Neuroethics is a radical new field within bioethics that, from what I have seen so far, seeks to rubber stamp every brave new world manipulation of the human being imaginable.
That point aside, one area of discourse within the field is an attempt to precisely define the nature and workings of the human mind. Many believe that our minds are us, and moreover, that what we think of as “mind” is actually simply a fiction created by our brain neurons popping. But now, a bioethicist argues that it ain’t so, Joe. From the piece (no link) “Our Brains Are Not Us,” (Bioethics, Volume 23 Number 6 2009 pp 321–329) by University of Calgary philosopher, Walter Gannon:
In The Astonishing Hypothesis, Francis Crick confidently asserts that we ‘are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’ Similarly, Jean-Pierre Changeux states in Neuronal Man that ‘all forms of behavior mobilize distinct sets of nerve cells, and it is at their level that the final explanation of behavior must be sought’. Further, Joseph LeDoux states that the underlying theme of his book, Synaptic Self, is that ‘you are your synapses.’…This neuroreductionism motivates the claim that our minds are just a function of and thus reducible to our brains. Mental states are constituted solely by brain states. We are essentially our brains.
That would make us mere automatons, it seems to me, which our experience demonstrates isn’t true. Gannon also rejects the idea:
I challenge and reject neuroreductionism by arguing that the mind emerges from and is shaped by interaction among the brain, body, and environment. The mind is not located in the brain but is distributed among these three entities as the organism engages with and constructs meaning from its surroundings. Our capacity for desires, beliefs, intentions, and emotions, and to deliberate, choose, and act, is grounded in the fact that we are embodied and embedded minds. We are embodied minds in the sense that our mental states are generated and sustained by the brain and its interaction with external and internal features of our bodies. We are also embedded minds in the sense that the content and felt quality of our mental states is shaped by how we are situated and act in the natural and social environment. We are constituted by our brains but are not identical to them. The brain is necessary but not sufficient to account for all the physiological and psychological properties that make each of us a unique person. The mind is not based solely on brain structure and function but on the continuous interaction of the brain with the body and the external world.
Interestingly, this also impacts the argument over brain death. Dr. D. Alan Shewmon, of UCLA, rejects brain death because he believes our body as a whole is the central integrator of the organism, rather than solely the brain, based on a few “brain dead” patients living for many years, which he states, would not be possible if brain death was truly dead.
Be that as it may, the idea that we are just our brains makes no more sense than we are just our genes. As Gannon points out, it would be an end to personal responsibility, because it misses what gives us free agency:
Steven Rose endorses the same nonreductionist model of the brainmind relation that I have defended. Rose states: “‘We’ are a bunch of neurons, and other cells. We are also, in part by virtue of possessing those neurons, humans with agency. It is precisely because we are biosocial organisms, because we have minds constituted through the evolutionary, developmental, and historical interaction of our bodies and brains (the bunch of neurons) with the social and natural worlds that surround us, that we . . . as humans, possess the agency to create and re-create our worlds.”
Indeed, we do–which is part of what makes us exceptional. Still, I suspect Gannon is also a reductionist, that we are more than our brains, bodies and the way they mediate our experiences. Rather, I think that the totality of who and what we are is not determinable through purely scientific methods. In the end, there will always be an element of mystery–the answers to which people will continue seek in the realms of philosophy, spirituality, world views, and religion.
July 10th, 2009 | 4:30 pm
Of course we are our brains.
A person without limbs is not less of a person because they have less of a body. Why? Because a person – that is their personality, emotions, memories, creativity, etc. – arise from the brain. We know this for a fact from researching diseases and injuries to the brain.
For example, President Ronald Reagan, like thousands of other Americans, slowly “faded away” from Alzheimer’s. Among the first symptoms:
* Memory changes that disrupt daily life
* Challenges in planning or solving problems
* Difficulty completing familiar tasks at home, at work or at leisure
* Confusion with time or place
* Trouble understanding visual images and spatial relationships
* New problems with words in speaking or writing
* Misplacing things and losing the ability to retrace steps
* Decreased or poor judgment
* Withdrawal from work or social activities
* Changes in mood and personality
In the final stages of the disease, he was so handicapped that he could no longer intelligbly speech, eat, walk, or use the tolitet without assistance. His reflexes would have become abnormal, his muscles grown rigid and his swallowing impaired. And all of this – all of it – was caused only by the destruction of brain cells (the rest of his body was not afflicted).
The Vatican also recognizes that personhood ends with the death of the brain. If this were not so, then organ donation would be a crime and a grave sin because most organs are obtained from brain dead individuals.
July 10th, 2009 | 6:19 pm
Well, I think the CC would deny that all we are is our brains. The CC accepts death by neurological criteria–as do I, although I am open to Shewmon–but I don’t think that is the same thing as saying that our essence is entirely gray matter.
July 10th, 2009 | 8:48 pm
Essence? You mean soul? Well personhood ends when the brain dies, then that means the soul departs as well.
Conversely, as long as the brain is alive then the soul is present no matter what happens to the body. In other words, the loss of organs or limbs or sense does not translate into a loss of soul.
As a thought experiment, suppose we could keep alive a human being who had their head severed due to a catastrophic accident. The functions of the heart, lungs, digestive systems etc. were all handled by machines, and communication was facilitated by computers controled by eye-movement like the COGAIN system (Communication by Gaze Interaction). Would this person still have a soul? Of Course!
Now why do you suppose the soul is linked to the brain but not the body?
July 11th, 2009 | 7:28 pm
If the Catholic Church recognizes personhood as ENDING when the brain dies, should it not also recognize the corollary: that personhood (rather than “life”) BEGINS when the brain first becomes functional? That is certainly not at the moment of conception, but about one to two weeks post implantation, when the embryonic stage of fetal development actually begins. In consequence, the use of embryonic stem cells from a blastocyst should not present ethical or moral problems, nor should emergency contraceptive measures such as Plan B.
July 11th, 2009 | 9:19 pm
R Hampton:
On your first post: While it is true that a person with no limbs is not intensively less a person, extensively this is not the case. Insofar as the limbs are a natural organ for the sake of movement in man, their absence is the privation of some actuality. In this vein, it is misleading to say that “we are our brains.” Our highest perfection and principle may reside in the brain, but in truth we are both “rational” and “animal”. I.e., we also digest food and move from place to place, which require more than just a brain.
And the second: The thought experiment is interesting, but I think impossible. There is a certain hierarchy that exists among the powers of the human soul. The functions of the lower organs are ordered to the higher (rational) functions, locally present in the brain. A severance would therefore entail the loss of the soul in that body — although the individual organs retain a potency for transplantation (i.e. to be “assumed” into a body with the rational form present) until cell death.
HistoryWriter: I don’t think the corollary should be true. As the Church recognizes, the principle of personhood is the presence or absence of the rational form (even when not in full actuality), not the presence or absence of brain function.
~From a Thomist.
July 12th, 2009 | 1:35 am
Of course we are NOT our brains, matierialism is the greatest untruth of our time, or all time. The brain is merely an interface device for the soul or psyche, like a wick to a flame. It allows the body, not the mind, to have a central control switchboard, like the nucleus of a cell. Damage to the brain only constricts how we can interact with the physical world, our soul still exists in its entirety. Without the brain, the pscyhe can still exist fully in a body, but the body alone cannot communicate, percieve or involuntarily function. It may be true that until the body truly dies, the soul exists in a comatose state, unable to truly enter the non-material realm or communicate in the physical realm.
People do not cease to exist when they die, they remain eternally, we just cannot interact with them physically, though they can likely still hear and see us perfectly well. Therefore, this idea of personhood ending with physical death makes no sense. Unless you are defining personhood in physical or legal terms, but it seems to me to be a spiritual term in its full meaning, defining the quality of a soul as a unique, priceless and unrepeatable being in God’s image. If the soul never dies, then neither can we speak of a “person” ever die. If a “person” can die, then by definition God too is dead.
While in the body, we are limited in space and time, when we lose the body, we lose direct contact with the physical world, but we also lose the time/space body limitation of movement. All time and place becomes present to us. Loss of the body we call death, the immaterial state we call eternity. The temporal-physical world exists within eternity, the brain exists within the mind, not otherwise. Again, if we are defining “mind” only as the expression of a soul through a body, we are using a very partial criteria. The true nature of a “mind”, (soul, psyche, or person) as far as we know, can only have a non-corporeal definition and measure.
July 12th, 2009 | 8:00 am
Kevin M: What you state as factual is really a matter of faith. No one has ever been able to establish that there is such an entity as a soul, let alone its characteristics, nor has anyone been able to determine exactly when during the reproductive process “ensoulment” occurs. With all due respect, hese are basically theological, not scientific precepts, and as such are not really a proper basis for public policy in a secular society. In my opinion the fact that we have a sense of self-awareness that makes us feel as if we’re part of a body-soul duality is a function of our highly-developed neurological systems — the same systems that produces phantom pain in missing limbs. A scientist would describe it thus: “Mind is what the brain does.” The concept of life-after-death, of some conscious part of us living on after physical death is, to my way of thinking, a necessary defense mechanism born of our inability to deal with the idea of permanent and complete oblivion. It is reassuring to think that some part of us lives on after death. Indeed it does, in the genes of our children, rather than in some incorporeal, invisible, immeasurable entity imprisoned in our physical bodies. If you have ever been under general anesthesia you will have experienced the analogue of death as science understands it: complete, total unawareness of anything and everything.
In short, a person without any brain function ceases to be a person as most people understand the term. I disagree with you that materialism is a great untruth. On the contrary, as the basis of scientific methodology it offers our best hope of understanding “reality.”
July 12th, 2009 | 2:13 pm
HistoryWriter: Perhaps the psyche/mind Kevin M postulates is a matter of “faith”. (I say this because of its resemblance to Cartesian dualism — a great falsity. I’m not sure if this was his intention, however.)
The view you express is typical of that held by most moderns, I think. In truth the existence of the human soul is not a matter of faith, but of natural philosophy (itself a science, in the older sense of the term), and can be demonstrated without recourse to the principles of sacred theology. Sadly, the moderns have forgotten this, enamored by the great progress of the physical sciences (a specialization of natural philosophy) beginning during the time of the scientific revolution. The result is an incomplete science. Hence, the modern dilemma: a clinging to the doctrine that everything reduces to the jostlings of elementary matter, while attempting to retain a conception of reality as we experience it. Common sense dictates that this is an impossible task; demonstration from universal first principles shows it to be so.
~From a Thomist.
July 12th, 2009 | 3:27 pm
An example of why we shouldn’t rely on what one religion or another says about life. Let’s just stick with the scientific fact that fertilization commences a new human life, rather than get bogged down with theological concepts, such as “souls.”
July 13th, 2009 | 6:28 pm
Kevin M,
Personhood matters for many reasons, but consider this: Is an amputated limb a ‘person’? Is a portion of the soul also severed? If you answered ‘No’ to both questions, then you believe the soul is particular to only some of our flesh.
Furthermore, if you believe Apes do not have souls but Humans do – and Apes are nearly human in all respects (then can learn to use tools, basic arithmetic operations, symbolic language, etc.) – then what is the significant material difference? The human brain.
T. Milkewicz,
I’m sure you see where I’m going with the thought experiment. Once we triangulate the location of the soul to be the head, we can further suppose the loss of eyes, ears, nose, etc. So if machines could render all other bodily functions for a brain to exist (and further assuming genuine communication by the brain verifies consciousness), then what would we confront? A sentient but soulless organ? An ensouled cyborg? Or perhaps an ordinary human reduced to its fundamental (material) being?
July 14th, 2009 | 1:13 am
R Hampton: I see that your argument to Kevin M reveals the source of the difficulty. You think that the soul is locally present in the brain alone, and controls the rest of the body by this medium. This cannot be the case. The whole soul is present in the whole living body. If it were not, our bodies would not be a natural unity, but a composite of multiple natures — which is clearly false. Your argument does not follow because the soul is immaterial, and hence, considered in itself, not subject to quantitative division.
Perhaps this clarifies my main point that man, in his perfection, includes all of his vital operations, even those which are not exclusively mental — e.g. the beating of the heart, the digestion of food, the metabolic activity of the cells, etc. The soul is the principle of these acts, too. This is why I pointed to the distinction between intensive and extensive measure. A person with no limbs IS extensively less a person. An actuality of his nature has been removed — namely the ability to walk about. Of course, this does not mean a “part” of his soul has been removed — only the condition for this particular act of the soul.
(By the way, apes do have souls, as do all animals, and even plants. The soul is the first actuality of a naturally organized body. In short: If it’s alive, it has a soul.)
~From a Thomist.
July 14th, 2009 | 4:18 pm
T. Milkewicz,
1. The truth is that our bodies are indeed composite in nature. Each cell is an individual living organism that metabolizes, moves, and reproduces independent of ‘our’ consciousness and ‘our’ soul. Furthermore, we can use another’s tisue – skin, muscle, tendon, blood, marrow, etc. – to replace parts of ourselves.
In fact, scientists have recently discovered that, as a matter of chance, a very small number of cells are transferred between mother and child during pregnancy, and continue to live for decades there after. It’s called microchimerism. In other words – to quote Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ – “I contain multitudes.”
2. Only man has an eternal (supernatural) soul. All other life has a mortal (natural soul) that ceases to exist at the end of life – e.g., there are no soybeans heaven.
As we know from the Vatican’s position on brain death, the soul departs ONLY when the brain stops functioning. Thus it’s the singular instance of the soul being quantitatively divided from the body. For that reason, a kidney taken from a donor and given to another does not also transfer a soul, whole or in part. And the replacement of organs with artificial hearts, titanium hips, cochlear implants, etc. also has no affect uppn our soul. How could it? It’s eternal and supernatural. Like God, it does not need a body.
So the eternal soul’s tenuous connection to the temporal material world is facilitated by one, and only one, organ; the human brain. In the natural world, truly we are our brain.
July 14th, 2009 | 8:17 pm
R Hampton:
1. I don’t think you are far from the truth, but you place emphasis in the wrong direction. Consider this: Which can be more truly called a whole — the cell in the body, or the body itself? When you have answered that, remember that only one can be the real whole when they are together. Another way of asking this is, which is primarily the cause of the other — the cell of the body, or the body of the cell? In answering this, consider the purpose of existing for each.
2. I won’t argue with you on that! Very true.
Some minor points, however: 1) You say: “it’s the singular instance of the soul being quantitatively divided from the body.” I’m puzzled by your use of extraneous/improper terminology. Don’t you just mean “it’s the singular instance of the soul being divided from the body?” 2) You say: “Like God, it does not need a body.” That is misleading. While true that the human soul is subsistent, God is a pure spirit, while the soul of man is the soul OF a body. As such, its existence is incomplete without the body. 3) The soul’s connection to the temporal material world is not tenuous, but very concrete — so concrete, in fact, that I resist calling it a “connection”. It is the (immaterial) form of a material being.
~From a Thomist.
July 15th, 2009 | 9:47 pm
1. a. They are both whole. That is the truth. As I explained previously, “our” cells can live outside the original host, even outside the human body.
b. The purpose of a cell’s existence – like all of life – is to live long enough to successfully reproduce. All other functions serve this primary drive. The body of a cell, and the body of a person (a vastly complex colony of cells) is again the same. It’s the material framework that supports for the functions of life.
2. a. The immaterial is supernatural – that is something that in no way shape or form can be detected, measured, or observed (directly or indirectly) within the natural world – like the soul. That which can be detected, measured or observed can be scientifically analyzed and rationally explained – like the body.
b. Man does not have the soul of a body, but a soul and a body.
Before creation, God was all there was – all-knowing, all-powerful, complete, and perfect. But God desired to be praised for his Godliness, and so created creation with the specific intention for Man to fulfill this role. But instead of “cutting to the chase” and creating his eternal Heavenly court, God first gave Man a body to be tested and a world for this to occur (even though God knew the outcome, making the test needless).
In any event, the body is irrelevant beyond the material world. In heaven there is no need to eat, so the soul has no mouth; there is no need to walk, so the soul has no legs; there is no need to see, so the soul has no eyes. Joining with God is all that there will be – provided you believe.
c. The soul’s connection to the material is tenuous because it is entirely dependent upon a mortal, fragile organ – the human brain. Once the bond is severed, the soul can never again reconnect with the natural world. But the soul itself is indestructible and indivisible, bound to eternity save for a brief moment in the natural realm.
July 16th, 2009 | 3:32 am
R Hampton:
This post is steadily falling further and further down, so I shall make this my last comment. First, however, thanks for your honesty and respectful manner. I’ve enjoyed the discussion.
I. a. Perhaps my brevity obscured the point I was making. I meant that they cannot both be wholes at the same time and in the same way (law of non-contradiction). Only one can be the principal whole. I take this to be the body — and I think this can be demonstratively shown, although I will not do so here. As far as skin transplants, blood transfusions, microchimerism, etc. go, my position is that cells in the body are not the same things as cells separated from the body. In the body, their essence is that of a part, and nothing more. Separated from the body, they are living, but very imperfect individuals. In this condition, they retain a potency to be reassumed by a body with a more perfect form (hence the fact that we can use cells even from other animals to replace human cells, in certain cases).
b. There are multiple purposes for a given living body’s existence — of which living long enough to successfully reproduce is certainly one. But what a bleak one! It’s like you read it from a biology textbook. In truth, there is a gradation among the purposes, of which man’s is the highest. The human body’s principal purpose for existing is to support the operation of the intellect. This is why it has nerves and, yes, a brain, so that a man may grow in knowledge of all things — in particular, knowledge about God. What higher purpose could there be?
2. a. Agreed, but with some qualifications. All things in the natural world are matter-form composites, of which man is the greatest, because his form (the human soul) alone can subsist apart from the body. In the supernatural world, all things are pure forms, whose essences consist in being form alone. The soul of man is not of the same nature as these.
b. Man has the soul of a body, and the body of a soul — the two compose a unity. If he were body and soul (to be very technical about language) he would not be one, but two.
On the whole, I agree with all this. However, the body is not irrelevant beyond the material world, as you say. Since we are talking about theology now, remember that Christ was not a soul alone, but also had a body after His resurrection. Remember, also, the Church’s teaching on the resurrection of the dead. Consider Job 19:25-26: “On the last day I shall rise out of the earth, and I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see my God.” The body is an essential part of man’s nature — not something to be discarded for eternity.
c. Enough has been said by me. If you are more interested in the scholarly study of these great questions, I highly recommend the writings of St. Thomas — in particularly, Q. 75-102 of the Summa Theologiae I, the Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, and Quaestiones disputatae De anima, all of which can be found in English online. Also, for a more modern consideration, the writings of Charles De Koninck are excellent (just now being made available in English, in fact) — particularly his essay “Le Cosmos.” Thanks again. It was a good discussion.
~From a Thomist.
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