they were joined by the rockbound ghosts of trilobites and crinoids, brachiopods and belemnites, ammonites, even dinosaurs.

Was there some point in the mile-long evolutionary progression up the canyons strata when something you could call a soul sprang into existence, like a light suddenly switched on? Or did the soul creep stealthily into the world: a dim thousandth of a soul in a pulsating tube-worm, a tenth of a soul in a coelacanth, half a soul in a tarsier, then a typical human soul, eventually a soul on the scale of a Beethoven or a Mandela? Or is it just silly to speak of souls at all?

Not silly if you mean something like an overwhelming sense of subjective, personal identity. Each one of us knows we possess it even if, as many modern thinkers aver, it is an illusion an illusion constructed, as Darwinians might speculate, because a coherent agency of singular purpose helps us to survive.

Visual illusions such as the Necker Cube

or the Penrose Impossible Triangle

or the Hollow Mask illusion demonstrate that the reality we see consists of constrained models constructed in the brain. The Necker Cubes two-dimensional pattern of lines on paper is compatible with two alternative constructions of a three-dimensional cube, and the brain adopts the two models in turn: the alternation is palpable and its frequency can even be measured. The Penrose Triangles lines on paper are incompatible with any real-world object. These illusions tease the brains model-construction software, thereby revealing its existence.

In the same way, the brain constructs in software the useful illusion of personal identity, an I apparently residing just behind the eyes, an agent taking decisions by free will, a unitary personality, seeking goals and feeling emotions. The construction of personhood takes place progressively in early childhood, perhaps by the joining up of previously disparate fragments. Some psychological disorders are interpreted as split personality, failure of the fragments to unite. Its a not unreasonable speculation that the progressive growth of consciousness in the infant mirrors a similar progression over the longer timescale of evolution. Does a fish, say, have a rudimentary feeling of conscious personhood, on something like the same level as a human baby?

We can speculate on the evolution of the soul, but only if we use the word to mean something like the constructed internal model of a self. Things are very different if, by soul, we mean a spook that survives bodily death. Personal identity is an emergent consequence of material brain activity and it must disintegrate, eventually reverting to its pre-birth nothingness, when the brain decays. But there are poetic usages of soul and related words that I am unashamed to embrace. In an essay published in my earlier anthology A Devils Chaplain, I deployed such words to extol a great teacher, F. W. Sanderson, headmaster of my old school before I was born. Notwithstanding the ever-present risk of misunderstanding, I wrote of the spirit and the ghost of the dead Sanderson: