Interesting Article from NYT

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The Duel Between Body and Soul

 

September 10, 2004

By PAUL BLOOM

 

 

 

 

 

New Haven - What people think about many of the big issues

that will be discussed in the next two months - like gay

marriage, stem-cell research and the role of religion in

public life - is intimately related to their views on human

nature. And while there may be differences between

Republicans and Democrats, one fundamental assumption is

accepted by almost everyone. This would be reassuring - if

science didn't tell us that this assumption is mistaken.

 

People see bodies and souls as separate; we are

common-sense dualists. The President's Council on Bioethics

expressed this belief system with considerable eloquence in

its December 2003 report " Being Human'': " We have both

corporeal and noncorporeal aspects. We are embodied spirits

and inspirited bodies (or, if you will, embodied minds and

minded bodies). "

 

Our dualism makes it possible for us to appreciate stories

where people are liberated from their bodies. In the movie

" 13 Going on 30,'' a teenager wakes up as Jennifer Garner,

just as a 12-year-old was once transformed into Tom Hanks

in " Big.'' Characters can trade bodies, as in " Freaky

Friday,'' or battle for control of a single body, as when

Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin fight it out in " All of Me.''

 

Body-hopping is not a Hollywood invention. Franz Kafka

tells of a man who wakes up one morning as a gigantic

insect. Homer, writing hundreds of years before the birth

of Christ, describes how the companions of Odysseus were

transformed into pigs - but their minds were unchanged, and

so they wept. Children easily understand stories in which

the frog becomes a prince or a villain takes control of a

superhero's body.

 

In fact, most people think that a far more radical

transformation actually takes place; they believe that the

soul can survive the complete destruction of the body. The

soul's eventual fate varies; most Americans believe it

ascends to heaven or descends into hell, while people from

other cultures believe that it enters a parallel spirit

world, or occupies some other body, human or animal.

 

Our dualist perspective also frames how we think about the

issues that are most central to our lives. It is no

accident that a bioethics committee is talking about

spirits. When people wonder about the moral status of

animals or fetuses or stem cells, for instance, they often

ask: Does it have a soul? If the answer is yes, then it is

a precious individual, deserving of compassion and care.

 

In the case of abortion, our common-sense dualism can

support either side of the issue. We use phrases like " my

body " and " my brain, " describing our bodies and body parts

as if they were possessions. Some people insist that all of

us - including pregnant women - own our bodies, and

therefore can use them as we wish. To others, the organism

residing inside a pregnant body has a soul of its own,

possibly from the moment of conception, and would thereby

have its own rights.

 

Admittedly, not everyone explicitly endorses dualism; some

people wouldn't be caught dead talking about souls or

spirits. But common-sense dualism still frames how we think

about such issues. That's why people often appeal to

science to answer the question " When does life begin? " in

the hopes that an objective answer will settle the abortion

debate once and for all. But the question is not really

about life in any biological sense. It is instead asking

about the magical moment at which a cluster of cells

becomes more than a mere physical thing. It is a question

about the soul.

 

And it is not a question that scientists could ever answer.

The qualities of mental life that we associate with souls

are purely corporeal; they emerge from biochemical

processes in the brain. This is starkly demonstrated in

cases in which damage to the brain wipes out capacities as

central to our humanity as memory, self-control and

decision-making.

 

One implication of this scientific view of mental life is

that it takes the important moral questions away from the

scientists. As the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker

points out, the qualities that we are most interested in

from a moral standpoint - consciousness and the capacity to

experience pain - result from brain processes that emerge

gradually in both development and evolution. There is no

moment at which a soulless body becomes an ensouled one,

and so scientific research cannot provide objective answers

to the questions that matter the most to us.

 

Some scholars are confident that people will come to accept

this scientific view. In the domain of bodies, after all,

most of us accept that common sense is wrong. We concede

that apparently solid objects are actually mostly empty

space, and consist of tiny particles and fields of energy.

Perhaps the same sort of reconciliation will happen in the

domain of souls, and it will come to be broadly recognized

that dualism, though intuitively appealing, is factually

mistaken.

 

I am less optimistic. I once asked my 6-year-old son, Max,

about the brain, and he said that it is very important and

involved in a lot of thinking - but it is not the source of

dreaming or feeling sad, or loving his brother. Max said

that's what he does, though he admitted that his brain

might help him out. Studies from developmental psychology

suggest that young children do not see their brain as the

source of conscious experience and will. They see it

instead as a tool we use for certain mental operations. It

is a cognitive prosthesis, added to the soul to increase

its computing power.

 

This understanding might not be so different from that of

many adults. People are often surprised to find out that

certain parts of the brain are shown to be active - they

" light up " - in a brain scanner when subjects think about

religion, sex or race. This surprise reveals the tacit

assumption that the brain is involved in some aspects of

mental life but not others. Even experts, when describing

such results, slip into dualistic language: " I think about

sex and this activates such-as-so part of my brain " - as if

there are two separate things going on, first the thought

and then the brain activity.

 

It gets worse. The conclusion that our souls are flesh is

profoundly troubling to many, as it clashes with the notion

that the soul survives the death of the body. It is a much

harder pill to swallow than evolution, then, and might be

impossible to reconcile with many religious views. Pope

John Paul II was clear about this, conceding our bodies may

have evolved, but that theories which " consider the spirit

as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere

epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the

truth about man. "

 

This clash is not going to be easily resolved. The great

conflict between science and religion in the last century

was over evolutionary biology. In this century, it will be

over psychology, and the stakes are nothing less than our

souls.

 

Paul Bloom,a professor of psychology at Yale, is the author

of " Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development

Explains What Makes Us Human. "

 

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