I Am a Camera

In Whither the "Magic" of Mind?, my latest addition to this blog, I extended a long string of prior posts about the subject of consciousness. I listed in that post some links to many of those earlier posts. Now, more on consciousness.

By consciousness I mean what philosophers of mind sometimes call "phenomenal consciousness" — not "access consciousness," which is "the global availability of information to processing systems in the brain." I gather that access consciousness is, to philosophers, roughly what psychologists mean by "cognition" or the "cognitive states" of the brain. Phenomenal consciousness or "subjective experience," as it is also called, accompanies access consciousness, but — at least to those philosophers who believe that it, in addition to mere cognition, truly exists — it is not the same thing.

Rather, consciousness (I'll henceforth omit the "phenomenal") is a sensation or impression of "what it is like" to be something to which we direct our attention. That "something" is an event which we are witness to ... say, the color red, for example, when we see a red tricycle. Accordingly, when we are cognitively aware of a thing or event that we sense in the external world, these philosophers say, our awareness is typically accompanied by a "qualitative feel." The color of the red tricycle, for instance, evokes in us a certain intangible feel that is different from the one associated with the color of, say, a yellow school bus.

Philosophers who ponder such things do not often say "qualitative feel," though. Instead, they say quale (KWAH-lay), the plural of which is qualia (KWAH-lee-uh). The cognitive awareness that we gain when we witness a passing yellow school bus gives rise, typically, to the experience of particular qualia. These qualia are the ones we associate with the color yellow, with the hulking size of the bus, with the sound it makes as it drives by our open window, etc. By virtue of these qualia, we form a subjective impression of "what it is like" to be a moving yellow school bus.

Every observable event is, in philosophy, a phenomenon. It will typically have in our subjective experience certain qualia associated with it. The qualia-laden phenomenon can be, but does not have to be, a sensory event based on stimuli received from the external world. It also can be something like a pain in the neck, or a sensation of hunger. It can be a thought. It can be a symbolic representation within the mind — as, for instance, the one psychologists call the "self," whenever it comes into mental focus during the course of our cognitive activity.

Any such phenomenal event can (or must) evoke a subjective experience above and beyond our immediate cognitive state or states. For example, when any of us thinks of his or her "self," each of us summons up his or her own private, inner impression of "what it is like to be me."


Many philosophers of mind who speak of phenomena and qualia are "dualists" who say the conscious mind, so described, is an entity distinct from all the brain states and activities that underlie consciousness. True, consciousness arises from the brain and its internal states, but it is more than just another functional state of the brain. It isn't physical, in the way that all the other aspects of the brain's functioning are physical. Hence, the physical activity of the neurons of the brain are not sufficient to explain why we are conscious in the first place.

These philosophical dualists are fond of talking about hypothetical alternative worlds in which each of us possesses a "zombie twin." My zombie twin — I'll call him Z.T. — looks and acts just like me in every respect ... including his ability to report in detail on his inner "conscious" experiences. But Z.T. isn't actually conscious! He's under the illusion that he has subjective inner experiences involving phenomenal events' qualities or qualia, but he really doesn't!

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

According to David J. Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, there must be psychophysical laws of nature in our universe by virtue of which immaterial, nonphysical conscious experiences arise in our brains, but not in those of our zombie twins in the "universe next door." These laws come into force in response to the sheer complexity of our brains' functional organization. In a hypothetical zombie world, however, these "psychophysical" laws would be wholly absent, even though the denizens' brains share the same functional organization as our own. Z.T. would lack conscious experience ... but he would still give the same reports about his conscious internal states as I do!

This anomaly makes sense to Chalmers and others with like takes on the conscious mind; after all, Z.T. and all the other zombie twins in the next universe over behave just like us. Behavior is seemingly a function of the brain's cognitive, information-processing capabilities, which in our zombie twins, by hypothesis, mimic perfectly our own. For us and for our zombie twins, reporting on one's interior states, including one's (illusory, in the case of Z.T.) consciousness, is, after all, no more than a matter of behavior.


Chalmers characterizes himself as a mind-body dualist, but this does not mean he believes that anything supernatural, such as God or the soul, exists. To him, the conscious mind is entirely a natural thing. It arises by virtue of laws of nature: physical laws such as human physicists study, amplified by psychophysical laws yet to be discovered.

My own inclination is to go one step further, and to look for ways in which the immaterial aspect of the mind called consciousness, or subjective experience, can be related to another putative immaterial aspect of our being: the soul.


Historically in Christian thought, there has been a fair amount of disagreement as to what the soul actually is. The standard view today is that the soul is one component of yet another sort of dualism, that of "body/soul."

Part of the reason for the historical disagreement is that the words used in the Old and New Testaments for these concepts vary from passage to passage. The Old Testament, written in Hebrew, uses certain Hebrew words for "body" and "soul," while the New Testament, translated from the Greek, uses others. Within a given Testament, different books and different passages within books employ different words for "body" and "soul."

In some cases in the New Testament, these words form not just a dualism but a triptych: "body," "soul," and "spirit." "Soul" and "spirit" seem, in many of these passages, to be distinct concepts. In other passages, the biblical ideas of "soul" and "spirit" seem interchangeable. Moreover, a word translated as "soul" and/or "spirit" sometimes seems to be better rendered in English as, for example, "life."

It has been claimed that part of the confusion comes from different notions of such matters among the Hebrew-speaking Israelites who wrote down the books Christians call the Old Testament, as opposed to those of the later Jewish and gentile writers of the New Testament, steeped as they were in the Hellenistic world of classical Greek ideas.


Over the course of early and medieval Christian history, luminaries such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas applied their intellects to these biblical concepts. Their ideas about the soul are still with us today. And there have been modern attempts to come to grips with the soul, with diverse results which vary among (for instance) Catholics who adhere to the Roman Church's catechetical teachings, conservative Protestants, theologically "liberal" Protestants, neoorthodox Protestants, and so forth and so on.

As a result of this historical and linguistic mishmash concerning the soul, my attempts to research the theology of the soul in preparation for what I am about to say have resulted in quite a bit of frustration. I am now, I admit, no more certain as to what the soul supposedly "is" from a theological point of view than I was when I started.


All the same, I think I can say with some confidence that we each have a soul, created by God. (I am of course assuming God and the soul both exist.) The body and the soul are compounded together in such a way as to make for the essential unity of who we each are as human individuals — a compound whose form or type is different than it would be otherwise.

An apt analogy is with the chemical compound table salt, or NaCl, which has an entire different nature than sodium (Na), chlorine (Cl), or a physical mixture of the two elements. Without their molecular bonds, the atoms of NaCl would not, for example, taste salty. Likewise, without a soul, we could not be said to be made in the "image of God" or to be the "salt of the earth."

That brief discussion represents at least a down payment on speaking theologically about what the soul is. What about what — if anything — the soul does?


One of the main things many theologians say a soul does is ferry our unique individual identities, after we die, into the afterlife. Different Christian denominations and theologians have different takes on the afterlife, in accordance with two promises we seem to have been given in scripture: first, that we immediately, upon dying, join God in some disembodied state of pure spirit or soul ... but, second, that one day in the indeterminate future we will also experience a bodily resurrection, in which each soul will be united with its body once more.

Some theologians have historically put more emphasis on the disembodied life of the soul following death, others on the resurrection. But all pretty much agree that, either way, we will still be who we always were, once we reach the afterlife. All our memories, for example, will be intact. The people we loved on this earth, we will still love. The knowledge we gained, we will not lose.

So my attempt to unify the idea of immaterial mental consciousness with the idea of an immaterial soul begins with trying to see how the soul could possibly ferry the identities we develop in this world into the next.


Start with memory. There is probably no aspect of the functioning of our brains that is more responsible for stabilizing our individual identities over the days and years of our lives than the fact that we remember what has happened to us in the past. Our personal history remains part of us forever — at least until we die.

Modern neuroscience has been able to discover quite a bit about how the neurons that make up our brains store memories. It is pretty clear that memory in the ordinary sense of the word is 100 percent physical. When, say, due to the ravages of a degenerative affliction such as Alzheimer's disease, we lose our ability to form memories, it is because our brain tissue isn't what it used to be. It is accordingly plausible to suppose that when our bodies decay fully after our death, our memories as such are simply gone.

But the soul is said to be able to violate that limitation. It is capable of ferrying our identities, including our memories, into the afterlife with us. How can this be?


Imagine, if you will, that the soul acts as a sort of camera. It contains the wherewithal to record the subjective impressions that we form in our minds when we direct our conscious attention to the various phenomenal events and qualia we bear witness to during our lives.

In terms of its ability to record our subjective experiences, the soul may accordingly be like a digital camera whose onboard memory capacity is very large, in terms of the number of megabytes of storage it contains — large, because it has to contain records of all the countless experiences that shape us during our lifetimes. These "photographic" records of our lifetime experiences are destined to accompany our soul into the afterlife and to form the basis for our continuing identities beyond the grave.

Suppose, also, that the conscious mind functions as sort of an optical mirror, like the ones found in the huge reflecting telescopes that gather light from stars and other objects in the heavens and focus it on photographic plates or human retinas. Such a mirror creates, at its focal point, an image of a scene. The image is wholly insubstantial, but it is nonetheless real.

To extend this admittedly speculative analogy of cameras and optical mirrors, suppose the soul receives from the conscious mind an image not of a pattern of light but a composite of the qualia of an event or phenomenon. It is this "optical" image which embodies the conscious, subjective experience that the soul "photographically" records.

If this extended analogy is correct, then consciousness exists to form phenomenal "images" which the soul somehow records. On this view, consciousness, like the soul, is immaterial, just as philosophers like David Chalmers claim it to be. It may well arise out of brain activity according to psychophysical laws such as Chalmers seeks. But it has a purpose which Chalmers does not entertain: to feed the soul with experiences to be ferried along with our basic identities into the afterlife. It is for this reason that I title this post, not all that tongue in cheek, "I Am a Camera."

Whither the "Magic" of Mind?

Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach

My last "Strange Loops" post was Brains and Thoughts. In it I talked yet again about the human mind — namely, about ideas concerning the mind that appear in Douglas R. Hofstadter's blockbuster 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.

To Hofstadter, that the human mind incorporates a sense of self is a thing that needs to be explained somehow. He explains it by recourse to a "self-symbol" or "self-subsystem."

In Hofstadter's view of the brain, its neurons' activities are organized in such a way as to produce, at a very high conceptual level, a plethora of "symbols." Along with the symbols themselves, there are also paths or patterns by which these symbols become active or are "triggered" in various combinations and sequences. Such a pattern, combination, or sequence of symbol activation constitutes a "thought."

A super-sized combination of symbols that tend to be activated together forms a "subsystem" (see p. 385). More precisely, a subsystem is "a constellation of symbols, each of which can be separately activated under the control of the subsystem itself." Another term Hofstadter uses for the same idea is "subbrain." A subsystem amounts to a "subbrain" of the entire brain.

Various subsystems or subbrains exist in each of our brains. Some of them, for example, "represent the people we know intimately," says Hofstadter. These subsystems associated with particular individuals constitute models by virtue of which we can understand and predict our friends' reactions to various contexts of experience, insofar as they may differ from what our own reactions would be.

Hofstadter gives the example of how we might know that a certain friend's concept of "mountain" is keyed to that friend's having had "a wonderful hiking experience in the Alps" years ago (p. 386). Accordingly, when we activate the "mountain" symbol in our own brain within the context of the subsystem that represents our Alp-hiking friend, that activation is somehow different from what it would be if it were activated in the context of just our own Alp-less personal experience.

Our own personal activation context for "mountain" — sans Alps, if we have never been there — and other symbols amounts to what Hofstadter calls our "self-symbol" or "self-subsystem." This unique symbol or subsystem of the human mind — though we each have a separate one of them, of course — is "the 'I' inside my brain," says he (p. 385).


I am right with Hofstadter on all the above, but our paths are nevertheless about to diverge. A bone of contention emerges, in fact, as of the "Where Is the Sense of Self" section of his intriguing chapter on "Minds and Thoughts" (see pp. 384-385).

Hofstadter's discussion of the self-symbol or self-subsystem follows closely on the heels of that particular section. In it and what follows he makes what I consider to be a bad mistake — a subtle one, to be sure, but nonetheless bad. He fails to distinguish between the self-symbol and consciousness.

I should have put that differently: he refuses to make a distinction between consciousness and the activity of the self-symbol. In fact, he makes it apparent that he would reject out of hand any proposed model of consciousness that would "elevate consciousness or awareness to [a] 'magical,' nonphysical level."

That resistance to the so-called "magical" seems to amount to nothing short of a bias on his part. True, it looks as if much of the remainder of his book (which I have not yet read) consists of a coherent argument against "magical" conceptions of the mind and consciousness. Yet as of this juncture in my reading, I feel disinclined to accept any such argument, on the grounds that I already have what I think is a well-justified view of consciousness that I imagine Hofstadter would call "magical."

In other words, my bias doesn't match Mr. Hofstadter's bias. Sorry about that.


My own bias when it comes to a philosophical understanding of consciousness is pretty well laid out in my earlier series of posts, which I collectively labeled "Quickening to Qualia":

• Quickening to Qualia, or Taking Consciousness Seriously
• One Hand Clapping (Q2Q II)
• The Qualities of Experience (Q2Q III)
• I and Thou (Q2Q IV)
• The Surprise of Selfhood (Q2Q V)
• What Is It Like To Be Self-Aware? (Q2Q VI)
• Water Into Wine (Q2Q VII)
• Thouness (Q2Q VIII)
• The "Thou" of Revelation ... (Q2Q IX)
• "Thouness" and Self (Q2Q X)
• The Mind's Enigmas (Q2Q XI)
• Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans (Q2Q XII)

Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

That string of posts drew upon, among others, two books that have helped shape my ideas. The first of these is Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, a book in which the author makes the case that consciousness is extraordinary. In explicating Darwin's theory of evolution as it applies to our human cultures as well as to the natural world, Wright 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 is the experience we have of what it is like to use our brains, says Wright. If the use of the brain involves high-level symbols, as Hofstadter believes, then Wright would say that consciousness is the experience we have of symbols being activated in certain sequences and combinatorial patterns.

That subjective experience, however, is something that goes on in addition to the symbol-activation process. Even if there exists a super-symbol or subsystem or subbrain that, in our so-called self-awareness, represents the self, the experience of being self-aware comes on top of the self-awareness per se.

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

Such a view of consciousness as the experience of awareness, rather than as just awareness per se, is expounded by the second of the two books I just mentioned: David J. Chalmers' The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Chalmers is a philosopher of mind who makes the case in his book that our knowing "what it is like" to know something is distinct from having the knowledge per se.

Awareness, or knowledge, is of immense practical benefit to us. So is self-awareness or self-knowledge. And (as Hofstadter points out in Gödel, Escher, Bach) it is tough to imagine that creatures as smart as we are could ever make sense of the world to which we relate without a symbol in our brains for the entity doing the relating (see p. 388).

What we are aware of at a conscious level exceeds all that, Chalmers says. We experience the "qualia" of the things in the outside world represented in our brains by Hofstadter's symbols. We also experience the qualia of our own internal states. So what are qualia?

A "quale" (the singular of qualia) is what gives any particular conscious experience its subjective quality. It is that experience's "qualitative feel":

When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and information processing [in the brain], but this processing does not usually go on in the dark. There is also an internal aspect; there is something it feels like to be a cognitive agent. This internal aspect is conscious experience. Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experiences of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one's tongue; from mundane sounds and smells to the encompassing grandeur of musical experience, from the triviality of a nagging itch to the weight of a deep existential angst; from the specificity of the taste of peppermint to the generality of one's experience of selfhood. (Chalmers p. 4)

To Chalmers (and to myself) consciousness is a feeling or aura that surrounds an awareness of what our mind is doing. It goes along with the awareness, but it is different. Our response to the qualitative feel of something is itself incapable itself of "doing" anything in the world, in a practical sense.

If we are aware of a red tricycle, for example, the color red is experienced consciously by us in a certain phenomenal way, above and beyond any psychological reactions we may have to red objects. We simply possess an idea of "what it is like" for something to be red. It is entirely possible that in some imaginary world other than the one which we actually inhabit, that same "what it is like" feeling or aura in the presence of a certain color would pertain not to red but to green.

That "what it is like" feeling or aura, whether it be associated with red or green, is sort of like a sidecar to the motorcycle which is the awareness of the color and of the object which has that color. The sidecar steers nothing, drives nothing, powers nothing. The motorcycle (or its driver) does all that practical stuff. The fellow in the sidecar — consciousness, subjective awareness, whatever you want to call it — simply comes along for the ride.


It is also possible for us to imagine a world of "zombies" who have all the smarts we do but lack conscious experience entirely. Think Lt. Comdr. Data, the android on the Star Trek: The Next Generation series. Data, a glorified robot who looked very nearly human, was forever stymied in trying to imagine the feel of the experiences that he knew his biology-based counterparts had. Try as he might, he couldn't experience anything — despite the fact that he was just as capable a starship officer as any of the flesh-and-blood officers were.

As Wright points out in Nonzero, in some imaginable alternative world there might have evolved flesh-and-blood creatures as smart as Data (and as us) who look just like us but are no more clued in to the subjective feelings of conscious experience than Data was.

Along these same lines, Chalmers asks (p. 4), "Why should there be conscious experience at all?" He finds consciousness "metaphysically baffling." His book represents an attempt (which I think is at least partially successful) to show that consciousness, so defined, must arise from laws of nature that are distinct from the ordinary laws of physics.

Speaking loosely, since he has no religious ax to grind, Chalmers says (p. 138) that "God still had more work to do" after he established the physical facts of our world. To wit, he had to add in the natural-but-not-physical laws by virtue of which consciousness would arise when the right type of physical organization — that of the human brain, for instance — emerged.


Such a view is religious only to the extent that you think natural laws, whether or not they happen to be physical laws, come from God. Chalmers happens to have no concern whatsoever about addressing this question. His talk of God as having "more work to do" is purely illustrative of his concept of natural laws as composing a larger category than merely physical laws. Even if there is no God behind the natural world and its scientific laws, his arguments would stand or fall by themselves.

Nonetheless, it occurs to me that Hofstadter might call Chalmers a dirty name: "soulist." In discussing the location in the brain of the sense of self, Hofstadter assumes the latter to be something of a "mechanism which does the perceiving of all the active symbols" in the brain (p. 385). He is about to identify that something as the "self-subsystem" I talked about earlier, but before he does that he takes a swipe at anyone who would "merely assert that the perceiver of all this neural action is the soul, which cannot be described in physical terms, and that is that."

Such a person who calls the brain's internal "perceiver" of its own neural action a non-physical phenomenon is thus lumped by Hofstadter into the category of "soulist," a word he has made up which apparently is the antonym of materialist. Hofstadter himself is such a materialist, or perhaps, better put, a mechanist. The brain to him is akin to a computer, a machine. Its awareness is "a direct effect of all the complex hardware and software" that it is made of (p. 388). End of story.


Just after saying that, he introduces the Oxford philosopher J.R. Lucas as something of a foil to his own mechanist views of consciousness. He starts down this path by excerpting (pp. 388-390) a long passage from Lucas' 1961 article "Minds, Machines, and Gödel," the full text of which may be read here. In the passage cited by Hofstadter, Lucas champions a reading of Gödel's incompleteness notions as demonstrating that the human mind cannot be equivalent to a machine, "within the meaning of the act."

That is, if a machine is defined as something that cannot stand outside itself as a formal, mechanical system and see the truth of those sorts of propositions which Gödel said all formal systems ineluctably lack proofs for, then the human mind is no machine. For the human mind can indeed see such truths. It is accordingly, Lucas says, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Why? Because it is of a degree of complexity that has gone, in the analogy Lucas draws to a nuclear reactor, "super-critical."

A machine might someday be built that has such super-critical complexity, Lucas wrote, but if it was built, "it would cease to be a machine, within the meaning of the act." It would be "no longer entirely predictable and entirely docile." It would "have a mind of its own" (can we say it would possess "free will"?) "Even when presented with a Gödel-type question" — i.e., a question that no formal, mechanical system could answer — "it [could get] the answer right."


To be quite frank, when I first began reading Hofstadter, I thought this sort of thing was exactly what he was leading up to. I thought he was going to use Gödelian incompleteness as a springboard to claiming that consciousness exceeds the merely physical workings of the brain, just as what we can know exceeds what we can demonstrate the truth of mechanically and formally.

Now I realize how wrong I was. Instead, Hofstadter is (as of the end of his chapter on "Minds and Thoughts") clearly about to embark on a demonstration of the opposite: that Gödelian incompleteness can be interpreted as supporting a strictly materialistic, mechanistic view of the mind, including the conscious and self-aware aspects thereof.

A clue to this comes from the way in which Hofstadter describes the Lucas paper in his bibliography (p. 751): "A highly controversial and provocative article, it claims to show that a human brain cannot, in principle, be modeled by a computer program. The argument is based entirely on Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, and is a fascinating one. The prose is (to my mind) incredibly infuriating — yet for that very reason, it makes humorous reading."

Talk about damning with faint praise! I found the prose excerpt from Lucas spoken of above to be anything but infuriating. In fact, I found it chimed with my own views, which means that I found Lucas to be in the same ballpark as Chalmers and Wright on the subject of consciousness.


To be more precise, Chalmers in his book seems to differ with Lucas, albeit in fairly nuanced ways that I frankly admit I am not mentally up to comprehending (see pp. 313-314), even though both writers take non-materialist approaches to the question of consciousness.

At the same time, Chalmers dismisses Hofstadter's views in Gödel, Escher, Bach much more broadly (pp. 30-31): "Hofstadter (1979) has some interesting things to say about consciousness, but he is more concerned with introspection, free will, and the sense of self than with expierience per se." In other words, Chalmers (generously, in my opinion) lets Hofstadter off the hook by reading him as saying nothing much at all about conscious experience as Chalmers describes the phenomenon.

I don't quite agree with Chalmers on this point. I think Hofstadter intentionally declines to address consciousness as a phenomenal, non-material thing, simply because he, Hofstadter, takes for granted that such a thing could never exist. If it did exist, it would be "magical," and it would demand a "soulist" explanation — which, to him, is no explanation at all.

In taking that approach, I think Hofstadter is guilty of artificially excluding a logical middle ground between his mechanistic, material view of consciousness and a true "soulist" view. I take the latter to amount to the standard religious notion of the "soul" as being somehow impressed upon the body by some higher power, call it God or whatever.

But, as Wright, Chalmers, and Lucas all demonstrate, there are various ways to occupy such a logical middle ground without adopting either a mechanical view of the mind or a traditional religious view of the soul.


Even if there really is such a possible middle ground, I have found in my readings of the subject of consciousness that there are a number of smart people like Hofstadter who shy away from it.

Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works

Steven Pinker, in his excellent book How the Mind Works, is one of them — see The Mind's Enigmas (Q2Q XI). Pinker agrees with Chalmers and others that consciousness (which he defines as Chalmers does) is bafflingly inexplicable; but he holds that it is like certain other things which he lists that defy all explanation. So be it, he seems to say.

Pinker is on record as being an atheist. As such, he is much kinder to the non-materialist view of consciousness than another well-known atheist who has written on the subject of the mind, Daniel Dennett. I haven't read Dennett, but from what I have read about his books and other writings, I feel confident in saying he does not subscribe to any such notion as a dualist division between the conscious mind and the physical brain.

And so it seems that the more opposed to religion one is, the less one is inclined to believe that the mind or soul is anything more than a direct result of the physical workings of the brain. I find that correlated opposition to two widely held ideas — God and the immaterial mind or soul — curious, to say the least. Perhaps their opponents resist both because both seem "magical" to them.

The Pope of Reason

I discussed the recent (and ongoing) flap over The Pope and Islam in my previous post. Last September, when Pope Benedict XVI addressed the "representatives of science" at the University of Regensburg, Germany, much umbrage was taken at some of his references to Islam. The Holy Father mentioned a dialogue between a Byzantine Christian emperor and an educated Persian Muslim during the siege of Constantinople (the city once called Byzantium) between 1394 and 1402. The thrust of one of the remarks made by Manuel II Paleologus, the emperor, was to note that Mohammed's command in the Qur'an had been to spread his new religion "by the sword" — that is, by force and compulsion, not by reason and persuasion.

What got overlooked in the hubbub over that seeming derogation of Islam was that the Pope also noted the injunction of surah 2,256 of the Qur'an: "There is no compulsion in religion."

(The prepared text of the Pope's Regensburg lecture can be read here, or in PDF format here. The Wikipedia article on it and the controversy it ignited is here.)


The Pope also cited a modern scholar of Islam named Theodore Khoury to the effect that "for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality."

Again, what got overlooked was that Pope Benedict's speech expounded how our own Judeo-Christian tradition in the West has, since the late Middle Ages, toyed with similar notions of God not being bound, at the very core of his being, by reason ... or anything else.

The Pope said this image of God as voluntarily having put on a mask of reason as his modus operandi toward Creation, even though there was nothing in his own nature which mandated that choice, was the start of a project — it continues today — to "dehellenize" Christian thought.

Ancient Greek philosophers held that God (albeit not the God of the Old Testament) was intrinsically rational, as was the world which they investigated and experienced. They referred to the orderliness of the universe as cosmos and the principle behind it as logos. Benedict feels that such Greek ideas were part and parcel of the message of the New Testament, right from the start of the Christian Church.

As such, they were not just "a preliminary inculturation" which grafted Hellenic notions onto Jewish ones in order to make Christianity palatable as it was transplanted from the Middle East to ancient Europe. When the Evangelist, writing in Greek, began the Gospel of John with a reference to the Creator God as logos, Word, reason — using "In the beginning" to mirror the first verse of Genesis — he gave Manuel II Paleologus every right to say 13 centuries later that not to act "with logos" is contrary to God's very nature.


I need to make a confession before I proceed any further. Upon reading the Pope's Regensburg lecture, I found myself realizing just how long and how deeply I have been in love with that philosophical project to dehellenize Christian understanding. I couldn't have called it by that name, but virtually every point the Holy Father made about how the dehellenizing of theology has proceeded during the last several centuries rang a bell with me. I'll discuss these points one by one in future posts; for now, let me just say that I stand convicted of having long been a dehellenizer par excellence.

And yet I also recognized, as I read the Pope's text, that I am in some deep sense no longer the dehellenizer I once was. In fact, my biases today are all in the opposite direction: toward reinstating the primacy of reason as the best — nay, only — way to tame the rampant craziness we find ourselves confronted with in today's world.


It's possible to say I'm wrong in all this, and that the Pope's emphasis on reason as indivisible from Christian faith (and vice versa) is actually the exact opposite of the apt prescription for the West today. Such a position is a coherent one as well. That I myself have upheld it with a fair degree of consistency — until now, that is — makes me sure of that.

What we have here, in the Pope's position on rationality as it diverges from the "modern" view of same, is a conflict of two worldviews that differ at a tremendously deep level of abstraction. Great minds — the Pope mentions, among others, that of Immanuel Kant — have for the past several centuries pondered such deep thoughts and come to the conclusion that ancient Greek approaches to rationality no longer make sense as the linchpin of modern philosophical understanding.


The Greeks' basic assumptions lasted in the West until at least the time of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century — perhaps for the very reason that they underpin Biblical assumptions in holy writ. Then, according to the Pope, Thomas' near-contemporary Duns Scotus contradicted Aquinas with respect to "the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done." Specifically, said Scotus, God acts in accord with reason only by virtue of a voluntary choice made on his part, not because of his true nature.

The Reformation, in the 16th century, "sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word," the Pope asserted at Regensburg, ignoring the fact that Word and logos are the same thing in John's Gospel. "When Kant [in the 18th century] stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole." That was the culmination of the first stage of the modern dehellenization project which Scotus' "voluntarism" had made possible.

The second stage, Benedict said, involved an initiative to bring Christianity "back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ's divinity and the triune God." The New Testament was re-interpreted in such a way as to make of Jesus but a man with a "simple message ... [albeit] a humanitarian moral message." Theology became "something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific," meaning it was no longer joined at the hip with reason. Accordingly, reason no longer took primacy over historical relativism or scientific empiricism.

In an age of science, according to the Pope, "only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield decisive certainty." This approach to the truth left God outside its available radius. It concomitantly dethroned reason, as the Greeks understood the word, as a source of knowledge. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason of 1781, followed by his Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgement, were instrumental in making reason serve as a "practical" tool rather than a pathway to higher truth.

Even so, the Pope says a kind of back-door Platonism, derived from Greek thought, has continued to inform the modern scientific view. Taking the form of Cartesianism, it "presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently."


Lost in the modernist shuffle, unfortunately, has been the idea that every human possesses a soul whose nature is fundamentally rational, and is thus analogous to God's own inner nature. Instead, another analogy, to the voluntarism of Scotus, has made each of us free agents for whom both reason and religious faith are matters of subjective choice, or of personal "conscience." (The quotation marks here are the Pope's.) Sadly, the Pope said, "the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by 'science' ... and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective."

The Pope, in fact, would like to reinstate "collective reason" as the touchstone of our common life together in a globalized world, in place of the merely personal and subjective. His hope is that the remnant of back-door Platonism that lingers in our scientific worldview — the idea that the world has a fundamentally "mathematical structure" — could become the basis for expanding the sphere of rationality to encompass, once again, the domain of the human spirit.

"Modern scientific reason," he says, "quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given ... ." Translation: nature is rational. So is the human spirit, at its very best ... and so too is the God of the Bible, properly interpreted, with all of scripture's hellenistic allusions still intact. Embracing the rich analogies between those three levels of understanding could propel the West into a newer, greater age.


More than that, it could serve as the basis for real interreligious dialogue with Islam. Before we can challenge Islam to take its "There is no compulsion in religion" mandate more seriously, we had better get straight in our own heads the extent to which we have marginalized reason in our own culture.

The guiding principle of this blog has always been a search for solidarity, by which I mean a coming together of all the disparate worldviews that do battle amongst us today. When I began the blog, I originally called it "A World of Doubt," in view of the fact that there is a culture war going on in America today between (at the extremes) those who claim their religion is definitely true and those who assert that there is no God and that all religions are false. Given that both sides speak with the swagger of certainty, I wanted to explore the possibility that "doubt" — a resolute openmindedness — was a viable middle position that could keep things from flying apart.

At some point I replaced "doubt" with "solidarity" as my goal of goals: seeing whether we all might be able to come together over a stripped-down understanding of religion or, at least, of the Christian one. (Along these lines, see also my now-defunct Jesus before Christianity blog.) I now recognize this paring down to have been an attempt to justify a dehellenized faith of the sort the Pope warned against at Regensburg: a simple, humanitarian message of "love thy neighbor," perhaps.

Today I see that simplifying the message isn't enough. Any formula such as "love thy neighbor," no matter how simplistic, is ineluctably perceived in its relationship to a wider context of thought. For us moderns today, that wider context demotes reason as a fount of truth and replaces it with subjectivity. If the Pope is right about his recognition of that — and I suddenly think he is — then loving your neighbor means little more than rationalizing the gulf between his world and yours as being dictated by the strictures of multiculturalism, or tolerance, or whatever.

But that can't be right, I now see. If he is living in a wholly different world, experientially speaking, then you and he are not really neighbors at all. In that case, the only way to build a bridge between your world and his is by the mutual exercise of reason.

That was the thrust of the Pope's Regensburg lecture. The point was not that Christianity is good, because rational, and Islam bad, because not. The point was not that Christianity and Islam cannot talk, period. It was rather that both religions must re-embrace reason before interreligious dialogue can flower and bear fruit.

The Pope and Islam

One of the things that concern me as a Catholic today is what Pope Benedict XVI has said and done with respect to Islam. This is the topic of a recent article by Jane Kramer in The New Yorker. Even more recently, the Catholic writer George Weigel published this article, also available here, taking Ms. Kramer and the magazine editors to task for factual inaccuracies and "tendentious mis-readings of documents."

The Pope was criticized by many last September for, in a speech at the University of Regensburg in Germany, citing "a question posed by a fourteenth century Byzantine emperor to a Persian guest at his winter barracks near Ankara. 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new,' the emperor asked the Persian, 'and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached'.” What he meant by dredging this quote up was hard to discover, but it apparently had to do with the Pope's feeling that Islam is not part of “the Western rational tradition.”

(The prepared text of the Pope's Regensburg lecture can be read here, or in PDF format here. The Wikipedia article on it and the controversy it ignited is here.)


I read the Kramer piece, which was generally hostile to Benedict XVI, with much puzzlement. It stemmed, I realized, from my own lack of understanding of the basic issue. The latter, if my shaky comprehension is to be believed, seems to revolve around a claim which the Pope supposedly is making to the effect that interreligious dialogue between Christians and Muslims will fail. Why? Because reason and rationalism are at the base of Christian understanding, historically, and are not equally fundamental to the Muslim worldview.

“In Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories — even that of rationality," the Pope apparently said at Regensburg.

I find my own personal knowledge base about the place of reason in Islam to be wholly inadequate to judging the Pope's claim, which is accordingly difficult for me to fathom the intent of. I admit to all that right up front.


Mr. Weigel's response to the Kramer article is of some help here, but not a lot. My fault, not his — it's essentially an op-ed piece, not a doctoral dissertation. And it's more about the hasty, error-prone judgmentalism of the secular press toward the Pope than about the basic issues at hand.

Still, I gain some insight when Mr. Weigel writes in rebuttal of

... Ms. Kramer’s bugbear about reason-and-faith. Classical ideas of reason have a privileged place in Christian theology, not because of xenophobia (“Ratzinger is Eurocentric. To him, Europe means Christianity.”) but because the conviction that human beings can know that some things are true is essential in a Church whose Lord taught that the truth is liberating. Doctrine is not excess baggage on the journey of faith. It’s the vehicle that makes the journey possible.

This comes in the wake of Mr. Weigel's umbrage at Ms. Kramer's

... brusque dismissal, without serious examination, of Benedict XVI's suggestion that the first inculturation of Christianity in the world of classical rationality was providential, because it gave early Christians the intellectual tools to turn their evangelical confession of faith (“Jesus is Lord”) into doctrine and creeds ...

"As for the issues put on the global table at Regensburg," Mr. Weigel adds, "does Ms. Kramer really think it a bad thing to challenge irrational forms of faith that command the murder of innocents in the name of God? Is it wrong to suggest that there is danger in the obverse of irrational faith: that trouble is afoot in the West’s loss of faith in reason, which erodes our capacity to defend the universality of human rights and the superiority of the rule of law over the rule of coercion?"

That's admittedly a bit hard for me to parse. I think Mr. Weigel is suggesting that we in the West today court an error which is the polar opposite of Islam's supposed tone-deafness to rational thought, namely, the decay of our capacity to discover and uphold truth when it conflicts with our other, less moderate inclinations.


Why does the Pope find Islam anti-rational? According to Ms. Kramer, "it was at Regensburg's theology department that he [as Joseph Ratzinger] honed his belief that the discourse of Christianity is a fundamentally rational discourse — as the West, grounded in Greek philosophical inquiry, understands reason — and as such not ultimately comprehensible, even for argument’s sake, outside the Judeo-Christian tradition." Benedict XVI apparently deems Islam at base unintelligible because it does not seek to know God's will preeminently through rational inquiry.

Again, I simply have no basis on which to evaluate such a claim of Islam's fundamental irrationality, if that is indeed what the Pope is claiming.

I do understand and sympathize, though, with one of Mr. Weigel's constant themes, "the conviction that human beings can know that some things are true," as he puts it in this article. The knowability of truth, the firmness of it, the impregnability of truth to relativistic thought, the fact that truth and love are synonyms of God — Mr. Weigel talks about these ideas often. "Truth and Love are, if you will, two 'names' for God as Christianity understands God," he says in this interview.


What I'm skeptical about is the ability of reason to know all truth.

The way I see it, reason is a system by which we develop confidence in the truth of propositions derivedfrom a set of original, taken-on-faith suppositions by the application of rules of logic. All the derivable propositions are supposed to form an intelligible, coherent whole. But as I discuss in The Incompleteness of Provability and the other posts in my "Strange Loops" series about Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, there seem inescapably to be truths that we cannot know without standing outside such formal systems of proof.

The mathematician Kurt Gödel was able in 1931 to find a way to prove the incompleteness of provability, using full mathematical rigor, Hofstadter shows. I wonder if the Pope's commitment to rationalism as the high road to truth might not stumble badly over Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.


A homely example of what I mean concerns a TV set I once owned. Back around 1990 I bought an expensive TV that contained what was at the time a novelty: digital picture-enhancement circuitry. After a year of use it started doing odd things. Instead of giving me a normal picture, after it had warmed up fully it would suddenly start showing what looked like a negative color photographic image, except that the result was weirder and more psychedelic even than that.

I knew enough about digital circuitry to know that the fault could well be due to a single signal line "flipping" from 1 to 0, or vice versa — or, possibly, simply "floating" without any definite value whatever. That changed the internal "logic" of the circuitry. Where the picture was originally meant to be one thing, it was now another.

But, given the altered "presupposition" which the faulty signal line now embodied, the TV system was still acting as "rationally" as it had always done. It still produced an intelligible, coherent picture — even if you had to be on LSD to appreciate it. The only way to know something was wrong was to stand outside the system and judge it from afar.


If you accidentally "flip" or nullify any of the (perhaps hidden) presuppositions of a rational system, you can end up, without quite realizing what has happened or how, with a convincing, if false, phantasmagoria.

I think that is the explanation for such less-than-wonderful aspects of the history of Christianity as the Spanish Inquisition and burnings at the stake. The Church was eventually able to stand outside itself and see how wrong such "logical" applications of its own theology were. Thank God.

So the questions I have are these: why does the Pope think the suicide bombings and other evil manifestations of Islamic fundamentalism are categorically different from those Christian sins? Why does he imagine (if indeed he does) that radical Islamism is anything other than a flipped or nullified presupposition in the logical fabric of an otherwise rational belief system? Why does he not believe that patient dialogue with Islam can help it recover its balance, to all our benefit?

Brains and Thoughts

Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach

It has been a while since my last "Strange Loops" post, Souls: What Are They, Anyway?. In it I talked some more about the human mind — namely, ideas concerning the mind that appear in Douglas R. Hofstadter's one-of-a-kind 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. To Hofstadter, the mind somehow arises out of the mechanical, deterministic operations of the brain. Yet it has non-deterministic attributes that cannot be fully explained at the level of neurons and their vast interconnections.

That said, Hofstadter's Chapter XI, "Brains and Thoughts," seeks a way to establish a high-level brain organization made of "symbols" that somehow emerges from "signals" exchanged by neurons, or from whole groups of neurons called "modules" by Hofstadter. An object of thought is presumably a matter of which modular symbols get activated, among the countless symbols a brain can house.

Perhaps there are large numbers of related symbols activated to represent a concept such as "car" or "road." Who can say?

I have to say at the outset of my discussion of this particular chapter that I am less than convinced that Hofstadter's speculations are on the money. I have the uneasy feeling that the author is trying to force human brain organization into patterns that are — to use one of his favorite words — "isomorphic" with the way computer programs model intelligence artificially. For example, computer programs have access to data — Hofstadter calls it "declarative knowledge," likening it to "facts" (see p. 363) — and are themselves made up of procedures that manipulate data in some way.

These data-manipulating procedures constitute the equivalent, he says, of human "procedural knowledge." An example that springs to mind is the person who says to a stranger asking directions, "I can't tell you how to get there, but I can drive you there myself."

Hofstadter's assumption, then, is that declarative knowledge may not be encoded at the brain's higher organizational levels in the same way procedural knowledge is. Somehow the symbol activation that goes on for human declarative knowledge to manifest itself is different from the type of activation that underlies procedural knowledge ... maybe.

Yet he quickly adds that "in between the declarative and procedural extremes, there are all possible shades." For example, how is a recalled melody stored in the brain? As a succession of remembered notes? As a group of relationships based on tone-to-tone musical intervals? As both of those and more: for instance, with emotional qualities that the notes evoke stored along with the notes?

Or, is melodic memory entirely procedural rather than declarative, as the previous speculations would seem to imply? Perhaps, though, it is a mix of the declarative and the procedural.

In short, Hofstadter offers just one basic high-level construct of brain organization: the potentially activated symbol. True, lurking in the background is a nebulous idea that symbols can trigger one another in mutual activation, and/or be activated in different ways for different purposes and with different results. Yet there is no real suggestion as to how, say, melodic memory can possibly combine two ways or patterns of symbol activation in one.


Another ambiguity arises in Hofstadter's discussion of "classes" versus "instances." Intuitively it seems as if there ought to be a firm distinction between broad conceptual categories — classes — and specific individual instances of those classes. "Golfer" would seem to represent a class of mental objects; "Tiger Woods," an instance. Yet both would, to Hofstadter, necessarily be represented by symbols.

Still, a "golfer" is an "athlete," possibly a "professional." And not all "golfers" are "championship golfers," the way Tiger Woods is. There can be many levels of specificity between a broad class and a specific manifestation or instance. Furthermore, it is likely that some, if not all, classes start off as instances: think of the child who encounters his or her very first golfer.

Once a class of sufficient generality has been constructed, then, each time it is activated by, say, a golfer seen on TV, something like a "rubbing off" must take place. In it, as when making a rubbing from a brass in a church, a copy of the original comes to be. The copy of the original symbol must be able to include sufficient idiosyncrasies to keep it distinct from all other copies. We can't afford to confuse Tiger Woods with Ernie Els, after all.


Another difficulty is that the roster of symbols in human brains can be extended, as we learn and gain experience, while experiments suggest that whatever symbols may be active in the brain of, say, a wasp, are hard-wired and cannot be augmented/altered. It is not clear exactly how symbols as high-level constructs that map to the lower-level patterns of neural signals in the human brain can explain the difference. Nor is it clear how our symbols undergird the capacity of the brain to deal with hypotheticals and what-if worlds.

To Hofstadter's credit, he alludes to all these conundrums. He also admits that he has no real evidence to support his hunch that symbols are very likely localizable to specific groups neurons, no matter how intricately they may be interwoven. Nor does he take much cognizance of the idea that, as I quoted a brain expert in Authority and Metaphor as theorizing, "The brain is a metaphor-making machine. It routinely expresses the concrete in terms of the figurative."


This theory of the human brain as a metaphor machine, which I have to admit gives my brain a buzz of recognition that is lacking when I trudge through Hofstadter's discussion, depends on the fact that the vast majority of each brain is composed of something called "association cortices" or "association regions." In this theory of the human mind as propounded by Baltimore neurosurgeon Michael Salcman, relational "associations" rather than encapsulated entities or "symbols" take center stage. An analogy would be the idea that music is actually a set of tonal relationships, not a set of notes.

I have to believe the capacity to make associations — metaphors, analogies, and the like — is more crucial to human intelligence than the (putative) existence of symbols that might or might not map to individual neural clusters or modules. It is in the realm of associations that leaps of insight can arise. In is in associations that Hofstadter's "strange loops" — patterns that reassert themselves at various levels of consideration — are most at home.

In fact, it seems pretty clear that Hofstadter's own brain made a metaphorical or analogical leap between computerized artificial intelligence efforts of the 1970s, when his book was being written, and human thought. I think he would agree with me, however, that not all leaps are created equal. I believe more in Dr. Salcman's leap concerning the centrality of associations than I do in Hofstadter's concerning symbols in the brain.

The Power of Grace

The theologian, teacher, and author Fr. Ron Rolheiser recently penned a column, The Resurrection - The Power of Positive Thinking or the Power of God?, that I think gets at something fundamental about the religious worldview, namely, what is so crucial about the experience of resurrection to Christian belief.

Fr. Rolheiser's Eastertime offering asked whether "the resurrection" Christians advert to is a metaphor for the good effects positive thinking has in our lives. Or, is that sense of resurrection "augmented by something beyond us ... the transcendent power of God breaking into nature and into our lives and doing for us what we can't do simply through will power and positive thinking"?

Perhaps surprisingly, Fr. Rolheiser's answers to those two seemingly opposed questions are yes and yes.

Yes, "faith, hope and positive thinking make good things happen and resurrect life from its many deaths." But also, yes, "a power and grace beyond us" come into play as well. "The resurrection is about power entering our world and our lives from beyond."


Power from beyond is the gift of grace. Grace, theologically speaking, is a freely made gift that we and the world receive from God without our having earned or merited it. It is the "happy ending" that didn't seem possible at the time.

Grace comes to us from beyond by "a power that can re-arrange the very atoms inside of our physical bodies, our aching emotions, and our divided world and raise up new life from the ashes."


To what Fr. Rolheiser says I would add the following suggestion: the difference between the secular or quasi-religious understanding of "resurrection" and the truly religious one boils down to how we experience it.

When he says the secular or New Age version of resurrection "is not just wishful thinking; proper attitude lets the right physical, emotional, and spiritual energy flow into the world and into the body," he hints at what I mean by "experience." Our mind is the seat of the attitudes we take, "proper" or "wishful." The human mind is, notably, conscious ... which means it is mysteriously able to have subjective experience of its own interior states, above and beyond the workings of the brain which produce those states.

It is at this level of consciousness that we experience everything, including, perhaps, "resurrection."

If we experience our life as being raised up from the ashes by a power beyond our ken, then so be it.

If we experience our life as being revived by positive thinking alone, so be it as well.

Who is to say that the one is not just a metaphor for the other, anyway, but actually the same thing, experienced differently?

Authority and Metaphor

Anyone who reads this blog is presumably able to tell that its author is neither an atheist nor a religious fundamentalist, but falls somewhere in between. For example, though I believe in God, I also believe in Darwin's theory of evolution.

One of the questions that perplexes me is, why (at least among those with active intellects) do there seem to be three kinds of people: those who believe in God but not Darwin, those who believe in Darwin but not God, and those who, like me, believe in both?

It occurs to me that it has to do with authority figures.

By an "authority figure" I mean a person in command. Religious fundamentalists believe that God is, first and foremost, such a person. Scientific atheists own to no such personal figure of authority. For them, authority comes impersonally from the scientific method and the discovery process it underwrites.

As for me, although I call myself religious I have trouble envisioning God as mainly an authority figure. Whatever my relationship with God is, it is not one of submitting to Him as an absolute master.


I find it interesting that the word "authority" is so closely related to "authorship." Fundamentalists think of the Bible as the authorial work of the One Lord of All. God wrote it, so it must be absolutely, literally true.

An assumption fundamentalists make is that God does not speak to us in metaphors, so slippery and fuzzy in their interpretation. To the mind of a fundamentalist, metaphors and other such soft forms of utterance do not go with the assertion of absolute sovereignty.

The scientific atheist uses metaphors without ceding them much authority. To a Darwinist, "survival of the fittest" is a convenient metaphor for the much more nuanced theory of natural selection that forms the core belief of Darwinism. Natural selection as it is understood toady actually talks about statistical probabilities, not stern absolutes of survival and death. Such a metaphor as "survival of the fittest" is not actually seen as binding on the theory per se.

Likewise, when scientists talk to us ordinary folk about quantum theory or string theory, they speak in analogies we have some chance of understanding. But when they talk among themselves, they prefer to use mathematics as a lingua franca.


Neither in the case of religious fundamentalists nor in that of scientific atheists does metaphor carry final authority. To religious liberals like myself, on the other hand, metaphor itself is apt to be seen as the central repository of authority.

No one person, divine or otherwise, is absolutely in command. Nor is absolute authority to be ceded to an impersonal process such as the scientific method. Rather, authority comes ultimately from within the individual mind. It is an emergent property of the brain.

It is, accordingly, a creative process, and like all creative processes, it springs from the metaphorical capacity of the mind.


That is a capacity that is explored in The Idea Machine, an article that appeared recently in The Baltimore Sun. According to Michael Salcman, a Baltimore neurosurgeon quoted extensively in the article, "The brain is a metaphor-making machine. It routinely expresses the concrete in terms of the figurative."

Salcman cites the poet Robert Frost to the effect that "poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another." Says Salcman, "That is what artists and scientists do all the time. The ability to compare one thing to the next is inherent to the way the brain is structured."


Scientists use metaphor to say one thing and mean another when they are thinking loosely, en route to making some concrete discovery. Yet the discovery itself, when they write it up as an article in a peer-reviewed journal, has to stand up to the decidedly non-poetic scrutiny of pursed-lipped skeptics who may not be thrilled in the least. Whether it's right or wrong, there has to ultimately be some authoritative way to express what they have discovered without using fuzzy, Frost-like language to put it across. There has to be the crisp equivalent of E = mc² at the bottom line.

When it comes to religious fundamentalists, they too insist that saying one thing and meaning another is not what God, in revealing Himself to humankind in the Holy Bible, would do.

Why is it that people on both sides of the Is-There-A-God question — and lots of other folks, too — consider it non-kosher to use figurative language to say one thing while meaning another? Especially when the thing which is meant by the utterance can hardly be encapsulated in everyday prosaic language, why is it so bad to rely on what the Sun article calls the "association regions" of the brain as a way of communicating what we think the ultimate nature of reality actually is?



The "association cortices" constitute what the article says is "the vast majority" of the human brain's neuronal constituency. Each of our brains contains about one trillion nerve cells or neurons, each with 10,000 synapses that link them across a narrow gap to other neurons. The associational cortices are no different in their organization from other areas of the brain, but instead of being dedicated to specific tasks like sensory input from a single organ or movement of a single muscle, they "respond to more than one type of sensory input" and tell us how one input pattern is like others we have experienced before.

The uniquely human capacity for unencumbered "free association" — unique because no other species possesses such a richly complex associational region in its brain — is the spark of our creative genius.

Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam"

The article hints that Michelangelo foreknew this finding of modern neuroscience concerning creativity and gave us a clue to it in his fresco "The Creation of Adam," in the Sistine Chapel. Or else, why does the Creator's swirling purple cloak form the shape of a human brain?


So religious fundamentalists today, and to a lesser extent atheistic scientists, are oddly in agreement that what the Sun article calls the "most human and complex parts" of the brain — the association cortices that give us our capacity for metaphor — are unreliable as sources of authority.

As a religious liberal who is perfectly comfortable with an authority figure that is anything but crisply concrete — the metaphorical capacity of the human mind — all I can say is, "How odd!"

Souls: What Are They, Anyway?

Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach

In my last "Strange Loops" post, Minds: What Are They, Anyway?, I talked about the mind — namely, ideas concerning the mind that appear in Douglas R. Hofstadter's one-of-a-kind 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. To Hofstadter, the mind somehow arises out of the mechanical, deterministic operations of the brain. Yet it has non-deterministic attributes that cannot be fully explained at the level of neurons and their vast interconnections, including:

• self-awareness
• consciousness
• sentience
• individual uniqueness, agency, and responsibility for imposing continuity and order on what would otherwise be frantic electrochemical chaos
• and several others

It is not easy to distinguish Hofstadter's ideas about the mind from certain longstanding philosophical ideas about the soul. In this post, I would like to go out on several limbs and investigate what impact Hofstadter's views, if taken as seriously as they deserve to be, might conceivably have on traditional notions of the soul.

I say "out on several limbs" because I intend to talk about a number of topics in which I am anything but well-versed. As a non-expert tailor, I will nevertheless be picking up buttons and sewing sizable vests on them.


I'll begin by alluding to John Dominic Crossan's review in The Washington Post Book World of the recent book Reading Judas, by Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King. The book is a translation and explication of the recently resurrected Gospel of Judas, a Gnostic Gospel that was lost for centuries and then found again not too long ago.

Judas Iscariot, of course, is the disciple who betrayed Jesus, leading to his crucifixion. That there should be an ancient Gospel lionizing Judas comes as a shock. Even more surprising, the Gospel of Judas says Judas' betrayal was blessed by Jesus himself as the only means by which he, Jesus, could be freed from the prison of his mortal body — in what the Gospel of Judas characterizes as the only kind of martyrdom that can be deemed good.

The Gospel of Judas was written in the second century A.D. at a time when Christians were in effect consenting to be put to violent death by the pagan Romans after undergoing great humiliations and suffering. According to Judas, this sort of martyrdom was not good, because it was done in the name of (hoped for) resurrection of the body, on the other side of death. The "good" martyrdom Judas espouses is, in contrast, done in the name of (supposedly) freeing the soul forever from the shackles of a material body.

Crossan points out that the notion of the body as imprisoning the separately existing soul comes originally from Greek — specifically, Platonic — philosophy. The Gospel of Judas was heavily influenced by Platonism.


But there has historically been a competing notion of what it means to have a soul. "The other interpretation," Crossan writes, "claims that we are ensouled bodies or incarnate spirits, indissoluble unions of body and soul, flesh and spirit, able — like two sides of a coin — to be distinguished but never separated."

Richard P. McBrien writes in Catholicism, his survey book on the time-honored style of Christian faith which also happens to be my own, about the Biblical view of the human person (p. 159):

The hope of salvation ... is expressed in terms of the resurrection of the body ("Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise ... "—Isaiah 26:19; see also Daniel 12:2-3, and 2 Maccabees 7:14), and this is taken up and developed in the New Testament ("If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile"—1 Corinthians 15:16-17; see the entire fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians as well as Mark 12:18-25; John 6:39-40; and Acts of the Apostles 24:15). The idea of the immortality of the soul, on the other hand, is not developed in the writings of the later Old Testament period nor in the New Testament. The notion of immortality reflects a world view different from the Bible's anthropology. Indeed, it is more akin to Greek philosophy (i.e., the human person as embodied spirit) than to the Hebrew mentality (i.e., the human person as animated body).

That which "animates" the body is an interpretation of the soul with which I imagine Hofstadter might provisionally agree — assuming he is willing to stipulate to the existence of a soul. I picture Hofstadter and Plato on opposite sides of the (in Crossan's words) "giant fissure in Western sensibility between two interpretations of human identity."

For Hofstadter, the mind (soul?) arises from the brain in such a way as to produce a unique identity, an ongoing self that is somehow more than the gray matter from which it arises, and with which it is in "indissoluble union." It is the whole arch to the gray matter's mere stones. Hofstadter's is a holistic outlook in which the mind or self is not so much greater than the "sum of its parts" as it is inherent in the intricate, uniquely complex way in which the parts organize themselves. In short, the conscious mind emerges as an organizational function of the workings of the brain.

As a result of its manner of organization, the mind qua mind qualifies as a dynamical system whose function is to respond to and manipulate high-level constructs that Hofstadter calls "active symbols." Symbol manipulation as an activity implies an agent, a "someone" who accomplishes the manipulation, since activities are, by definition, performed by agents. Who or what is the "someone" here?

Hofstadter says (p. 327) that "the full system is responsible for how its symbols trigger each other, and so it is quite reasonable to speak of the full system as the 'agent'." The mind-as-agent is, accordingly, "this partially constant, partially varying system" which, not incidentally, experiences its own "state" as one that is being "slowly transformed, or updated." This sense of self or subjective experience emerges in the mind out of its own active symbols' ceaseless operation and interaction over time.

In fact, the activities of the symbols are "not absolutely free. The activities of all symbols," Dr. Anteater says to his interlocutors, "are strictly determined by the state of the full system in which they reside."


I interpret this as representing what is called, in dynamical systems theory today, "top-down causation" or "top-down influence," another name for which is "whole-part influence." The opposite conceptual pole from top-down causation or whole-part influence is "bottom-up causation." Many dynamical systems — especially those that remain "partially constant, partially varying" over time — tend to have bottom-up and top-down influences going on within themselves constantly. These causal influences vertically interpenetrate and constrain one another all the while. It is as though the puppet constrains the puppeteer as much as the puppeteer manipulates the puppet.

The puppeteer in this particular case, i.e., the "full system" which we call the mind or the self or the soul, is not and need not be conscious of anything that is going on below the level of the brain's "active symbols." In particular, nothing at the level of what Hofstadter calls "signals" need be conscious. Signals are solely brain-related, while symbols are present to the conscious mind.

Magically, one of the symbols which the mind as "full system" is able to manipulate is that which represents its own "overall state" (see p. 328). Dr. Anteater: "In any conscious system there are symbols which represent the brain state, and they themselves are part of the very brain state which they symbolize. For consciousness requires a large degree of self-consciousness."


I realize the ideas I have just presented will seem quite baffling to anyone who has not had a great deal of exposure to the various concepts involved. Top-down influence? Bottom-up causation? Dynamical systems theory? Holistic understandings of things that science no longer hopes to explain by reducing them to the causal contributions of their tiniest parts? None of these is an easy concept to wrap the mind around.

Victor Zuckerkandl's The Sense of Music

One way to approach comprehending such holistic concepts is by analogy with music. I am currently reading a classic introduction to how music, on its face just a collection of audible tones, can possibly have meaning or sense. The book is Victor Zuckerkandl's The Sense of Music, from 1959, and it adopts a holistic attitude toward melodies built up from tones.

Zuckerkandl does not use terms like bottom-up and top-down, which have been brought into the conversation about holistic systems since he wrote his seminal book on music theory, but he does allude to some of the same ideas in different terms, and he clearly thinks that pieces of music must be understood, ultimately, as wholes.

For example, when he calls music "one of the most highly developed, most intricately organized, must subtly constructed creations of the human mind" (p. 3), he is speaking of a piece of music as a sort of complex system. The nature of complex systems, or of complexity in general, is what dynamical systems theory theorizes about.

When we experience music, the complex system which is the mind interacts with the complex system which is the music. "For music to come alive in a mind," Zuckerkandl writes (p. 4), "experience must somehow connect with experience, one musical experience with another, musical experiences with experiences of different kinds, the whole thing must develop, must grow in scope and depth." If we equate the verb "experience" with the verb "manipulate," as in Hofstadter's "the mind manipulates symbols," we see that Zuckerkandl is speaking Hofstadter's language! To experience anything at the level of consciousness is to compare that experience with all others — which is to say, to engage in the manipulation of symbols.

So the mind, as it prepares itself to understand the musical complexity of Bach and Beethoven — not just the simplicity of a folk song — is taking charge of and assuming "responsibility" for the manipulation of its own internal symbols.


The ideas of melodic tone and pitch are introduced by Zuckerkandl in such a way as to emphasize that tones are not like musical atoms. They are not the basic particles from which music is built, à la Tinker Toys or molecules. When it comes to music, the bricks (the tones) are not as important as the mortar (the pitch intervals between tones): the tonal relations that are set up as individual tones are played melodically in sequence, or are sounded harmonically in chords, note atop note.

Again, complex dynamical systems are notoriously ones in which higher-level entities — "symbols," as we can echo Hofstadter in calling them — arise from relationships among lower-level entities (pitches) that themselves have no intrinsic "meaning."

In the case of a piece of music, one of the "meanings" or "symbols" that typically arises quite early on in the piece is the tonal center that has sprung into being. The tonal center is generally thought of as the lowest tone in the scale associated with the key of the piece: the keynote. It can be established in as few as two notes, though more than two notes are often used. Once it is established, the other tones in the music are typically heard as being in dynamic relationship to — in tension with — the tonal center. They gravitate around, wishing to fall back toward, the keynote, just as the planets do the sun.

But some of the notes in music of any degree of complexity higher than some simple folk melody are not heard as individual way stations along the highway back to the "destination" note, aka the tonal center. These "extra" notes instead participate in clusters or groups which themselves serve as way stations. There are accordingly groups of notes, and groups of groups of notes, and groups of groups of groups of notes ... on up to the highest level, the musical piece as a whole. That level encompasses the musical "meaning" of the "full system."

You could call that highest-level meaning the "soul" of the piece, without doing violence to any of the concepts involved. All music is soul music.

Jim Law's The Backyard Vintner

Another way to understand holistic concepts comes from the world of wine. Jim Law's The Backyard Vintner: An Enthusiast's Guide to Growing Grapes and Making Wine at Home is an excellent introduction to how grapes express themselves as wine, even for those who have no intention of planting their own vines.

As Law makes clear, one can think of a wine as the self-expression of the grapes from which it was made, since nothing which goes into the wine doesn't come out of the grapes. But there is a yet higher level of understanding or meaning when it comes to wine. This is the level called terroir.

As Law, owner/winegrower at the small Linden Vineyards winery on the Virginia Blue Ridge, puts it (p. 10):

If you envision a vineyard replete with bottles of wine hanging from the vines, you are not far wrong. In fact, the foundation of wine is the vineyard. The true character of a good wine comes from what the French refer to as terroir — the taste of the place in which the grapes are grown. A Napa Valley Chardonnay and a French Chablis are made from the same grape variety, yet the wines have nothing in common. Why? The weather and soils in each place are completely different, resulting in wines that, though made from the same grape, do not have the same taste. Discovering the terroir from my little patch of earth is the most intellectually stimulating part of the wine growing process.

Observe that the highest level of wine character — it's "soul," if you will — is not determined by the type of grapes it was made from so much as where the vines were planted, the specific ground that the roots were in. But terroir also includes the climate of the vineyard's unique patch of earth, and the weather conditions that year, and decisions made by the vintner as to when to harvest, and ... and ... and ... . The soul of a wine is an expression of how all these factors came together in one unique holistic organization, that one time, perhaps never to be duplicated in exactly that same way again.


The difference between the soul of a human and that of a piece of music or a wine seems to be that only the human mind is self-aware. Self-awareness is the "strange loop" Hofstadter quite often refers to, in which a mind somehow incorporates the whole of itself within itself. When a holistic system possesses a manipulable symbol representing its "overall state," it qualifies as a mind that is conscious of itself. In some mysterious way, it experiences itself.

But lest we be too hasty in assigning self-awareness uniquely to the human mind, what about Hofstadter's Aunt Hillary? As an ant colony of many castes and teams and teams of teams working on multiple levels to represent information as signals and symbols, isn't Aunt Hillary tantamount to a conscious, self-aware agent, capable of self-expression through the "writing" of her ant trails?

If you answer to that question is no, how so? On the basis of what do you ascribe conscious experience to me — or to yourself — and not to Aunt Hillary?

It occurs to me that we are blind to consciousness not of our own particular kind. Extending that notion, perhaps we ought to consider the possibility that music is somehow self-aware. Or that wine is.

We know from remarks Hofstadter makes throughout his book that certain music — in particular, that of Bach — exhibits a kind of "strange loopiness." So does the visual art of M.C. Escher. What about a wine — no vin ordinaire — that preserves a distinct memory of its terroir, and seems to live and breathe as it ages in its bottle?

The overarching point here seems to be that we really have no real idea to what entities to attribute mind or soul. Does the planet have a soul? Is the Internet self-aware?