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 I wrote a great deal of verbiage in support of this thesis, which I posted to this blog and have now withdrawn.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.