We began last Thursday to look at Kevin Corcoran's book Rethinking Human Nature: A Christian Materialist Alternative to the Soul where he develops a constitution view of human persons. Professor Corcoran
is a philosopher teaching at Calvin College specializing in philosophy
of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion - a philosopher who
tries to connect philosophy with bible, theology, faith, and science. Reading this book is something of a new experience for me as I have taken one and only one philosophy course - some many years ago as a freshman in college. Formal philosophy is not, and never has been, high on my list for leisure reading. But this book is interesting.
Today's post will consider a few points from Chapters 1 and 2, the dualist and nothing-but materialist views of human persons. The key question is that introduced in the last post - what is the essence of a human person? What relationship does this essence have to our physical bodies?
Dualism is pretty clear - at least in the common view. Human persons consist of separable parts - body and soul. Corcoran introduces three varieties of dualism and discusses arguments for and against each.
The nothing-but materialist view is also relatively clear - metaphysical naturalism claims that there is nothing but the natural world and thus we must be defined by our bodies. We are not defined by the precise matter of composition, neither are we defined merely as animals - organisms. But we are defined by some natural feature of a living body.
This whole discussion leads to the significance of consciousness as we consider the essence of a human person - the capacity for consciousness.
Corcoran suggests that consciousness is a problem for nothing-but materialism, but no less so for dualism. Consciousness does not prove that we possess an immaterial soul.
This leads to the questions for discussion today.
Does the capacity for consciousness define the essence of a human person?
Is consciousness an argument for the existence of God? Is it something that cannot be explained by natural mechanism alone?
I struggled with this post - there are a dozen discussions I would like to start (perhaps some of them will come up again in later posts). It was hard to choose a focus for this post. But I am a scientist, and as such the role of science and naturalism in the way we think about the world around us is a problem that constantly confronts - as a result I am going to pick up on this point in Corcoran's book.
Consciousness is an unsolved problem. We have no clue what creates consciousness - in humans, or in animals, for who would suggest that cats and dogs, for example, have no consciousness. (Just watch the video on a soldier and his dog in Weekly Meanderings and try to claim the absence of consciousness.) It is clear however, that consciousness is intimately connected to the brain and to the physical structures of the brain.
In the scientific community there is an assumption that there must be a natural explanation for consciousness - we may never know the explanation, our brains may be constitutionally incapable of discovering it - but it must exist. The metaphysical naturalism of many absolutely requires a natural explanation, for nothing else exists.
Is this the perfect place for to look for proof of God?
Corcoran here has a discussion that I find particularly good - worthy of consideration, so I will quote at length.
And I think what McGinn means by "resolutely shunning the supernatural" is to rule out a priori, the existence of God, the soul, or anything supernatural or immaterial. To put it another way, McGinn is a metaphysical naturalist (a naturalist about everything: the natural world is all there is, so it is exhaustive of reality). But one need not embrace that thoroughly secular claim in order to believe that is is in virtue of some natural property of brains that organisms are conscious.
For example, I am a theist, a supernaturalist, you might say. As such, I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth. And since I believe in the God of the Christian Scripture, I believe neither that the natural world is all there is nor that the natural world is "casually closed." I believe, in other words, that God can intervene in the natural world, that God has done so, and that God continues to do so. Nevertheless, I believe that, for the most part, God does not directly intervene in the natural world. Since the natural world has yielded in so many ways to scientific explanation over the past several hundred years, it seems only plausible to believe that God created the world - the natural world - with its own integrity, such that is operates according to regularities that can be grasped and understood not only by those who acknowledge its author but also by those who do not and whose explanations, though accurate, do not appeal to the author of nature. ...
Since God created the natural world and all that it contains with its own integrity, it is also reasonable to believe that consciousness itself - a feature encountered in the natural world - has a natural explanation. In other words, we can accept McGinn's assertion that it is in virtue of a natural property of the brain that organisms are conscious without accepting his metaphysical naturalism. (pp. 59-60)
Corcoran suggest that we should take a view of chastened naturalism. Chastened naturalism accepts a natural view but refuses to take it all the way. Granting that consciousness is a natural property of organisms is not capitulation and does not require the sacrifice of Christian commitments. Consciousness may some day yield to natural explanation and the Christian faith will emerge unscathed.
Back to the topic of consideration - Corcoran finds the identification of human persons with an immaterial soul or a material body unconvincing. I agree - dualist views that divorce thought and consciousness from our physical being are unconvincing - both scientifically and philosophically. Research on the brain demonstrates a deep connectedness between our consciousness and the essence of what makes us human persons and our material bodies. Consider, for example, studies that show that interfering with signals in a
specific part of the brain can turn off a natural tendency to see
ourselves positively, glossing over negative characteristics. Don't these kinds of studies prove that mind and brain are not separable? That, despite what Descartes claimed, the part of me that thinks is identical, at least in this life, to the body?
But perhaps you disagree.
Is consciousness a problem for materialism and an indication of the dual nature of human persons as body and soul?
If you wish to contact me, you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net
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RJS wrote that "Consciousness may some day yield to natural explanation and the Christian faith will emerge unscathed."
Very well done and very well said. Thanks so much for this effort and sharing these thoughts.
I agree that the consciousness problem remains, as they call it, "the hard problem" and, whatever we eventually figure out, if we do, it will not threaten the Christian faith.
Another thing that Hans Kung rightly points out, whatever is going on after we die, it isn't temporal, so talk about what happens to us eventually, or in the interim, or so on and so forth, now vs later, is rather meaningless and possibilities are wide open (none that would threaten the Christian faith).
I have a wide set of comments, so I'll keep each brief.
RJS: "...the dualist and nothing-but materialist views of human persons."
As I said in the previous posting, this, like dualism itself is a false dichotomy. There are other metaphysical choices besides these two.
"We have no clue what creates consciousness."
The problem lies deeper than that. It has been utterly impossible to even define what consciousness is, let alone how it works. And this is key to begin understanding what it is. To define something is to objectify it, to literally turn it into an Object. Consciousness on the other hand escapes all such attempts. It cannot be objectified. In the language on Levinas, it is pure Subject. In this it share much with Free Will. In fact, it seems to me that Free Will has to be considered part of consciousness--without consciousness, there is no free will.
"Consciousness may some day yield to natural explanation and the Christian faith will emerge unscathed."
If this were to happen, free will would also be given a natural explanation. A natural explanation however would make Free Will a non-entity. Giving something a natural explanation means putting it in a rigid cause-and-effect framework. If there is such a causal explanation, the Will cannot be free, by definition.
"Is consciousness a problem for materialism and an indication of the dual nature of human persons as body and soul?"
Material objects by definition are those objects that can be objectified by means of input through our senses. If as I argued above the essence of consciousness is that it cannot be objectified, then it certainly is a problem from a purely materialistic viewpoint. However, again, a dual nature of body and soul is not the only alternative. If instead the body is that part of ourselves that can be objectified by means of input through our senses, the "rest of us," i.e. our soul is different from the body not in essence but only in the way we know it.
"Is consciousness an argument for the existence of God? Is it something that cannot be explained by natural mechanism alone?
...
Is this the perfect place for to look for proof of God?"
I certainly would say yes to these statements. The Bible teaches that we are made in the image of God. To look at consciousness and free will is to add depth and specificity to this teaching. In certain aspects Free Will is an "uncaused cause," to use Aristotle's language. Then our Free Will is the image of God as Prime Mover. Our free will is merely an image, not a perfect copy of God as Prime Mover, since we are dependent on God, but in many respect they are similar.
RJS#14
The comparison between an immaterial mind or "soul" and the brain and the brain dependent on oxygen is meant to show that dependence does not demonstrate identity. Damage to the brain that decreases the performance of the mind does not show the two are identical, just as the brain is not identical to the lungs that provide it with the oxygen it requires to function properly. I am sorry that you do not care for the illustration but I think you may misunderstand its point-stated in my comment-that dependence does not demonstrate identity. I think my illustration makes that point.
For further discussion see the Plantinga essay I cite in comment 12. The reason why I find a form of dualism most attractive is that I think it makes better sense of scripture, it more adequately explains our continuing identity through time and it better accounts for the things we want to say our minds do. The fact that God exists without a body does much to lessen the difficulty of envisioning our existence as having an immaterial aspect.
If you wish, RJS, I would like to hear what philosophical and scientific objections you have to sophisticated versions of dualism.
Napman,
So I come back to my question. What are the characteristics of the soul?
Are consciousness, thought, or emotion characteristics of the soul or the body? The problem I have with a dualist view is the deep interrelation. Mess with this part of the brain and thinking and emotion change. This is why I brought of the example of an experiment where signals in a specific part of the brain turn off a natural tendency to see ourselves positively, glossing over negative characteristics. Mess with a few cells or the signals in a region of the brain and the person thinks, understands, and feels differently.
RJS#18
I find it hard to conceive of any mind capable of thought, reason, decision, perception, intentionality, consciousness, etc., to be the result of purely material objects interacting with one another. The soul to me is simply another word for these mental functions.
I acknowledge experiments which show how changes in the brain effect changes in the functioning of the mind. There, however, is more than one logical explanation for this result. One can simply collapse the mind into the brain and say that the brain is all there is. Or one can conclude that the brain and an immaterial mind depend on one another in deep and powerful ways. The experiment does not disclose the conclusion drawn, in my opinion, but other considerations that require independent argument. It is these independent arguments that incline me to a more dualistic position.
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