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CHAPTER 1
Grappling With The Concepts
Until fairly recent times, one of the biggest problems faced by philosophers was the looming shadow of religion. The Church came complete with its own ontology, and churches in general (or synagogues, temples or mosques) are rarely kindly disposed toward competition. Early Christian ontology built on what went before, namely, pagan beliefs, which were intimately related to what we would now call folk psychology. That is, every person, no matter how clever or educated or sophisticated, has an immediate and direct knowledge of what it is like to be human: it feels like something. A rock, we imagine, doesn't feel like anything, it has no more feeling of its own than a bit of finger nail we have pared. But being human is somehow alive and exciting. It brings a knowledge state and a feeling state, so humans can know things and make decisions, and we also have senses and emotions.
All of this adds up to something pretty amazing, which is what the folk psychology version captures: inside each of our heads there is a special something which does all the feeling and sensing and knowing and remembering and deciding that separates us from animals, rocks and dead humans. Most people imagine that the little inner something has the form of a person, so it's usually called a homunculus, meaning little man. In this version, your homunculus sits inside your head, checking your visual input on the TV monitors, listening to the loudspeakers from your ears, smelling what you are about to eat and making all the decisions you need to get through you day. The homunculus is the sense of self, the sense of being a me as distinct from your sense of being you which I can't access (also known as the doctrine of privacy). Also, animals have some sort of sense of self (try stealing your dog's favorite toy). We know that animals can sense and can learn simple things but they are pretty limited so we needn't talk more about them.
However, this special something-in-the-head we can all experience directly is special in another respect: nobody has ever seen it. When a person is alive, we are fairly sure his homunculus is busy and on top of things but, when he is dead, he turns into just another lump of meat that needs to be buried fairly quickly. What happened to his homunculus? What is that essential spark, that vital something that we all know is there but nobody has ever seen? Aha, people decided long ago, it must be magic. If the natural world is the world of trees and water and cows and rocks and weather, then the vital spark must be something from beyond the natural world. It must be super natural, which means it must have come from the Ultimate Supernatural Source, God. So the soul, God's special innervating spark, must arrive some time before birth and take up residence in the head until, at the instant of death, it decides to abandon ship and head back to the Elysian fields. All cultures have some version or other of this notion as their folk explanation of what activates humans, of what separates us from pigs, trees, rocks and steaks.
You need to understand that we define a homunculus by what it does in the mental life, not by where it came from (such as heaven, the life force in your food etc.) or its shape or particular properties. It is defined by its functional role in the mental economy, not by its provenance or any other properties. The homunculus explains human activity; that is his purpose. Modern versions of homunculi (the plural) claim they do not involve magic but they fill the same role, so they explain nothing that the old soul didn't. It doesn't really matter, as the idea has been around forever.
In the main, religions around the world are pretty intolerant of people messing with their patented message but the ancient Greeks were unusual in that, mostly, they didn't mind people devising their own schemes. Thus, several of the early thinkers raised serious doubts about the idea of a magical soul living inside the head. Socrates wasn't at all clear what went on in the head or where it came from but he was concerned with the concept of a good life. He wandered around asking sticky questions but some people didn't like them. Eventually, when he had annoyed enough people, this was held against him ("impiety and corrupting the young") and he was condemned to death. His pupil, Plato, adhered more closely to the notion of a magical soul living inside the body until it was called to higher duties, so he didn't have the same trouble with the bigwigs. Aristotle doubted this view, arguing instead that the soul and body were essentially related so that the one could not survive without the other. At the moment of death of the body, he said, the soul also dies. His concept is much closer to the modern notion of the mind as a product of the brain than to the old supernatural idea, but it didn't mesh with the Christian idea of an immortal homunculus or soul, so Aristotle's idea fell in a hole for nearly two thousand years.
In the Abrahamic religions (Jewish, Christian and Muslim), the soul was created perfectly by God and implanted in the fetus, probably at the instant of conception. There it remained until the body was no longer suitable for it, and it returned to live forever in harmony with its Creator. That was the original plan; the major religions also accept the idea of the Fall from Grace so that naughty souls went to a bad place where they were handed over to demons to be tormented for eternity as punishment. In this concept, religion has four elements: explanation, inspiration, exhortation and consolation.
In the first place, religion explained the nature of the universe and how humans could do what they did. The explanation came both from the experience of being human (feeling and knowing) and also from watching humans at work and at play, doing things that other animals clearly couldn't. Chief among these were the quintessentially human attributes of speech, nobility (often in short supply), awareness of beauty, art, etc. The bad bits (war and assorted savageries) could be explained either as God's children being naughty because of their Fall from Grace, or as the result of demonic intervention. In a religion, everything has an explanation. In the first place, it explains the folk psychology experience of something vital occupying the inner space behind our eyes. Further, religion inspired people to do better, in their public and private lives, by publicizing the approved local version of the creation and other uplifting moments in religious history. Exhortation was simply the power of religion to insist people follow the rules or suffer the consequences (now and in the future), while consolation was important for people who had not the slightest knowledge of how the universe worked and often had reason to feel they had got a pretty raw deal. If the poor believed that, in the end, all their oppressors would get it in the neck, they were more likely to keep in their place, pay their taxes and not bother the wealthy.
Backed by the full power of the Church, the religious explanation of human experience remained in place for many centuries. People who questioned it rarely went back for a second round. However, in the early part of the seventeenth century, people started to wonder if there might be more to the world than "that's the way God made it." Armed with his new telescope, the philosopher and naturalist, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), questioned one of the most fundamental beliefs of the Church, the notion that the world is at the centre of the universe. Compounding his sins, he also suggested the heavens weren't perfect. This earned him what was, by their standards, a fairly mild visit to the Inquisition. Suitably chastened, Galileo recanted but, from the Church's point of view, the damage was done, the rot had started.
Soon after, the French polymath, Rene Descartes (1596-1650) began his program of inquiry into the nature of mind. By a process of systematic doubt, he concluded that the existence of the mind or soul is the only certain thing in our lives. As humans, our senses, our memories and our knowledge can be wrong in every respect except this one: that we exist. Simply by asking the question "Do I exist?" we prove incontrovertibly that we do. Even the last man alive would know that he is alive. If he didn't exist, he couldn't ask the question. Everything else in life could be an illusion but the fact that our souls or minds exist cannot be denied: to each individual, it is a real thing. However, Descartes was fully aware that the mind or soul is a special sort of real thing, one which nobody can see. So he arrived at his conclusion, known ever after as "substance dualism." On the one hand, we have the body, which is an ordinary lump of physical substance (it can be localized, seen, cut up and it definitely smells). In this respect, the human body is just a clever physical machine, more or less the same as all other animals have. Descartes was sure that we could give a full account of animals in terms of their physical machinery. However, motivating and controlling our human machine is an entity made of a different sort of non-physical or soul substance. This is the divine spark, put there by God until it is called away. That is, the mind is a real thing (able to move our limbs and tongues) but it is invisible, formless, weightless, colorless, odorless and tasteless. Thus, unlike chimps, the living human is made of two substances, the material substance of the body and the soul-substance of the homunculus.
Immediately, everybody knew there were problems with this idea, namely, that if the soul has no physical properties, how could it interact with the body? How can something that can go through walls pull on strings in the body to move the arms? So we arrive at the classic "mind-body problem" which has kept philosophers in jobs for centuries. In modern terms, we would phrase it this way: Over here, in the physical realm, subject to the laws of thermodynamics and the laws of the space-time continuum, we have an ordinary biological machine of remarkable similarity to that given to chimps (in fact, we have something like 98% of our DNA, if not more, in common with chimps). If the soul is not a physical entity, and is not subject to the same laws, how can it interfere in nature without causing serious and eventually fatal imbalances in the matter-energy equations that govern the natural universe? Clearly, it cannot, which has led people to reject any and every idea that has a dualist element in it. They see this problem, of mind-body interaction, as the defining silliness of any and all dualist models, because dualist models inevitably lead to breaches of the laws of nature.
In modern times, the most vehement rejectionists have included the American philosophers, Daniel Dennett and John Searle. Dennett in particular loathes and detests dualism as prescientific malarkey designed to fool the masses, religious mumbo-jumbo that distracts us from our real task of explaining behavior in natural terms. Science, they say, is about rational explanations of the phenomena of life, so something that can never be seen or found or isolated is forever beyond the reach of science. So, over the years, there have been many attempts to make sense of the human experience within a scientific framework. Before we talk about them, we should look briefly at what is called the Western scientific framework or ontology.
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Starting just before the time of Galileo, in a number of centers around Europe, some strikingly original thinkers decided that the explanation of the universe given by the Church didn't match the facts they observed quite as well as it should. For example, Galileo himself observed sunspots and what we would now call a supernova, meaning the celestial sphere was not fixed and perfect; despite everything the Church had said, he had clear proof that the heavens changed. The Danish astronomer Copernicus amassed huge amounts of evidence to show that the earth could not be the center of the universe, i.e. the universe was heliocentric, not geocentric. William Harvey showed how blood circulated, the first microscopes showed a totally new world waiting to be described, and so on. From this arose the idea that it was no longer good enough to study the classics to find out about the world, the classics were (horror of horrors) more often wrong than right. The new attitude was that facts were all that counted; in the new science, facts always trumped opinions.
So we gained the concept of an empirical science exploring a material (non-supernatural) universe. Now that it seemed God did not interfere daily in the workings of the world, it meant that any conclusion about the nature of the universe could always be overturned by newly observed facts. The entire scientific tradition changed, from the scientist as the person with the best knowledge of the Bible and the classic texts, to the person who could fit the newest facts into the boldest conjectures or theories. In fact, even the name changed: people who looked at the natural world were no longer known as 'natural philosophers' but as scientists (Latin scientia, knowledge, fr. Latin scire, to know).
For human mental function, the question was simple: is the "vital spark" (which the Church called the soul) a supernatural element or should it be explained in the same, empirical terms as were making such progress in explaining the phenomena of the natural world? With time, the mainstream churches made grudging accommodation with the burgeoning field of natural science, retreating slightly as new discoveries reinforced the notion that the world is just a heap of rocks populated by some clever machines. The next major blow to the religious view came in the mid-nineteenth century, with the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. Actually, the theory of evolution was co-discovered by James Wallace, of whom we hear very little, but that's another story. So, as industry and science transformed our views of the universe, people began looking to the last great holdout of religious belief, the soul. Could this also be explained in the same terms as, say, steam trains and the telegraph? Needless to say, the Church wasn't inclined to admit defeat and fought a rearguard action which is still going on today. Interestingly enough, in Descartes' original writings, in which he had characterized the human body as a non-miraculous, purely physical machine, some people have detected hints that he was heading toward a materialist explanation of the soul but held back because of his (well-founded) fear of the Inquisition. After he saw what had happened to Galileo, Descartes withdrew from publication a book in which he supported the heliocentric view.
It is difficult for us to understand the intense intellectual and emotional shock people experienced following the publication of Darwin's work. We have grown up in a world of constant change, where scientists are given the very greatest respect because they do the intellectual heavy digging that industry then translates into major technological improvements in life style. So, these days, when people try to argue that science will eventually explain the mind, nobody pays much attention: change is the norm, stasis requires explanation. It is the spiritualists who are reeling under the battering of rampant materialist science. But it wasn't always so.
Darwin didn't directly address the question of the soul but, intellectually, there was no doubt where he was heading. In the second half of the nineteenth century, biological science began making huge advances. Louis Pasteur showed that diseases were caused by tiny beasties, not by magic spells, and Rudolph Virchow began the process of putting pathology on a scientific footing. Santiago Ramon y Cajal began to tease apart the ultimate mystery, the brain, and so on. When the remarkable Hermann von Helmholtz developed a rational basis for investigating living organisms, philosophy had to come to terms with the new science. Ideas were on the move, and one of them was the notion that science could reach further and further to explain the ultimate mystery of life, the "vital spark" which the Church still claimed as its own.
In Leipzig, in Germany, a young physician called Wilhelm Wundt was the first to combine Helmholtz's methods with the study of the mind. Wundt (1832-1920) trained as a physician, then worked under Helmholtz for some years. Apparently, he then decided to enter the church, so he studied philosophy. However, he had the novel idea of combining Helmholtz's scientific research methodology with the study of the mind, so he left the church to open a laboratory in Leipzig in 1879. This entered history as the first purely scientific psychology laboratory. Wundt was apparently a very inquisitive person and applied the new methods to anything that caught his fancy. He had a large number of students, many of whom went on to become famous psychologists in their own right. In particular, they studied the physiology and phenomenology of sensation, blurring the borderland with philosophy, which had always had an interest in the nature of experience. So began the generation of the "armchair philosopher" (actually an armchair psychologist), as people sat around in comfortable universities, trying to work out from their direct experience the nature of sensation. From this activity (or inactivity) came the notorious quote: "I'm having an orange after-experience" (if you look at a green light, it leaves an orange after-image). The goal was to understand these matters in materialist terms but, of course, they didn't have the technology. That didn't come for another hundred years (we now explain after-images in terms of depigmentation of the retinal photoreceptors; introspection is useless). However, and despite the interest Wundt was generating, introspection of the mind didn't go away. So, in the last years before World War I, an American psychologist decided a revolution was in order.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A (Somewhat Irreverent) Introduction to Philosophy for Medical Students and Other Busy People"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Niall McLaren.
Excerpted by permission of Loving Healing Press, Inc..
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