Right now, inside of your head, you are experiencing an inner movie. This movie is simply amazing. There’s 3D imaging,  surround sound, and a plethora of special effects. Through these effects, you are able to hear and see the world around you. You’re also able to sense it—the scent of a summer rain, the taste of that first sip of coffee in the morning, the feel of the mug as you wrap your hands around it. Your inner movie even provides you with a sense of your body—pain, hunger, warmth, cold, even orgasms. There are emotions too—joy, anger, anxiety, that cozy and cuddly feeling you get every time you see a baby sloth (okay, that may just be me).

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At the heart of your inner movie is the fact that you are experiencing all of this directly. This is your movie, your subjective experience. Your inner movie is what we call your stream of consciousness. William James was the first to coin the phrase “stream of consciousness.” He described it in his book, Principles of Psychology, as sort of a river of awareness. It’s a constant barrage of thoughts, ideas, images, emotions, memories, and sensations. Each thought, feeling, etc. flows into the next, overlapping and melding into one another, providing us with the rich experience that is life. All of us are conscious. This is a fundamental fact of human existence, but what is consciousness and what does it have to do with the soul?

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To find out, we’re going to have to go back, WAY back. Like ancient Greece back. The Greeks thought of the soul as the characteristic which set apart living and nonliving things. For them, it was the thing that was responsible for our emotional states and that which allowed practical thinking and reasoning. The Greeks also saw the soul as the home of our virtues (like justice and courage) and our ability to maintain them. Later philosophical thinking would equate the soul to mental and psychological functions like thought, perception, and desire but this wouldn’t happen for some time. As for consciousness? Well, the Greeks didn’t have a word for that. They didn’t need it. Their definition of the soul was all the explanation they required.

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Enter the beginning of the modern era. This is when consciousness became regarded as definitive of the mental, something which existed within the mind alone. Remember Rene Descartes from history class? You know, French guy with the pointy nose and Guy Fawkes mustache? Hero to the leaders of the French Revolution? This dude was all about the mind. He truly believed that logic, introspection, and clarity of thought could solve all the world’s problems. If all of us were just better at thinking, there would be no crime, war, etc. You know how people always tell you in order to solve a really big problem you need to break down into smaller ones? You can thank Descartes for that.

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So, what did Descartes think of consciousness? In 1640, he wrote of consciousness,  “By the word thought (pensee) I understand all that of which we are conscious as operating in us.” His view on the matter, however, can be summed up by his ultimate philosophical conclusion: Cogito Ergo Sum or, as we know it, “I think, therefore, I am.” For him, consciousness was axiomatic, or self-evident, obvious. Consciousness is thought, which is of the mind and you cannot logically debate the existence of consciousness without using your mind to do so. Fairly cut and dry and what we’d expect from Mr. Guy Fawkes of Logic and Rationale.

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In 1688, another philosopher, this one with an even pointier nose, piggy-backed off of Descartes’ work. You’ll know this guy as well. He was an Englishman by the name of John Locke. Yep, that guy, the separation of church and state dude. It was because of his arguments on religious tolerance that England became the envy of European nations by the 18th century. In England, you could no longer be locked up for what you believed. In fact, what you believed had absolutely no effect on your status or prospects, a concept which was foreign to most other developed countries at the time.

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John Locke’s contribution to the concepts of consciousness and the soul are much like Descartes’. Both Locke and Descartes regarded consciousness as essential to human thought and personal identity. Locke, however, used the terms “soul” and “consciousness” somewhat interchangeably. In his celebrated book, An Essay on Human Understanding, Locke wrote:

“I do not say there is no soul in a man, because he is not sensible of it in his sleep; but I do say, he cannot think at any time, waking or sleeping: without being sensible of it. Our being sensible of it is not necessary to anything but to our thoughts; and to them it is, and to them it always will be necessary…”

Confusing? A bit. Basically, Locke believed that personal identity is a matter of psychological continuity and rooted in consciousness. He also believed that consciousness could be transferred from one person to another. Sort of like reincarnation. Locke uses the story of the Prince and Cobbler to illustrate his thoughts on this. In this story, a prince switches bodies with a cobbler, Freaky Friday style. When the prince is in the new body, he doesn’t become the cobbler. He still has all his old princely thoughts about him. He’s himself, with the same memories and the same consciousness.

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For the next two centuries, following Locke and Descartes’ revelations, nothing really happens in the realm of the soul and consciousness. Thought and conscious continued to share the same domain. As we rounded into the twentieth century, scientists moved away from thinking about conscious subjectively and began to focus on the objective nature of behavior. Internal events, such as emotions and thought, became less important than observable behavior. This was the era of the disciplined science. Anything which could not be scientifically and objectively measured was left behind to make way for the more “sophisticated” studies.

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Even in the 1960s, when cognitive psychologists began to dip their toes into internal processes (such as memory, emotions, and intelligence), the concepts of consciousness and the soul were largely neglected. These notions were simply too subjective for scientists of that time. It wasn’t until the last twenty years or so that scientists began to take a closer look at the concept of consciousness.

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In recent years, the focal point surrounding the science of consciousness has been all about correlations, correlations between certain areas of the brain and certain states of consciousness. Since modern science has solved Descartes’ mind-body problem, the relationship between the mental realm (our thoughts, beliefs, etc.) and the physical realm (our bodies, neurons, etc.), a new proverbial can of worms has been opened up surrounding the concepts of the soul and consciousness.

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On one side you have the materialists (or physicalists) who believe in nothing more than the physical. Our bodies and minds are complete entities and nothing resides outside of them which cannot be explained by science. For the materialist, consciousness is a neurological phenomenon. Put simply, it’s just a thing our brain does, like how it produces happy chemicals when we’re working out, or the way it’s sending signals to and from your eyes to interpret the words that you’re reading right now. It’s just another brain function.

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The opposing view is that of the dualists. Consciousness is more than merely a brain function. It’s something immaterial, separate from our bodies and our physical forms. It cannot be treated as operating within the physical realm because it’s not physical. It’s more than that. Dualists see a difference between “mental” (or the brain) and “mind.” For them, the mind is not related to mental processes. It’s something else entirely.

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So which side is right? Is consciousness just some quirky side effect of our complex command module-our brains? Or is it something outside of our bodies? Without looking at this through the lens of religion or spiritual belief, I challenge you to think on this. What do you think consciousness is? Stay tuned for my next article where I will share my own personal opinion on the matter and talk about some more really cool philosophy.