Our confrontation as finite, divisible, temporal organisms with the infinite, indivisible, and eternal cosmos is a function of evolution’s exploitation of a set of boundary-creating, “self”-defining tools. Self, and all of its historically-accreted, functionally synonymous terms such as mind, soul, psyche and consciousness, is a construct of aggregated multi-modal capabilities of living things. These capabilities demonstrate emergent qualities, complexity, and organization in the story of life on this planet. Evolution operates on these capacities as they are modified to optimize fitness using genetic and epigenetic mechanisms of transmission of traits to subsequent generations. Our experience of soul, of individuation, is imbedded in the ongoing species-wide process of optimizing our local and global evolutionary fitness.
Talking about evolution and soul in one breath makes for some heuristic, and hypothesis-testing, difficulties. Imbedded and coexistent in the physical brain are the evolving archetypal semiotics of the human mind. These innate capacities structure our identity, experience, and capacity for language; they define the boundaries of what can be known, how we can have knowledge about self and world, and how we establish meaning and value as we adapt those capacities to meet the challenges on hand. While it has been possible explore the ways that brains and nervous systems have changed physically and functionally over time, the task of realizing the implications of evolutionary change on mind and soul is more problematic. However, such an endeavor promises to account for opportunistic, adaptational mechanisms operating not solely on what we experience and act upon as beings, but also on what we feel, love, dream, venerate and worship as “becomings.”
To pursue testable hypotheses concerning these innate and adaptive aspects of mind, I am in favor of rehabilitating the concept of “soul” for purposes of evaluating this complexity and richness that defines our humanity. And what we call “soul” is a composite, the parts of which we label self, God or Gods, consciousness, the unconscious, the Other, and all of the archetypal representations of identity that are the inheritance built into our brains of a species-wide innate set of symbols and cognitive-emotive tools. Universal to the species, yes, but, per Carl Jung, they are allowed to be uniquely experienced, defined, adapted, and exploited by individuals and the cultures which they constitute as members. And further, these shards of self are separately amenable to selective pressures and evolutionary changes in their identity, their expression and their mutual relations.
Testing of our hypothesis would allow demonstrations that these variations in competency, method and style not only characterize individuals, but also can be used to define groups of individuals, and the forebears who passed those variations along to them. This suggests that if we better understood the workings of the mind as an emergent phenomenon of the innate and adaptive capacities of the human brain, as we have examined the evolution of its capacities for language and symbolic representation as well as integration and control of somatic processes, we would undoubtedly recognize in its working, as we do in the immune system and the rest of the body, the “kluge-like”, often maladroit, imperfect, but functionally useful compromises manifesting in the connections between our states of consciousness, our modes of conduct, and the various ways we use our attention.
Such understanding might help explicate our ideas about ultimate agency, attachment, cooperation, and altruism, and our emergent evolution as individuals, dyads, and groups of bodies with minds. It may explicate further the association in development and function of the self-defining systems of the CNS and immunity, which share among all of the body systems unique interactivity in development and function, as well as peculiar symmetries and possible organizational homologies. A mature science of the mind might attempt to posit and prove hypotheses based on these ideas, and the process of doing so will likely necessitate a shift in the paradigm of what is defined and operationalized as not only self, but its soul.