Are you familiar with any good arguments for the soul? Many people today don’t know any.

Here’s one I think you should know: the qualia argument. It runs as follows: Mary is a 55 year old neuroscientist. She lives in a special, locked research facility. This facility does not contain any colored objects. Every object in that facility is colorless, or grey. Mary has lived there from birth. She has never set foot outside the facility.

Locked up there, Mary has become the world expert in the perception of purple. She knows, down the molecule, what wavelengths of light produce purple. She knows how the wavelengths pass through an eyeball, stimulate the cells of the retina, and how a ‘purple’ signal runs down the optic nerve to the superior colliculus. She knows how it reaches the occipital cortex, and what occurs in the brain’s higher cortex, e.g. how your brain distinguishes all shades of purple.

Literally, no future discoveries can be made on the subject.

But Mary gets frustrated and bored. One day, she decides to break out. She unlocks the emergency hatch, and stumbles out, squinting as the glaring sun pours into her eyes.

Surrounding the facility, there are fields of lavender. She stands gazing at the purple lavender.

Question for you: has she learned anything new?

Has she learned anything that wasn’t already known, scientifically? Think about it. Most people have a tendency to say, YES.

This argument is called the qualia argument. A qualia in philosophy, is the subjective ‘what it is like’ to see a color. In addition to a comprehensive knowledge about the brain, there is an additional thing, the ‘what it is like’ to be seeing purple as a real person. In other words, when anyone sees purple, something purply has been known and something has occurred that cannot be fully explained by electrophysiology and neurology. After all, your brain is, on the inside, only grey. I challenge you to dissect a brain and find anything purple. You won’t find it.

We all, like Mary, have from birth inhabited our brain. Your brain is, so to speak, a locked research facility. It is a lot like the grey, colorless facility which Mary inhabited. And from which there is no escape.

Is it not true that we only research the world from behind the filter of our own, colorless brains? And how would we get outside of our brains? Even if we wanted to try?

When people are depressed, they retreat into themselves. They spend all their time thinking and they refuse social engagements. They may be walking in the daylight, but it is as if they are still indoors. They exist in the indoors of a shadowy mental existence.

How does color get into the grayness of our brain matter?

How can purple- whatever ‘purple’ is- pierce into the shadows of our mental existence?

If all we are, is a walking and talking brain— if that’s what consciousness is— then subjectivity is rather dull. Like the research facility where Mary lived, our subjectivity filters everything into its own shade of grey. Brain tissue is exactly that: a million shades of grey. If your experience of the world can be reduced to the activities of a brain, then ‘purple’ is an illusion.

If you reject this— if you think color isn’t an illusion— then your perception of purple must involve some capacity besides the brain.

This is, presumably, a capacity of the human soul.

It is what Emily Dickinson meant when she said, “The brain is wider than the sky— For—put them side by side— the one the other will contain.”

If this isn’t true, if the brain is all we are, then nothing can be known that isn’t filtered through the colorless grey matter that sleeps beneath our skull. In that case, all we have are shadowy representations. But it seems we do have more than that.

Depression and its treatment with psychedelics may offer a further clue.

The depressed do seem to retreat into a boring, colorless subjectivity.

And psychedelics, which treat depression, appear to do the opposite, drawing a person out of their subjectivity by heightening the senses.

A vast number of people have reported that psychedelics have helped them not only overcome depression but recover their soul with its irreducible qualities.  They report a newfound intense interest in the objective reality of the world and of loved ones, as contrasted with the relative un-importance of the self.

Aldous Huxley in his essay ‘The Doors of Perception’ spoke of how his use of mescaline restored to him the ‘luminous’ qualities of flowers, rocks, and other natural objects. This is very similar to many testimonies from people that psilocybin made colors even more real, surroundings more luminous.

Is this an illusion caused by a drug? Or is it how we’re meant to see?

Perhaps all the drug is doing is returning a person to their natural capacity? And that there is some widespread problem nowadays, some shadowy kind of subjectivity, pervasive in our culture, which closes most of us off to reality?

Think of a tourist entering in a cathedral in France, hiding behind the lens of a camera. It is a common behavior. You can see it all over Europe. Does this tourist really see the cathedral at all? Or does he merely document the colorless fact that he went there? But ultimately, was he present? Was he really there at all? Or was he only in his brain? Was it a real cathedral he was, all along, interested in? Or the idea of a cathedral?

His grey and colorless SONY camera may be good at recording color, but it does not contain any color within itself. And its role is not to interact with reality, but to protect him from it.  It also protects them from having to confront the profound spiritual motivations which drove a real Frenchman in 1163 to build Notre Dame.

The African tribal view of the matter— that a camera will steal your soul— may be true on some level. Ultimately, no camera can replace your confrontation with reality. Purple is so beautiful in itself, that it is like a god, and if you’re not at least tempted to revere and worship it, you’re not really experiencing purple, but the idea of purple.

Nor will any illusion of subjectivity protect you from the real world.

The locked research facility could not inoculate Mary from the real world, and likewise, the idea that ‘all we are is a brain’ will not protect you from reality.

At some point you may—like Mary—decide to rediscover your own soul, and break out.