Allegory of the Human Machine

I believe that a few singular concepts may have been guessed correctly by man in his musing on spirituality and ontology. The ideas of a soul, spirit, or ethereal body are fundamentally identical ideas proposed by nearly every distinct spiritual dogma around the world. I think that’s because this is the one idea that they all got right. There is undeniably something beyond our physical body. A man is simply not just his brain. With only a little thought, this revelation becomes blatantly apparent. If you are just the biological and chemical equivalent of a massively parallel computer system, then from where does your consciousness arise? A computer is just a chain reaction of chemical and physical interactions of matter and energy, and while our minds are certainly rather complex, this is all that they are. Our minds are simply very intricate, well-oiled logic devices. They should operate independently and objectively just like any other machine. So why is this clearly not the case? Once our computer technology develops past the limitations of silicon, be it with the embracing of grapheme semiconductors, or quantum computing, or what have you, we can expect that man will finally have the tools of sentient creation at his disposal. We will create an electrical or quantum device analogous to a human brain. It shall be, psychologically speaking, entirely human. It shall supposedly be capable of such things as learning, experiencing human emotions and qualities—love, laughter, hope, imagination, contempt, jealousy—and may even question its own existence with philosophical wonder just as we do. But again, it is simply a very complex machine that models our brain structure and behavior. So the question arises—is it sentient? Does it have its own conscious world of existence just like each and every one of us? I don’t think so, to be honest. I believe that conscious existence is an exclusively human experience. In fact, I think that our behavior is greatly influenced by our awareness of our own conscious existence. In that way, I might speculate the behavior of our “human machine” to be slightly robotic. Like it would go through the motions rather convincingly, but simultaneously would lack that spark of humanity that exists within each of us. Not being truly conscious, it may not wonder about its purpose, fear the uncertainty of death, or be capable of making a truly meaningful connection to another. This speculation of mine assumes that the soul carries some kind of information with it—a personality of its own perhaps. Maybe it carries with it the essence of who we are, such as our core beliefs and motivations. This aspect to our existence would then affect the way we behave on this earth with influence originating not just from the physical brain and its many thoughts and calculations, as would probably be the case for our poor machine. Or maybe our souls are less interesting and distinct, and serve as the naked property of conscious awareness, and nothing more. Of course the influence that this property would have on our behavior is not to be underestimated, assuming that we are aware of its presence. I simply can’t wait until the day we can make the “human machine” a reality. Hopefully, we may finally gain some insight into some of the most petulant ontological questions we have been asking since the beginning.