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Xue Fan
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CONSCIOUSNESS,
LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE
What is consciousness? What is life? What is the universe? This book explores
these three interconnected questions, providing deep insights into the past,
present and future of consciousness research.
Consciousness, Life and the Universe builds a unified view of consciousness
across biological, chemical and physical scales, tracing the natural connections
from the infinitesimally small to the infinitely big; from quantum fields and
elementary particles to molecules, cells and living organisms to the cosmos;
from the evolution of life to the evolution of the universe and to the future of
humanity. The book provides a unified framework for future consciousness
studies and identifies the scientific and technological approaches that are
essential for further understanding consciousness. Through this pioneering
research approach, the book clearly redefines consciousness and life and
conceives a plausible view of the origin and nature of the universe.
This is a must-read for students and researchers in consciousness studies,
cognitive psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience, as well as anyone
interested in the biological and physical basis of consciousness and the history
and evolution of consciousness research.
Xue Fan is a researcher in epistemology and history of science and technology

at the Brain Mind Institute at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Lausanne (EPFL), specializing in neuroscience and consciousness studies.
Xue Fan gained a PhD in epistemology and history of science and technology
and a PhD in literature and philosophy from Paris Diderot University.
CONSCIOUSNESS,
LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE
Xue Fan
Designed cover image: © Getty Images
First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2024 Xue Fan
The right of Xue Fan to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-63685-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-63684-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-63686-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781032636863
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
成然寐，蘧然觉。
庄周, 《庄子》
We are born as from a quiet sleep,

and we die to a calm awaking.*
Zhuang Zhou, Zhuangzi
* Müller, F.M. (ed.) (1891) The Sacred Books of the East. Translated by J. Legge. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
CONTENTS
Foreword xi
Introduction: the ultimate questions of consciousness, life

and the universe 1
1 A tale of millions of years: the origin of consciousness

research (from the Old Stone Age to the Middle Ages) 5
Myth: facing the unknown and the abyss 5
Religion: the words of an oak 14
Philosophy: know thyself 22
Science: the substrates of the soul 27
2 A five-century quest: explaining consciousness

(17th century–today) 37
Ghost in the machine and birth of consciousness 37
Measure consciousness: rise of experimental
psychology 41
Era of consciousness: qualia, brain, computer and
quantum mind 43
The hard problem: what is it like to be a bat or a
zombie? 43
The emergence of the explanatory gap 43
The hard problem, a false problem? 45
The neural basis of consciousness: specialization,
integration and embodiment 46
viii Contents
Global integration of brain activity 47

Key integrative neural structures 51
Computers as brains and conscious machines 55
The rise of information theory, functionalism and
computationalism 55
The birth of the Turing test and conscious
machines 57
Quantum consciousness 63
Consciousness: spectator or actor? 64
Consciousness and quantum brain 66
Where are we now? 69
3 Toward the ultimate understanding of consciousness:

tracing the deep roots in life and the universe 78
Our essence: the hidden foundation and nature of
consciousness 78
The indispensable substratum of consciousness 79
Anatomical hierarchy of consciousness 79
Evolutionary and developmental hierarchy of the
substrates of consciousness 82
Functional hierarchy of the substrates of
consciousness 83
What is consciousness? 85
Feeling the body: integrated internal body
mapping as foundational consciousness 86
Sensing the world: integrated body-environment
mapping as expansive consciousness 90
Higher cognitive functions as advanced mapping
tools for augmenting consciousness 95
In search of the hidden part of ourselves: the
nonconscious processes of the human organism 97
Neural information processing that does not produce
conscious experience 98
Dissociate experimentally conscious and
nonconscious processes 98
When the blind are not blind . . . 99
Markers of conscious and nonconscious
processes? 101
Physiological processes that cannot be consciously
controlled 103
Cognitive processes out of our control 103
Contents ix
Those automatic functions that keep us alive 104

Nonconscious control of muscles and action 104
Physiological processes that cannot be directly
accessed through consciousness 106
The inner workings of our body insulated from
ourselves 106
Benefits and fatal flaws of the limited conscious
access to our body 107
Unlock the secrets of our body: map the
nonconscious and expand consciousness 109
A so long journey: from a single cell to the human
organism 111
Building a home: primitive internal and external
mapping in unicellular organisms 112
Emergence of the first living structures 112
Membrane, the foundation of a home 113
The origin of internal and external mapping in
living organisms 115
Building a body: augmented and integrated
internal and external mapping in multicellular
organisms 120
Unity makes strength: from single cells to
multicellular organisms 120
Enhancement of senses and global homeostatic
systems—enhancement of mapping
abilities 121
Emergence of nervous systems: a further step in
integrated mapping 123
The human organism: advanced internal
and external mapping and the next leap of
evolution 130
From a bacterium’s sensing to human
consciousness 130
What makes our consciousness human 131
The next evolutionary leap of human
consciousness 142
Deep in our cells: from particles to the universe 145
The origin of consciousness: what is life? 145
The very pulse of life and consciousness 145
The foundation and origin of life on Earth 150
x Contents
Special structures in the fabric of the

universe 156
The ultimate origin and meaning of life and
consciousness: what is the universe? 158
The cosmic origin of the fundamental laws
governing life and consciousness 159
The mind of God or the origin of the universe:
nothingness? 167
The final judgment: all is meaningless? 171
4 Expand consciousness: toward the unknown 180

Expand body mapping and enhance self-regulation and
self-repair 180
Expand environment mapping and assimilate the
worlds of other life-forms 185
Expand the multiscale mapping of the universe: from
nothingness to the entire cosmos 186
Conclusion: create the future 189

Index 190
FOREWORD
In Consciousness, Life and the Universe, Dr. Xue Fan, a historian and phi
losopher of science, provides a unique, original and elegant review across bil
lions of years of many aspects of life, not least importantly of consciousness
and initially its old cousin, the soul. From ancient times until today, humans
have mostly considered the soul to be separate from the body, and this is the
theme of the very interesting first part of the book. In old myths, the spirits of
the dead were thought to haunt the living, and measures were taken to please
the evil spirits. In practically all religions, the soul is considered immortal. In
Christianity, there is a paradise for the well-behaved and an awful place for
the remaining group. Similarly in other Abrahamic religions, there are a good
place and an evil place for the souls. The souls are treated somewhat differ
ently in Hinduism and in Buddhism, but in both, they are thought to migrate
after death. The Epicureans represent one of the few exceptions. “I was not;
I have been; I am not; I do not care” was written on their gravestones. The
ancient Indian school of thought, Charvaka, similarly, considered that the
mind was a product of the body and perished with it. Except for these two
examples, practically all religions have preached that the soul will survive
after the death of the body.
Xue Fan also deals with the views of philosophers. Interestingly, up till
the 19th century, practically all philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle and
Descartes, thought that the soul would exist after the death of the body,
although they speculated wildly about what the soul might consist of. The
seat of the soul was mostly considered to be in the heart, although the brain
was regarded by some as the seat of sensation and thought as early as the 5th
century bce. Descartes, belonging to the latter group, thought of the body as
a machine and that the soul would control the body through the pineal gland,
xii Foreword
as it was unpaired. Leonardo da Vinci placed the soul in the optic chiasm,
while others placed it in the fourth ventricle. Aristotle reported that the soul
(nous) would be installed in male fetuses 40 days after conception, while in
female fetuses 90 days after!
The next interesting section of the book describes consciousness as the
coexistence and integration of the many faculties of the brain, based on struc
ture and function in neurobiological terms. Xue Fan provides a critical analy
sis of the many different theories of consciousness that have been presented
over the years by philosophers, neuroscientists, computer scientists and
physicists. Xue Fan also brings forward the essential role of the intralaminar
group of thalamic nuclei and of the ascending reticular system in maintaining
consciousness. The same areas are involved in the transition from wakeful
ness to sleep, an unconscious condition. These structures feed information to
the relevant parts of the forebrain. In contrast, large parts of the cortex can
be damaged bilaterally with maintained consciousness, whether they be the
occipital, parietal, temporal or frontal lobes. In conclusion, consciousness
is not dependent on any given part of the cortex. Even children with hydra
nencephaly, a severe condition in which the cerebral hemispheres are absent,
display consciousness, although with reduced mental capacity.
Xue Fan also emphasizes the remarkable wealth of unconscious process
ing, which is not available to our conscious brain that only represents a very
limited part of the overall operation of our nervous system. Take, for instance,
the operation of the large neuronal networks in the gut, which we have no
possibility to become aware of. The same applies to the hypothalamic control
of, for instance, the water-salt balance, endocrine system, stress, tempera
ture regulation and so forth. These are complex homeostatic systems, which
depend on different sensors and feedback and effector systems. We are largely
unaware of them, and it is only when there is a major problem that informa
tion is channeled to the conscious level for action, such as when stomachache
occurs or when we feel thirsty or hungry. These many remarkable control
systems represent the larger part of our nervous system, and they operate
without our interference. We cannot get access to their data even if our con
scious part of the brain would try to. These aspects also relate to Freud’s
early emphasis on the importance of the unconscious for the understanding
of human behavior.
The brain does thus not let most of the rich information needed for our
survival reach consciousness, which is processed by a refined homeostatic
machinery within the nervous system out of our conscious control—maybe
for good reasons. The conscious part of the brain is mainly reserved for
actions in relation to the world around us. It of course also includes cogni
tive aspects, such as learning and memory of past events that can be used for
future planning.
Foreword xiii
I have emphasized only a few important highlights in Xue Fan’s valu-

able and original contribution, which, however, is written in a much richer
framework. It extends from the origin of life with chains of RNA to unicel-
lular organisms sensing the surrounding world and finally to aspects of the
universe. I recommend this unique book to everybody with an interest in life
on Earth and beyond.
Stockholm, 23 March 2023
Sten Grillner
Distinguished Professor of Neurophysiology and Behavior
Former chair of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Nobel Institute for Neurophysiology, Karolinska Institute
Royal Swedish Academy of Science
INTRODUCTION
The ultimate questions of consciousness,
life and the universe
They say that just before we die, we would see our entire life flash in our
mind in seconds, which would be the swan song of our brain, our final dream
before death. We are not sure about that yet. We will see.
There are certain moments in life that determine who we are, leading us
to understand what is essential and that all the rest is insignificant. Illness
makes us conscious of the fragility of our body, our finitude and what life
really means. The inexorable absence of loved ones makes us conscious of
how visceral the connection with another being can be and how empty the
world could feel, even full of wonders. At twilight in Africa, surrounded by
an ancient land and grand mountains under a majestic dark blue sky, we
become conscious of the weight of eons and of our deep connection with
something much bigger than us. These are some moments leading to the
ultimate questions of consciousness, life and the universe, which form the
foundation of our existence.
The Sun, with a diameter of about 1.4 million kilometers, is more than a
million times bigger than the Earth. However, about 9,500 light-years from
the Earth, the red star UY Scuti is five billion times bigger than the Sun yet
just looks like a tiny dot among several hundred billion stars in our galaxy,
which itself appears a tiny dot among hundreds of billions of galaxies in the
universe. Nevertheless, we, tiny creatures living on a speck of dust drifting in
a seemingly infinite space can look beyond our little lives, conscious not only
of ourselves but also of the vast universe.
About 13.5 billion years after the birth of the universe and 4.2 billion
years after that of the Earth, dinosaurs began their 160 million years’ reign
on Earth, more than 500 times longer than the history of Homo sapiens,
which is merely a blink of an eye in the history of the Earth. Today, all that is
DOI: 10.4324/9781032636863-1
2 Introduction
left of dinosaurs is mere bones. Yet the human mind can travel across billions
of years, reason about the origin of the universe and contemplate these giant
creatures once roaming the Earth.
Consciousness connects us to ourselves and the universe, the finite to the
infinite, the ephemeral to the eternal. Where will it finally lead us? Who can
tell the limits of ourselves and of our reality?
What is consciousness? What is life? What is the universe?
In search for answers, humans began to weave their tale of millions of
years. Those ancient myths concealed a deep truth and gave birth to religion,
philosophy and science. Then began the five-century quest for explaining
consciousness, which confounded the greatest minds, from the ghost in the
machine to the rise of experimental psychology to the era of consciousness.
Philosophy tackles the hard problem, neuroscience tries to find the neural
basis of consciousness, computer science regards computers as brains and
investigates conscious machines, and quantum physics tries to discover an
essential role for consciousness in the physical world. Yet a deep understand
ing of consciousness in relation to life and the universe is still missing.
Therefore, we will embark on a journey toward the ultimate understand
ing of consciousness by tracing its deep roots in life and the universe. The
identification of the indispensable substratum of consciousness will lead to
a clear redefinition of consciousness. The nonconscious processes of our
body will reveal the hidden part of ourselves and our potential for expand
ing consciousness. The four-billion-year evolution of life on Earth, from the
first living molecular structures to the human organism, will tell how con
sciousness has evolved as a fundamental process of life. To trace the origin
of consciousness, we will try to understand what is life, which will lead us
to revise the division of different patterns of matter into the conscious and
the nonconscious, the living and the nonliving. To elucidate the ultimate ori
gin and meaning of life and consciousness, we will try to understand what
is the universe, which will lead us to investigate its origin and nature, from
nothingness to vacuum fluctuations to the entire cosmos. Finally, we will use
our acquired knowledge to build a path for expanding consciousness and
improving the human condition.
This will be an exciting adventure, from the redefinition of consciousness
to that of life, from the first living molecular structures to the human organ
ism and civilization, from quantum fields and subatomic particles to the giant
Cosmic Web, from an infinitesimal fraction of a second to the entire time
span of the universe, from nothingness to the whole cosmos.
Philosophers ask fundamental questions about the nature and meaning
of consciousness, life and the universe and examine them through logical
reasoning. Scientists try to discover the fundamental laws governing con
sciousness, life and the universe in a quantified manner based on observation,
experimentation and abstraction. Most people try to understand themselves,
Introduction 3
life and the world through their lifelong experience. Here, different paths
converge, using different languages to try to express the same truth. As Ste
phen Hawking said,
[I]f we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable

in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all,
philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in
the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist.
If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human
reason—for then we would know the mind of God.
(Hawking, 1988)
Everything we do in science and humanities is conditioned by our world-

view, which is necessarily limited and shaped by our consciousness. It is only
through the consensual regularities identified through our consciousness that
we come to know the world and describe its properties. All research, includ
ing science, depends on consciousness—the foundation of all our knowledge.
Even physical science does not deal with the world itself but a world of shad
ows, a world of models and conceptual constructs shaped by human con
sciousness and built through human perception and reasoning.
Facing the wide unknown of consciousness, life and the universe, we need
to remain open but avoid unfounded speculations; we need vastly more
knowledge from multiple disciplines in humanities and science to rise to this
supreme challenge. For Erwin Schrödinger, a founder of quantum mechan
ics, his own pursuit of understanding life and consciousness was rooted in
human innate longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge, and although
the knowledge of multifarious branches is overwhelming, we should venture
to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories and integrate the sum total of
all that is known into a whole (Schrödinger, 2012). In this book, to explore
the ultimate questions of consciousness, life and the universe, we leverage
and integrate knowledge and methods from multiple disciplines in humani
ties and science, in particular philosophy, history, neuroscience, computer
science, medicine, psychology, biotechnology, evolutionary science, biology,
chemistry, physics and cosmology.
The common spirit of research must be changed. Any attempt to under
stand the universe should explain its relationship to consciousness and life,
and any attempt to understand consciousness and life should trace their deep
roots in the universe. The fundamental mission of humanities and science is
to elucidate the place of humans in the universe, and any kind of research
should be connected to the existence of every human being without which
it would be meaningless. Why build a science, a theory or a philosophy if it
cannot be effective in expanding our consciousness and improving the human
condition?
4 Introduction
Humans are not the only beings that are conscious of their finitude. Some
animals also possess this knowledge. Feeling their end approach, they will
leave others and quietly die alone in an isolated place. There is grandeur in
this choice. Humans have evolved more abilities to change the world and
themselves. When the final moment comes, let it be a supernova.
Bibliography
Hawking, S.W. (1988) A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.
Toronto; New York: Bantam.
Schrödinger, E. (2012) What Is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical
Sketches. New York: Cambridge University Press.
1
A TALE OF MILLIONS OF YEARS
The origin of consciousness research (from the
Old Stone Age to the Middle Ages)
One day, in the 4th century bce, Zhuang Zhou, a Daoist philosopher,
dreamed of himself being a butterfly, a free and insouciant psyche. Hav
ing suddenly awoken, pondering this oneiric experience, he wondered, “Am
I Zhuang Zhou who dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of
being Zhuang Zhou?” Life is a tale.
Two millennia elapsed. One day, in the 19th century, on the other side of
the world, a solitary Christian poet, deep in his soul, believed to see a world
in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower. “Hold infinity in the palm
of your hand, and eternity in an hour” (Blake, 1863), so we were told. Life
is a tale.
Here is a tale, a tale of millions of years, a tale of love and loss, life and
death, a tale of what it means to be human and a tale of our essence. From
the collective evolutionary journey of humans, which began about two mil
lion years ago in Africa, to our individual life on Earth, which lasts for dec
ades, it is our history.
Myth: facing the unknown and the abyss

The first humans, fragile in front of nature and constantly in fear of its
caprices, struggled to survive from day to day starvation and disasters, cold
and darkness. They tried to explain the world and their own life, endure a
precarious existence and the uncontrollable, protect what they loved and free
themselves from suffering. The explanations that they imagined grew into
stories about superpowers and gods, the creation of the world and the origin
and fate of humans. These stories then became myths.
DOI: 10.4324/9781032636863-2
6 A tale of millions of years
About 100,000 years ago, early Homo sapiens in the Levant covered their
dead with red ocher, in the color of blood and life, and buried them with
grave offerings, caring about their well-being in the afterlife (Hovers et al.,
2003). About 60,000 years later, Aboriginal Australians also covered their
dead with red ocher, symbolizing blood and the Great Goddess, hoping for
the rebirth of their loved ones. They shared their being with their land, which
they believed to have feelings. When they died, their spirits—the essence
thought to define a person—returned to the land where they were born. Their
land suffered and trees died. The spirits of the dead would eventually go to
the Skyworld and enter the eternal Dreamtime—the real existence in which
they could be connected to all their ancestors and the origin of time from
which all lives emerged through birth and to which they would return after
death to be reborn (Charlesworth et al., 1984). Death was part of this cycle
of life, and the present life, prone to harshness and randomness, was merely
a passing phase, a moment in eternity. Through rituals or during dreams, the
spirit of a person could leave the body and enter the Dreamtime where time
and space were boundless. The dead remained an integral part of the world
of the living. Their spirits talked to their loved ones in dreams and could heal
them if they were in pain.
Over 30,000 years ago, Cro-Magnons, early European modern humans,
began to paint humans, animals and goddesses on the walls or ceilings of
deep, dark caverns, the hidden Upper Paleolithic underground cathedrals
for magical and spiritual rituals, such as the Chauvet Cave in France. Sym
bolic art was born. Haunted by the spirits of the dead, Cro-Magnons tried to
charm and control them through the worship of the goddess. Cro-Magnons
buried their dead with food, clothing, tools and ornaments to prepare them
for the journey to the spirit world, where they could live for all eternity with
their ancestors and gods. The spirit left the body at death, and the body was
buried in the womb of the earth, from which new life would emerge. The
liberated spirit would ascend to heaven in the form of a bird.
Over 5,000 years ago, Sumer in Mesopotamia became the earliest liter
ate civilization on Earth. Sumerians believed that the souls of the dead went
to the underworld, a dark and drear cavern deep underground, where they
dwelt in a weak, shadowy form of life and could only feed on dry dust. To
allow their loved ones to drink in this land of no return, the families of the
dead poured libations into their graves through a clay pipe. Sumerians tried
to have as many children as possible, so they would not suffer from thirst
after death. The vital importance attached to death and the afterlife was
emphasized in the 4,000-year-old Sumerian poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh,
the earliest surviving great work of literature, which recounted the quest of
a hero for immortality. Afflicted by the death of his friend Enkidu, the king
Gilgamesh realized his own mortality and set off on a perilous journey to
discover the secret of eternal life. “The life that you seek, you will not find.
A tale of millions of years 7
When the gods created mankind, death they imposed on mankind; life they
kept in their power” (Jastrow and Clay, 1920), so he was finally told. Gil
gamesh then became “He who saw the unknown,” “He who saw the abyss.”
Sumerians built the earliest pyramids, ziggurats (Figure 1.1).
From the Old Kingdom, the “Age of the Pyramids,” established about
4,700 years ago, ancient Egyptians expended enormous energy and resources
to ensure the survival of their souls after death, which formed the foundation
of their civilization (Figure 1.2). They thought that the soul was composed of
multiple parts and that each played a role in the dead’s access to the afterlife
(Taylor, 2001). The first part was the khet, the physical body of the dead,
which should be well preserved to allow the dead to reach the underworld
of death and rebirth, ruled by Osiris, who had been murdered by his brother
and then resurrected by his sister and wife, Isis. After the murder, Isis cried
for her dead husband. The Nile flooded and then retreated, crops grew and
died each year, and so did the human soul’s cycle of life, death and rebirth.
In the Old Kingdom, only the pharaohs could be mummified and had access
to an eternal existence in the afterlife. Their tombs, their palaces after death,
FIGURE 1.1 Ziggurat of Ur (21st century bce), the Neo-Sumerian Empire, Meso
potamia. Tell el-Muqayyar, Dhi Qar Province, Iraq
Source: Author: Kaufingdude. CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
deed.en)
FIGURE 1.2 Giza pyramid complex (2600–2500 bce), Giza, Egypt

Source: Author: Yasser Nazmi. CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
deed.en)
were protected by Pyramid Texts—complex spells to guide their souls to the

afterlife (Figure 1.3). In the Middle Kingdom, all dead could be mummified,
and their souls were protected by Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead to
avoid the perils in the underworld to not die a second time and be reborn in
the afterlife. The mummy would be reanimated in the underworld through
funeral rites, and the most important step was to magically open the mouth
of the mummy to allow the dead to breathe, eat, drink and speak, as well as
to form the sah, the spiritual body that could exist in the afterlife. The name
of the dead, the ren, was thought to be a part of the soul containing a person’s
identity, which would live for as long as the name was spoken. Some tomb
inscriptions implored passersby to speak aloud the names of the deceased to
perpetuate their life. The ib, the heart, was created from one drop of blood
from the heart of the child’s mother and was considered to be the seat of emo
tion, thought and memory. The ib was an essential part of the soul and the
key to the afterlife. The heart was preserved inside the mummy with a heart
scarab atop—an amulet symbolizing Khepri, the morning manifestation of
the sun god Ra, representing creation and rebirth. In the Hall of Two Truths
in the underworld, the heart was weighed against the feather of Ma’at, the
goddess of truth and justice, to determine the fate of the dead (Figure 1.4). If
the Scale of Justice was balanced, the dead would go on a perilous journey to
Aaru, the boundless reed fields in the east where the sun rose, a paradise with
eternal bliss. If the heart, heavy with evil, outweighed the feather, it would be
FIGURE 1.3 A burial chamber with the walls covered with Pyramid Texts. Pyra
mid of Unas. 5th Dyn. Sakkara., n.d. Brooklyn Museum Archives
(S10–08 Sakkara, image 9643)
Source: Author: Brooklyn Museum
devoured by Ammit, a demoness with a composite body combining croco

dile, lion and hippopotamus—the three man-eating animals most feared by
ancient Egyptians. This second death condemned the soul to an everlasting
restlessness in the underworld. The ka, vital essence, was breathed by gods
into humans at birth, and its departure caused death. Offerings of food and
drink were made to ensure the survival of the ka after death. The ba, per
sonality, would be released through the “opening the mouth” ceremony to
join the ka and form the akh, the spirit of the dead, which could exist in the
afterlife and be invoked by prayers or written letters left in the tomb to help
the dead’s living relatives. Each night, the ba had to return to its body in the
tomb for being reenergized, so it could emerge again as the akh with the
morning sun, following the daily rebirth cycle of Ra. Each day, Ra traveled
across the sky on his solar barge, the Boat of Millions of Years. At night, he
descended into the underworld where he had to defeat Apep, a giant serpent
and the Lord of Chaos, in order to be regenerated by Osiris and reborn at
dawn. Only then would the sun rise again the next morning. The survival of
FIGURE 1.4 Weighing of the heart, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Papyrus of
Ani (19th Dynasty, c. 1250 bce). Edited by A. Mayer in 1925. CC
BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)
Source: Wellcome Images
the soul had never been granted forever. Instead, it must be gained through a
perpetual struggle in the cycle of life, death and rebirth.
Some 4,000 years ago, ancient Mayas began to develop their civilization.
Like ancient Egyptians, they believed that the soul had multiple parts such
as “breath,” “shadow” and “blood.” The loss of one or more parts would
cause disease. A person’s soul had an animal or a natural phenomenon as
companion and protector; it is the soul’s “co-essence.” Maya families buried
their dead under their houses and made regular offerings. The afterlife was
conceived of as either an underworld or a paradise such as “Flower Moun
tain.” Ancestral spirits were highly worshiped as protectors of their living
descendants, capable of interceding with gods. Maya royalty also built great
pyramids as palaces for their dead, although most of them served as temples
to gods (Figure 1.5). Maya pyramids were also places for human sacrifice.
In some rituals, a human was killed and skinned, and a priest, dressed in the
skin of the sacrificed person, performed a ritual dance symbolizing rebirth.
Ancient Egyptian and Maya pyramids had their counterparts in ancient
China. To ensure the survival of their souls in the afterlife, Chinese emperors
built gigantic mausoleums. Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor who unified
China in 221 bce, began to build his mausoleum when he ascended to the
throne at age 13, mobilizing 700,000 men over 38 years. The mausoleum
FIGURE 1.5 Maya pyramid, Temple of the Inscriptions (7th century), served as the
tomb of K'inich Janaab Pakal I (603–683), Mexico
Source: Author: Jan Harenburg. CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)
included palaces, heavenly constellations, as well as rivers and the sea that
were made of mercury and set to flow mechanically. At his burial, many of
his wives were sacrificed to accompany him in the afterlife. About 7,000 life-
sized terracotta statues of warriors as well as chariots and horses formed the
Terracotta Army and were deployed in the mausoleum to protect the dead
emperor in the afterlife (Figure 1.6). However, such a spectacular afterlife
was only reserved for emperors. Most of the souls of the dead went to “Yel
low Springs,” the underworld. While digging wells deep underground, the
water that first appeared was yellow in color and thus became the symbol of
the underworld. On their journey to Yellow Springs, the souls were guided
by Manjusaka or red spider lilies—the hell flowers blooming along the path
(Figure 1.7). Manjusaka is poisonous, and its leaves and flowers could never
meet: the leaves will fully appear only after the flowers have faded away,
which symbolizes the ultimate separation and death. The souls would arrive
at the River of Forgetfulness, above which was the Bridge of Sighs. On the
bridge, Meng Po, the goddess of forgetfulness, would invite the souls to drink
a potion prepared from all the tears that a person had shed in life: tears of
birth, tears of old age, tears of suffering, tears of regret, tears of love and loss,
tears in illness and tears of separation. Then, the souls could forget their past,
cross the bridge and be reincarnated.
FIGURE 1.6 Terracotta Army, mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor (3rd century
bce) in Xi’an, China
Source: Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by-sa/3.0/deed.en)
FIGURE 1.7 Manjusaka or red spider lilies, the “hell flowers” that guide the souls
of the dead to “Yellow Springs,” the ancient Chinese underworld
Source: Author: xe zna. CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)
The river of forgetfulness also existed in Hades, the ancient Greek under
world, and its name was Lethe. The souls of the dead drank water from the
Lethe to forget their past lives and begin anew. Other rivers in Hades are
the Styx, the river of hatred between life and death, which circled Hades
seven times; the Acheron, the river of pain, over which Charon, the ferryman,
would row the souls who paid him coins that had been placed under their
tongue during burial; the Phlegethon, the river of fire leading to Tartarus, the
hell beneath Hades for the evil souls, to which the Titans were banished by
Zeus, opposite to blissful Elysium for the distinguished souls and the Aspho
del Meadows for the ordinary. In front of the entrance to Hades lived some
special gods: Phobos, god of fear; Limos, goddess of starvation; Nosoi, god
of disease; Algos, gods of pain; Geras, god of old age; Penthos, god of grief;
Hypnos, god of sleep; Thanatos, god of death. As souls in Hades were inac
tive, blood offerings intended to give them the vital essence were made to
communicate with them. The souls in the underworld did not evolve and
lived as mere shadows of their past lives. Homer, the author of the Iliad and
the Odyssey, thus thought that the best fate for humans was never to be born
because the greatness of life could never balance the price of death (Mystaki
dou et al., 2005).
About 1,000 years ago, the Inuit arose in western Alaska. Like ancient
Egyptians and Mayas, they also thought that the soul had several parts, such
as the life force, which would depart for the east after death as well as the
personal spirit and the name soul, both of which could be reborn. Considered
weak, the souls of children needed to be protected by their dead relatives,
whose names were therefore carried by children to incorporate their souls.
For the Inuit, all things had a soul, and the soul of killed animals or humans
could take revenge. Life in the Arctic was harsh and prone to hazards. The
Inuit lived constantly in fear of the wrath of nature and the spirits of the
dead. Taboos and rituals were established to placate gods and spirits, and
shamans became the mediators between the world of humans and the world
of gods and spirits. As the soul was thought to have originated in the sky,
Inuits peered into northern lights to try to see the spirits of their loved ones
dancing in the afterlife. When people died, their families observed three days
of mourning and promised venison to their souls. The souls of the dead went
to the underworld, where they would be purified for a year before traveling
to the Land of the Moon, the land of eternal peace and bliss.
While the Inuit incorporated into themselves the souls of their dead by
bearing their names, the Fore people in Papua New Guinea did so by con
suming the corpses of their loved ones. Like the Inuit and the Australian Abo
rigines who also lived in Oceania, the Fore believed that their land was alive
and created their ancestors. For them, the soul of each person had five parts
(Whitfield et al., 2008). Immediately after death, the auma, the good quali
ties of a person, would travel across the land bidding farewell and depart for
the land of the dead. To help the auma on this journey, the family left food
and water with the body. The ama, similar to the auma but more powerful,
would remain to assist the family until mortuary rituals had been completed.
The aona, the abilities of a person, would be passed on to the deceased’s
favorite child. The yesegi, the ancestral power of a person, would be trans
ferred to the deceased’s children. The kwela, the pollution from the decompo
sition of the body, could harm the family if the obsequies were not conducted
properly. Two or three days after death, the body would be cooked and con
sumed out of love and grief to incorporate the deceased’s soul in the family.
This funerary cannibalism was the origin of Kuru, a form of transmissible
spongiform encephalopathy caused by the transmission of prions, which also
includes the “mad cow disease.” Kuru mostly affected Fore women and chil
dren because they usually consumed the brain, the organ in which infectious
prions were most concentrated.
Religion: the words of an oak

The first prophecies were the words of an oak, said Socrates (Plato, 2011).
Like the Inuit and the Fore, many indigenous peoples believed that all things
were sentient and animated with a spirit or soul, not just humans and ani
mals but also plants, rivers, rocks, mountains, winds, storms, thunder and
even words. Reflecting a generalization of the self-recognition of humans as
sentient beings endowed with a soul, this form of belief, animism, dates back
to the Old Stone Age and is considered to be the earliest form of religion, the
foundation of indigenous peoples’ spiritual beliefs. Animism is still present
today in various forms, even in some scientific circles such as quantum ani
mism in physics, according to which consciousness is an inherent property of
the world, which is quantum animated, and everything is a quantum system
and thus conscious.
To communicate with the world of spirits was the role of shamans. Sha
manism is as old as animism, also dating back to the Old Stone Age. In
shamanism, the soul was believed to leave the body and journey to the spirit
world during sleep and insanity, in trances and delirium, and ultimately upon
death. Illness was caused by losing one’s soul in dreaming, during a trauma or
through witchcraft. During rituals, shamans went into a trance to allow their
souls to enter the realm of spirits, where they could practice divination and
healing. Shamans treated illness by healing the soul. Immersed in an enchant
ing trance music, wearing the soulcatcher as a necklace, Tsimshian shamans
of the Pacific Northwest Coast danced and went into a trance to enter the
spirit world and capture the soul of a patient or an evil spirit. The soul-
catcher, an amulet in the form of a tube decorated by mythical figures, was
used to contain the lost soul or hold an evil spirit extracted from a patient
(Figure 1.8). In Austronesian shamanism, the soul was thought to have two
FIGURE 1.8 Soulcatcher made of bone and used by shamans

Source: Purchase from the J.H. Wade Fund. Cleveland Museum of Art
parts: the “body soul” associated with breath and life and located in the liver
or the heart, and the “free soul” in the head. The “free soul” could leave
the body and sometimes get lost in the spirit world or be stolen by an evil
spirit, which would cause illness. Shamans must return the “free soul” to the
afflicted person; otherwise, the person would become insane or die.
Sangomas are South African shamans and traditional healers practicing
ngoma, which originated from a belief in ancestral spirits and was introduced
into Southern Africa through Bantu migration about 4,000 years ago. San
gomas are still revered in South Africa today because illness is thought to be
caused by witchcraft, pollution or disregard for ancestors. Ancestral spirits
exist in the afterlife and could intervene in the world of the living, so they
must be shown respect through ritual and animal sacrifice. Sangomas mediate
between patients and spirits to restore harmony. To receive the guidance of
ancestral spirits for healing, sangomas dance and go into a trance to invoke
ancestors and throw bones on the floor, such as animal vertebrae and shells
with symbolic meanings, to communicate with the spirits. The spirits com
municate the solutions by the way the bones fall, which is then interpreted by
sangomas. Sangomas may also choose to be possessed by ancestral spirits to
get their advice. With fervent drumming invoking the spirits, sangomas will
fall into a trance to be possessed by ancestors, who will communicate directly
with the patient. To celebrate the spirits, sangomas sing ancestral songs and
dance until exhaustion.
Ngoma originated from Bantu peoples’ ancient belief in the spirits of
the dead influencing the living. The spirits of the dead could live on as long
as there was someone who remembered them. The dead communed with
the living through omens, in dreams or via seers. They could also return
to the world of the living in the form of animals such as birds or snakes.
The cult of the dead also existed in North Africa in more ancient religions
such as the Berber religion. Like early Homo sapiens in the Levant and
Australian Aborigines, ancient Berbers painted the bodies of their dead

with ocher. A mummy of a three-year-old child was discovered in a cave in
Libya, carefully wrapped in a goatskin, with the entrails replaced by wild
herbs, which dates back to around 3500 bce, as old as the earliest known
ancient Egyptian mummy. Ancient Berbers considered the spirits of their
ancestors to be gods. After having prayed, they slept in the tombs of their
ancestors or on their burial mounds and waited for them in dreams to
answer their questions.
Dis Manibus, “to the Spirits of the Dead,” with these words inscribed
on their tombs, ancient Romans venerated their dead since the 8th cen
tury bce (King, 2020). Offerings were burned on the funeral pyre before
cremation, and the dead would share the last meal with their families. On
the eighth day of mourning, the souls of the dead entered the underworld
and became the Manes, deities in the underworld. The Manes received
burned offerings in nighttime rituals and blood sacrifices through gladia
torial games. Ancient Romans’ belief in the afterlife was similar to that of
ancient Greeks, except that they replaced Hades with Pluto as the ruler of
the underworld. The mundus of Ceres (goddess of agriculture and guard
ian of the underworld), a pit thought to contain a gate to the underworld,
was sealed by a sacred stone (Fowler, 1912). Each year, the sacred stone
was removed three times to allow the souls of the dead to be reunited with
their families.
Daoism originated in prehistoric China and was further developed by
the philosopher Lao Zi in the 4th century bce (Figure 1.9). In Daoism,
there are two types of soul. The hun, the heavenly or breath soul repre
senting Yang and defining human nature, enters the body through the nose
from the air and is contained in the heart. Fond of wandering, it leaves
the body during sleep and ultimately at death to ascend to heaven. The
po, the earthly or bodily soul representing Yin and generating emotions,
enters the body by the mouth through tastes and resides in the stomach.
The po is corporeal and remains within the body of the dead. A sacred
lamp is lit for the dead, symbolizing the light of wisdom and immortal
ity, and the soul is refined and purified by the scented smoke of burning
incense. Zhuang Zhou said,
Birth is not a beginning; death is not an end. There is existence without

limitation; there is continuity without a starting-point. Existence without
limitation is Space. Continuity without a starting-point is Time. There is
birth, there is death, there is issuing forth, there is entering in.
(Zhuang, 1889)
About 2,500 years ago, various Indian cultures and traditions began to
fuse to form Hinduism. For Hindus, the soul and true Self, Atman, is the
FIGURE 1.9 Modern Yin-Yang Symbol in Daoism with black representing Yin and
white representing Yang, which reflects the intertwined duality of all
things in nature
Source: Author: Universal Octopus. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by
sa/4.0/deed.en)
immutable, eternal essence of all living beings (Monier-Williams, 1891).

Atman will leave the body at death and travel through a very long and
dark tunnel toward the South. The families will light a lamp and keep it
beside the head of their dead to light their way. The nature of existence
is considered to be a cycle of birth, growth, decay and renewal. Atman
goes through samsara, the endless cycle of life, death and reincarnation,
a cycle of aimless wandering and mundane existence. The ultimate goal
of humans is to attain moksha, liberation from samsara through self-per
fection and self-realization. For Advaita Vedanta, a school of Hinduism,
Atman is identical to Brahman, the supreme soul (Sharma, 2007). Only
Brahman exists; only Brahman is true. The world of plurality is maya,
illusion. The goal of life is to realize that one’s soul is identical to the
supreme soul, which is present in everything and everyone. All beings are
interconnected and form one. When embodied beings transcend, they will
be liberated from birth, pain, old age and death and attain immortality
and eternal bliss.
In contrast to Hinduism, Buddhism, which originated in Iron Age India
around the 5th century bce, believes in Anatman, no-Self (Gombrich, 2018).
There is no permanent Self, no immutable Atman or soul. The Self is an illu

sion, a composite of impermanent aggregates. The person is only a changing
construct relying on complex combinations of mental and material compo
nents. Mental states form a mental stream that is not material and will exist
in other bodies after the death of this body. However, this mental stream is
not a soul in the Platonic sense but an impersonal series of mental events.
Mind and matter are evanescent events, interacting in an ongoing and fluc
tuating process. All things are impermanent. We crave and cling to imperma
nent states and things, which is unsatisfactory and painful, which is dukkha.
The ultimate goal of Buddhists is to realize no-Self or Emptiness to attain
nirvana, the liberation from samsara, the wheel of existence turning around
endlessly, which is the source of dukkha. This worldview centering on the
impermanence of life led to the sky burial practiced by Tibetan Buddhists and
recorded in the Tibetan Book of the Dead in the 8th century. After death, the
body is regarded as an empty vessel in stark contrast to ancient Egyptians’
belief in the survival of the soul of the dead depending on the body that itself
was considered to be a part of the soul, hence the vital importance of body
preservation. During the sky burial, usually at dawn, the corpse is placed on
the “charnel ground,” a specific location on a mountaintop for sky burial, to
decompose and be eaten by scavenging animals, in particular carrion birds.
The sky burial, “giving alms to the birds,” is considered to be an act of gen
erosity and compassion for all beings by offering one’s own body. Pieces of
the human skeleton left from the sky burial are used to produce ritual tools,
such as the thigh-bone trumpet and the skull cup—the kapala. The kapala is
used in meditation to achieve a transcendental state of mind during rituals. In
the extinct Kapalika tradition in Hinduism (Lorenzen, 1972), it was used as a
begging bowl. The Kapalikas, “skullmen,” carried a skull-topped trident and
an empty human skull. They smeared their body with ashes from the funeral
pyre out of love for their dead and revered their fierce gods who drank blood
from the kapala.
Zoroastrians also expose their dead to scavenging birds such as vul
tures, which is regarded as an individual’s final act of charity, and they
build for this purpose a circular, raised structure—the Tower of Silence
(Figure 1.10). Zoroastrianism, one of the oldest survival religions in the
world, had been the state religion of the ancient Iranian empires from the
6th century bce for over 1,000 years. In Zoroastrianism, a dead body is
believed to be contaminated by Nasu, the corpse demoness in the form of
a fly (Spaeth, 2013). To prevent the pollution of earth, bodies are placed
on the roof of the tower, which is divided into three concentric circles: the
bodies of men in the outer circle, women in the second and children in
the innermost. Over the years, bleached by the sun and wind, the bones
disintegrate and are washed out by rain to the sea. Upon death, the soul
will leave the body and linger on earth for three days. On the fourth day,
FIGURE 1.10 Tower of Silence, Yazd, Iran (c. 19th century)

Source: Author: Bramstercate. CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
deed.en)
the soul will be reunited with its fravashi, the higher spirit, which has
existed since the creation of the universe. During life, the fravashi protects
the individual, and the fravashi of ancestors can be invoked for help. The
good souls are received at the House of Song, the evil ones fall into the
House of Lies, and the ordinary ones go to a neutral place. All the dead
will be resurrected at Frashokereti for the universal purification and rec
tification of the world (Boyce, 2000).
In Judaism, established in the 6th century bce, the resurrection of the dead
will happen during the Messianic Age, and the righteous will live forever in
the World to Come. The soul is believed to be given by God, who created
Adam from dust and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life to make him
a living being. The soul has several aspects: Nefesh, living being; ruach, wind;
neshamah, breath; chayah, life; yechidah, singularity (Leibowitz, 2018). The
soul has been considered immortal in mainstream Judaism since the Babylo
nian exile. The souls of all dead go to Sheol, the underworld shadowed by
the darkness of death, and become Rephaim, shades (Lewis, 1989). Shades
can be contacted by the living by specific means, such as the Witch of Endor
summoning the shade of prophet Samuel, who predicted the downfall of
Saul. Families bury their loved ones with great care to ensure their happiness
in the afterlife. Since the soul is judged according to a whole life’s tests and
struggles, it is the day of death of a person that is commemorated each year
by the family instead of the day of birth.
Originally a sect of Second Temple Judaism in the 1st century in the Roman
province of Judea, Christianity became an independent religion after the fall
of Jerusalem in 70 ce. In accordance with Judaism, Christianity believes that
the soul is created and given by God. The Catholic Church considers the
soul to be the innermost aspect and spiritual principle of humans. Separated
from the body at death, the soul will be reunited with the body to which God
will give incorruptible life at the resurrection for the Last Judgment, and the
dead will rise again as did Jesus, the Messiah, who himself had risen from the
dead. “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to
come” (Burn, 1909), as stated in the Nicene Creed.
Similar to Judaism and Christianity, another Abrahamic religion,
Islam, which originated in the 7th century in Mecca, believes in the resur
rection of the dead for the Last Judgment. God created man from dust and
endowed him with two types of soul: the immortal ruh is the immaterial
˙
essence that makes the body alive and the essential self beyond emotions
and instincts; the mortal nafs, driven by the ruh, is sensory perceptions
˙
and bodily desires (Tritton, 1971). At death, the soul will withdraw from
the body and go to the intermediate realm between the world of the living
and the world of spirits, where the soul will contemplate the wrongdoing
of its past life until the Day of Resurrection. Death is not the end but the
beginning of the afterlife. The worldly life is just a test to determine each
person’s ultimate, everlasting destination, Heaven or Hell, according to
their deeds in life and their faith in God, Allah. On the Last Day, resur
rected humans will pass over Hell across a bridge as thin as human hair
and sharper than a razor to enter Heaven. Those weighted with their evil
deeds will fall into Hell.
While in the Islamic sensual paradise, faithful men would be accompa
nied by beautiful, transparent women, the houris, death and the afterlife
in the old Norse religion in Scandinavia could be erotic but dark and vio
lent, immersed in the warlike customs of the fierce Vikings. The old Norse
religion developed around the 2nd century and believed in a quadripartite
soul: the hamr, shape; the fylgja, astral double; the hamingja, luck, which
could be inherited by another; the hugr, mind, which left the body at death
and departed for the realm of the dead (Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, 1991).
All the warriors who died in battle went to heaven. Half of them were cho
sen by Odin, the god of wisdom, war and death, to join him at Valhalla,
the Hall of the Slain, and to prepare the final battle for the gods against
their enemies to renew the world; another half resided in Fólkvangr, a great
meadow, ruled by Freyja, the goddess of love and beauty (Lindow, 2002).
Ordinary people went to Hel, the underworld, beneath which lay a dark
and misty place where the wicked suffered punishments. Death was often
described in erotic terms in old Norse poetry: in the afterlife, the souls of
kings and warriors were welcomed by goddesses in their beds. Tall phal
lic memorial stones were raised in remembrance of dead men, such as the
Viking Age image stones, which still stand on Gotland in Sweden today
(Figure 1.11). The ship burial was typical in Norse funerals (Figure 1.12).
The deceased was laid in a ship, real or in stone, which would be buried or
burnt. Norse funerals involved human sacrifice. Slaves were sacrificed to
serve their masters in the afterlife. Human sacrifice was sometimes accom
panied by violent sexual rites. In the Viking ship burial witnessed by the
traveler Ahmad Ibn Fadlan in the 10th century, when a dead chieftain was
put in a ship, a slave girl would undergo a series of sexual rites before being
killed (Fadlan, 2012). She went from tent to tent to sleep with their masters
and served as a vessel to transfer life force to the soul of the dead chieftain
in the afterlife. Finally, she got on the ship, and beside the dead chieftain,
she had sex with several men before being strangled and stabbed. Then the
ship was burned, generating a pillar of smoke to send the dead man’s soul
to the afterlife. Life, death, sex and violence thus merged. The survival of
the soul and the afterlife did have a cost.
FIGURE 1.11 An image stone at Klinteberget, Gotland, Sweden. Though all traces
of inscription or paint are gone, the contour of the stone is preserved.
Source: Author: Arkland. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en)
FIGURE 1.12 The Gokstad ship, a 9th-century Viking ship found in a burial
mound at Gokstad in Norway
Source: Author: Jim Killock. CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
deed.en)
Philosophy: know thyself

Why do humans exist?
“To observe the heavens,” answered Pythagoras (Chroust, 1964), while
Socrates would probably respond, “Know thyself.” For the Daoist philos
opher, Lao Zi, knowing the self is enlightenment. The Hindu Upanishads
regarded understanding the true Self as the essential knowledge leading to
the ultimate liberation of the soul (Müller, 1879). Some questions thus arose:
What is the self, the soul? What is its origin? How is it generated?
Over 2,300 years ago, Aristotle wrote in De Anima, “The knowledge
of the soul admittedly contributes greatly to the advance of truth,” while
warning that “[t]o attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of
the most difficult things in the world” (Aristotle, 1931). He thought that
the soul was in some sense the principle of animal life, which made a living
being alive.
In the Tanakh, Job lamented that life was but a breath. So is the soul.
This is exactly the original meaning of the Greek word psyche, the breath of
life, from which were derived other meanings: soul, spirit, mind or self. The
soul was considered above all to be the feeling of being alive; it was about
breathing, being warm and moving, rather than the coldness and rigidity
of a corpse. The link between the soul and breath was present across dif
ferent ancient beliefs. In Daoist philosophy, the hun, the heavenly soul was
associated with air and breath, so was the soul in Inuit beliefs. The Ka in
ancient Egyptian beliefs was breathed by gods into humans so was the soul
in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Psyche is also the ancient Greek word
for “butterfly”—a symbol for the soul, which influenced ancient Greek and
Roman art in which death was depicted as a butterfly winging out of a per
son’s mouth. The ancient Greek goddess of the soul was Psyche, the wife of
the god of desire and love, Eros.
Therefore, in most ancient beliefs and philosophies, the origin of the
soul or mind was divine with its unknowable depth and indefinable essence
related to the nature of God, which defied human reasoning. In Hindu
philosophy, the source of individual souls and all minds is Purusha or Brah
man, the cosmic soul and Universal Principle, eternal and all-pervasive,
which breathes life into matter and acts as the first animating cause of
the universe (Frazier, 2011). To Plato, logos or nous, the immortal soul of
humans related to reason and intellect, was given by God to guide humans
to commune with the divine soul of the universe, which was a living being
endowed with intelligence, containing and connecting all other living beings
(Plato, 1888). In Aristotle’s view, nous, the intellectual soul of humans, was
also immortal and divine (Aristotle, 1931). The actuality of nous was life,
and God was that actuality. The essential actuality of God was the best and
eternal life.
The concept of the world soul or the sublime mind has persisted until
today, even among eminent physicists. Max Planck, the Nobel Prize winner
in Physics in 1918, a founder of quantum mechanics, revealed his thoughts
on this matter in 1944:
As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science,
to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms
this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only
by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and
holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume
behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This
Mind is the matrix of all matter.
(Planck, 1944)
Other thinkers took a materialistic position without divine forces or super

intelligence creating the soul or mind. One of these schools of thought was
Charvaka, an old materialist and atheistic school, which mainly developed
around the 6th century bce in ancient India, predating Buddhism. Charvaka
denied an immortal, incorporeal soul and considered the mind to be an emer
gent property of matter and corporeal in nature (Billington, 1997).
Most ancient philosophers, however, thought that the soul was immate
rial. Plato’s theory of the soul was representative. According to Plato, the soul
was incorporeal and participated in what he termed the “Form” or “Idea”
of life. The Platonic Forms were the essence of all beings, of which diverse
objects and phenomena in the material world were mere imitations under dif
ferent circumstances. The Forms were aspatial and atemporal, neither physi
cal nor mental. The realm of Forms or Ideas, the realm of the intelligible, was
superior to the ethereal realm of stars and planets and the material world on
Earth. The immortal soul of humans was able to commune with the realm
of Forms, where it originated and returned after death. The realm of Forms
was the truth, while the physical world was its mere shadow. The prisoners
in Plato’s Cave could only see the shadows of things cast on the wall without
being able to see their real sources, so they took the shadows for the truth.
One day, a prisoner freed himself out of the cave and saw the real world,
the sun and the truth. He returned to the cave to inform and free the others.
However, after being exposed to sunlight, his eyes were not used to darkness
anymore and became apparently blind. The others then thought that the out
side was harmful and therefore did not believe him. They would kill anyone
who wanted to free them. Nevertheless, the liberated prisoner, having once
looked straight at the sun, would prefer to endure everything rather than
associate himself with the beliefs held sacred in the cave (Plato, 1900).
Other philosophers thought that the soul was composed of elements such
as water, air or fire. For instance, Heraclitus, whose philosophy had influ
enced Plato’s theory of Forms, thought that the soul was a vapor, a sentient
and perceptive exhalation from water, the least corporeal and in ceaseless
flux. As it rose, it became more and more volatile and ethereal until it was
transformed into fire, the very first element and the original intelligence in the
universe, which controlled all (Long, 1999). The cosmic soul was the vital
breath of the universe, as the human soul was to the individual, which existed
within the cosmic soul.
As humans have various vital and mental faculties, does the soul or mind
also have multiple parts? Where are they located? To this question, ancient
philosophers’ answers were as diverse as their thoughts on the nature of the
soul. Confucianism, founded by the Chinese philosopher Confucius in the
6th century bce, developed a dualistic view (Nylan, 2001). The soul had two
parts, hun and po, both located in the heart: the hun, associated with air
and breath, representing Yang; the po, associated with the body, representing
Yin. After death, the hun ascended to heaven, while the po descended under
ground. During the same period, the concept of the tripartite soul was devel
oped by influential philosophers such as Pythagoras and Plato. Pythagoras
thought that the soul was composed of three parts: Thymos, passion; nous,
spirit; phrenes, intellect (Zhmud, 2012). The phrenes, the only immortal part
of the soul, was solely present in humans, while the thymos and the nous
were also present in animals. Pythagoras located the phrenes and the nous
in the head, while the thymos in the heart. Influenced by Pythagoras, Plato
also divided the soul into three parts: logos, reason; thymos, passion; eros,
desire. The immortal logos was located in the head, and the mortal thymos
and eros in the thorax. The logos acted like a charioteer striving to drive a
chariot pulled by two-winged horses opposite in breed and character (Plato,
2011). If the white horse, the thymos, obeyed the charioteer, the soul would
rise to enlightenment. Otherwise, overcome by the black horse, the eros, the
soul would lose its wings and fall to Earth. Some philosophers thought that
the soul had even more parts. For example, Plutarch, a Platonist in the 1st
century and priest at the Temple of Apollo, believed in a five-part soul. Apart
from Plato’s logos, thumos and eros, Plutarch further defined another two
parts: one responsible for nurture and growth, the other for perception.
Aristotle’s ideas differed from Pythagoreanism and Platonism (Aristotle,
1931). In his view, the soul was unitary but endowed with different degrees
and functions. Plants had the vegetative soul in charge of nutrition and
growth, animals had the sensitive soul including the functions of the vegeta
tive soul but also responsible for sensation, and finally, humans had the intel
lectual soul, which, apart from the capacities of the vegetative and sensitive
souls, also included the nous, the ability to reason and understand. Relating
sensation to blood, Aristotle considered the heart to be the seat of sensation,
while the rational soul, immortal and self-existent, did not operate through
any specific bodily organ.
These philosophers thus attributed to the soul several functions. The soul
was the vital breath and life force, whose absence caused death, such as the
hun in Confucianism. The soul caused motion, such as Heraclitus’ water-
generated soul in ceaseless flux. According to Anaxagoras, whose philosophy
influenced Socrates, it was the mind that set all in movement (Kirk et al.,
1983). Aristotle considered sensation to be a function of the soul and associ
ated it with blood, and so did Critias, a student of Socrates and second cousin
of Plato (Morison, 2023). Finally, the intellect and reason were regarded
as the highest faculties of the soul by some eminent philosophers, such as
Pythagoras’ phrenes, Plato’s logos and Aristotle’s nous, which could con
nect humans to the intelligible and divine. The power of the soul and mind
reached its apogee in idealism. According to Vijñānavāda, a doctrine of Bud
dhist philosophy, which developed in the 4th century, all things were only
mind, and nothing really existed but the flow of mental experiences because
however one imagined things, that was how they appeared (Williams et al.,
2011). For Wang Yangming, a 16th-century Confucian philosopher, it was
not the world that shaped the mind but the mind that gave reason to the
world (Chang, 1962).
What is the soul’s relationship to the body, the corporeal and perisha
ble? Both Pythagoras and Plato thought that the soul was incorporeal and
immortal and would continue to exist after the death of the body. They
believed in the transmigration of the soul to another body, the metempsycho
sis. Pythagoras who had influenced Plato might himself have been inspired by
Orphism, which developed in the 6th century bce in ancient Greece (Brem
mer, 2001). Orphism was based on the myth of Orpheus, a legendary musi
cian and poet, whose music could charm almost any being. Grieved by the
death of his wife, Eurydice, he traveled to the underworld, nearly succeeded
in bringing her back from Hades but finally lost her forever because of a
single glance. In Orphism, the soul, divine and immortal, aspired to free
dom, while the body held it prisoner. Death liberated the soul but only for
a brief moment, as the wheel of birth drew the soul back into the corporeal
world, and the soul alternated between ephemeral freedom and endless rein
carnation. It was only through the grace of gods and self-purification that
the soul could achieve the spiral ascent of destiny to eternal life, similar to
moksha in Hinduism. Pythagoras might also be influenced by Pherecydes of
Syros who was thought to be his teacher. Pherecydes was among the earli
est philosophers in ancient Greece to treat and teach the immortality of the
soul and reincarnation (Schibli, 1990). Pythagoras was a strong exponent of
metempsychosis, and his belief in the immortality of the soul influenced early
Christians.
Plato’s Republic was closed by the myth of Er, who returned to life after
death and a journey in the underworld, where he saw the souls choose
new lives, human or animal, then drink of Lethe and fly to their new birth
like shooting stars. Plato’s Phaedo was about the last hours of Socrates
who was sentenced to death for his beliefs and poisoned by hemlock.
For Socrates, all of philosophy was training for death. Faced with his
imminent death, he tried to prove the immortality of the soul to embrace
death without suffering: “the return to life is a real fact, and so it is that
the living are born from the dead, and that the souls of the dead do exist”
(Plato, 1875). The soul would not perish and vanish away into nothing
ness at death as feared by his disciple Cebes and others, for the dead was
generated from the living and vice versa, which formed an endless life
death-life cycle, just like sleep from awakening and awakening from sleep.
The soul participated in the Form of Life, and Forms, unchanging, would
never become their opposite. The body was visible and mortal, while the
soul was invisible and divine and therefore would survive the death of the
body. Furthermore, a priori knowledge existed, which originated from
recollections of knowledge gained in a previous life. As death purified the
soul by liberating it from the passions and desires of the body, only the
philosophers contemplating death their entire life could approach wisdom
and truth in death, the ideal destination of the soul. Socrates even pre
ferred the afterlife to the living world: “I should go to dwell in the com
pany of not only of Gods wise and good but next also of men that have
died better than those here on earth” (Plato, 1875). Soul and body, mind
and matter, intellect and sensation, reason and desire, truth and shadow,
immortal and mortal, eternal and ephemeral, the relation between which
was dark and invisible to the bodily eye but could be known by using the
mind through philosophy.
Aristotle had a different point of view. From his teacher Plato’s theory of
Forms, Aristotle developed his own hylomorphic theory for a unitary view of
matter and Form, body and soul. The soul was related to the body as Form
to matter; it was the Form of a natural body having life potentially within
it. A living being consisted of a body with the property of life—its soul.
Although the soul did not belong to a separate ontological realm such as
Plato’s realm of Forms, it was not reducible to mere matter because its essen
tial attribute was organization and function. Aristotle rejected the doctrine of
metempsychosis assuming that any soul could inhabit any body. He denied a
priori knowledge gained in a previous life but believed in the mind as a blank
slate, a tabula rasa. However, Aristotle believed that nous was immortal and
divine and could exist independently of the body.
Only a few philosophers believed in the annihilation of the soul and mind
at death and eternal oblivion. The materialist schools such as Charvaka did
not even consider the afterlife as an option because its existence was unverifi
able. In Charvaka, the only means of acquiring valid knowledge was through
sense perception, and the world was bound by the limits of our sense expe
riences. Charvaka defended a radical reductive materialism, according to
which all beings derived from the composition of the four elements: earth,
water, fire and air. Therefore, mental states could be completely reduced to
physical processes. The mind was a product of the structure of the body
and perished with it. Death was the end; there was no afterlife, no soul:
higher than this world, there was none; there was no heaven and no hell; the
world of Shiva and other such worlds were all invented by ignorant impos
tors (Rangacarya, 1909).
Science: the substrates of the soul

The philosophy of Charvaka was based on materialism and empiricism and
only relied on the experiential and verifiable, which has become the central
tenet of the modern scientific method. Science emerged from myth, religion
and philosophy. Pythagoras developed mathematical theorems and identified
the planet Venus while believing in musica universalis and metempsychosis;
Plato’s Timaeus is still considered of great value by mathematicians as well
as by historians and philosophers of science today; Aristotle reasoned about
the divine and immortal nous while excelling in physics and biology; Dao
ism believed in the immortality of humans’ heavenly soul while developing
alchemy and medicine. In Aristotle’s view, science was practical, poetical or
theoretical. Tied by the activity of thinking, poetry and metaphysics had the
same status as physics and mathematics.
Aristotle defined the soul, except nous, as biological processes of a liv
ing organism including metabolism, temperature regulation, sensory infor
mation processing, inheritance and development. In the physics developed
by Stoicism, a Greek materialist school founded by Zeno of Citium in the
3rd century bce, the human soul was an emanation from the logos of God,
pneuma, meaning “breath,” considered to be the primitive substance of the
universe pervading everything (Inwood, 2003). The property of things was
determined by the tension of pneuma. Pneuma in inorganic bodies was of
the lowest tension and provided cohesion; pneuma in plants possessed the
next degree of tension and generated growth; in a higher tension, pneuma
endowed all animals with the soul that provided sensation and perception;
pneuma in its highest form bestowed the rational soul on humans. However,
in ancient Greek medicine, pneuma was the circulating air necessary for the
functioning of vital organs and the material sustaining mind in a body (van
der Eijk, 2005), while for Ibn al-Nafis, an Arab polymath in the 13th century
who was the first to describe the pulmonary circulation of the blood, the soul
was simply what a human indicated by saying “I” (Fancy, 2013).
Alcmaeon of Croton, a natural philosopher and pioneer in anatomical dis
section in the 5th century bce, traced the optic nerves into the brain and iden
tified the brain as the seat of sensation and thought (Tannery, 1887). However,
Alcmaeon did not use experimental methods to understand the genesis of the
mind. Instead, he only claimed that the soul was in ceaseless movement and
thus contained in itself a principle of motion, just like the heavenly bodies in
perpetual movement, which he believed to be divine. Therefore, the human
soul was divine and immortal. Although Aristotle thought that other types
of soul derived from the parents physically, the human nous was divine and
beyond the energeia of the body. He believed that a fetus in early gestation
had the vegetative and then the sensitive soul, and God would bestow nous
on humans 40 days after conception for male fetuses and 90 days after con
ception for female fetuses, the stage at which movement was first felt within
the womb and pregnancy was certain (Aristotle, 1887). This was Aristotle’s
theory of epigenesis, which was embraced in the 13th century by Thomas
Aquinas, the immensely influential Christian philosopher, who believed that
the intellectual soul was created by God at the end of human generation. The
soul was also considered divine in Stoic physics: the human soul originated
from the pneuma or logos of God, which was received at birth in its rudi
mentary form through contact with the outer air and was transformed into a
rational soul at age 14 (Brennan, 2007).
Although both atomism and Stoicism were materialist schools, they dif
fered on the origin of the soul. For the atomists, all beings, including the
soul, were composed of “atoms”—tiny, indivisible and invisible particles.
All occurrences, even sensations and thoughts, resulted from atomic motion
and interaction. The atomists did not believe in the divine origin of the soul.
Democritus was a founder of Greek atomism in the 5th century bce, regarded
as the father of modern science. Yet his work was at the time rejected by Plato
and Aristotle, and Plato even wished all his books burnt. From Democritus’
atomic theory, Epicurus developed his own version of atomism. Epicurus
founded the influential philosophical school, the Garden, in competition with
the Stoic school, the Stoa, and Plato’s powerful Academy. Epicurus thought
that the soul, composed of a small number of atoms, was formed at concep
tion, which differed from the Aristotelian and Stoic views. In contrast to
Democritus’s deterministic physics, Epicurus posited “atomic swerve,” the
slight deviation of atoms from their expected course, keeping the mind from
experiencing an inner compulsion in doing everything it does and from being
forced to endure and suffer like a captive in chains (Lucretius, 2001). There
fore, in his view, humans’ free will is derived from the indeterministic motion
of atoms.
Galen, the influential Greek physician and surgeon, was more cautious
about the origin and nature of the soul. Galen established his authority
in the 2nd century, and his views dominated Western medicine for over
1,000 years. Believing that the best physician should also be a philosopher,
Galen combined medicine with philosophy, and his thoughts were particu
larly influenced by Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. Although Galen derived
his tripartite theory of the soul from that of Plato, he disagreed with Plato’s
belief in the divine origin and immortality of humans’ rational soul because
this belief could not be demonstrated scientifically by experiments. In Galen’s
view, humans had no means to know the substance of God or even of their
own soul. Therefore, he avoided asserting anything regarding these ques
tions, whether the soul was corporeal or incorporeal, eternal or corruptible.
He did, however, hypothesize that the soul, including the rational soul, was
corporeal and mortal. For him, if the rational part was a form of the soul,
then it was mortal: for it was a temperament of the brain (Galen, 2020).
Different from Galen, earlier natural philosophers had firm views on the
nature of the soul. According to Aristotle, pneuma was the primary driving
force of the soul; it was the “vital heat,” the warm, mobile air contained in all
air necessary for life. There was water in earth, and air in water, and in all air
was vital heat, so in a sense all things were full of soul (Aristotle, 1942). The
Stoics considered pneuma to be a mixture of air and fire providing motion
and warmth. This view was thought to have a profound impact on Christian
ity: the Holy Spirit was depicted in the form of tongues of fire accompanied
by a mighty rushing wind at Pentecost.
The atomists thought that the soul was unitary and pervaded the entire
body, as did the Stoics. The Stoic soul had eight faculties, including the five
senses, voice, reproduction and the hêgemonikon—the central commanding
faculty that dominated the seven other faculties derived from its pneuma
(Inwood, 2003). The Stoics located the hêgemonikon, in particular respon
sible for logos, in the heart, from which the pneuma diffused throughout the
body, as the heart was observed to be the first functioning organ of the fetus.
In a hen’s egg, Aristotle also observed that the heart was the first organ to be
active. Therefore, he thought that pneuma, the vital heat, first made the heart
appear and then the other organs. Galen opposed Aristotle’s cardiocentric
view and criticized the conception and localization of the pneuma or soul by
the Stoics who failed, in his view, to provide a credible explanation. Rely
ing on his experience in medicine as well as in dissection and vivisection of
animals, he developed his tripartite theory of the soul: the pneuma physicon,
the natural soul in the liver, thought to be the source of the veins and blood,
regulating the living forces in the body, in particular blood and bodily pleas
ures; the pneuma zoticon, the vital soul in the heart, circulating throughout
the body and generating emotions; the pneuma psychikon, the rational soul
located in the brain, governing cognitive functions such as thought and rea
son (Hankinson, 2008). Galen thus laid the foundations for future localiza
tion theories. Pneuma was inhaled into the lungs and also passed through
pores of the skin. The vital pneuma circulated in the arterial system, and
the psychic pneuma within the brain and nervous system. In Galen’s view,
the soul as a whole maintained the health of the body by strengthening the
functioning capacity of organs.
More than 400 years before Galen, the Greek physician Herophilus already
localized the soul in the brain, specifically in the fourth ventricle. Herophilus
was a pioneer in scientific dissection of human bodies, even reported to have
vivisected at least 600 prisoners (Tertullian, 2010). Galen based his work
on the anatomical findings of Herophilus because dissection and vivisection
on humans were strictly prohibited at the time. Through dissection, Hero
philus succeeded in differentiating nerves from blood vessels and thought
that nerves carried the pneuma or soul to animate the body. Like Alcmaeon,
Herophilus traced the nerves throughout the body and observed that they all
converged to the brain as a continuation of the spinal cord and cerebellum,
located most closely to the fourth ventricle of the brain (von Staden, 1989).
Having also identified motor and sensory nerves, he thus inferred that the
center of movement and perception, the soul, resided in the fourth ventricle.
Furthermore, he noticed the bumpy aspect of the walls of the brain ventricles,
which he named the “choroid plexus” and saw it as a result of the interaction
of the brain with the pneuma. The term “choroid plexus” is still used today,
but the designated structure secretes cerebrospinal fluid rather than pneuma.
Pneuma was inhaled by the lungs and sent to the brain ventricles through
the vessels to be converted into the psychic pneuma, which was then sent
through the nervous system to generate thought, motion and other functions
of the body. In the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci also located the soul in
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Consciousness Life and The Universe Xue Fan Full Chapter PDF

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Consciousness, Life and the Universe

Consciousness, Life and the Universe Xue Fan

Diamond Hill Kit Fan

Universal Biology after Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel: The

Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics 1st Edition Shan

Self-Consciousness and ’split’ Brains: The Mind’s I

The Epistemic Role of Consciousness Declan Smithies

Women Negotiating Feminism and Science Fiction Fandom:

Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness: Through

Xue Fan is a researcher in epistemology and history of science and technology

We are born as from a quiet sleep,

Zhuang Zhou, Zhuangzi

Introduction: the ultimate questions of consciousness, life

1 A tale of millions of years: the origin of consciousness

2 A five-century quest: explaining consciousness

Global integration of brain activity 47

3 Toward the ultimate understanding of consciousness:

Those automatic functions that keep us alive 104

Special structures in the fabric of the

4 Expand consciousness: toward the unknown 180

Conclusion: create the future 189

I have emphasized only a few important highlights in Xue Fan’s valu-

[I]f we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable

Everything we do in science and humanities is conditioned by our world-

Myth: facing the unknown and the abyss

FIGURE 1.2 Giza pyramid complex (2600–2500 bce), Giza, Egypt

were protected by Pyramid Texts—complex spells to guide their souls to the

devoured by Ammit, a demoness with a composite body combining croco­

Religion: the words of an oak

FIGURE 1.8 Soulcatcher made of bone and used by shamans

Australian Aborigines, ancient Berbers painted the bodies of their dead

Birth is not a beginning; death is not an end. There is existence without

immutable, eternal essence of all living beings (Monier-Williams, 1891).

There is no permanent Self, no immutable Atman or soul. The Self is an illu­

FIGURE 1.10 Tower of Silence, Yazd, Iran (c. 19th century)

Philosophy: know thyself

Other thinkers took a materialistic position without divine forces or super

Science: the substrates of the soul

“Costs less per mile of service”

The Brick Row Book Shop, Inc.

The Brick Row Book Shop, Inc.

THE NEW NASH FOUR SPORT CAR

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Poems of Arthur O’Shaughnessy

‘Hath any loved you well, down there,

O’Shaughnessy died in 1881. Until the publication of this

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

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devoured by Ammit, a demoness with a composite body combining croco

There is no permanent Self, no immutable Atman or soul. The Self is an illu