Brains, bodies and souls

There are four main families of views of who we are:

1. Bodies (or organisms)

2. Brains (or at least cerebra)

3. Body-soul composites

4. Souls.

For the sake of filling out logical space, and maybe getting some insight, it’s worth thinking a bit about what other options there might be. Here is one that occurred to me:

5. Brain-soul (or cerebrum-soul) composites.

I suppose the reason this is not much (if at all) talked about is that if one believes in a soul, the body-soul composite or soul-only views seem more natural. Why might one accept a brain-soul composite view? (For simplicity, I won’t worry about the brain-cerebrum distinction.)

Here is one line of thought. Suppose we accept some of the standard arguments for dualism, such as that matter can’t be conscious or that matter cannot think abstract thoughts. This leads us to think the mind cannot be entirely material. But at the same time, there is some reason to think the mind is at least partly material: the brain’s activity sure seems like an integral part of our discoursive thought. Thus, the dualist might have reason to say that the mind is a brain-soul composite. At the same time, there is a Cartesian line of thought that we should be identified with the minimal entity hosting our thoughts, namely the mind. Putting all these lines of thought together, we conclude that we are minds, and hence brain-soul composites.

Now I don’t endorse (5). The main ethical arguments against (2) and (4), namely that they don’t do justice to the deep ethical significance of the human body, apply against (5) as well. But if one is not impressed by these arguments, there really is some reason to accept (5).

Furthermore, exploring new options, like the brain-soul composite option, sometimes may give new insights into old options. I am now pretty much convinced that the mind is something like the brain plus soul (or maybe cerebrum plus intellectual part of soul or some other similar combination). Since it is extremely plausible that all of my mind is a part of me, this gives me a new reason to reject (4), the view that I am just a soul. At the same time, I do not think it is necessary to hold that I am just a mind, so I can continue to accept view (3).

The view that the mind is the brain plus soul has an interesting consequence for the interim state, the state of the human being between death and the resurrection of the body. I previously thought that the human being in the interim state is in an unfortunately amputated state, having lost all of the body. But if we see the brain as a part of the mind, the amputated nature of the human being in the interim state is even more vivid: a part of the human mind is missing in the interim state. This gives a better explanation of why Paul was right to insist on the importance of the physical resurrection—we cannot be fully in our mind without at least some of our physical components.

Humanity and humans

From childhood, I remember the Polish Christmas carol “Amidst the Silence of Night” from around the beginning of the 19th century, and I remember being particularly impressed by the lines:

Ahh, welcome, Savior, longed for of old,
four thousand years awaited.
For you, kings, prophets waited,
and you this night to us appeared.

I have lately found troubling the question: Why did God wait over a hundred thousand years from the beginning of the human race to send us his Son and give us the Gospel?

The standard answer is that God needed to prepare humankind. The carol’s version of this answer suggests that this preparation intensified our longings for salvation through millenia of waiting. A variant is that we need a lot of time to fully realize our moral depravity in the absence of God. Or one might emphasize that moral teaching is a slow and gradual process, and millenia are needed to make us ready to receive the Gospel.

I think there is something to all the answers, but they do not fully satisfy as they stand. After all, a human child from 100,000 years ago is presumably roughly as capable of moral development as a modern child. If we had time travel, it seems plausible that missionaries would be just as effective 100,000 years ago as they were 1000 years ago. The intensification of longings and the realization of social moral depravity are, indeed, important considerations, but human memory, even aided by writing, only goes back a few thousand years. Thus, two thousand years of waiting and learning about moral depravity would likely have had basically the same result for the individuals in the time of the Incarnation as a hundred thousand years did.

I am starting to think that this problem cannot be fully resolved simply by considering individual goods. It is important, I think, to consider humankind as a whole, with goods attached to the human community as a whole. The good of moral development can be considered on an individual level, and that good needs a few decade rather than millenia. But the good of moral development can also be considered on the level of humankind as well, and there millenia are fitting for the development not to ride roughshod over nature. Similarly, the good of longing for and anticipation of a great good only needs at most a few decades in an individual, but there is a value in humankind as a whole longing for and anticipating on a species timescale rather an individual timescale.

In other words, reflection on the waiting for Christ pushes us away from an overly individualistic view. As do, of course, other aspects of Christian theology, such as reflection on the Fall, the Church, the atonement, etc.

Am I fully satisfied? Not quite. Is the value of humankind’s more organic development worth sacrificing the goods of thousands of generations of ordinary humans who did not hear the Gospel? God seems to think so, and I am willing to trust him. There is doubtless a lot more to be said. But it helps me to think that this is yet another one of those many things where one needs to view a community (broadly understood) as having a moral significance going beyond the provision of more individualistic goods.

Two more remarks. First, a graduate student pointed out to me (if I understood them right) that perhaps we should measure individual moral achievement relative to the state of social development. If so, then perhaps there was not so great a loss to individuals, since what might matter for their moral wellbeing is this relative moral achievement.

Second, the specifically Christian theological problem that this post addresses has an analogue to a subspecies of the problem of evil that somehow has particularly bothered me for a long time: the evils caused by lack of knowledge, and especially lack of medical knowledge. Think of the millenia of people suffering and dying of in ways that could have been averted had people only known more, say, about boiling water, washing hands or making vaccines. I think there is a value in humankind’s organic epistemic development. But to employ that as an answer one has to be willing to say that such global goods of humankind as a whole can trump individual goods.

(Note that all that I say is meant to be compatible with a metaphysics of value on which the loci of value are always individuals. For an individual’s well-being can include external facts about humankind. Thus the good of humankind as a whole might be metaphysically housed in the members. The important thing, however, is that these goods are goods the human has qua part of humanity.)

Another argument that we likely start small

In a number of recent posts, I argued that mid-sized objects like ourselves start microscopic. All my arguments so far relied on relativity. Here is one that doesn’t.

1. Biological entities are unlikely to have a perfectly flat macroscopic geometrical face (biological things tend to be rounded, rough, pointy, but not perfectly flat).

2. We are four-dimensional.

3. We are biological entities.

4. If we don’t start microscopic and we are four-dimensional, then we have a perfectly flat macroscopic geometrical face at our temporal beginning.

5. So, probably, we start microscopic.

Why the restriction to macroscopic faces? Two reasons. First, if space is discrete and grid-like, then it may be that all objects have perfectly flat sides at the grid-spacing level. Second, if we are made of point particles, then our geometry likely includes perfectly flat triangles between three outer point particles.

Are we finite?

Here’s a valid argument with plausible premises:

1. A finite being has finite value.

2. Any being with finite value may be permissibly sacrificed for a sufficiently large finite benefit.

3. It is wrong to sacrifice a human for any finite benefit.

4. So, a human has infinite value. (2 and 3)

5. So, a human is an infinite being. (1 and 4)

That conclusion itself is interesting. But also:

6. Any purely material being made of a finite amount of matter is a finite being.

7. If human beings are purely material, they are made of a finite amount of matter.

8. So, human beings are not purely material. (5, 6 and 7)

I am not sure, all that said, whether I buy (2). I think a deontology might provide a way of denying it.

And, of course, work needs to be done to reconcile (5) with the tradition that holds that all creatures are finite, and only God is infinite. Off-hand, I think one would need to distinguish between senses of being “infinite”. Famously, Augustine said that the numbers are finite because they are contained in the mind of God. There is, thus, an absolute sense of the infinite, where only God is infinite, and anything full contained in the divine mind is absolutely finite. But surely there is also a sense in which there are infinitely many numbers! So there must another sense of the infinite, and that might be a sense in which humans might be infinite.

Nor do I really know what it means to say that a human is infinite.

Lots of room for further research if one doesn’t just reject the whole line of thought.

Dualist eliminativism

Eliminativism holds that our standard folk-psychological concepts of mental functioning—say, thoughts, desires, intentions and awareness—have no application or are nonsense. Usually, eliminativism goes hand in hand with physicalism and scientism: the justification for eliminativism is the idea that the truly applicable concepts of mental functioning are going to be the ones of a developed neuroscience, and it is unlikely that these will match up our current folk psychology.

But we can make a case for eliminativism on deeply humanistic grounds independent of neuroscience. We start with the intuition that the human being is very mysterious and complex. Our best ways of capturing the depths of human mental functioning are found neither in philosophy nor in science, but literature. This is very much what we would expect if our standard concepts did not correctly apply to the mind’s functioning, but were only rough approximations. Art flourishes in limitations of medium, and the novelist and poet uses the poor tool of these concepts to express the human heart. Similarly, the face expresses the soul (to tweak Wittgenstein’s famous dictum), and yet what we see in the face is more complex, more mysterious than what we express with our folk psychological vocabulary.

There is thus a shallowness to our folk-psychological vocabulary which simply does not match the wondrous mystery of the human being.

Finally, and here we have some intersection with the more usual arguments for eliminativism, our predictive ability with respect to human behavior is very poor. Just think how rarely we can predict what will be said next in conversation. And even our prediction of our own behavior, even our mental behavior, is quite poor.

The above considerations may be compatible with physicalism, but I think it is reasonable to think that they actually support dualism better. For on physicalism, ultimately human mental function would be explicable in the mechanistic terminology of physics, and my considerations suggest an ineffability to the human being that may be reasonably thought to outpace mechanistic expressions.

But whether or not these considerations in fact support dualism over physicalism, they are clearly compatible with dualism. And so we have a corner of logical space not much explored by (at least Western) philosophers: dualist eliminativism. I do not endorse this view, but in some moods I find it attractive. Though I would like it to come along with some kind of a story about the approximate truth of our ordinary claims about the mind.

Shape and parts

Alice is a two-dimensional object. Suppose Alice’s simple parts fill a round region of space. Then Alice is round, right?

Perhaps not! Imagine that Alice started out as an extended simple in the shape of a solid square and inside the space occupied by her there was an extended simple, Barbara, in the shape of a circle. (This requires there to be two things in the same place: that’s not a serious difficulty.) But now suppose that Alice metaphysically ingested Barbara, i.e., a parthood relation came into existence between Barbara and Alice, but without any other changes in Alice or Barbara.

Now Alice has one simple part, Barbara (or a descendant of Barbara, if objects “lose their identity” upon becoming parts—but for simplicity, I will just call that part Barbara), who is circular. So, Alice’s simple parts fill a circular region of space. But Alice is square: the total region occupied by her is a square. So, it is possible to have one’s simple parts fill a circular region of space without being circular.

It is tempting to say that Alice has two simple parts: a smaller circular one and a larger square one that encompasses the circular one. But that is mistaken. For where would the “larger square part” come from? Alice had no proper parts, being an extended simple, before ingesting Barbara, and the only part she acquired was Barbara.

Maybe the way to describe the story is this: Alice is square directly, in her own right. But she is circular in respect of her proper parts. Maybe Alice is the closest we can have to a square circle?
Here is another apparent possibility. Imagine that Alice started as an immaterial object with no shape. But she acquired a circular part, and came to be circular in respect of her proper parts. So, now, Alice is circular in respect of her proper parts, but has no shape directly, in her own right.

Once these distinctions have been made, we can ask this interesting question:

• Do we human beings have shape directly or merely in respect of our proper parts?

If the answer is “merely in respect of our proper parts”, that would suggest a view on which we are both immaterial and material, a kind of Hegelian synthesis of materialism and simple dualism.

Time is not the measure of change or animals are not essentially temporal

Imagine that beings like us come into existence at the very first moment of time and they are the only contingent beings. To aid imagination, suppose we are these beings, and it is now the very first moment of time. Then, barring divine promises or other such divine moral considerations, it is possible that both (a) we won’t exist at any point of the future, and (b) it’s not the case that anything else will come into existence. Thus:

1. It is possible that the only contingent beings there are are human-like beings and that contingent beings exist at one and only one moment.

But:

2. Change requires at least two moments of time.

Putting all of the above together, we get:

3. Either (a) human-like beings can exist without time or (b) time does not require change or (c) time cannot have a beginning or (d) time cannot have an end.

I think theists are likely to deny both 3c and 3d: God can create and terminate a timeline. That leaves the theist 3a and 3b. I think both 3a and 3b are plausible moves.

Aristotle famously held that time depends on change, but he thought that time couldn’t have a beginning or an end, and thus he accepted both 3c and 3d. The argument he actually gave for 3c and 3d doesn’t work (basically, it fails to distinguish “not was” from “was not” and “not will” from “will not”), but we can now see that there actually is a plausible Aristotelian reason to accept that time can’t have a beginning or an end if we think time is the measure of change.

Why am I talking of human-like beings rather than human beings? Well, maybe, “human being” is a biological kind, and biological kinds depend on evolutionary history, so maybe it is not possible for human beings to come into existence at the first moment of time, as they wouldn’t have an evolutionary history. But beings just like humans could.

Affronts to human dignity

Some evils are not just very bad. They are affronts to human dignity. But those evils, paradoxically, provide an argument for the existence of God. We do not know what human dignity consists in, but it isn’t just being an agent, being really smart, etc. For human dignity to play the sort of moral role it does, it needs to be something beyond the physical, something numinous, something like a divine spark. And on our best theories of what things are like if there is no God, there is nothing like that.

So:

1. There are affronts to human dignity.

2. If there are affronts to human dignity, there is human dignity.

3. If there is human dignity, there is a God.

4. So, there is a God.

This argument is very close to the one I made here, but manages to avoid some rabbit-holes.

Death, dignity and eternal life

One way to look at the difference between the deaths of humans and brute animals is to say that the death of a human typically deprives the human of goods of rational life that the brute animal is not deprived of. While it is indeed an important part of the evil of typical cases of death in humans that they are deprived of such goods, however, focusing on this leads to a difficulty seeing what is distinctively bad about the death of humans who are not deprived of such goods by death, say elderly humans who have already lost the distinctive goods of rational life.

Sure, one can say that the death of a human is the death of a being that normally has the goods of rational life. But it is unclear why the death of a being that normally has the goods of rational life but actually lacks them is worse than the death of a being that actually and normally lacks the goods of rational life.

(Of course, not everybody shares the normative view that there is something distinctively bad about the death of a human being even when the goods of rational life have already been lost. A significant number of people think that euthanasia in such cases is morally licit. But even among those who think that euthanasia in such cases is morally licit, I think many will still think that there is something particularly morally bad about killing such human beings against their clear prior wishes, and those may find something plausible about what I say below.)

How, then, do we explain the distinctive bad in the death of human beings, even ones that lack the distinctive goods of rational life? In the end, I think I would like to invoke human dignity here, but to a significant degree that’s just giving a name to the problem. Instead of invoking and trying to explain human dignity, I want to explore a different option, one that I think in the end will not succeed, but perhaps there is something in the vicinity that can.

Here is a hypothesis:

• It is the nature of human beings to live forever and never die, but the nature of brute animals is to have a finite life.

If this is true, then death always constitutes a mutilation of the human being. It is what directly deprives the human being of the normative diachronic shape of its life. And killing a human mutilates the human being.

Objection 1: If a murderer didn’t kill her victim, the victim would still have died at some later point.

Response: The murderer is still the proximate cause of the victim’s not living forever. And such proximate causation matters. Suppose that my brother murdered Sally’s brother, and to avenge her brother, in true Hammurabic fashion, Sally seeks to kill me. When she finally comes upon me, I am already falling off a cliff. A moment before I would have hit the ground, Sally shoots and kills me. Sally has murdered me, a grave evil. She is the proximate cause of my death. And that matters, even though it would make little difference to my life if Sally hadn’t killed me.

Objection 2: Even if it is the nature of brute animals to have a finite life, it is not the nature of brute animals to die young. But it is not wrong to kill a brute animal when it is young, even though doing so mutilates the brute animal in much the same way that killing a human mutilates the human by causing her life to be finite if the hypothesis is true.

Response: Agreed: it does mutilate the brute animal to kill it when it is young. But to foreshorten the life of a human being from infinity to a finite amount is much worse—in a sense, infinitely worse—than to foreshorten the life of a brute animal from a longer finite length to a shorter finite length.

Objection 3: Christian faith holds that humans will be resurrected. Thus, killing a human being does not succeed in causing the human being to lose infinite life.

Response: Yes, but according to the hypothesis it is not only the nature of human beings to have an infinite future life but it is also the nature of human beings to have a death-free infinite future life.

Objection 4: Imagine an otherwise unremarkable shrub which has a very special nature: it is supposed to live forever, undying. Destroying this shrub would feel distinctively bad as compared to destroying an ordinary shrub, but still not bad in the same way that killing a human being is. Hence, reference to the normativeness of an infinite future life is not enough to explain the distinctive badness of killing humans.

Response: I think that this objection is decisive. Mere invocation of the normativeness of an infinite deathless life is not enough to solve the problem of the distinctive badness of human death. One still needs something like a story about the special dignity of human beings. But it might be that the hypothesis still helps: it multiplies the synchronic dignity of the human being by something like infinity. So less needs to be accomplished by the dignity part of the account.

Dignity, humanity and Aristotelianism

1. All humans have dignity because they are humans.
2. Humans do not have dignity because of an extrinsic property.
3. So, being human isn't an extrinsic property.
4. If to be human is to be a member of a particular biological taxon, then being human is extrinsic. (Biological taxa are defined by gene interchange in a population and are thus extrinsic characterizations of individuals.)
5. So, to be human is not the same as to be a member of a biological taxon.
6. Our best alternative to the biological taxonomic account of what it is to be human is the Aristotelian account that it is to have a human form, so the Aristotelian account is probably true.

Theistic frequentism and evolution

Readers here may be interested in this post of mine on Prosblogion.

Transgender realism, abortion, animalism and colocationism

There are two major families of views on our relationship to the biological world. On animalism, we are animals of the species homo sapiens. Animalism comes in two varieties: physicalist animalism says that we are purely physical animals and dualist animalism says that some or all animals, including all of us, have non-physical features such as non-physical mental states or a soul (of a Cartesian or an Aristotelian sort). On colocationism, wherever one of us is present, there is an animal of the species homo sapiens present as well, but we are not identical to such an animal. There are multiple varieties of colocationism. On the constitution view, we are wholly constituted by our associated animals. Typically, such constitution theorists are physicalists—the animals are purely physical and hence so are we. The other main variety of colocationism is further-aspect dualist colocationism on which our associated animals are purely physical, but we are not. This includes a view on which we are souls (which count as located wherever the ensouled bodies are), a view on which we are a composite of an animal and a soul and a view on which we are partly constituted by an animal and partly constituted by a non-physical aspect. The debate on animalism versus colocationism is thus to a significant degree orthogonal to the debate between physicalists and dualists.

If animalism is true, then a normal adult, say Sally, used to be a fetus, and to have killed that fetus would have been to kill Sally, and it would have deprived Sally of even more than killing Sally now would. Thus, animalism strongly suggests that abortion is wrong, though violinist-type arguments could be used to try to resist that conclusion. On the other hand, colocationist views are much more congenial to pro-choice philosophers, and hence appear to be somewhat dominant in the pro-choice moral philosophy scene. For if colocationism is true, then it could be that the human animal existed significantly before Sally came to be colocated with it, and if so, then killing that human animal in abortion would not have been a killing of Sally. Though, a colocationist could also think that colocation started at fertilization and hence a killing of the fetus would also be a killing of the colocated Sally.

So whether animalism or colocationism is the right metaphysics of us is very relevant to the moral status of abortion.

Now I will cautiously wade into waters that are rather unfamiliar to me, and I apologize if I use terminology in non-standard ways. The question of animalism versus colocationism appears to be very relevant to the question of transgender realism. Let Type I Transgender Realism (1TR) be the view that some people literally are men in female bodies or women in male bodies. Let Type II Transgender Realism (2TR) be the claim that some people who had female bodies and felt that they were or should be men are now, after gender reassignment surgery and hormonal treatment, literally men, and some people who had male bodies and felt that they were or should be women are now, after gender reassignment surgery and hormonal treatment, literally women. If 1TR is true, so is 2TR: surely a man in a female body does not cease to be a man after the body is surgically modified to be more male-like. But at the same time, the law in a number of jurisdictions tracks 2TR but not 1TR, requiring surgery for legal classification as male or female.

Now, it seems very plausible that whether a human animal is male or female (or hermaphrodite) depends on biological criteria very much like those by which we ask whether an elephant or a gecko or maybe even a plant is male or female (or hermaphrodite). These criteria do not depend on psychological states but on whether the organism is such that it should produce its own sperm or such that should produce its own eggs (or both). It is also very plausible that men are male (though they may be more or less feminine) and women are female (though they may be more or less masculine). So if we are human animals, then whether we are male or female, and hence whether we are men or women, depends solely on biological criteria, and 1TR is false.

Moreover, if we are human animals, then 2TR is also false, at least given the current surgical methods. If we remove a mouse's female reproductive system and reshape what remains to look like male genitalia, and treat with hormones, what we have is a female mouse that has lost its reproductive system and behaves like a male. It might be more complicated if a functioning male reproductive system is transplanted. But I think it would still be true that the resulting mouse isn't such that it should produce sperm. Moreover, the mouse doesn't produce its own sperm—it produces the donor's sperm. Here's another route to the conclusion that even a functioning male reproductive transplant doesn't turn the female mouse male. After mere removal of a female (respectively, male) mouse's reproductive system, what we have is a female (respectively, male) mouse that is missing a reproductive system. But now imagine two identical twin female mice, A and B. Both have their female reproductive systems removed. But B then has a male reproductive system added, and then removed. If B became male upon addition of the male reproductive system, then B should still be male after removal thereof—a male does not cease to be a male after losing the reproductive system, but becomes a mutilated male. But A and B may be exactly alike at the end of suffering all this cruelty. It would then be odd to say that of two exactly similar mice, one is male and one is female. So we should say that they are both female, and hence B was female all along, even while having the male reproductive system.

Maybe an animalist could get out of this argument by distinguishing between sex and gender, and denying the idea that a man is an adult male human and a woman is an adult female human. Instead, perhaps, a man is an adult masculine human and a woman is an adult feminine human. The appeal to non-human animals in my argument then becomes irrelevant because only human animals can be men and women. On this story, there will be a disnalogy between the triple of terms "human", "woman" and "man" and triples like "chicken", "hen" and "rooster". A hen is a female chicken, but a woman need not be a female human. While this animalist-compatible view would let one preserve 1TR and 2TR, it would not be compatible with the aspiration that "a woman in a man's body" may have to be really female. It is my impression it is more the genderqueer than the transgendered who use phrases like "male woman" or "female man". Besides the idea of literally male women and female men seems problematic.

On the other hand, if colocationism is true, it is much easier to hold to 1TR and 2TR. Sure, Sally's associated animal (the animal that she is partly or wholly constituted by) may be male, but perhaps maleness and femaleness in a human person is not simply determined by whether the human animal is male or female. Colocationism could allow one to hold to 1TR without revisionary biology and without the oddness of saying that Sally is a male woman. Moreover, colocationism makes it plausible that sexual reassignment surgery could be a valuable thing: it is fitting that a man be associated with a male animal and a woman with a female animal, and while my arguments above suggest that surgery will not change the sex of the associated animal, it could somewhat improve the fit between the person and the associated animal.

Of course, colocationism by itself does not imply 1TR or 2TR: one could still think that a person is a man if and only if the person is associated with an adult male human animal and that a person is a woman if and only if the person is associated with an adult female human animal. But colocationism opens options beyond that.

So the debate between animalism and colocationism is not only highly relevant to the abortion debate but also to the question of transgender realism. Settling the question between the animalists and colocationists would not completely settle the latter two questions, but it would lead to significant progress.

Let me end by saying, without argument, that we are primates and all primates are animals. Hence animalism is true.