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The Interconnectedness of Human Souls

Presented by Penn Humanities Forum at University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum)

October 7, 2009

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A human soul is no longer thought of as an ethereal piece of matter that floats away into heaven when the person dies. But what, then, if anything, is it? If one believes that a human soul is a special kind of pattern that arises in a human brain over the course of a lifetime, then it follows that its pattern, like any pattern, is subject to copying in many substrates and at various levels of fidelity. Like a picture that can be realized with hundreds of coarse-grained pixels or millions of fine-grained pixels, copies of human souls come in all grades. And where do these copies of a given human soul reside? What, that is, are the other substrates that house a given soul? Other human brains, of course, some in rather detailed ways, some in very crude ways. Thus a human soul, contrary to what we tend to think, is a floating, distributed entity rather than an entity limited to one sole location.