Software and Hardware
Fixing the sicknesses of the soul.
Thought
The human experience is more than just biology and chemistry. Instinctively I seem to know that ‘Me’ is more than just the genetic composition I see when I look in the mirror. I am not just a brain and beating heart. Sometimes it can almost feel like Me and my body are not necessarily the same thing, the same way that software is not the same thing as hardware. My body is just the hardware my soul was downloaded onto. It is clear that some bodies are not able to run the software correctly, the same way that my original iPhone could not run the latest iOS.
I think that suffering could broadly be put into two categories, physical and spiritual. Clearly when a leg is broken it causes suffering. But what about the brain? I think here too the two categories remain. Sometimes the brain gets hurt, harmed or damaged which prevents our soul from being able to operate correctly.
I know that many have bought into biological explanations for ailments such as anxiety, depression, and other emotional troubles. I know there are ‘studies’ and ‘research’ that some love to cite to explain and justify. But I cannot help but believe that depression, anxiety and stress are, to use my analogy, software problems.
Somewhere the bug or virus of depression and anxiety has invaded our soul and we haven’t caught it, we haven’t run the latest updates, or scanned for and removed them. And so the begin to infect our lives. Am I wrong? I might be. But if we were just hardware; nothing more than biology and chemistry, how is it that depression for example still exists when pharmaceutical companies tell us that this condition is a chemical imbalance that their pills rectify?
Depression, anxiety and similar problems are very real, difficult and even debilitating. But I am convinced we will never solve a software problem by improving or tweaking the hardware. The spiritual sicknesses of the soul require spiritual remedies.
Quote.
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find you have excluded life itself.
- C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain, p.25)