Out-of-Body Experiences as the Origin of the Concept of a “Soul”

Contemporary philosophical and scientific discussions of mind developed from a “proto-concept of mind”, a mythical, traditionalistic, animistic and quasi-sensory theory about what it means to have a mind. It can be found in many different cultures and has a semantic core corresponding to the folk-phenomenological notion of a “soul”. It will be argued that this notion originates in accurate and truthful first-person reports about the experiential content of a specific neurophenomenological state-class called “out-of-body experiences”. They can be undergone by every human being and seem to possess a culturally invariant cluster of functional and phenomenal core properties similar to the proto-concept of mind. The common causal factor in the emergence and development of the notion of the soul and the proto-concept of mind may consist in a yet to be determined set of properties realized by the human brain, underlying the cluster of phenomenal properties described in the relevant first-person reports. This hypothesis suggests that such a neurofunctional substrate led human beings at different times, and in widely varying cultural contexts, to postulate the existence of a soul and to begin developing a theory of mind. 1. The Proto-Concept of Mind What is the “proto-concept of mind”? In many cultures we simultaneously find prescientific theories about a “breath of life”, e.g., the Hebrew ruach, the Arabic ruh, the Latin spiritus, the Greek pneuma or the Indian prana and the five koshas, respectively, etc. (for historical details and further references see Verbeke 1974, Schrott 1974). Typically this is a spatially extended entity, keeping the body alive and leaving it during phases of unconsciousness and after death. It has a material aspect, though more subtle than that of the physical body. We are confronted with an almost ubiquitous idea of what mind actually is, which in all its