Wrote this for the Beyond Fiction column which I share with Tee Shern Ren in Phases Online. I think Sarah Lee hates me now because I keep turning stuff in late.
Bear in mind that this was written for a column, not a blog entry, so I get to be all didactic and one-sided and stuff ^_^ Also, it's written for an audience primarily of Malaysian teenagers, so I can't be as erudite (trans: cheeminated) as I'd like to be sometimes. I would appreciate feedback on a) general content and b) whether or not it's too cheem for the intended audience.
This is based on lots of conversations with EK, last week's sermon at church, and talking to Steve, who tipped me off to the Delgado book, about sticking things in people's brains. I'd like to have written more about cultural stuff like the idea of responsibility for one's actions, the age of reason, and why giving prisoners implants to control criminal behavior probably wouldn't sit well with the general public, but it was getting wayyyy too long already.
And yes, the "close friend" is EK...obvi. I would have liked to have written "my boyfriend" but that might have been construed as a slap at Algene Tan's (one of the columnists for the Rated R section) glowing opinion of Joshua Harris' I Kissed Dating Goodbye. (Harris has some good ideas, but by his own admission he's rather in the position of a recovering alcoholic saying that all drinking is sinful.)
A close friend of mine is fond of a song by Rush called “Freewill”. Since I’m a Christian and he’s an atheist, arguing back and forth about religion and metaphysics has become one of the running themes in our relationship. Part of the song goes:
You can choose a ready guide
In some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide
You still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears
And kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose free will
What is this ‘will’ anyway? Note, free will doesn’t simply mean not doing what other people tell you. Assuming that you have free will, you can choose to follow or not to follow instructions from outside yourself, but take responsibility for the choice. Like this:
Stick out your tongue.
Did you stick out your tongue? Wah, so obedient. Did you choose to do that freely, or just because you had to follow along with the story?
You didn’t stick out your tongue? How do you know you weren’t just compelled to rebel against authority? Okay, I give you another chance.
Don’t stick out your tongue.
Oh goodie. Now roll your eyes at my awful lameness.
Concepts like ‘will’ and ‘mind’ may be hard to define precisely, yet we know they’re real, or feel like they’re real. Except when we’re sleeping or unconscious, we know something’s there behind the eyes. So we’ll look behind the eyes first, into the brain.
People use the phrase “gray matter” to mean smartness or intelligence, referring crudely to the parts of the brain that appear gray because of the cell bodies of the neurons clustered there (“white matter” is where the axons are. If you imagine neurons as electronic components, axons are the wires connecting them). People who study the brain are discovering more and more that this wrinkly lump of gray tissue is in fact an incredibly complex organic computer. We’ve accepted for a long time that the parts of a person that interact directly with the rest of the world – that is, sensation and action – are controlled by parts of the brain. Have a stroke, half the face goes slack. Kena whack on the back of the skull, go blind.
However, things that we normally think of as abstract, like memory, reason, and emotion also have physical bases. For instance, a chunk labelled the hypothalamus controls what my psychopharmacology professor calls “the four Fs of behaviour”: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and, er...f__king. Another little chunk called the septal area, if damaged, causes uncontrollable rage, e.g. the story of a maddened rat that chased a researcher up a chair. People who fall in love have a decrease in the neurotransmitter serotonin that resembles people with obsessive-compulsive disorder - speaking from past experience, it’s a really weird feeling. Even religious experience – the meditations of Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks – has been shown to involve changes in brain activity as shown by MRI and EEG, respectively (WIRED magazine, February 2006).
Knowing these things about the workings of the brain, we find ways to manipulate it. Large sections of the pharmaceutical industry (and the alcoholic beverage industry, and organised crime groups) are based on the fact that emotions, sensations, and behaviors can be adjusted by increasing or decreasing communications between certain brain cells by application of certain chemicals. In animal studies, rats, cats, and monkeys have been made to act like remote-controlled robots. In one particularly famous experiment, a charging bull was stopped in its tracks with a radio transmitter (Jose Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind, 1969). Some types of epilepsy can be controlled by implanting electrodes into the patients’ brains, which is a good application of the technology, but in theory an evil mad scientist with enough money could raise an army of mind-controlled slaves.
Hence my friend’s argument that “neurology disproves the existence of the soul”. Since everything we experience has its roots in the movement of ions across membranes and neurotransmitters across synapses, that’s all there is to a person. A popular Christian writer has called this perspective ‘nothing-buttery’ (C.S. Lewis). “It’s nothing but a lump of cells...”, true. My answer was that neuroscience simply shows the physical basis for the soul. What a thing is made of on the physical level says nothing about its metaphysical existence. A book may be nothing but paper and ink, but I would be much less upset if you threw my bottle of Quink and ream of printer paper into the toilet than if you did that with my copy of The Name of the Rose. And even if you hunted down and burned every single copy of it in the world, the book could still exist in electronic copy, or perhaps even in the memory of an Umberto Eco fan. For us who are written in flesh and blood, perhaps this would be immortality – being remembered in the mind of God.
More of the Rush song:
A planet of playthings
We dance on the strings
Of powers we cannot perceive
The stars aren’t aligned ---
Or the gods are malign
Blame is better to give than receive
What I find baffling about a lot of people who insist that there is no god, no supernatural, nothing but the physical world, is that they also insist that the human mind is free. For the reasons outlined above, this can’t be the case. If consciousness has a purely material basis, we are reacting to our environment as fixedly as the stupidest ant, or a chunk of gravel rolling down a hillside for that matter, bound by the laws of physics. It would seem that we’re trapped, either way – slaves to sin, or slaves to God, as Paul of Tarsus wrote (Romans 6). If we are only chemical robots, all our arguments and thoughts are pointless. If we are only divine puppets, then the incarnation and the sacrifice were pointless, because we are offered a choice in that sacrifice, and choice isn’t meaningful unless it’s free.
My contention that soul = brain does put me in a sticky spot. What about people who have suffered brain damage or a mental disorder? The law acknowledges that they have physical conditions that make them not fully responsible for their actions. Does the soul of a human fetus grow along with its nervous system from a primitive neural tube to a fully developed infant brain, or is ‘soulness’ a property that emerges abruptly at some point? (I don’t subscribe to the idea of there being a crèche of baby souls up in heaven waiting to be born.) Do animals intelligent enough to have ‘personality’ such as some of the larger mammals, birds, and octopuses have half-souls? I don’t know the answers and would doubt anyone who claimed to know with absolute certainty.
The point at which the practical questions of everyday life lay a tripwire across the path of all this neuroscience and philosophising is this: Subjectivity matters. There are more than six billion people on Earth, out of whom I am neither the smartest nor the strongest nor the prettiest nor the fastest or the toughest. The Earth itself is a speck of sand whirling through a void, and some time from now – much longer than the lifespan of the species Homo sapiens – will be melted by the ballooning sun, which itself is only a little bubble of gas among millions upon millions. On an objective scale I matter nothing to the universe, but the small world of my senses and thoughts matters very much because it is the only world accessible to me – I can’t have other people’s experiences, and I certainly don’t have a mind big enough to contain the whole of the “real world”.
The issue that is important to the things I do and the decisions I make isn’t whether or not I am totally free to think and act in any way possible, or whether there are such things as absolute right and wrong. The question is whether or not I choose to think about and act on what I believe to be right – whether morality is logical, intuitive or conditioned, even if choice itself is a hallucination. Because I feel it’s real, that choice and its moral consequences are real to me. Human society revolves around the idea of personal responsibility, whether for praise or blame.
The old Methodists used to have a greeting: “Is it well with your soul?” The soul may be a metaphysical object that inhabits the body as a shell, or it may be simply the workings of the mushy, wet, biological brain. Regardless, you know that when I say ‘your soul’ I mean the you to whom I am writing – a being that feels, thinks, and acts. Is it well?
