Spiritualists and theists, what does the brain do? (See details)

Unlike some others I know, I realize I don’t have all the answers. Some things are better percieved and understood via ways of knowing other than the scientific method. There’s definitely nothing wrong with the scientific method, but it’s not the only method of knowing.

“What is the function of the brain if the mind can still happily occur once the brain stops working?”

Physical interaction.

Mine is faith based. “Faith is believing when common sense tells you not to.” Miracle on 34th Street

The brain appears to function in two modes running in parallel which, ideally, act as complements. One mode is global, undifferentiated awareness—experience as a seamless whole. The other mode is discursive, analytical and conceptual; this mode gives us our world of discreet things (including ourselves as one more thing among things).

The “wholeness” mode operates on a subconscious level, necessarily so because it has no conceptual content. It knows “being” before “thingness”; the thingness is supplied by the discursive mode. Our conscious mind takes the awareness of the “wholeness” mode and cognitively maps it according to its conceptual scheme, necessarily losing the wholeness in the process. So the world of our everyday consciousness is a world of separations and distinctions.

In moments of quietness, when the discursive mode winds down a bit, we get the occasional intimation of wholeness, more intuitively (which is how the “wholeness” mode presents) than overtly. The discursive mode has no idea what to make of this, and so either dismisses it or spins a story about it.

To the “discursive” mode, its way of apprehending reality is the only way; if it can’t be understood in analytical, conceptual terms, then it isn’t real. To the “wholeness” mode, the differentiations that are the stock in trade of the “discursive” mode are simply distortions of the wholeness that it takes to be the bottom line.

What we call “spirituality “ is, I think, our acknowledgment of the “wholeness” mode of the mind. All of the concepts, doctrines and cosmologies that constitute the formalistic aspects of religion are just attempts by the discursive mode to make some kind of sense out of the instinctive urgings of the “wholeness” mode. That may mean postulating some external God as the source of those urgings, but not necessarily. Buddhists just take wholeness and differentiation to be two inseparable and equally valid aspects of reality.

As for the soul, this is a gambit by the “discursive” mode to supply a subjective “experiencer” in its scheme whereby an objective external world is experienced by some elusive internal recipient. The “wholeness” mode has no need to postulate an experiencer, because it doesn’t distinguish between subject and object.

I’ve often wondered what the brains of theists and spiritualists do.

(sorry, couldn’t help it)

I think that @PARAprakrti hit the nail on the head. If the mind is larger than, transitional through, potentially separate and apart from the brain, the brains purpose seems to be to allow the mind to experience the physical world, and perhaps even to allow the mind to work on it. It may even be necessary to allow the mind to experience time in a linear manner.

But I feel like that is a theory we could discuss without the reference to the article – which I didn’t really follow in terms of the argument.

“Through this very human cognitive prism, our species was doomed to experience certain unshakable cognitive illusions – including feeling as though there are unseen moral forces that are concerned about us as individuals. Much like optical illusions, we can, through knowledge, accept that what we perceive does not reflect reality. But as the data mounts, it is becoming clear that even atheists experience the vague sense that they are here for a preconceived purpose, that their minds are endless, that there are inherent moral truths, and that the nonhuman world employs human justice.”

The sense of a preconceived purpose being a product of something inherent in us rather than produced by society generally seems like the precise thing Holmes would find distasteful. Even without reference to god or spirituality, social forces around us pushe us in one direction or another, our parents have expectations for us, successes are objectively measured in certain ways, etc. And by the time we’re able to communicate any feeling that a “plan” exists, we would have already been programmed by those around us to feel that way, regardless of a biological affiliation. The idea that the mind is endless is expected, as we never remember the beginning, and none knows what it’s like at the end – at least, none that can communicate it. When you’re in the middle of the ocean, no shore in sight, the ocean seems endless too. Inherent moral truths may be a product of biology, but that doesn’t really point in any direction at all. And the comment about the non-human world employs a human justice seems to come out of nowhere – it may be related to the previous comment about how atheists say things like the dead must feel vindicated, but that statement is really more likely a product of carelessness, and wouldn’t stand up to further questioning (at least, a good reasonable person wouldn’t defend it on further questioning).

“Is God a human instinct? It is instinctive for us to seek a grand, moralistic mind that is not there. God is the default stance. And as I describe in The God Instinct, the illusion of God solved a very specific evolutionary problem for our ancestors – that of reputation-harming (and thus gene-compromising) gossip. By inhibiting selfish behaviours that they feared would be punished by supernatural agents, our ancestors would have promoted their prosocial reputations among actual people. But unlike any previous generation, we are now in a position to correct that wayward stance through an informed understanding of why we sense a mental presence that never was.”

The argument that the idea of God solved a particular evolutionary problem for our ancestors is incredibly dangerous, I think. The author skirts social Darwinism with the reference. It’s also completely inaccurate and profoundly “Western” biased. There are still cultures of humans today that have beliefs that, although magical, aren’t based on the importance of a creator-god, any gods at all, or consider God to be concerned with our actions at all. That completely undermines the entire argument. But making the argument in face of that seems to indicate that the author believes that evolution is applicable to societies, as those that used God as a method of control of the social behavior of others in the group were able to survive, advance, and most importantly but not mentioned, conquer. It’s also not God but religion that is often used in that way, as the structures of religion are the ones that are able to order the moral system in such a manner that allow us to determine who deserves to be punished for their “evil” transgressions, and bring both the potential for punishment from our peers and that from God much closer together, as well as probable in our minds. Suffering by burning at the stake for allegedly unChristian behavior is a good way to get people to be scared of violating gods law, and literalize the punishments of hell. But Greek societies didn’t really have caring gods, and thought fate was fixed, and that the afterlife was inevitably hellish for incredibly good people unless they were actually heroic. That has nothing to do with maintaining a moral order so that we do not harm each other for our benefit – in fact, it’s more about ensuring that people will act only in their self interest in order to achieve greatness. And without any gods at all, our ancestors would have had a terribly effective time promoting pro-social behavior by declaring no afterlife at all, and using communal retribution to punish those who harmed others – imagine being sentenced to die for harm you’ve done when you’ve been taught that nothing follows this life.

Although in the end the author advocates setting aside the “use” of religious fear of persecution by God for a better understanding of why we have these senses, there is nothing at all that indicates that evolution produced the idea of God to help us survive (attributing intent in evolution), or that the general feeling or sensation of a grandness is a product of evolution, considering that the default is “god” for us because we are Western. Those without god, and who never had him, show that God is just as arguably one of the many products of our struggle to understand the universe, and as we get better and better at it we replace magical explanations for things with natural ones.

It’s proper that you quoted Holmes in the summary. He would have hated this article. ;-)

The soul is not conscious after death- this is a non-biblical myth. Therefore, the question no longer is necessary!!

@Harold
Then what you mean by “soul” is something entirely consisting of the material nature, which has nothing to do with consciousness (before or after death.) Or, if you are a physicalist—subscribing to the idea that the phenomenon known as consciousness is nothing more than the aggregate of neurons firing in the brain—then you can’t be a theist in any meaningful sense of the word. The hurdle you will have to overcome is explaining for what possible reason the omni-deity has to create anything at all. If you remove souls from the transcendental equation, then you’re left with a purportedly infallible God making a fallible decision; an inherent absurdity.

@thorninmud Excellent discussion. I am inclined to agree. Thanks.

@crazyivan Yeah, got that T-Shirt myself.

@iamthemob However distasteful Holmes might find it, why would society (a collective of individuals) produce things absent in the individuals that make it up?

Like you, I had problems with the use of the non-human world as an analogy. Also, your point is well taken regarding early man being more attuned to animism, ancestor worship and such than to theistic religion. That seems to be a relatively recent idea. My impression was the same. Holmes would find holes in Dr. Bering’s argument. But at the same time, he would find them thought provoking.

@Harold That may be your belief about the “soul” and I don’t necessarily question that belief. But that is clearly not what many believers in a soul mean by the word, so I think the question remains necessary.

@ETpro – I completely agree that the ideas provoke thought – I mean, did you see the treatise I wrote on the article? I wouldn’t have had the article not come into play. We need bad ideas as much as good ones to lead us to the best ones (objectively – my subjective assessment of this being a “bad idea” don’t come into play. ;-)).

But as we learned from “Inception” ;-) – ideas are like a virus. The fact that humanity seems to be unique in its ability to remember and record the past, and theorize about the future suggests results in us creating reasons that, why and how certain things happen. Living things appear to share, above a certain level of development, a curiosity about things that results in adaptive learning. For us, because we have a concept of history that extends before our lives, this also results in learning that can be maladaptive. Organisms without this capability can be said to care and learn from results…we crave a reason. This craving is a result of our unique ability, I would say. And it’s also the explanation as to the inevitability of the spontaneous production of “things” absent in individuals. Were each human being raised in a vacuum, we’d probably come up with our own reasons why things happened (hell – it’s reasonable to assume that raised in a vacuum we’d never really separate out ourselves from what happens around us in a conceptual sense – the moon rises each night, for instance, because I need to be able to see. Night happens because I need to be cool. etc.).

But history fills in these gaps for us. Those that take care of us, when asked why x or y happens, will give explanation z. We’ll accept it. Then we meet another group who says that it’s explanation a. Somehow we have to resolve the cognitive dissonance that results from being confronted with an idea that undermines the explanation given to us by those caring for us. The difficulty of this results in conflict. And societies that have a concept that allows a more strictly ordered society, where power is placed in the hands of a smaller group that has a current interest in maintaining that power, is both (1) motivated to impose that concept on others through force, and (2) better able to do so.

Global interaction undermines this structure now. It’s not the only reason, but it’s part of the reason we get reactive stances from people arguing for “traditional morality” or “traditional normality” in the face of contact. This isn’t, therefore, so much a production of something that wasn’t in us to begin with, it’s simply that we’ve produced something that has been successfully spread as an idea, is a good organizing principle, and has influence and has had influence on how we actually explain things to ourselves and each other – the result of what’s something shared by us all individually.

The need that we have is for a reason. Saying that there’s an evolutionary need for God is a narrow interpretation.

@PARAprakrti – Not so at all. The bible says “God breathed into man the breath of life, and he BECAME a living soul.” He wasn’t GIVEN a soul, he became one. There is a simple equation here: body + breath = soul. When the breath goes (death), the body decays, and the soul ceases to exist. I am not a physicalist at all. God is capable of recreating that soul, which is what He will do at the resurrection.
@ETpro – I am aware that the majority of theists believe in an immortal soul, but if they base their beliefs on the bible, they are obviously in error. I was simply stating that the truth about the soul makes the question lose its point. I do see your point, however.

@Harold—One thing I’ve never quite understood about your interpretation of “soul” is this: Those who are to be resurrected in spirit form would, according to your view, then have non-material bodies, right? What exactly is it that constitutes the essence of a particular person that carries over from the fleshly body to the spirit body?

If the soul= body+breath, and nothing from the fleshly body carries over to the “resurrected” spirit body, and breath is an impersonal factor, then in what sense is this spirit-being the same person?

It can’t be a matter of the spirit-being’s spirit-brain (whatever that might be) getting programmed with all of the same data and propensities as the old flesh one. Consider this hypothetical situation: Suppose God created right now a spirit being and began replicating your mental content until just one slight bit was missing, a certain memory perhaps. As you watch this process, I’d guess that you wouldn’t feel that this spirit being was becoming more and more “you”—more and more like you, perhaps, but not “you”. Suppose then that God were to tell you that once that last little memory was added, you in your fleshly form would be annihilated. Would it be reasonable to say that this news wouldn’t disturb you, because this new spirit-being would be there carrying mental processes identical to yours?

@Harold, you wrote:“God is capable of recreating that soul, which is what He will do at the resurrection.”

But if God creates the soul, then you cannot explain why God creates anything in the first place. You are stuck with saying that an infallible God acts in a fallible way since creation and the very act of creating is inherently inferior to a transcendental, self-satisfied, eternal being. This may just be a case of you using the word “soul” in a different way, but whatever we’re calling it, we’re referring to something that supposedly exists regardless of bodily situation.

This has nothing to do with God’s capability. No one is contesting that.

@thorninmud – I don’t know where the idea comes from that spirit-beings are what will be resurrected. I believe that the resurrected will have physical bodies. The recreation of the “soul” is the recreation of the entire person (body and breath). When the bible refers to a fleshly body, it is referring to the mortal bodies we have now, ie one subject to sin. Being “resurrected in the spirit” does not mean that the resurrected ARE spirits, but that they are people recreated with immortality.
@PARAprakrti – I may be stupid, but I can’t follow your logic. Happy to respond if I actually understand what your line of thought is!

@Harold—Well, I believe that’s how 1 Corinthians 15;44 is usually understood: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.”

But even assuming that a new corporeal body is formed at resurrection, the same problem arises: what is the essence of the person that carries over from the old “you” to the new “you”?

@thorninmud you have hit upon salvation. II Corinthains 5

@Harold—Then let me just ask you: For what reason might God have for creating anything at all?

Note that I am not necessarily asking what the reason is. I am just asking what possible reasons there are.

@thorninmud – natural body is the mortal body we die with, and spiritual body is the immortal one we are raised with. The essence is the person’s character/personality, which God is able to recreate at the resurrection.
@PARAprakrti – God created the universe for His pleasure, simple as that. I still don’t see the connection, sorry.

@Harold Thanks for your response. That’s a new take on eschatology to me. I have the same reservations to it that @thorninmud expressed. I look forward to your response.

This discussion certainly has spun into something I didn’t expect when I posed the question. I’m loveing it.

@Harold you wrote: “God created the universe for His pleasure, simple as that.”

But God is eternally enjoying within Himself. So, your answer doesn’t suffice, especially since it implies that God seeks pleasure in fleeting things; something only us foolish, fallen souls do.

@Harold—I don’t want you to feel ganged up on here; I’ve just always wondered how people who believe in resurrection understand this issue. While the Bible may not explicitly spell out the existence of a soul that leaves the body, I think that most theologians consider this to be a necessary implication of the whole idea of resurrection because of this very problem. If literally nothing carries over from one life form to the next—if there’s no continuity—then it becomes difficult to accept this new being as truly the old being, and not just an upgraded copy.

Do you see what I mean? I can accept that to someone who knew the old so-and-so, the new so-and-so might pass as the same. And I can accept that the new so-and-so might have the perception of having lived, died and reappeared on the scene, thanks to having duplicate memories. But it seems evident that the subjective experience of the old so-and-so ended at his death, and the appearance later of someone with his character and personality won’t benefit him in any way. Someone else will just be carrying on where he left off.

My Christian grandmother would say that when one dies, one goes into a sort of “sleep” where one is completely unconscious, awaiting the resurrection. I suppose this was her way around your problem, @thorninmud. Rather than saying that the individual completely ceases to exist and is then re-created. She’d say that the individual is just in some sort of dormant state.

@ETpro That’s a t-Shirt? I need that one…

@PARAprakrti Yes, I’ve heard that variation too. That means, though, that while one is dead, then there’s some kernel of him somewhere “sleeping”, even though his body has dispersed to the four winds. I’m not sure that @Harold would agree to that because this “kernel” sounds an awful lot like the classic notion of a soul. In fact, I’m not seeing how it would be different at all. Whether it’s “asleep” or “awake”, it’s still an essence of a particular person existing somewhere in some form after death.

@PARAprakrti – sorry, I still don’t see the connection of your comments to the topic. I’m trying to, but not yet.
@thorninmud & @ETpro – I don’t think that God needs a conscious soul in order to raise someone from the dead. He created us unique in the first place. A basic premise of belief in God is that He can do anything. Why can’t He create the same person again? Their thoughts take up where they left off when they died. I have no theory as to HOW God does it- that’s His business. The bible makes it very clear that death is a sleep- Jesus Himself said it about Lazarus, and about Jairus’ daughter, to name a couple.

One thing I really don’t understand- if our soul goes to heaven when we die, and the resurrection is a raising to life of a spirit body, what exactly is raised at the resurrection? What is the point of a resurrection? What is happening in 1 Thessalonians 4?

The teaching of an immortal soul also leads to the terrible teaching of hell, which is totally opposed to the loving God found in Scripture. Death for those who are not raised to life again is an eternal sleep.

@ETpro – I am glad you’re loving the discussion- I was worried that you’d feel we’d hijacked your question. @thorninmud – don’t worry, I’m enjoying the good spirit in this discussion. I’m used to being in the minority, and quite enjoy it. As long as we respect each other, differences are good.

@Harold The very fact that Jesus compares death to sleep (as does Paul at 1 Thessalonians 4:13) would seem to indicate that the person exists after death. What is it then that’s “sleeping”? In your formulation “soul = body + breath”, there doesn’t seem to be anything at all that could be said to “sleep” after death.

If, as you said earlier, a person’s essence—what constitutes their identity—is a particular character and cognitive content, then why am I not a different person every time there is some alteration in the way I remember this or that? Even my character evolves with time. Damage to the brain can instantly cause substantial shifts in character, memory and perception. Which is the “real” person, the one before the damage or the one after the damage? If such a person were to be resurrected in his pre-damage mental configuration, then isn’t the resurrected one a different person than the one who died? If someone dies of Alzheimer’s, to what state would his memory be reset at resurrection? When, during the process of cognitive decline, did he stop being himself? And aren’t we all going through a process of cognitive decline?

These are the kinds of impasses that arise anytime we try to identify a personal essence. Maybe there is no such thing as a personal essence. But then there would be nothing to resurrect.

Humans tend to cling desperately to self-hood, and want whatever that self is to go on for as long as possible, but the more rigorously we look for that self, the less personal it appears. Maybe what we most fundamentally are isn’t something personal at all, and we are just way too focused on what we think makes us different from everyone, and everything, else.

@Harold you wrote: “sorry, I still don’t see the connection of your comments to the topic. I’m trying to, but not yet.”

We’ll get to that in time. In the meantime, do you concede my point regarding my previous response to you?

@thorninmud – Death is compared to sleep in that it is a state of unconsciousness, from which we will be raised up at the resurrection. The formulation is not mine- it is found in Genesis. It is God’s formula.

I see your point about cognitive decline, but God knows the person’s character better than we do, and is able to bring them back to whatever point He knows will be the definition of that person. My mother died of Alzheimers two months ago, so I really do understand what you mean. I have confidence that she will be resurrected as I knew her when she was younger. At exactly what point, I can’t say, but I trust that God knows best.

I would be interested to see your response to the other part of my last post- ie what is the point of a resurrection if there are spirit bodies raised?

@PARAprakrti – I’ll be interested to see how you tie this in to the topic. No, I don’t concede your point at all, as I don’t perceive the universe to be a fleeting thing.

@Harold—I don’t believe in any form of resurrection, personally, but 1 Corinthians 15 definitely appears to be talking about a resurrection in spirit form:

35 But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” 36 How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37 When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. 38 But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. 39 Not all flesh is the same: People have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another. 40 There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another. 41 The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor.

42 So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; 43 it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44 it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.

If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. 45 So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. 46 The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. 47 The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven. 48 As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. 49 And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man.

50 I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

@Harold—you wrote: “No, I don’t concede your point at all, as I don’t perceive the universe to be a fleeting thing.”

Of course. You believe in a universe that was created, but that never ceases after that initial creation. Is that correct? Now, whether the universe lasts forever from some initial point or is temporary doesn’t really affect my argument; because it isn’t some imagined totality we call “universe” that your idea of God is seeking enjoyment in. It is the quite demonstrably fleeting individual parts within that so-called universe that your idea of God is necessarily seeking enjoyment in.