Is my soul supposed to burn like this?

I’ve had several people recently ask me about the reason for the name of this website and domain.

Let me first state that, no, I do not believe in any form of incorporeal, spiritual, immortal, or otherwise supernatural “soul.” There are many reasons that I disbelieve in a soul, but you can find a sufficient, if simple and unsophisticated, explanation of my own reasoning in this previous post.

Before I explain exactly why I call this site “biochemicalsoul,” I’d like to quote one of my favorite lines concerning the soul. These words come from Lisa Simpson – yes, that’s the yellow, animated, fictitious Lisa Simpson of Matt Groening’s creation:

“Whether or not the soul is physically real…it’s the symbol of everything fine inside us.” – Lisa Simpson

I think that quote perfectly summarizes my own usage of the word soul in my blog title. Originally, I had a website at “mychemicalsoul.com.” It was read by about five people – that’s five people that read it once, not five regular visitors. In it, I basically had compiled everything that I have produced. All my writings and rantings (most hilariously stupid and awkward – everything you can still find here pre-2008, which isn’t a far cry from what I still have going on here), all my art – ranging from sketches from junior high, to clay sculptures and wood carvings, watercolor paintings, and digital artwork and animation, and my photography. After a short while I decided “mychemicalsoul” was exceedingly lame, so I came up with the moderately less lame “biochemicalsoul.”

In essence, it was everything from my head that could be put in digital interwebbed¹,² form. Being the science/biology dork that I am, I wanted something pithy that embodied the above Lisa Simpson version of the soul and my own understanding of consciousness – namely that from a reductionist perspective, everything about who we are breaks down to complex synaptic networks and, ultimately, biochemistry.

Yeah yeah, I know – really it can be reduced to lower levels ending in quantum physics. But I couldn’t call it “neurobiochemisynapticquantumsoul.com.”

So my thoughts, interests, art, photography, and everything else in this site is about as good of a public display of my “soul” that I can put forth.

Hence: biochemicalsoul.com.

Note: I’m still migrating my art and photography, but some of it is available on the “art” tab.

Footnotes:

1. yes it is a word – look it up(↩)
2. oh, you did look it up and couldn’t find it? That’s what you get for relying on the internets(↩)