The soul and the spheroidons

In practice, the soul would be the current state of our neuronal connections or something like that. Inside that neurons’web in our brain a “little” universe of ideas will be formed, most of them floating at ease like celestial bodies and some others making specialized groups which would interact to define our soul.

With a super-capacity memory, the human brain begins to register everything the senses perceive from the first time. All that information would be useless if there would be no way to manage it (to manage it, not in the sense of “to organize it” as the brain takes care of that when we sleep) For that prestigious position the “I”, the conscience, was nominated or it did it by itself. Not sure if I’m talking about “ego” from that ego, id and super-ego’s psychoanalytic stuff; in any case I just mean a mental entity whose main managing tasks are:

• Establishing boundaries between our body and anything that is not our body.
• To make, develop and protect an identity for our body.
• To use all means available in that body for the wellbeing of that body itself (even if it got confused in the path and determine itself as an isolated/independent entity)

Consciousness is only one of the abilities that our brain develops besides controlling body functions, storing and sorting information... However, starting from the... I... Ego, the brain gets a lot of means to manipulate what is there outside of the body, the external world.

What is the approach for the Ego to foment identity and physical wellbeing? Simply enough, if it hurts the body, reject it! if it gives pleasure, let’s have it again! But the body will ask for more, for that it has a memory that remind him “I have tasted that before” On the other hand, life is uncertain and brain is imaginative; then it begins to interpret and associate signals to promises of pleasures and pains, known ones or new ones. The chocolate cake is not there anymore but our consciousness make the mind to react: wish, hunger, happiness...

That longing for the good and repulse for the “not so good” and anything that got involved and take us to that exploring path along life, those are the feelings. So, why we don’t always understand them? Maybe because in that wild search for pleasure we have gone so far without even take the time to slowly experience that in the end a confused succession of affective references without object is all what is left. (“affective” meaning a rather temporal attachment to something)

The soul then will be a system of ideas where they interact a consciousness (Ego), information (all that is perceived and stored) and a will (feelings) with the purpose of physical wellbeing or its own idea of wellbeing (in case of those affections that seem not to have direct relation to the physiologic) Bodies and minds can vary not only among humans but between alien intelligences or artificial lives like conscious machines; but in essence they are just those three things, not mentioning, of course, the organ or mechanism that makes that system work and the body for its existence has been developed.

Now, let’s consider the case of the spheroidon; a creature with a complex soul whose body is just an organic levitating spheric shell (yes, it’s just an example, I’m not that mad) Practically a body and a brain at the same time! That makes us think if the soul may be a mere consequence of a biologic adaptation, a simple form of bio-diversity, or on the contrary the biggest step in all living beings’ evolution.


An animal like humans consume and deal with a lot of energy within its body and in its machines, which coincide with the ultimate purpose of life itself. But, if things go further to living forms even more advanced than spheroidons, beings made all of energy like souls made bodies or vice versa... then what? well who knows. For now, let’s leave it at that.

January 22, 2006. El Jardín Lúgubre