Many people believe that they have a soul, an inner being which transcends the physical nature of our world. Perhaps it even transcends death. Some also believe that other animals have souls as well.

But what could a soul be? It seems strange in this very physical world to think of it as an ethereal, largely undetectable inner “self” yet we are aware of the world in much that way – as an ethereal yet undetectable “consciousness”. While we may be tempted to think of the soul as a kind of inner person or a spirit being or some kind of inter-dimensional shadow, it is the fact that we are conscious – aware – of the world and our lives that leads us to think we have a soul. Many think it is this conscious awareness that is the everyday manifestation of our soul. It is the sounds, colours, feelings and thoughts we experience that makes up our conscious awareness of the world and in the absence of a good explanation for how we can do this it seems reasonable to think that there IS no explanation – this is just what it is to have a soul.

Of course, this is a bit of a non-explanation when considered from an empirical (scientific) point of view. Trying to ascertain what this inner being (consciousness) is has occupied enquiring minds for thousands of years. So difficult has the problem been that the term “the hard problem” was coined by philosopher Geoffrey Chalmers in 1995 when he wrote that “the hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how sentient organisms have qualia or phenomenal experiences—how and why it is that some internal states are felt states, such as heat or pain, rather than unfelt states, as in a thermostat or a toaster. Explaining how the brain works in a mechanical sense might be difficult, but these are easy problems in contrast to explaining why it is that we seem to have experiences – why it is that there is something that it is like to be a mind.”

Today, we know that experiences are somehow a property of brains. There has been considerable research into what are called the easy problems – how the brain does what it does. It seems clear that the physical processes of brains are what accounts for that indefinable inner being. Souls, it seems, are really no more than brains doing stuff. When our brain processes information and directs our behaviours, we have experiences – conscious awareness of what we are doing. There seems to be a direct correlation between what brains do and the things we experience. This fits with our physical view of the world. There is a lot of evidence that only material physical things can influence the world but no evidence that immaterial things can do the same. An immaterial consciousness would not seem able to influence the physical world. Yet we are left with the nagging problem of explaining how the seemingly immaterial nature of consciousness is in fact part of our world and appears to drive how physical things happen (eg, we can decide to pick up the phone and order dinner).

Some argue that consciousness is a kind of universal property of the world which, perhaps, attends most of the physical objects in the world, but it isn’t clear what they mean by this. When we experience the world we depend on the way our brains function to have these experiences. What we are aware of changes in lockstep with changes in brain states; sometimes we experience things that are not genuine objective external events, for example when we dream or have hallucinations, so consciousness seems to be derived from within, not from without. Absent a brain and what could consciousness be? If a brain is needed to mediate consciousness into some experiential form, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to say that consciousness without a brain is not anything at all, which makes it somewhat empty as a natural property of physical things.

Others suggest that consciousness IS the world and that all there really can be is consciousness – perhaps pure thought – in which individual episodes of consciousness are somehow dissociated moments of a greater continuum. This cannot be disproved because we can always resort to explaining everything away in this manner and it seems somewhat arbitrary to claim that a pure consciousness would bother to instantiate multiple episodes of isolated consciousness.

Nonetheless, this point of view does have an essential factual basis. After all, if our experience stems from how our brains function, then the world we experience is one of our own making. The entire universe as it appears to us IS all there is and so in a very real way, all there really is for each of us is our consciousness. But that is a different proposition from the claim that the universe itself is consciousness. So far, there is little evidence to support such an idea.

In a nutshell then, it would seem to be the case that non-physical things such as a soul in the traditional sense cannot influence the physical world. Physical things (eg brains) affect other physical things (eg behaviours) so we are safe to conclude that when we experience the world, experience is what it is for our brain to interact with the world. This interaction can be described in physical terms and leaves little room for anything more.

The answer to our question, it seems, is no. Animals, including humans, do not really have souls. Worse, we don’t even exist in the way that we think we do – as actual selves with awareness of the world and free will to make choices about how we live in the world. Brains do stuff but free floating selves that have no physical presence cannot, indeed do not, do stuff. In the end, it seems, we really are just a pack of neurons, to quote Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick in his book, “The Astonishing Hypothesis”.

But I admit, this is not a satisfying conclusion. As human beings, we need meaning and purpose to live rewarding lives. For this reason, I think it is much nicer to live in the world believing that we all have souls and that just maybe, there is a greater goodness to it all. To me, it seems better to believe that I am more than just the operation of a kind of biological machine. I am sure you do too. If the world we experience is of our own making, there really is space in there for souls and better places. And in that world, all animals do have souls!