The Soul-Memory Nexus

If we classify philosophical conceptions of what the soul may be, we find three categories in use. I want to look at each as it relates to memory. At the end I’ll try to make clear why choosing memory as a magnifying glass makes sense. Let’s start a listing of the categories. The soul is—

A. Immortal and Uncreated. We find this conceptualization in Plato and also in Hindu thought. In both traditions, reincarnation (metempsychosis in the Greek version) is presumed to take place. If the soul is conceived as immaterial and uncreated, our inability to remember any past existence before the current incarnation becomes a problem. To reconcile the supposed status of the soul with its very limited memory calls for an explanation. A contradiction looms without one.

B. Created but Immortal. This formulation underlies Western Christian, and particularly Catholic, thought. Here the fact that we don’t remember preexistence is a virtue. Why should we if we did not exist? The evidence that memory may operate after the body is left behind (see postings on NDEs) is confirmatory. Once created, immortal—and, in the out-of-body state, still functioning.

C. Material and Perishable. The naturalistic view has no concept of an independent soul. That which we call soul is the material functioning of brain processes, a kind of input-output device. Memory is stored in tissue. Our experience of memory, tied entirely to this life, is consistent with the naturalistic view.

The problem identified in A is somewhat mitigated by the fact that some people remember previous lives. I will discuss that subject in more detail in future postings. The problem remains, however, because most people don’t have such memories. Nor do we have evidence from NDE reports that, on departure from the body, old memory streams become active and, Aha!, we now remember lives in earlier incarnations.

What is an amelioration of the problem in A becomes a problem in B. Reports of previous lives are not by any measure universal, however; thus the B position may still be correct, but it seems to require some modification. We might assume, for instance, that created souls might conceivably stay on in this dimension after one life and manage somehow to occupy new bodies. Why would they do so? It may be that they failed to achieve their purpose here. A surprisingly large proportion of those reporting previous lives lost the life that they remember in youth through violence or accidents. This option (“stay-and-go-around-again”) may even have divine sanction. In this formulation, which I’ve never encountered as a doctrine anywhere, reincarnation may be recognized as an exception, but not, as in Hinduism, as the universal rule.

Evidence of earlier lives is consistent with a conception of the soul as an independent agent, not with the naturalistic view. This last mode of thought needs to explain the evidence as something other than it is understood to be. There may be memories, but they’re not of another life, for instance. The super-psi theory is a favorite mode of explanation. For that, please see the posting under that heading.

Significance of Memory. Memory is central to our experience of duration. Any concept of life after death requires that we should remember what came before. Exactly the same rule applies to previous lives. If we don’t remember them, they might as well not have been. Another way to put this is that a third party may know with certainty that Jane Doe, now in heaven, is the same Jane Doe who lived in the twentieth century in Amherst, say. But Jane Doe herself will not know that if she doesn’t remember her days in Amherst. Ontological continuity is not the same as conscious continuity. The latter requires memory. Yet another way to put this is that if memory is discontinuous—if it ceases on death or fades away entirely after death; if it is wiped away upon birth and is not recoverable later—then the materialistic theories are functionally identical to spiritual experience. You die; with death you’re gone. A temporally delimited memory is equivalent to materialism. Applied to the concept of agency, the essence of which is consciousness, endurance in an agency requires endurance of memory. If we cannot discover where the memories of a previous existence are stored, why they are inaccessible, and how they might be recovered, the logical position is B: we were created at or around birth. I’m obviously not done with this subject.