Soul in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish Philosophy

If one wants to pay attention to the nature of consciousness or soul in the Hebrew scriptures (which is recognized as foundational by traditional Christianity and Islam as well as by Judaism), there are two essential words to consider: “nephesh” (נֶפֶשׁ), often translated as “soul,” and “ruach” (רוּחַ), often translated “spirit.” Neither word is translated consistently, nor does either map cleanly onto modern meanings of soul or consciousness.

Nephesh and Ruach in the Hebrew Bible

The essential verse for nephesh is Genesis 2:7: “God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” and “the man became a living being (or soul, nephesh).” If nephesh is translated “soul,” that “soul” was not immortal (in that it had to be described as “living”); it was not a nonphysical substance given to the man, but rather it was what the man became. Nephesh applies to all sentient creatures, not just to humans, and although mostly translated “soul”, it is elsewhere translated as life, person, creature, mind, heart (emotions), desires. There are several places where the context seems to require that nephesh be translated “dead”—it would be an odd coupling, indeed, for nephesh to be an immortal soul and at the same time be dead.

The first use of ruach in the Hebrew bible is Genesis 1:2, where it is the “spirit” (ruach) of God that is hovering in the darkness over the surface of the waters of a formless and desolately empty earth. But ruach is elsewhere translated “wind” (many verses), as well as vigor, courage, anger, disposition, patience, desire, even mind as the seat of mental acts or moral courage. Ruach is used in “holy spirit” as well as in God's spirit. While neither nephesh nor ruach means soul or consciousness, ruach seems closer to a mental designator and nephesh closer to a living body designator.

Segal’s Defense of Souls and Animalism

Philosopher and rabbi Aaron Segal offers a defense of a traditional Judaic view that there are souls and that they exist long before being embodied. Responding to the materialist challenge that it's very surprising that none of us remembers anything from before we were born, he proposes that each of us has “been in existence for a very long time" but "only came to be a thinking thing at a certain point in the development of her body (or brain).”

Other respectable metaphysical views, he argues, “have us existing for just as long and undergoing transformations no less radical than this. For example, according to one prominent view, anything that ever exists, always existed and always will exist. Nothing really goes into or out of existence. What looks like going into and out of existence is just a matter of going from being abstract (with no causal powers and no location, like a feature) to being concrete (with causal powers and a particular location, like a person), and back again. An immaterialist who goes this route need not maintain that any of us has undergone a transformation so radical as from the abstract to the concrete: just from unthinking to thinking” (Olson & Segal, 2023; Segal, 2023).

Segal then moves to a view he calls “closer to home”: animalism—a prominent version of materialism that each of us is a human organism. “Quite plausibly,” he says, “animalism has as a consequence that each of us was once an unthinking fetus. So, according to that prominent version of materialism, each of us has undergone a transformation from an unthinking thing to a thinking thing.”

Shyfrin’s Kabbalah of Information

Physicist/businessman Eduard Shyfrin, who has developed a “Kabbalah of Information” framework that integrates information theory with the Jewish mystical tradition, calls the Kabbalah soul “the information entity with the dimension of self that is structurally part of the informational foundations of the worlds (The Tree of Sefirot)” (Shyfrin, n.d.).

The Kabbalah of Information, Shyfrin says, holds that God created only information, nothing else, as the building blocks of all reality. Thus, there is no fundamental difference between material and spiritual. Creation is an information space (“infospace”), composed of concepts of different complexity and dimensionality. The distance between concepts in infospace is measured by the likeness of their meaning, generating a form of hierarchy of concepts or “worlds”—as determined by the Kabbalah Law of Likeness. Moreover, all the worlds are structurally invariant; the Tree of Sefirot has a fractal structure. The transfer from one concept to another is incremental; it takes place when information change reaches an “error threshold” (Shyfrin, 2019).

Based on the above, Shyfrin explains that the “soul” is the information structure similar to the structure of the “worlds” (Tree of Sefirot), with the additional dimension of “self.” This structural similarity allows for the smooth interaction between the soul and the Tree of Sefirot. Souls can “move” in infospace, which, for example, is the process of learning and thinking. All souls intrinsically have the same kinds of concepts in general, but in particular, souls are distinguished by their taking concepts from different parts of the hierarchy of concepts. This process determines the “DNA” of the soul and all its potential functions (i.e., intellect, memory, etc.) (Shyfrin, 2019).

In addition, according to Shyfrin, because “according to the Torah the soul is in the blood” (hence the Judaic prohibition against eating blood), "the information content of part of the soul's hierarchy may be structurally similar to that of DNA.” Perhaps, at the moment of the soul's creation, “G-D chooses its complexity and dimensionality, which have hierarchies of structure and which entail the soul's intellectual potential.”^[1]

Footnote

[1]. According to Shyfrin, the Kabbalah Law of Correspondence states that every concept has a multitude of corresponding concepts in all parts of information space, which has a fractal, hierarchical structure that generates differences in complexity and dimensionality.