A Cosmological Neuroscientific Approach to the Soul of Multiverse

Based on neuroscientific facts and cosmological considerations, the hypothesis is presented here that just as the guided complexity of matter and energy in the unique space-time of each human brain generates the host’s Soul, the infinite complexity of the Multiverse, a more likely embodiment of the allness of existence than a single Universe, must also have a Soul. It is appreciated that this hypothesized Soul of Multiverse, imagined as majestically as ob-scurely in some ancient religious texts, is currently outside of the realm of science. Yet, this paper argues that the intellectual and technological advances of the 21 st century created favorable conditions for starting to address the nature of Soul across human and cosmic scales with the approach of cosmological neuroscience. This interdisciplinary field aims to examine the nervous system in the context of cosmic laws, including the laws that made life on Earth possible and let it evolve to generate the nervous system and its increasingly more sophisticated forms culminating into the appearance of human Soul and its noospheric expansion with purpose and potential to transcend. A human-specific prefrontal cortical supercircuitry termed Self-Ken, with domains Conscience, Mission, Will and Identity, is proposed for the neural center of the individual human Soul. The design of a globally applicable Noospheric Creativity Monitor is introduced to initiate the examination of Soul at its individual and global levels. Possible experimental astronomical and broadened cosmological studies are mentioned to evaluate the discussed hypothesis.


Introduction
At the time of this writing, spring of 2022, children are murdered and towns are How to cite this paper: Ludvig, N. (2022). A Cosmological Neuroscientific Approach to the Soul of Multiverse. Open Journal of Philosophy,12,[460][461][462][463][464][465][466][467][468][469][470][471][472][473] https://doi.org/10. 4236/ojpp.2022.123030 The ancient author or authors of the Katha Upanishad asked us to "Know the atman to be the master of the chariot and the body the chariot…", where the word atman meant the "the individual soul", the very Self "united with the body" yet also different from it (see (Nikhilananda, 1949)). Not without similar ambiguity, Aristotle taught, and recorded in his writing "On the Soul", that "…it is clear that the soul is inseparable from its body, or at any rate that certain parts of it are (if it has parts)…Yet some may be separable because they are not the actualities of any body at all." But Blaise Pascal was clear in his Pensées: "…we are composed of two natures, opposite to one another and radically different in kind-namely soul and body. For it is impossible for the reasoning part of us to be other than spiritual; and if anyone claimed that we are not composite, but simply corporeal, this would put us even further from having knowledge of things, because matter that knows itself is as inconceivable as anything could be." Francis Crick was as clear as Pascal-in the expression of his diametrically opposite concept: "The Astonishing Hypothesis is that You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules (Crick, 1994)." Views on the Soul at cosmic dimensions have always been as contradictory. Nikhilananda (1949) explained that the sacred texts of the Upanishads had connected the Soul to the Universe by teaching that the "Universe evolves from the union of prakriti (nature) and Purusha", where the term Purusha denoted Spirit or Soul. On the other hand, Aristotle's summary of his thoughts "On the Universe" didn't even include the word "soul" and Blaise Pascal's Pensées is silent about the possible nature of the Holy Spirit. Francis Crick's "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul" stayed within the limits of brain research and particularly stressed that "A modern neurobiologist sees no need for the religious concept of a soul to explain the behavior of humans and other animals (Crick, 1994)." Nikola Tesla didn't mince words either: "To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine…In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call 'soul' or 'spirit' is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body… (Tesla, 1935)" Nevertheless, the Universe Nikola Tesla referred to must be more than a "great machine", as its seemingly infinite complexity across 90 billion light-years has been "functioning" for at least 13 billion years while generated life on Earth, which, even at its miniscule dimensions, presently vibrates with more than 8 million different species of animals, plants, fungi and protozoa (Sweetlove, 2011) and allowed the intelligence of humans like Aristotle, Pascal, Crick, Nikhilananda, and Tesla's very own, to thrive. And while religious concepts of the Soul are indeed unnecessary "to explain the behavior of humans and other animals" in the most elementary level, the essence, and I emphasize: essence, of religious concepts may help to think about the evolutionary origin, wider context and ultimate aim of these very behaviors.

A New Definition of Soul Applicable to Human and Cosmic Levels
Soul can be defined as a product of matter and energy in special nodes of space-time where the guided structural and dynamic complexity of the involved substances reaches such a high level that a distinct presence is born, the presence of soul: neither matter nor energy yet inseparable from each while equips the meaning of both with purpose and the potential to transcend. This definition, put together for this article, is consistent with the opinion that the Soul is a manifestation of the brain's "vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules" (Crick, 1994). But the addition that this assembly of matter and energy is perhaps the attribute of "special nodes of space-time" connects the idea of the individual Soul to its surrounding spheres. Where these spheres as much include the global "envelop of thinking substance", "Noosphere", recognized by Teilhard de Chardin (1959), as the cosmic systems scanned by the Webb space telescope.
While this definition mentions the necessity of structural and dynamic complexity of matter and energy for the production of Soul, it also adds that this complexity is perhaps a "guided" one. This points to the equal necessity of a source that empowers matter and energy in the human brain to produce not just a "great machine" but also a carrier of "purpose" and "potential to transcend". with or without the Will needed for this accomplishment, and with or without social success for the Identity that links these three into a coherent whole.
And the phrase of potential to transcend refers to the ability that once allowed the life of some arboreal, ape-like animals in East Africa change into the life of a new species whose descendants, though after millions of years of evolution, now listen to the sounds of Mars via the rover they named Perseverance. Though a detail of fundamental significance, it is still a detail whether abiogenesis or the "Directed Panspermia" Crick & Orgel (1973) dared to think about was behind the cosmic program that probably operated through the DNA and cellular architecture of the Last Universal Common Ancestors (Glansdorff et al., 2008), launching evolution toward increasingly complex organisms with increasingly sophisticated neural processors to ultimately produce the human Soul. Yes, Francis Crick himself felt, exactly 20 years after his and James D. Watson's historic discovery of the structure of DNA (Watson & Crick, 1953), and Leslie Orgel, one of the greatest RNA researchers (Orgel, 2004) agreed, that "it is possible" that "organisms were deliberately transmitted to the earth by intelligent beings on another planet", though "scientific evidence is inadequate at the present time to say anything about the probability." A too extraordinary proposal, it did not take the extra burden of addressing whether there might be a cosmic law behind not only the generation of life but also its spread across the Universe.
The ideas in the above paragraphs are not incompatible with the thoughts of the scientist, artist and poet Alfred Russell Wallace (1889), co-discoverer of the role of evolution in life on Earth. Since this is what he wrote in his pivotal "Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection with Some of Its Applications" (1889) on the 3 stages of evolution: "The first stage is the change from inorganic to organic, when the earliest vegetable cell…first appeared. This is often imputed to a mere increase of complexity of chemical compounds; but increase of complexity of chemical compounds…could certainly not have produced living protoplasm…The next stage is still more marvelous…it is the introduction of…consciousness…The third stage is…the existence in man of number of his most characteristic and noblest faculties…These three distinct stages of progress from inorganic world of matter and motion up to man, point clearly to an unseen universe, to a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is altogether subordinate."

The Specific Hypothesis on the Soul of Multiverse
Does it make sense to consider Wallace's "unseen universe" as part of a Multiverse? Isn't it arrogance to use the term "Soul of Multiverse", knowing that Universes outside of our own have never been detected and exist only in philosophical essays and cosmological theories (Collins, 2007 Humankind's current understanding of the last 13.8 billion years of its approximately 90 billion light years diameter hosting Universe is based on observing this environment with advanced technologies for a flash of ~100 years from a microscopic orbit of less than 1/10,000 of a single light year. But future astronomical observations for hundreds of more years from hundreds of times larger orbits may show that our Universe is moving in the way it is moving not because of the explosion of its densely concentrated matter, energy, space and time about 13.8 billion years ago, as taught by current cosmology, but because the Universe is a flowing wave acted upon by the flowing waves of other, nearby, Universes belonging to the Multiverse. We shouldn't forget that Nikola Tesla (1926), who as clearly saw signs of engineering in the Universe as in humans, was convinced that "…we are nothing but waves in space and time" (1926). Which suggests he felt that the Universe may also behave like waves: these fundamental manifestations of matter and energy across all levels of existence from the wave-nature of subatomic particles through the waves of oceans and neural action potentials to the likely occurring gravitational waves. Thus, associating the phenomenon of Soul with the expanse of a flowing Multiverse and its cosmic programs is not unreasonable.
Though the term Soul of Multiverse itself may sound new, humankind has been aware of its essence, and I emphasize: essence, for thousands of years. The Book of Genesis imagines a "Spirit of God" contributing to the creation of our world. The Gospel according to St. Matthew mentions Jesus telling his disciples to go and teach in the name of not just the Father and the Son but also in the name of the "Holy Spirit". Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching drew our attention to a cosmic "Way" with "…infinite possibilities…older than God". The Soul of Multiverse is a scientific interpretation of the mystery of "Spirit", "Holy Spirit", "Way" and analogous religious concepts. And if these mysteries can be interpreted scientifically, as this article just did, then they can also be approached with the intellectual and technological tools of true science, just as true science has also approached other religious subjects from the nature of celestial objects through the origin of animals to the splendor of the world.
Most scientists of our time think that science and religion are incompatible approaches to the laws of Cosmos. But this was not always the case. Lomonosov wrote in his report on the discovery of Venus atmosphere in 1761 that "…Truth and faith are two sisters and daughters of one Almighty Parent: they can never come in a quarrel with one another…" (see (Shiltsev, 2012)). Darwin (1859) did not see contradiction between his theory on the origin of species and the "…laws impressed on matter by the Creator…" Einstein (1935) confessed in his book, "The World as I See It", that "…A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms, it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious at-titude…" We can learn from these scientists' embrace of the cosmic "something we cannot penetrate", however differently they called it. This article calls it as

Neuroscience to Approach the Soul of Multiverse at the Individual Level
It is the neural blueprint of the human Soul that needs to be understood by mapping its core circuitry and supporting system in the human-specific, pre- Scientific examination of the fourth domain, Mission, has yet to be conducted.
For such a prefrontal cortical function hasn't been accepted by mainstream neuroscience, although it is hard to deny that the health, physical strength and beauty of a person, along with his or her comprehension of complexity, accuracy of thinking, use of willpower, recruitment of emotions, production of originality, access to memories and operation with speed, all modified by surrounding space-time and social determinants, lay a Mission for him or her. The Mission destined to be his or hers alone, realized or not, welcomed or not.
The time may come sooner than later for approaching the human Soul with precision psychology: long-term, personalized studies on the interactions, and I emphasize: interactions, of the murderer-to-saint spectrum of Conscience, the Will that can command the sacrifice of biological comfort for abstract principles, the infinitely diverse Identity, and the Mission that enables all of us, whether born in a shantytown, like Diego Maradona, or in a royal court, like Princess Mako of Akishino, to transcend, as they did.
To go deeper into the nature of the individual Soul, precision psychology must be complemented with long term electrophysiological and molecular recordings in the prefrontal cortex.
Brain-machine interfaces with thousands of cell-recording electrode-channels implantable in the human cerebral cortex have already been developed (Musk & Neuralink, 2019), and molecular brain-machine interfaces (Ludvig, 2000;Ludvig et al., 2016) are supportively reexamined (Gernert & Feja, 2020) and tested with new approaches in clinical neurosurgical setting (Altenmüller at al, 2020). These achievements are still far from yielding knowledge on the guided complexity N. Ludvig Figure 1. Architecture of the human brain, according to this author (Ludvig, 1999(Ludvig, , 2000Ludvig et al., 2009Ludvig et al., , 2015. The layout is consistent with current neuroscientific concepts, but the inclusion of "Self-Ken", a hypothesized supercircuitry in the human-specific, prefrontal cortical cognitive system with extensive association cortical and subcortical connections to support such key functions as Conscience, Mission, Will and Identity, is an addition. I view it as the central medium of the individual human Soul. The division of the Cognitive System to conscious and subconscious layers is indicated as appropriate, just as its fundamentally important connections to the Emotional and Motivational systems. The supercircuitry of Self-Ken likely includes neurons belonging not only to the primate-specific dorsolateral prefrontal cortices but also to the orbitofrontal and cingulate areas: reminders of our older mammalian roots (Fuster, 2002;Kolk & Rakic, 2022).
of the approximately 1 billion local neurons of the neural center of human Soul.
But it can be anticipated that one day electrophysiological/neurochemical nanoelectrodes, perhaps built from the 10 nm diameter current ones (Abbott et al., 2020), will be led by neurosurgeon-supervised AI into the ~40 nm diameter extracellular channels throughout the prefrontal cortex, to meet the Soul of the first implanted pioneer and show its real mystery to an as humbly marveling humankind as the one that watched the real mystery of the Moon on July 20,

1969.
The four domains of Self-Ken (Figure 1) already transcended to form Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere at a new level through the World Wide Web. Of which examination should help us to understand how the nature of Soul expands from the individual human sphere to the sphere of the Earth: one step towards the Multiverse. And just as understanding the operation of Soul within the confines of the human brain has the practical relevance of advancing mental care, understanding the noospheric Soul has the practical relevance of nurturing

Neuroscience to Approach the Soul of Multiverse at the Noospheric Level
If the Introduction mentioned the inability of current science to shed light into the laws that determine the fight of evil and divine across the individual, global and cosmic spheres of the Soul, this fight within the digital noosphere has already been recognized.
Edward Snowden (2019) was the first who made public that "…the Internet of today is unrecognizable…our attention, our activities, our locations, our desireseverything about us that we revealed, knowingly or not, was being surveilled and sold in secret…" And he didn't forget to add that "…governments could spy on the world without telling a soul…" Sure, he had to escape from the very country his ancestors started.
But the same Internet also embraces the divine. At the time of this writing, it allows the Swedish environmentalist teenager communicate with her 15 million followers all over the world; provides the Missionaries of Charity in India with a website that documents its service with information available to anyone on Earth; let the performances of Parsifal be seen and heard by everyone who wants to experience the cosmic Soul it relays, either on the Eastern or the Western Hemisphere.
Neuroscience is ready to capture the waves that move creativity across the globe: Figure 2 introduces the design of a Noospheric Creativity Monitor (NCM) for this purpose. As described in its clinically oriented version (Ludvig et al., 2011), the device could be safely used and worn by many interested creative men and women and their non-creative (control) counterparts from all cultures.
The system would resolve, with 2-millisecond accuracy, not only the induction, work and passing of creative desires, thoughts and feelings and their EEG correlates during creative acts, but it would also give insight into how the individual Souls pulse together in response to significant global events, such as inspiring cultural and political events, as well as wars and natural catastrophes, across all seasons. The EEG recordings would focus on the center of creative acts proved to be in the prefrontal cortex (De Souza et al., 2014;Benedek et al., 2020;Bogolepova et al., 2021). At the same time, the EEG-synchronized audiovisual recordings of the device would let each 2-millisecond, coded EEG wave-segment be correlated with the user's coded interactions with his or her surroundings, including the tone and content of conversations, head-and hand-movements, locomotion, physical contacts, unique behaviors and reactions to changes in the sounds and lights of the area of the unfolding creative event.
Besides letting us know about the basic, cross-cultural and environment-sensitive, electrophysiological correlates of creative acts, the practical relevance of NCM studies is to help us understand how to guide the noosphere towards choosing the right global Conscience, Will, Identity and Mission, just as the individual Self-Ken has been guided during its evolution toward these choices. . Design of the NCM system, a wearable device to be part of a global network and operating for a full year, with weekly 24-hour recordings, to generate meaningful results on the association cortical, including prefrontal cortical, EEG activity of each participant artist, scientist and inventor, along with his/her surrounding environment and social interactions before, during and after creative work. The 3 unique features of the device are: 1) A medallion of which multiple functions include the collection of artifact-free, wirelessly transmitted EEG data along with environmental audio-and video-recordings to send all to the participant's wrist watch; 2) This wrist watch continuously analyzing the received dataset with the novel method of dynamic neurocombinatorics; 3) The participantcontrolled communication of this wrist watch through the very channels of noospheric Conscience the above paragraph mentioned.

Experimental Astronomy to Explore the Existence of the Multiverse
Evaluation of the Soul of Multiverse hypothesis should include testing, with the tools of both theoretical physics and experimental astronomy, whether Universes exist outside of our own. The horizon of the observable Universe has been getting farer and farer from us. The limited, geocentric Ptolemaic view to the Universe was followed by a scientific outlook to the entire Milky Way.
Whether the Milky Way is the entire Universe itself or just one of the galaxies that form an immensely larger Universe was passionately debated in the 1920s (see (Trimble, 1995)). But within a decade, the existence of galaxies other than ours was proved. As mentioned, the Universe is now seen as a 90 billion light years diameter, expanding system of more than 100 billion accelerating galaxies.
Since these galaxies were found to be accelerating even more than what was ex- pected on the basis of their masses while their structure showed unexpected dynamic stability, astrophysicists have been trying to explain these observations with the effects of "dark energy" (Copeland et al., 2006) and the presence of "dark matter" (Bahcall, 2015). The existence of dark energy and dark matter, however, is unproven. At least, examination of the problem of dark matter "requires an extension of our current understanding of particle physics or otherwise point to a modification of gravity on cosmological scales" (Bahcall, 2015).
It has not been examined whether the kinetic properties of our Universe could, in fact, be due to immensely large gravitational, tidal-like forces, with or without other, not yet known physical forces, originating from present and/or past interferences from the waves of other, nearby Universes of the Multiverse.
Long-term monitoring of changes in the gravitational and electromagnetic envelop of properly selected galaxies in the local universe (Jarrett, 2004)

Broadened Cosmology to Assist Neuroscience Approaching the Soul of Multiverse
Digitally enhanced complex thinking, a way to live in the developed internet age with the faith in truth we can use if so choose, separating significant and non-significant data with the purpose of serving that truth, may offer a useful methodology for connecting the individual and noospheric levels of Soul to the level of the Multiverse.
To this way of thinking, the separation of science, art, religion, philosophy and engineering is more artificial than natural, obscures the grandeur of complexity with the convenience of reductionist views, provides a less efficient approach to the ultimate laws of our world than the synthesis of the best of science, art, religion, philosophy and engineering. To this way of thinking, the physicist Einstein's observation, that the cosmic laws are "manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty", relays the same phenomenon as the Transformation Music of "Parsifal" or the Quran's note in Sura 31 that "If all the trees on earth were pens and the sea were ink with seven more seas to replenish it, God's words would not be exhausted". To this way of thinking, Spinoza's message in his Ethics, that "Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of divine nature", served, in its depth, the same purpose as the reading from the Book of Genesis by the engineers Frank Borman, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell when they orbited the Moon with their Apollo 8. Because the message of the philosopher and the reading of the astronauts both aimed to convey the reve- And this way of thinking would not mind to broaden the practice of cosmology to extract relevant components of astronomy, astrobiology, scientific philosophy, engineering, quality art and sacred scriptures with the aim of shedding light on the blueprint of a cosmic governing mechanism, whether it is called as "mind", "software", "intelligence", "spirit" or "soul". Such broadened cosmology would consider Rabindranath Tagore (1931)'s note on evolution that "…A multitude of cells were bound together into a larger unit, not through aggregation, but through a marvelous quality of complex interrelationship…the creative principle of unity, the divine mystery of existence…" Then, admitting that this "mystery" is difficult to explain with abiogenesis theories, the discipline would turn to the Crick & Orgel (1973) idea on Directed Panspermia and examine its claim that "…It is a little surprising that organisms with somewhat different codes do not coexist. The universality of the code follows naturally from an 'infective' theory of the origins of life…" In fact, we on Earth are already thinking about "seeding biochemistry" into the subsurface ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus (Smith et al., 2021).
Since hypothesizing a Soul that imbues the cosmic matter, energy, space and time with "purpose and the potential to transcend" is as consistent with the thought of the philosopher poet as with the vision of the cited molecular biologists and astrobiologists, broadened cosmology could use the intellectual tools of astronomy, astrobiology, scientific philosophy, neuroengineering, art and religion to examine the existence of this overarching Soul. Today, many would state that such a Soul is something inherently impossible to understand. But "The history of science is littered with statements that something was inherently impossible to understand (Crick, 1994)." Along with broadened cosmology, cosmological neuroscience might be well positioned to approach the problem of Soul across human and cosmic scales. For its aim is to examine the nervous system in the context of cosmic laws, including the laws that made life on Earth possible and let it evolve to generate the nervous system and its increasingly more sophisticated forms culminating into the appearance of human Soul and its noospheric expansion with purpose and potential to transcend.

Conclusion
The hypothesis was presented that just as the guided complexity of matter and energy in the unique space-time of each human brain generates the host's Soul, the infinite complexity of the Multiverse, a more likely embodiment of the allness of existence than a single Universe, must also have a Soul. a prefrontal cortical supercircuitry functioning as "Self-Ken"; 2) Revisiting Alfred Russell Wallace's synthesis of evolutionary concepts and reasonable thoughts on the "world of spirit"; 3) Examining Teilhard de Chardin's "noosphere" with globally networked creativity monitoring systems; 4) Using Francis Crick's and Leslie Orgel's proposal of "directed panspermia" as inspiration for novel, broadened cosmological investigations. The hypothesis that not only a Multiverse may exist but it may be imbued with a Soul will certainly be criticized