Water Into Wine (Q2Q VII)

This post follows What Is It Like To Be Self-Aware? (Q2Q VI) as the seventh in my "Quickening to Qualia" series.

Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works

When we think hard about the phenomenon of consciousness, as I have been doing all along in this series, we are apt to agree with professor of psychology Steven Pinker, writing in How the Mind Works, that "consciousness or sentience, the raw sensation of toothaches and redness and saltiness and middle C, is still a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" (p. 60).

"Consciousness," Pinker notes, "has struck a great many thinkers as not just a problem but almost a miracle" (p. 132). One such thinker, Thomas Huxley, the English biologist known as "Darwin's bulldog" for defending the theory of evolution by natural selection, called it "just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp." Philosopher Colin McGinn, adds Pinker, speaks of "the water of the human brain ... turned into the wine of consciousness."


I must admit that I personally find consciousness not only unaccountable but nearly indescribable, despite my possibly vain attempts to characterize it in earlier posts. "Raw sensation" may be as good a way as any to characterize the ephemeral phenomenon we call subjective experience (the latter being synonymous with consciousness or sentience).

Yet "raw sensation" is a phrase that feels like the opposite sort of thing. It is quite close to the primary idea of sensation as being what nerve endings do in feeding data to the brain. One reads, in discussions of consciousness, references to the notion of the "sensation of redness," for example. What is meant, though, is anything but the notion of what light of a certain wavelength does to receptors in the retina of the eye.


It is as if there is a mind within the mind. The outer mind is a computer. It takes in the sensory data from nerve receptors and processes it into various sorts of perceptions and higher cogitations. The outer mind is responsible for learning, memory, emotions, and everything else about the mental life which we place in the category of psychological, or functional, or behavior-causing.

At some point in the outer mind's neural circuitry perhaps — speaking not literally but figuratively — there might be taps or probes from the inner mind which furnish the latter with its raw sensations: e.g., "redness." The inner mind is a mind of experientiality. Toothaches and redness and saltiness and middle C are experiences that the inner mind is alert to.

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

Imagined slightly differently, there is an interface between the outer mind of activity and the inner mind of experience. The "sensory inputs" at the interface to the inner mind are the qualia, such as "redness," spoken of by David J. Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.

In The Surprise of Selfhood (Q2Q V) and I and Thou (Q2Q IV), I suggested that Judeo-Christian religion is all about an I-Thou relationship with God. We cannot enter into an I-Thou relationship with a personal God, I said then, unless we are ourselves persons who can have the experience of selfhood. I think I'd now prefer to change that: what we actually need is a capacity for the experience of "Thouness."

Martin Buber's I and Thou

On this view, which I adapt from I and Thou by Martin Buber, "Thouness" is a quale (the singular of qualia), just as is "redness" is also a quale. "Thouuness" contrasts with another quale, "Itness," in this way: "Thouness" is associated with others whom we experience as subjects; "Itness," with mere objects. Subjects have inner minds like ours, capable of conscious experience; objects do not, and are fair game for various forms of manipulation which we undertake with a view to our personal gratification.

Chalmers's view of the conscious, subjective experience of such qualia is that it co-occurs with the psychological operations of what I am calling the outer mind. He wants to lay the groundwork for a scientific theory to explain, as cognitive science does for the outer mind, the workings of the inner mind.

He also wants to establish that the set of facts about and properties of experientiality in the inner mind supervenes on the physical facts and properties of the outer, functional mind in a way that results from the natural laws of this world. Supervenience basically means that facts at a "higher level" actually add nothing at all to the facts pertaining to some foundational "lower level."

For example, the facts of biology supervene on the facts of physics in this world. Once you know the facts of physics and the properties of the world's biological entities, you know all the facts about biology. (For the most part, facts are merely specific instantiations of general properties. Humans qua humans have the property of having a brain. It is accordingly a fact that you have a brain, and another fact that I have a brain.)

The properties of human brains for the most part supervene on the properties physicists study. The facts about brains, likewise, on physical facts. Furthermore, they both do so in a logically supervienient way. There could be no world physically indistinguishable from our own in which the properties and facts pertaining to human brains were different. Chalmers says that logical supervenience is (with a slight semantic qualification) the same thing as metaphysical supervenience.

But, says Chalmers, there could be a physically indistinguishable world in which God (speaking hypothetically, since Chalmers claims no belief in God) did not go to the trouble of establishing an (extra) natural law which makes conscious experience supervene on the physical, in a mode of supervenience Chalmers terms natural supervenience. If conscious experience in the inner mind (as I call it) co-occurs with the functional information processing going on in the outer mind, it is only because God (again, speaking hypothetically) made this extra law.

I'll now take it a step further: I suggest a firm theological explanation for the co-occurrence. God not just hypothetically but actually ordained, when he created our world, that by virtue of its natural laws there would be such an inevitable co-occurrence. His purpose: to enable creatures to evolve who can enter into a I-Thou relationship with him, and equally with each other, the twin foundations of spiritual life. Absent our inner mind's receptivity to the quale of "Thouness," that could never happen. The "water" of our natural lives could never be turned, through faith and good works, into "new wine."

What Is It Like To Be Self-Aware? (Q2Q VI)

In my series of posts under the umbrella title "Quickening to Qualia," or Q2Q, this is the sixth. The fifth, this one's predecessor, was The Surprise of Selfhood (Q2Q V).

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

Thus far, when I wasn't rambling on about what I imagine to be the religious implications of my topic, I was considering what it means to be conscious, a subject investigated by David J. Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.

This philosopher of mind says our minds are both psychological and phenomenal. The psychological properties of mind comprise just about everything we, in our everyday way of thinking, would call mental. Most or all of what we think of as cognition, not to mention perception or sensation, is, to Chalmers, psychological. Such psychological operations of the mind are basically functional. They take in information, they process that input, they produce output. The output typically determines behavior.

As all this goes on from one moment to the next, there is something else going on as well: experience. We have an experience of what it is like to be pricked by a rose, even as our functional minds react in a more practical way. These what-it-is-like experiences are the phenomenal components of our minds. It is by virtue of them that we are truly conscious.

Chalmers puts it this way (p. 11): "On the phenomenal concept, mind is characterized by the way it feels; on the psychological concept, mind is characterized by what it does."

All of our mental states are apt to have phenomenal and psychological aspects yoked in tandem. This is why our everyday language is ambiguous between the two. When we say we are "conscious" (see pp. 26-27) we often mean simply that we are awake, not asleep. Or, if we claim to be "conscious" of something, then either we have knowledge of that thing, or we are paying attention to it. Behavior under our "conscious" control is, basically, voluntary behavior.

We can be "conscious" of internal states of mind; this is introspection. Often, if we wish, we can report verbally on our "conscious" internal states.

We even have the ability to think about ourselves: "our existence as individuals ... our distinctness from others" (p. 27). It is in this respect, I think, that the phenomenal, as distinct from the psychological, is at its most diaphanous.


Chalmers has it that all these everyday ideas of what it means to be "conscious" are really about awareness, not consciousness per se. All forms of awareness, whether focused externally or internally — including self-awareness — are in and of themselves functional and, accordingly, psychological.

"Self-consciousness" is consequently an ambiguous term. On the one hand, it "can be understood as awareness of oneself" (p. 29). This is a functional, psychological idea. It might better be styled "self-awareness."

On the other hand, "self-consciousness" has "a certain sort of phenomenal state associated with" it (p. 27). I take it that he means here roughly this: an experience of what it is like to be self-aware.


Awareness is accordingly, per Chalmers, "psychological consciousness," which is functional, as distinct from "phenomenal consciousness," which is not. Now, it is the latter which Chalmers means, most of the time, when he uses (just plain) "consciousness." I have to admit to wondering, by the bye, why he doesn't simply replace this term with another: experience.

True, experience is another word with more than one everyday meaning. But it is one which, to my mind, carries the intended overtones of indescribable savor or ineffable aura better than the relatively neutral "consciousness": "I can't tell you what it's like, you just have to experience it."


At any rate, whether you choose to call it the one or you call it the other, it grows ever more diaphanous over the course of Chalmers's first chapter, as he teases apart all the concepts which might be, and often are, referred to as "consciousness."

We need to be cognizant, he says, not just of a distinction between the psychological mind and the physical body (i.e., the brain). We also need to take into account the distinction between the phenomenal mind and the psychological-functional-causal mind — no matter how diaphanous the former concept becomes by comparison with the latter.

Why? Even thouugh the two mental capacities typically co-occur, "one can wonder how to explain the phenomenal quality [of experience], and one can wonder how to explain the playing of the causal role, and these are two distinct wonderings" (p. 22).

Put more succinctly, we can ask ourselves what it is like to be self-aware ... and, since we can, we require an explanation for this fact. It will never come, says Chalmers, from a consideration of the psychological-functional-causal mind alone.

The Surprise of Selfhood (Q2Q V)

I now take up the fifth installment in a series of posts I have labeled "Quickening to Qualia." This post follows on I and Thou (Q2Q IV), in which I argued that we are able to have an I-Thou relationship with God — with one another, too — because one of the components of our human mentality is intrinsically relational.

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

The relational component of our human mental capacity is brought up briefly by David J. Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. This philosopher of mind says our minds are both psychological and phenomenal. Our minds correlate our behavior with our circumstances and are aware of our inner states, but beyond that, they experience.

Our minds' ability to know "what it is like" to, say, see the color red is part and parcel of subjective experience. Subjective experience is connected with sensation, perception, cognition, and the other aspects of human psychological capacities. Still, conscious experience is fundamentally a separate kind of thing. It is phenomenal, not psychological.

A third mental component, the relational, comes into the picture for Chalmers only as a stopgap against the possibility that the phenomenal and the psychological do not wholly exhaust the mental capacities we humans have. His true interest is in the phenomenal component of the human mind, our consciousness or subjective experience. He says it serves to give us access to "qualitative feels" or qualia: notions like redness and surprisingness. Qualia are the stuff of consciousness.

To me, Chalmers misses a bet by saying — even in the teeth of a possible third component of the mind which he dubs relational — that "there is no independent third class of phenomena forcing itself on us to be explained" (p. 21). He thinks once you explain the phenomenal and the psychological, you can most likely combine the two explanations rather trivially to explain the relational.


I think — to pick up on ideas explicated by the theologian-philosopher Martin Buber in I and Thou — this may be true for I-It relationships, but not for I-Thou relationships. Religion, in Buber's view, would be meaningless without the possibility of a dialogue between two persons.

I look at it this way:

1. We gain spiritual life by entering into an I-Thou relationship with a personal God.
   
   
2. We cannot enter into an I-Thou relationship with God unless we are ourselves persons, albeit imperfect ones. As persons, we are possessed of free will, and we can choose not to allow God to perfect us in our personhood. But we can also allow God to leverage our natural personhood into a permanent spiritual life with him.
   
   
3. We cannot be persons, possessed of free will, as all persons are, unless we can have the experience of selfhood. (Chalmers calls this "self-consciousness.")
   
   
4. We cannot be self-conscious unless we are conscious: unless we are capable of having subjective experiences by virtue of the phenomenal components of our minds.
   
   
5. The fact that we are conscious is surprising, given that (per Chalmers) we conceivably might have evolved as zombie creatures with only psychological, not phenomenal, components to our mentality.

I think of the search for an I-Thou relationship with God — in which God, not us, does most of the work of fitting us for such a relationship — as the essence of faith.

In the Christian view of faith, we are told by God, working in our hearts and via the Bible and the Church, what we must do and must not do; this is Judeo-Christian morality. It is all about avoiding the things that lock us into damaging I-It outlooks and encouraging the things that open us to life-giving I-Thou relationality.

I-It outlooks subliminally treat all others as objects, as dead things. They eventually deaden the "I" half of the I-It equation, as well as the "It" half.

I-Thou relationality lets God into our lives, both individually and communally. That is when he can begin the work of radically changing our imperfect natural selves into perfect spiritual beings.


By virtue of the logic above, we would have no hope becoming spiritual selves in I-Thou relationality with God if we were not, equally surprisingly, conscious to begin with. Our consciousness underpins our self-awareness, which underpins our existence as persons who possess free will and can accept or refuse Gods' redemption, which underpins our ability to learn to relate, in I-Thou fashion, with the One God Who is in Three Persons, Father, Son, and Spirit.

The Christian notion of the Holy Trinity, by the way, has been called by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity a union of three divine persons. The first is the Father, the Lord God of the Old Testament. The second is his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, who was of the same sort of Being as the Father "before all worlds." The third divine personage, the Holy Ghost, is the spirit of their mutual love.

I wonder if Buber, if he were Christian — he was in fact Jewish — would have said that the Holy Spirit is the original I-Thou relationship!


Chalmers addresses the question of the reasons, metaphysical or otherwise, why brains such as ours which are complex information processors can also have conscious experience. I have not yet read far enough into his book to know what answers he comes up with. My answer is similar to that of Robert Wright in Nonzero. We could have found ourselves inhabiting an externally identical zombie world, but didn't. That is because of our surprising consciousness alone.

But evolution needn't have made us conscious, since our inner experience has nothing to do with what natural selection "sees" and ratifies. Natural selection is interested only in what we do, not in how we feel about it. So the surprising experience of selfhood which depends on our equally surprising experience of consciousness cannot be explained by Darwinian principles.

That suggests that God made a world in which there would evolve creatures with enough information-processing "smarts" to also be conscious, so to be able to be made to have, through faith, perfect spiritual selves.


As Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity's final chapter, "I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call 'me' can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own."

In Chalmers's analysis, with the exception of the phenomenal properties of "my" mind, most of what I call "me" can indeed be explained, if not easily, someday by cognitive scientists studying the specifically psychological properties of the mind. Only phenomenology (remember, Chalmers says little about relationality) is deeply mysterious and truly surprising.

The deepest mystery is not why there exist the psychological states that arise from physical changes in the brain in response to environmental stimuli; these states alone are what cause our subsequent behavior. It is rather why psychological states invariably co-occur with experiential states. "Perhaps it is logically possible," writes Chalmers, "that one could have the experience without the causation, but it seems to be an empirical fact that they go together" (p. 22).

Put another way, the unfailing link between our psychological mind and our phenomenal mind is something of a brute fact in search of an explanation. This is what Chalmers calls "the mind-mind problem" (p. 25).

Perhaps the basis of an explanation is in the five steps of logic listed above. In a nutshell: God's plan insists that we live in a world of consciousness, leading up to selfhood. So that is exactly the sort of world he created.

I and Thou (Q2Q IV)

This is the fourth in my "Quickening to Qualia" series of posts, in which I study the phenomenon of consciousness with an eye toward discovering what kinship the topic may have with religious experience, Christian or otherwise. The most recent entry in the series was, until now, The Qualities of Experience (Q2Q III).

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

David J. Chalmers, philosopher of mind and author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, says that anything we call "mental" may be divided into two aspects, the psychological and the phenomenal. The two are conceptually different, although any mental function such as cognition, perception, or sensation, or any mental state such as pain or belief, is typically a combination of both.

"At a first approximation," Chalmers points out, "phenomenal concepts deal with the first-person aspects of mind, and psychological concepts deal with the third-person aspects" (p. 16). The first-person aspects concern the person-as-subject, i.e., as a subjective experiencer. The third-person aspects concern the person-as-object, i.e., as a behaver or doer.


It is my own contention that the phenomenal mind is not just a first-person "I" mind; it may also involve a second-person "Thou" mentality. For us to treat others as if they have the same potential qualities of experience as we do is to treat each of them as a "Thou," not an "It"; as a person, not an object or thing.

Martin Buber's I and Thou

This may be what Martin Buber was getting at in I and Thou: the crucialness of dialogues and of "interhuman meetings" among persons who recognize one another as such — i.e., as capable of the same subjective, conscious experiences as one's own self is. The publisher's description of the book adds that

Buber goes on to demonstrate how these interhuman meetings are a reflection of the human meeting with God. For Buber, the essence of biblical religion consists in the fact that — regardless of the infinite abyss between them — a dialogue between man and God is possible.

Religion would be meaningless without the possibility of dialogue between persons, eh? It would seem, then, that religion and spirituality, properly understood, may be dependent in some way on qualia, the phenomenal qualities of our conscious experience, since only persons such as we are sufficiently self-experiential to recognize their own potentialities in other persons!


Still and all, there seems to be yet more going on here. Perhaps "Thou-mindedness" fits into a third category of mental aspects which Chalmers notes: the relational.

"Certain beliefs" that we entertain in our minds, Chalmers says, "may depend on the state of the environment as well the internal state of the thinker" (p. 21). Belief is accordingly, in his view, one of several "intentional" states we find our minds in, along with that of desire and that of hope.

In this usage, "intentionality" represents the defining characteristic of mental states that are "about things in the world" (p. 19). Per Wikipedia, "Every psychical, or mental, phenomenon, every psychological act, has a content, and is directed at an object (the intentional object). Every belief, desire, etc. has an object that it is about: the believed, the wanted."

Even so, we also seem to have inward states associated with our beliefs and desires; these qualify as phenomenal. When we take together the phenomenal (or first-person) and psychological (or third-person) aspects of belief (hope, desire, etc.), Chalmers says, we have possible grounds for finding that there is a third — a relational — component of our various mental states.

When it comes to this putative relational component, though, Chalmers seems to think that "there is no independent third class of phenomena forcing itself on us to be explained" (p. 21). When we have accounted for the phenomenal and the psychological, that is, we will have sufficiently accounted for the relational as well.


I think Chalmers commits a subtle error here. What he says may be true of what Martin Buber calls a basically lifeless I-It relationship, but I doubt that it is true of a fundamentally living I-Thou relationship.

When we believe (or hope) that the "intentional object" toward which an existing mental state is presently directed is a person, not a thing, we experience a unique sort of phenomenon: the kind that is given rise to by perceiving our interlocutor as having the same capacities as we do for first-person, qualia-based, inner experience.

Indeed, the characterization just given, "intentional object," is all wrong here. What we are beholding is an "intentional subject."


So it remains quite true that we can't really plumb the quintessential religious experience — the I-Thou relationship with God and with one another — without understanding phenomenality in addition to psychology. But on top of giving phenomena their due, right alongside the merely psychological, we must also recognize that what is truly vital, spiritually speaking, is the relationship itself, not the phenomenal and psychological components which combine to enable it.

The Qualities of Experience (Q2Q III)

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

This is the third in my "Quickening to Qualia" series of posts, in which I study the phenomenon of consciousness with an eye toward discovering what kinship the topic may have with religious experience, Christian or otherwise. The most recent entry in the series was, until now, One Hand Clapping (Q2Q II).

David J. Chalmers, philosopher of mind and author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, says in his book's first chapter that consciousness's very existence is surprising. He wants to know why there should be consciousness at all: why there is a "subjective quality of experience" (see p. 6) that emerges from the complex brain states we possess as cognitive agents.

I spoke in my earlier posts as if the "qualitative feels" or qualia which our consciousness is aware of when it beholds, say, a red tricycle were characteristics of the tricycle itself. That was apparently a subtle error on my part. Chalmers makes of qualia, those qualities of experience that are associated with some phenomenon, a near-synonym for the phenomenon itself — the subjective experience qua experience which is consciousness per se.

Consciousness is phenomenal, rather than psychological — more on this distinction later. A phenomenon is a particular conscious state given rise to by a particular underlying psychological state. Chalmers wants a scientific (not merely philosophical) theory of consciousness to explain why that particular qualitative feel arises when we see a red tricycle or, say, hear middle C played on a piano.

I find it confusing that Chalmers uses "qualia" in both singular and plural. According to this Wikipedia article, "qualia" (plural) are "most simply defined as qualities or feelings, like redness, as considered independently of their effects on behaviour." The word "qualia" comes from the Latin for "what sort" or "what kind." There is also a Latin and English singular, "quale" (KWAH-lee), which I will henceforth adopt in place of Chalmers's singular "qualia" (KWAH-lee-uh).

Accordingly, when I behold a red tricycle, I am aware of the quale called "redness." I experience it. I am conscious of it. But this quale is not something the tricycle has. It is rather something that I have; it is given rise to by my perception of a red tricycle. In short, our qualia (plural) are all in our head.


Still, what are qualia? They are thus describable: a quale or set of qualia is "what it is like" to be in a particular mental or psychological state, i.e., to be doing certain kinds of information processing in the brain. These states, this processing, are spoken of by Chalmers as causing or explaining behavior, and of themselves having causes in the physical or psychological realm. But the qualia themselves are all about feelings we have while we are in the associated psychological states — not necessarily emotions per se, but possibly those too.

The "what it is like" aspect of qualia can be illustrated, I think, by this image:


This is an optical illusion. It comes into our brains as a particular pattern of (visual) sensation.

Depending on the perspective which our brain's perceptual processing capacity happens to impose on the sensation, we will see it as either a beautiful young woman or an old crone. Perception, Chalmers says, is largely psychological, though tinged with the phenomenal.

With some effort, we can learn to change perspectives at will. Learning, or adapting to environmental stimuli, is almost wholly a matter of the psychological, as opposed to the phenomenal, aspect of the mental realm.

All that sort of thing is a matter of controlling our mental states. That's mainly cognition, as opposed to perception, sensation, or even learning, and it's heavily weighted toward the psychological. For example, we often use reason to convince ourselves of certain beliefs, such as that the image above is not "really" one or the other, a beautiful young girl or an old crone.

What isn't a matter of our psychological capacities is how we react inwardly to what we see in the image: how the qualitative feel of the act of viewing the image switches as our perceptual perspective switches.

How we perceive the picture is psychological; it can determine what we do as we view the picture. Do our pupils dilate or contract? Do we smile or frown? Do we wrinkle our noses?

What it is like to perceive the picture from one perspective or the other is phenomenal; how we feel about the perception, how we react inwardly to it, does nothing with respect to our measurable behavior. It merely accompanies all the psychological, behavior-related stuff that is going on independently of it. That stuff would happen, willy-nilly, even if there were no conscious, subjective experience going on at the same time — even if, that is, we were zombies.

Even if we were non-sentient zombies, we might still wrinkle our noses — assuming we continue to recognize the need to behave differently toward old crones who are possibly evil witches than we do toward beautiful young girls who are, hopefully, not.

In short, behavior-related mental activity (psychology) and experiential mental activity (being attentive to qualia) are correlated, but ultimately different. Chalmers allows as how there may one day arrive some "deep" understanding which can unite the two in a comprehensive theory of the mind, but to wave off the psychological-phemomenal distinction a priori, he says, is an error best avoided at this stage.


Chalmers likens the conscious experience associated with the phenomenal more to pure sensation than to mental capacities like perception, cognition, and learning that lean more toward the psychological aspect of mentality. It puts me in mind of one of my favorite treats as a child. My father was a chief of police, responsible for selecting equipment to be used by his officers in controlling traffic. Salesmen would give him samples of glow-in-the-dark materials for making uniforms and other police accoutrements visible at night. He would bring these patches in their various glowing colors home to me, since he knew they fascinated me.

Whenever the electric power went out in a storm, he would let me set up an array of his glow-in-the-dark patches against a wall in the unlit dining room of our house, illuminate them briefly with a flashlight, then turn off the flashlight and in sheer rapture watch them luminesce. One of them looked about like this:


This image is from the Wikipedia article on "qualia." It is an illustration of the "canonical quale" we call redness. Redness seems to be, in everyday terms, a matter of sensation alone. But why does redness "feel" different from, say, blueness? As a child, I couldn't yet formulate such a question, but I knew I responded differently to different glow-in-the-dark patches whose only distinction was one of color.

Nor could I then realize that the circumstances of my primitive light show pretty much eliminated all perceptions beyond the mere shapes of the patches and all cognition beyond recognizing that the patches needed to be re-illuminated from time to time, or they would dim and go dark.

This is, I think, a good illustration of why Chalmers says that sensation leans more toward the purely phenomenal than do perception and cognition, both of which are heavily psychological.


In my next post in this series, I will bring up a point that Chalmers mentions and then passes over: the idea that, in addition to the phenomenal and psychological aspects of the mental, a third, the relational aspect, may exist.

One Hand Clapping (Q2Q II)

This is the second in my "Quickening to Qualia" series of posts. In Quickening to Qualia, or Taking Consciousness Seriously (Q2Q I) I said something about consciousness. Specifically, I said that it quintessentially amounts to our experience of phenomena.

Those phenomena, with their qualia or "qualitative feels," accompany the merely physical things that appear in our abstract "field of view." Our cognition of those physical things in themselves underlies our consciousness, but cognition and consciousness are not the same phenomena at all. This dualistic view of mind and matter, I said, links up with my own religious worldview and belief in God, but I didn't say why.

Richard P. McBrien's's Catholicism

In Of the Self and the Soul, the post which led up to this Q2Q series, I suggested that the human soul is itself a phenomenal reality: God "first casts his eye" on a child-to-be in the womb, and a soul is born. This theological image, I think, goes along with the basic idea of phenomenology, as expressed by Richard P. McBrien in Catholicism:

Consciousness is never closed in upon itself ... . It has an intentionality, i.e., it is always conscious of something, of phenomena.

Phenomenology studies such phenomena, not as things in themselves (as other sciences do) but as objects of intentionality. ... [It] maintains that there is a fundamental and irreducible duality between consciousness and the world. The two are correlated as the eye is correlated with the field of vision. There can be no field of vision without the eye, and yet the two remain distinct. For the same reason there can be no reality without consciousness. The task of phenomenology is to describe the various regions of reality in the way they appear to consciousness, and to show what activity consciousness must carry out to allow such regions of reality to appear. (p. 118)

God's "eye" falls upon the seed of an embryo, an egg from a woman just fertilized by a sperm from a man, and a new region of reality appears in his divine consciousness. It creates the phenomenon that we would call a soul. As a theological explanation of the immortal soul, how elegant this view seems, how right (though I hasten to add that I do not know whether my Church would agree with me). The zygote is the physical "thing." The soul is the phennomenal "region of reality" which, appearing in the field of vision of the Lord God on High, accompanies it and, thereby, becomes real.


It puts me in mind of the Zen Buddhist koan, What is the sound of one hand clapping? One possible answer: the soul.

The soul is a phenomenal reality that, from our materialistic point of view, is imperceptible. We can perceive the fertilized egg, at least in principle, using a microscope. But we cannot detect the soul, any more than we can be conscious of the sound of one hand clapping. The "hand" is there for us, i.e., the zygote is the "hand." The "sound" is not, i.e., the soul equates to the "sound."

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

There are "spiritual" moments when I feel God is in his heaven and all is right with the world. I think these are the moments when the only judgments I am concerned with making are what David J. Chalmers, philosopher of mind and author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, calls in that book "phenomenal judgments." Without yet having read his exact definition of such judgments, I am assuming he refers to the judgments by which consciousness discerns the qualia or "qualitative feels" that are experienced by us sentient beings when we bring something physical into our phenomenal field of vision: this tricycle is red, that spoon feels cool to the touch.

That seems to me to be what heaven will be like for us. We will simply take in the qualia of everyone and everything around us. There will be no necessity to make any further judgments about them at all — particularly, any moral judgments. Anything that is in heaven will have passed muster with God, and will be unassailably good.


I am therefore interested in seeing how far the phenomenological view of consciousness can be pushed in a spiritual, or at least a theological, direction. My guide to the phenomenological view of consciousness is The Conscious Mind, by Chalmers, a philosopher who personally has no religious ax to grind and who only reluctantly drew his conclusions to the effect that consciousness must be accounted for with reference to more than a reductive, materialistic worldview.

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity

I myself begin with a belief in God and a (fairly liberal) Catholic outlook on Christian theology. I am not trying to prove the existence of God or the truth of the notion that the point of Christian faith is, as C.S. Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity, "to drawn men into Christ, to make them little Christs."

Lewis, in his chapter on "Is Christianity Hard or Easy?", makes the point that we are not drawn into Christ by half measures, but by suffering the death of the "natural self." Christ in effect says, "I have not come to torment your natural self" — i.e., by letting it go on being "starved and hampered and worried at every turn." No, that isn't it at all. Christ has come, says Lewis, to kill the natural self.

This difference between

• the ongoing torment of trying to be "good" while only becoming "angrier and angrier" at one's own inability to both measure up and still keep one's natural self intact, and
• a (nonphysical) death of the natural self

lies at the heart of Christ's call upon us, says Lewis. What I'm wondering is whether there isn't a strong kinship between "killing" the natural self and coming to see that our true self, our soul, is a phenomenon which accompanies or arises from our mere psychological sense of self. The phenomenal self or soul is not an ordinary thing that can be explained with reference to the workings of material reality alone.

Our phenomenal sense of self is more real, in other words, than our psychological "self" ever is — that's what I'm going for here. Our "self-consciousness," our "self-awareness," when it becomes perfectly complete, finally and fully trumps the natural "self" that psychology studies, which itself is blind to the reality of the phenomenal world and stuck in the illusion that the physical and psychological worlds are all there is to know.


I'm saying there is a kinship between the mystery of consciousness, and particularly that of self-consciousness, and the mystery of what Christ asks of us. Yet I don't know how far that kinship can be pushed without distorting either Christianity or phenomenology. I wouldn't want anyone to feel that I am saying heaven is no more than a state of mind, or anything like that. Rather, I start from the point of view that heaven is real and wonder what phenomenology can tell us about it.

The starting point to my inquiry, seemingly, is to figure out what Chalmers means by consciousness as being "the most vivid of phenomena; nothing is more real to us" (p. 3). He shows that the notion of consciousness is quite diffuse and hard to pin down, even among psychologists. "What is central to consciousness" (see pp. 3-5) is not perception, which can be subliminal, or thought, which can take place entirely in the "unconscious" mind. It is not feeling, at least not of the emotional sort. Rather, what is central to consciousness is experience.

Conscious experience is the "something it is like" for us to perform "a whir of causation and information processing" in our brains. It is not the cognitive whir in itself; it is its accompaniment or "internal aspect," the "something it feels like to be a cognitive agent."


There is a "deep philosophical mystery" about why there should be conscious experience at all. The surprisingness of consciousness, says Chalmers, is far and away more shocking than anything we might consider startling about "the facts of physics, and even the facts about dynamics and information processing in complex systems."

Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe

That last bit hurts. For years I have engaged in a somewhat esoteric inquiry (not unlike this one) into the "mysteries" of so-called nonlinear dynamical systems, a.k.a. complex adaptive systems. These are natural, physical systems that live at the "edge of chaos," a previously unsuspected physical regime of fecund evolutionary growth. The earth's biosphere is just one such system. Human technology, for example, may be another. (The best book on this topic is, I think, Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe, in which the author finds our species to be "we the expected," evolutionarily speaking.)

These complex systems are information processors. They are canonically made up of entities that trade information back and forth along networks of intercommunication that have just the right amount of connectivity among the individual entities. Out of this manifold of information interchange mysteriously emerges behavior at the system level that looks like graceful but innovative evolutionary change. I saw the sciences of complexity and self-organization as an embroidery on standard Darwinian evolution theory that, by offsetting creationism, would harmonize it with my more liberal religious faith.

It still may be that, but Chalmers is saying that all the mysteries of information processing and complexity in the material world can't hold a candle to the mysteries of the "utterly unexpected" consciousness which that complex information processing apparently gives rise to. It is the latter which is "metaphysically baffling." It is something we could not have predicted from the features of our usually materialistic worldview of science — even of the sciences of complexity — all by itself.

Perhaps the perfection of our consciousness is the utterly unexpected sound of one hand clapping.

Quickening to Qualia, or Taking Consciousness Seriously (Q2Q I)

I would now like to extend some of the ideas I broached in Of the Self and the Soul concerning consciousness. This is the first in my "Quickening to Qualia" series of posts.

Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

Robert Wright writes in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny that he considers consciousness extraordinary. In explicating Darwin's theory of evolution as it applies to our human cultures as well as to the natural, biological world, the science writer shows that natural selection steadily builds up greater complexity over vast stretches of time, leading to (among other things) brains.

But Darwinian natural selection cannot explain why advanced brains should be conscious.

Consciousness, as I interpret Wright's view of it, is the inner experience we have: what it is like to use our brains. Our brains go through various machinations at a neural or physical level, thereby accomplishing what neuroscientists and behavioral scientists call cognition. Cognition depends on perception, which, when we are dealing with stimuli we receive from the world at large, or from within our body, depends on sensation. Cognition organizes our actions in the world as we respond to our perceived situations.

But, says Wright, big-brained creatures of our general ilk don't actually need to be conscious of all this cognitive activity going on. There could, in some other, hypothetical world, be highly evolved zombies who have no inner experience of their cognitive brain states. These "robots with unusually good skin" would be just as capable as we are at doing all the things which natural selection intrinsically favors — they would be just as "fit" as we, in a Darwinian sense — but they would not be sentient.

That suggests to Wright that our consciousness is epiphenomenal, by which he means it is explanatorially irrelevant to any truly scientific view of human behavior and of how that behavior has evolved. Nothing which natural selection cannot "see," he says, belongs in any such view. Since consciousness doesn't actually "do" anything — since all of our behavior can be fully explained at a neural and physical level — natural selection is blind to it and cannot account for its presence.

Wright builds this view of consciousness into an argument that (a) modern communications may be linking us all together into one giant global brain, itself conscious, and (b) this may be the "purpose" behind evolution, such that it becomes a "non-crazy question" to ask if there is a God.

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

Wright's view of consciousness depends in part on that of David J. Chalmers, philosopher of mind and author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. I obtained Chalmers's book over six years ago, after I first read Wright's book. I found it too difficult a read at the time, and I set it aside mostly unread. Now I am coming back to it, and it seems a lot less obscure. In fact, I would like for this to be the first in a series of posts about it, to which I will add more as I work my way through the book.

I have already dipped into various portions of the book enough to learn that Chalmers "takes consciousness seriously." By this he means that he doesn't agree with the apparently something-like-one-in-three of scientists who claim a completely reductive and materialist theory of cognition would answer all the "easy" and "hard" questions about consciousness too.

Those other scientists, Chalmers says, are on the far side of a Great Divide. They are confident that consciousness is not only a completely natural phenomenon — Chalmers agrees with them on that much — but that it can be explanatorially reduced by everyday scientific methodology to physical-level activity, the workings of interconnected neurons. Chalmers, however, is a mind-body dualist, not a materialist. He thinks conscious mental states cannot be reduced to mere physical activity in the brain.


Chalmers furthermore thinks we need a science of consciousness, whose natural laws needn't be physical laws. Such a science would need a philosophical theory of consciousness to get it started. It would not be as dependent on observation as ordinary sciences are, since the only consciousness one can observe is one's own.

As a dualist, Chalmers holds that consciousness supervenes on physical brain states. It accordingly accompanies the cognitive brain states that give rise to it. This supervenience is natural, not logical: there might be, or this might have been, a "zombie world" where brains aren't conscious. But in our world, laws of nature dictate that consciousness tightly "coheres" with cognition — or, more canonically, with brain-like information processing in general.

What consciousness is composed of is phenomena. Consciousness — itself a phenomenon — attends to things in the physical world not as physical things per se but in terms of their phenomenality: physical things are thus also entities that, once they are perceived by the brain based on sensory input, produce qualia.

A red tricycle not only has the physical characteristics that make it red — say, paint that absorbs all but red light — it accordingly has the ability to produce in our consciousness "a qualitative feel — an associated quality of experience" (p. 4). A quale (KWAH-lay), the singular of qualia, is nothing more than a qualitative feel which is associated with the subjective experience of being aware of something.

The "something" of which we are consciously aware can be an object in the external world, such as a red tricycle, conveyed to our brain by sensory stimuli. It can also be something in our inner world — for example, a memory of a red tricycle, or a thought about tricycles in general, or a feeling of hunger, or a thought about consciousness. The object of which we are conscious can even be our "self"; the symbol which our brain maintains to represent its own identity also has a set of associated qualitative feels or qualia. In fact, anything of which we are consciously aware has associated qualia.

"These qualitative feels," Chalmers himself puts it, "are also known as phenomenal qualities, or qualia for short. The problem of explaining these phenomenal qualities is just the problem of explaining consciousness. This is the really hard part of the mind-body problem."

For example, a red tricycle's qualitative feel or qualia would include that phenomenal quality by which we judge it to be red. But how should we explain such phenomenal judgments of, say, redness in terms of our consciousness? This is one of the topics which Chalmers takes up in detail in the course of his book.


To me, Chalmers's view of consciousness and the judgments it enables u to make about phenomena themselves have something of the right "qualitative feel." I freely admit that I am biased in a way Chalmers is not. He says he took a lot of convincing before abandoning his original inclination toward strictly materialist and reductive explanations of all things.

His dualist theory of consciousness conceals no religious agenda, he says; he reports having "no strong spiritual or religious inclinations" (p. xiv). I will have to read the rest of the book to see whether he even mentions anything like Robert Wright's "non-crazy question" about consciousness implying purpose in the universe, and perhaps a God behind it.

My own bias is in favor of taking a view of consciousness which brings it into relation with the soul, that word being used in its religious or theological sense. So there will very likely be a point at which Chalmers and I part company; however, we agree that the conscious mind is not explainable in terms of physical, material causes.

Even Wright talks as if he is a hard-headed skeptic in no hurry to be convinced of any consciousness-God connection. To him, it's just a "non-crazy question." To me, it's more. I believe in God, in a way that goes along with my being a Christian of fairly liberal (for a Roman Catholic) theological persuasion.

I have an intuition that a phenomenological view of consciousness, such as that of Chalmers, offers a unique pathway into a religious worldview like mine. Like Wright and Chalmers, I believe consciousness is (at least to a first approximation) epiphenomenal; it is out of the "loop" of physical causation. So what is it here for? Why is it that the only thing we as persons really know directly is our conscious experience? Why is everything else filtered through that?

It is as if our world didn't have to be made that way — and if it is, it's because God decreed it.

God, who is himself personal, made a world that would in the normal course of evolution produce persons. God, who himself has a mind, made an evolving world that made us, with our own independent minds. God, himself conscious, sought fellowship with creatures who have their own inner experience.

That is the thrust of my own "qualitative feel" for the phenomenon of consciousness. I will explore it more as I continue to read Chalmers's book and comment on it in future posts in this series.

[This post was edited and revised on 5/10/07.]

Of the Self and the Soul

This was originally to be the first in a series of posts whose original intent was to try to figure out when, during its development in a human womb, a sperm-fertilized egg cell that becomes an embryo, then takes on the status of a fetus, acquires a soul. This effort has evolved quite a bit since I began it initially. My initial intent was to dispute the idea that ensouled human life begins at the moment of biological conception. Later, I wanted to do more than that. I wanted to see when human life qua human life does begin.

By "human life" I meant (since I believe in a God-given soul) life after the "arrival" of the soul in the new human-to-be, developing in the womb of its mother. Biased against the assertion that all abortion is tantamount to murder (though this is what my church, the Roman Catholic Church, teaches) I wanted to discover some intellectually and spiritually acceptable argument against that belief. I wanted to show that abortion isn't murder until some time well after pregnancy begins.


I started out simply trying to show how science can furnish arguments to the effect that the instant at which fertilization of the egg from the mother takes place by the action of a sperm from the father is very likely not the moment when the soul "comes to earth" and joins the body (see Considering Embryos). As I proceeded, however, I became interested in figuring out when exactly the soul does come, and why that particular moment or juncture in fetal development is the "right" one to construe as the beginning of human life, as opposed to all other possible candidate moments.

My initial thought in this regard was to identify as the transition point when the soul actually comes into the picture the "dawn of sentience," the time at which the embryo or fetus first becomes conscious. I wrote a great deal of verbiage in support of this thesis, which I posted to this blog and have now withdrawn.

As I tried to develop my argument, I did some (further) reading on the subject of what consciousness or sentience actually is. In so doing, I came to see that self-consciousness, or self-awareness, is considered by those in the know — philosophers of mind, psychologists, neuroscientists, etc. — to be a special case of "mere" consciousness. While consciousness per se might well be something we humans share with other species, and maybe even with things that are not alive in any ordinary sense, self-awareness is different.

I prefer the term "self-awareness" to "self-consciousness," by the way, since the latter can, Webster says, mean no more than "uncomfortably conscious of oneself as an object of the observation of others": ill-at-ease in social situations.

Self-awareness of the profound sort that I am talking about, most experts assume — though this cannot actually be proved — is something unique to humans. One has to be conscious to be self-aware, but presumably humans are the only conscious entities in the natural world that are self-aware. We are accordingly the only conscious agents in the world who qualify as persons.

So my argument evolved into one dependent on the idea that the soul comes to us when and only when we have developed, in our mother's womb, into full-fledged persons who have become not only conscious but self-aware. Ergo, whatever the moral implications of abortion prior to the dawn of fetal self-awareness may be, abortion isn't necessarily murder.


That was the project I originally had in mind. But as I investigated such areas of human inquiry as various theories of consciousness/self-awareness and the Christian notion of the soul, I ran into problems.

One of these problems was the very notion that the soul — the transcendent dimension or spiritual principle of the human person, which survives after death — is something that "arrives," something that can "come to earth" from on high at some particular time. In the Bible, specifically, neither the Old Testament nor the New has it that soul and body are ever all that distinct to begin with. We are each an animated body, in the view of the Bible writers, not an incarnated spirit. (See Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism, p. 159.)

The latter idea came into Christendom from ancient Greek thought, via the patristic writings of the Early Church and then the Scholastic philosophy of the medieval period. Where the animated-body view spoke mainly of the resurrection of the body, the incarnated-spirit idea envisioned Christian salvation in terms of the immortality of the soul.

Modern Christian thought, guided by science, philosophy, etc., draws in various ways from both traditions. I find that I am not qualified — as yet — fully to disentangle such questions. But it has become evident to me that my original concept of the soul as something separate from and added to the body may be subject to doubt.


In fact, I now find myself leaning more in the direction of the animated-body notion of the soul. I interpret this notion as (at least possibly) an instance of what I believe is called by modern philosophers "phenomenal" existence.

I have only an incipient grasp of phenomenology, I admit. My understanding is that physical and phenomenal existence are seen as conceptually different, with the former giving rise, in the case of consciousness, to the latter. Accordingly, consciousness or sentience or subjective experience is "always conscious of something, of phenomena" (McBrien 118, my italics).

In at least one phemomenological view of consciousness (that of Chalmers; see below), in this world it very likely arises naturally from physical brain states, but it is not identical to them. Nor is there necessarily any logical reason to presuppose that this arising of consciousness must happen. This could instead have been a "zombie world" where physics and psychology say all there is to say about the workings of the human mind.

Real consciousness is in this view aware of external objects, in themselves, as phenomena whose characteristics are called qualia. The physical and psychological processes of sensation, perception, and cognition merely underlie consciousness. Instead of seeing, say, a red tricycle as just a thing in the external world, it experiences a red tricycle. There is thus (again, in this particular philosophical view) a dualism between the physical and the phenomenal. You can't in our natural world have the phenomenal without the physical — or vice versa — but the two are not the same. Hence, consciousness "has a structure and rules proper to itself ... an intentionality" (McBrien 118).

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

The same philosophical position, that of phenomenology, can serve (as I have already indicated) as a basis to suppose that consciousness, and particularly self-consciousness or the human sense of self, is unique to human persons, given rise to by the sheer complexity of the "information states" human brains can take on. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, by the philosopher of mind David J. Chalmers, hints that such may in fact be the case.

Chalmers is careful to give contrary theoretical positions their due, but he basically favors a phenomenological mind-brain dualism, a fundamental distinction between the phenomenon of consciousness and the psychological workings of the mind which gives rise to it. But, again, this dualism is naturalistic; it is in the nature of things in this world, not the result of some logical necessity. Hence, the strictly conceptual possibility that the mind could exist independently from the brain simply does not pertain to our actual world.

Chalmers does not dwell on self-consciousness or self-awareness as such. He seems to feel that we humans possess it uniquely, in that we alone are agents or persons; other animals may lack it. It, too, seemingly represents for him a phenomenal counterpart to something brain-based and neural, something whose operations we call psychological. We have a subjective, intentional experience of the inner self, just as we have a subjective, intentional experience of a red tricycle. The real objects of these experiences both qualify as not things but phenomena.


This view, which I find I now tend to adopt as my own, poses another pair of problems for my original intention to demonstrate that early-stage abortion is not tantamount to murder.

At first, I thought to suggest that there is a "dawn of sentience," during later stages of fetal development — sentience being a synonym for consciousness or subjective experience. If that were so, perhaps the soul "arrives" at that juncture, not before.

But Chalmers seems to think it to be non-crazy to associate some incipient form of consciousness with anything, alive or not, that processes information — even a thermostat! Clearly a very-early-stage human embryo, whose nervous system has already begun to form during the third week of pregnancy and which now responds to external stimuli, processes information. In other words, its mother may not yet have even discovered she is pregnant by the time her embryo has already had its "dawn of sentience."


The second of the pair of problems posed to my position by Chalmers's ideas on consciousness has to do with what I imagined to be the "dawn of self-awareness," supposedly occurring sometime after the dawn of sentience. I had hoped to be able to show that the "dawn of self-awareness" comes at sometime roughly near the point at which the fetus becomes viable outside the womb, in (say) the seventh or eighth month of pregnancy.

But showing that seems not to be possible. For one thing, I have yet to find in Chalmers or anywhere else anything which justifies supposing that self-awareness as a form of consciousness can exist prior to the inception of the self as a psychological construct.

When a psychologist speaks of the self, what he or she has in mind depends in part on his or her particular school of personality theory. But in general, personality theories that emphasize the self at all hold that a newborn infant doesn't even have one yet! The self seemingly appears in the psyche during (say) the first few months of human life after birth, after the neonate has begun to recognize that the external world is something separate, a set of objects that can be inspected, moved around in, and manipulated.

If that is so, then very likely the fetus has no self, psychological or phenomenal, to be aware of. The dawn of self-awareness comes only after birth; it cannot serve as a possible delimiter to when early-term abortion stops counting as anything other than murder.


Then there is the problem of when, from a religious perspective, ensoulment happens — i.e., when the body of the embryo or fetus acquires a soul. According to Wikipedia, during at least one period in the Middle Ages the Catholic Church held that ensoulment coincides with the "quickening" event during the second trimester of pregnancy when the mother first feels the fetus move in her womb. Still, during most of history ensoulment has been taken to occur at the time of conception.

In the same way as, according to phenomenology, consciousness is "associated with" underlying physical brain states, I wonder if perhaps the soul is, at bottom, the phenomenal aspect which is associated with the physical human body from the moment of its conception on.

(I hope I am stating this right. I find that speaking phenomenologically feels quite clumsy, as of yet. I would like to say that the "phenomenal soul," if there be such a thing, emerges at conception. However, I am aware that emergentism is a philosophical position in its own right, and may require a different theory of consciousness — and possibly of the soul. So maybe I'd better avoid saying "emerges" and just keep saying "arises from," or "is given rise to," or "is associated with.")

The general idea of phenomenology seems to be that phenomena, with their qualia, deserve to be treated by philosophers in a different way than the mere "things" which give rise to them. Their very existence is of a unique sort. They are "objects of intentionality," per the philosopher Husserl.

As intentional objects, moreover, they are to consciousness as the field of vision is to the eye. "There can be no field of vision without the eye, and yet the two remain distinct," McBrien writes of Husserl's insights (McBrien 118). "For the same reason there can be no reality without consciousness. The task of phenomenology is to describe the various regions of reality in the way they appear to consciousness, and to show what activity consciousness must carry out to allow such regions of reality to appear."

So it occurs to me that a human soul could be thought of as one of the countless "intentional objects" of God's consciousness. We assume that God has a mind and a will, after all, implying that he is possessed of some sort of consciousness. Suppose a child-to-be appears in God's consciousness — in his "eye" or phenomenological field of vision, as it were — and boom! A soul is born.


What seems to have happened to me, along the way to trying to show that an early-stage fetus is not ensouled until some (apparently nonexistent) "dawn of fetal self-awareness," is that I have managed to begin convincing myself of just the opposite. There is every reason to believe, I now think, that ensoulment occurs at conception, when God "first casts his eye" on the child-to-be.

So I have discovered in the very concepts which I have drawn from phenomenology, in hopes of using them to morally legitimize early-term abortions in Christian eyes, reason to believe I've been wrong, wrong, wrong all along.

It is not a comfortable feeling, I can assure you.

Considering Embryos

As I wrote in a post over in another blog, a new book by Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, nicely reconciles Darwinism with faith. Collins is the physician-geneticist who headed the Human Genome Project, and a committed evangelical Christian to boot, who believes in a God that cares about us and wants to be in fellowship with us. Collins also believes unreservedly in Darwinian evolution. The main point of his book is that the latter can be rather easily reconciled with the former.

Once Collins has made that argument (which I won't go into now) in the course of the book per se, he attaches a lengthy appendix dealing with issues of bioethics from a religious-scientific point of view. Among these issues are abortion, cloning, and research into human stem cells, some of which come from human embryos.

One of the topics he addresses in his discussion of the abortion issue is that of when precisely a feritilized egg cell which begins to divide and form an embryo takes on the status of a human life. From a religious perspective, this transition is usually identified with coming to possess a God-given soul.

Many religious people who oppose abortion outright say that it is at the moment of conception, at the instant when sperm meets egg, that the soul commences to be. From that point on, the embryonic life is fully human. To destroy the embryo on purpose is tantamount to murder. This indeed is, to the best of my understanding, the precise position of my own religious denomination, the Roman Catholic Church.

Collins points out a difficulty with this approach to the issue, though, one which I had never considered before. It is the case of identical twins.

Identical twins arise from a single fertilized egg, also known as a zygote. In the womb of the mother, the zygote begins to divide in the usual way, making an embryo of first two cells, then four, then eight, etc. But now something unusual happens: the embryo itself splits in two. It might be, in a given instance, an embryo of eight cells that turns into two separate embryos of four cells apiece. Those two embryos are just alike; they have the exact same DNA.

The two identical embryos then go on to increase in size, independently one one another, in the usual way. This happens by virtue of further cell divisions. At some point, the cells in each embryo begin to differentiate from one another, so as to form different tissues and organs. (The embryonic stem cells which now come into being play a crucial role in cell differentiation.) The two identical embryos soon become fetuses, and nine months or so after the single sperm from a father met the single egg from a mother, two healthy identical-twin babies are born.

As Collins points out, there was only one moment of conception, but the result has been two human infants, just alike in their DNA, but presumably with two independent souls. If the human soul "arrives" at the moment of conception, then in the identical-twins scenario, when and how does the second soul "arrive" — the one for the "extra" body that belongs to the "second" twin?


A second topic which Collins takes up involves, in its own way, a similar conundrum. In his discussion of stem-cell research, Collins points out a possible way around the ethical problem of obtaining embryonic stem cells only by destryoing embryos.

In the normal course of events, a human embryo in its mother's womb develops in the first four or five days of pregnancy into a blastocyst, a ball of 50-150 cells whose outer layer will form the enclosing placenta and whose inner cells, which consist of the embryonic stem cells or ESCs, will become a fetus. See "Embryonic stem cell" and related articles in Wikipedia for more on the science of embryonic stem cells.

The ESCs are "pluripotent," meaning that they can "develop into each of the more than 200 cell types of the adult body when given sufficient and necessary stimulation for a specific cell type." Adult bodies also make stem cells, but adult stem cells (ASCs) are only "unipotent." Each can generate only one type of organ or tissue.

Pluripotent ESCs accordingly have greater potential, if harvested and manipulated to be used in new therapies for diseases like Alzheimer's, in which cells in victims' bodies have died and need replacement.

The lines of embryonic stem cells currently used in ESC research all originated with embryos produced in fertility clinics. These were "excess" embryos that turned out not to be used in in-vitro fertilization procedures. They would otherwise be discarded. Some of them have been used instead to derive lines of embryonic stem cells, a process which has the side effect of destroying the embryos.

Collins notes that this sort of thing is ethically problematical from the point of view of those who believe the fertilized egg and resulting embryo already has a soul. So he suggests an alternative way to obtain embryonic human stem cells, a derivative of the procedure used in making clones such as Dolly the sheep.


The technique is called "somatic cell nuclear transfer" (SCNT). SCNT involves, as I understand it, removing the nucleus of an egg cell and replacing it with the nucleus of (say) a skin cell from a different donor.

The nucleus of an egg cell contains all the DNA that would normally be contributed by a mother to the eventual zygote that results when her egg is fertilized by a sperm cell from a father. The sperm which fertilizes the egg contains, in its own nucleus, the father's DNA. Each gamete, whether sperm or egg, contains half the number of chromosomes of an ordinary body cell. When sperm and egg meet and unify, a single nucleus results having the full complement of chromosomes.

When an unfertilized egg has its nucleus removed by a scientist and replaced with the nucleus of an ordinary body cell from a male or female donor other than the female that has produced the egg, the resulting cell (given the proper manipulation) is able to start dividing into an embryo. This embryo is in most ways just like an embryo that comes from the customary fertilization of an egg by a sperm ... except, of course, that the embryo will turn into a genetic clone of the donor of the nucleus. It will have no DNA whatsoever from the surrogate mother whose egg cell has been borrowed, and possibly in whose womb the embryo is implanted to be carried to term.

This is a brief summary of the process called somatic cell nuclear transfer or SCNT. Given that "somatic" means "bodily," or "of the body," you can see why the term is used. The nucleus (with its DNA) taken from a cell in the body of a donor organism is transferred to an egg cell from another (necessarily female) organism. The SCNT-derived cell then may develop into a clone of the nucleus donor.

Or, as Collins points out, the embryo which results from SCNT might be used to harvest embryonic stem cells. Instead of implanting it in a womb to be carried to term and given birth to, it can stay in a test tube until its stem cells are harvested; then the remainder of the blastocyst could be discarded. The stem cells thus harvested could well be as valuable to medical research as those which derive from a fertilized egg — because in most ways, the two sources of embryonic stem cells are just alike.

The question is, would an SCNT-derived blastocyst, intended to be used as a source of human stem cells, possess a soul? After all, if those who say the soul appears at the instant of conception are right, then in the case where there is nuclear transfer, but no sperm-egg conception, when and how would the soul appear?


This question is admittedly a tricky one. Presumably, an SCNT-derived human blastocyst could instead be introduced into a woman's womb, where it would actually turn into a baby who is a clone of the donor of the original nucleus. This has not actually been tried in humans, of course, as it has in sheep and other species. There are obvious religious and ethical objections, not to mention the practical and scientific problems of cloned organisms in other species not turning out as robust as might be hoped.

But let us say the practical problems could be solved and the ethical problems ignored. Would the clone-child have a soul? Most of us who believe in souls at all would answer an emphatic yes. After all, the process which turns a single fertilized egg into two identical twins in a mother's womb is a natural form of cloning. Admittedly, it is different in technical detail, but it results in two humans having identical DNA, even though there has been but one single fertilization of an egg by a sperm.


I have just given two cases in which it doesn't make sense to say the human soul "arrives" at the time of conception, when one sperm meets one egg, and only then. Of course, one might respond that God could make a "special delivery" of an "extra" soul when the embryo divides into twins, and that there is likewise a special delivery of a soul from God when a human embryo is derived via SCNT. But this sort of fixing up of the soul-arrival scenario isn't very intuitively satisfying, at least not to me.

And so I now question the whole idea of the soul "arriving." I have a completely different notion of what theologians call "ensoulment." I'll discuss it in a follow-up post, Of the Self and the Soul.

Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (IV)

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity

In Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (I) I said the Christian God is Perfect Goodness. In Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (II), that God is Perfect Love. And in Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (III), I ascribed the idea of God as Perfect Penitence to the nature of Jesus Christ as the incarnation of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.

In that last essay I listed a number of roles this Second Divine Person plays in Christian belief. He is the Son of God. He is, as Eternal Word, the Co-Creator of the World. He is, by virtue of the love he and his Father share, a participant in the neverending beatific union whose name is Holy Spirit. He is, as I also wrote, the Ideal Person whom we, when we pray, "dress up as" and impersonate. As such, he is the Patient Partner who stands beside us each time we pray and guides us in our impersonation.

I now see that an aspect of one of these facets of Christ's identity which I listed in the previous post was given too short shrift. In saying that he is the Perfect Penitent — that his death on a cross as a God-become-mortal saves us both communally and individually — I brushed right by something essential to Lewis's anatomy of the Christian viewpoint: the idea that God as Christ is (in my own words) the Perfect Captain.

The point that I needed to enlarge on and didn't was the one about Christ as the communal, or corporate, Savior and Redeemer of us all. Christians speak of themselves, taken together, as the Body of Christ. That makes Christ their corporate Head, or as I would prefer to put it, their Perfect Captain.

I very definitely mean to use the word "captain" in the sense of a military leader of a group of fighting soldiers, since in Lewis's view, the coming of Christ has in fact amounted to an "invasion" of Enemy-held land. The Enemy in this case is Satan, and the land Satan holds hostage is our fallen world. We who are the Body of Christ are accordingly the Perfect Captain's footsoldiers.

To extend the analogy a bit further: the Commander-in-Chief of our invading good army is God the Father. The Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity, can perhaps be visualised, accordingly, as Company Chaplain.

Notice that the "cap" in "captain" derives from the Latin for "head." As the head of his invading company, Christ leads us in the battle against entrenched Evil. Any leader demands and deserves his troops' loyalty. A function of our loyalty to our captian is that we are commissioned to follow his commands. A second function is that we ordinary footsoldiers need to be mutually wacthful after one another's survival and welfare. We, as the saying goes, watch each other's backs.

It's like any company or brigade or regiment in wartime. We don't necessarily have to like the guy in the foxhole next to us to feel responsible for seeing that he doesn't die in battle, if we can possibly help him stay alive.


The analogy which Lewis uses is an even better one. The Body of Christ is, in that picture, an actual bodily organism, full of different organs, of which Christ is the Head. We humans constitute, quite naturally, the individual organs.

In this view we are anything but exact copies of one another, anything but interchangeable parts. We are all different, and we each have disparate roles in keeping the Body going. Our duties to one another are not solely for the sake of aiding the other individual organs qua individuals; they are just as much for the sake of maintaining the Body as a whole.

In saying such a thing there is a danger of "overcompensating" for the arrant individualism which such a Body analogy is meant to offset in each of us, who often behave as if we were the center of our own universe. Yet there is also the danger of our taking overweening pride in our own individual function in the Body of Christ, as if a pancreas were to lord it over an appendix. Lewis deals with this twin danger in his "Two Notes" chapter, in Book IV:

The idea that the whole human race is, in a sense, one thing — one large organism, like a tree — must not be confused with the idea that individual differences do not matter or that real people, Tom and Nobby and Kate, are somehow less important than collective things like classes, races, and so forth. Indeed the two ideas are opposites. Things which are parts of a single organism may be very different from one another: things which are not, may be very alike. Six pennies are quite separate and very alike: my nose and my lungs are very different but they are only alive at all because they are parts of my body and share its common life. Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group of items in a list, but as organs in a body — different from one another and each contributing what no other could. When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbours, into people exactly like yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be that. You and they are different organs, intended to do different things. On the other hand, when you are tempted not to bother about someone else's troubles because they are "no business of yours," remember that though he is different from you he is part of the same organism as you. If you forget that he belongs to the same organism as yourself you will become an Individualist. If you forget that he is a different organ from you, if you want to suppress differences and make people all alike, you will become a Totalitarian. But a Christian must not be either a Totalitarian or an Individualist.

I feel a strong desire to tell you — and I suspect you feel a strong desire to tell me — which of these two errors is the worse. That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs — pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.

Quite a lot of Christian wisdom is concentrated in these two straightforward paragraphs. As separate organs in a single Body whose Head is Christ, we realize that our love for God and love for neighbor — the two Great Commandments our Perfect Captain gives us — amount to the same thing. They together constitute our solemn duties as footsoldiers of the Lord.

They serve, furthermore, to guide us between the twin errors of (as Lewis calls them) Individualism and Totalitarianism. If we were independent organisms, and not mere organs in this one metaphorical Body, we would be justified in being selfish Individualists. But if we were as indistinguishable as pennies in a roll, our proper form of governance would be Totalitarianism.

The Twin Commandments of love for God and neighbor hence model for us a religion whose entire genius lies in its moderation. If we are to avoid the snares of Satan, we must navigate between all sorts of errors that Satan makes into pairs of tempting opposites. It is natural that each of us is going to be tempted by one counterpoised error, more so than the other. But as Christians we are to seek the spiritual over the natural, when the latter poses a mortal threat to us. This is why we need a Perfect Captain to lead us past the diabolical land mines and on into battle.