Psychology Working Outline Assignment

13

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM IIA

Arguments Regarding and Versions of Substance Dualism

But the soul is present as a whole not only in the entire mass of a body, but also in every least part of the body at the same time.

AUGUSTINE, ON THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 26.25

The immortality of the soul is something of such vital importance to us, affecting us so deeply, that one must have lost all feeling not to care about knowing the facts of the matter.

PASCAL, PENSÉES, LAFUMA EDITION, 427

I think we ought to hold not only that man has a soul, but that it is important that he should know that he has a soul.

J. GRESHAM MACHEN, THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF MAN

The human form or “soul” shapes the human bodily organism, gives it the purposes of biological, psychological, rational, social, cultural, and moral existence, and provides the biological,

psychological, rational, and volitional powers to function in all the ways proper to human nature.

JOHN COOPER, BODY, SOUL AND LIFE EVERLASTING

1—INTRODUCTION In the previous two chapters we examined different dualist and physicalist views of consciousness and mental properties/states. We also considered the arguments for and against each view, concluding that some form of immaterialism regarding consciousness—either mere-property dualism or

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property dualism simpliciter—is the most reasonable position to hold. Here, we turn to an investigation of the claim that the possessor of consciousness is an immaterial substance distinct from the body. Thus, in this chapter, we shall, first, provide a brief summary of important metaphysical notions for analyzing whether a soul exists and if so, what a soul is; second, proffer a set of arguments that, if successful, support all the different versions of substance dualism (generic dualism); third, characterize three different versions of substance dualism; and fourth, conclude with some ideas about the structure of the human soul and the nature of animal souls. For two reasons, we shall not consider some standard arguments against substance dualism. For one thing, most of the arguments against mere-property dualism or property dualism simpliciter presented in the previous two chapters can be equally leveled against substance dualism. Second, one of the arguments against substance dualism is the claim that physicalists have offered a better candidate for the “self,” and we will investigate that claim in the next chapter.

2—METAPHYSICAL FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYZING THE SOUL Before we can fruitfully discuss the soul in what follows, it will be useful to get before us a relevant lexicon. Some of what follows will be a refresher for what has already been covered in earlier chapters.

Part-whole relations are important for treatments of substance dualism, and there are two kinds of parts relevant to our discussion—separable and inseparable.

P is a separable part of some whole W =def. P is a particular and p can exist if it is not a part of W.

P is an inseparable part of some whole W =def. P is a particular and p cannot exist if it is not a part of W. In contemporary philosophy, inseparable parts were most fruitfully

analyzed in the writings of Brentano, Husserl, and their followers.1 The

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paradigm case of an inseparable part in this tradition is a (monadic) property-instance or relation-instance. Thus, if substance s has property P, the-having-of-P-by-s is (1) a property-instance of P; (2) an inseparable part of s, which we may also call a mode of s. Assuming for the sake of argument that a lump of clay is a substance (most likely, it is an ordered aggregate, not a substance; see below) and that it has a spherical shape, then the lump is a substance, the property of being spherical is a universal attribute, and the-having-of-sphericity-by-the-clay is a mode (inseparable part) of the clay and a property-instance of sphericity.

Setting aside properties, there are two ways something can be simple in the sense relevant to what follows: by being uncomposed of separable parts or by being metaphysically indivisible. “Metaphysically indivisible” is used here to mean what many philosophers say by “indivisible in thought.” Something could be metaphysically divisible but not physically divisible (if, say, such division annihilated the whole), but not conversely. Moreover, all particulars that are metaphysically indivisible are uncomposed, but not conversely (an extended whole with no separable parts could still be divided). According to our usage, a substance with inseparable parts is simple.

A substance =def. an essentially characterized particular that (1) has (and is the principle of unity for its) properties but is not had by or predicable of something more basic than it; (2) is an enduring continuant; (3) has inseparable parts but is not composed of separable parts; (4) is complete in species.2

Regarding condition (4), a thing’s species (i.e., essence) answers the most basic question “What kind of thing is this?” where by “most basic” is meant (i) an answer to this question is presupposed by an answer to any less basic question of this form (for Socrates, being human is presupposed by the answer “being white” to the less basic question, “What kind of thing is Socrates?”); (ii) an answer to this question is true of the object in every possible world in which it exists. A hand is not complete in species because “being a hand” does not adequately capture the sort of thing it is. Rather, being a human hand or a gorilla’s hand is required. But being human is complete in species.

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A mereological aggregate =def. (1) a particular whole; (2) is such that it is constituted by at least substantial separable parts and external relation-instances between and among those substantial separable parts (there are differences as to whether such aggregates have additional constituents, e.g., boundaries).

3—DEFENDING GENERIC SUBSTANCE DUALISM In section four, we will look at three currently popular forms of substance dualism. But there are arguments that equally support each form, so we will defend what we shall call “generic substance dualism” in this section. According to generic substance dualism, there is a substantial, immaterial self/I/soul/mind that is not identical to its body.

At least six arguments have been offered in the recent literature for some form of substance dualism.

3.1 Our Basic Awareness of the Self

Stewart Goetz has advanced the following type of argument for the nonphysical nature of the self, which we have modified:3

1. I am essentially an indivisible, simple spiritual substance.

2. Any physical body is essentially a divisible or complex entity (any physical body has spatial extension or separable parts).

3. The law of identity (if x is identical to y, then whatever is true of x is true of y and vice versa).

4. Therefore, I am not identical with my (or any) physical body.

5. If I am not identical with a physical body, then I am a soul.

6. Therefore, I am a soul.

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Premise (2) is pretty obvious, and (5) is commonsensical. The body and brain are complex material objects made of billions of parts—atoms and molecules. Premise (3) is the law of identity we introduced in chapter one. Regarding premise (1), we know it is true by introspection. When we enter most deeply into ourselves, we become aware of a very basic fact presented to us: we are aware of our own self (ego, I, center of consciousness) as being distinct from our bodies and from any particular mental experience we have, and as being an uncomposed, spatially unextended, simple center of consciousness. In short, we are just aware of ourselves as simple, conscious things. This fundamental awareness is what grounds my properly basic belief (a belief it is rational to have that is not based on other beliefs) that I am a simple, substantial center of consciousness. On the basis of this awareness, and premises (2) and (3), I know that I am not identical to my body or my conscious states; rather, I am the immaterial self that has a body and a conscious mental life.

An experiment may help convince you of this. Right now I am looking at a chair in my office. As I walk toward the chair, I experience a series of what are called phenomenological objects or chair representations. That is, I have several different chair experiences that replace one another in rapid succession. As I approach the chair, my chair sensations vary. If I pay attention, I am also aware of two more things. First, I do not simply experience a series of sense-images of a chair. Rather, through self- awareness, I also experience the fact that it is I myself who has each chair experience. Each chair sensation produced at each angle of perspective has a perceiver who is I. An “I” accompanies each sense experience to produce a series of awarenesses—“I am experiencing a chair sense-image now.”

I am also aware of the basic fact that the same self that is currently having a fairly large chair experience (as my eyes come to within twelve inches of the chair) is the very same self as the one who had all of the other chair experiences preceding this current one. Through self-awareness, I am aware of the fact that I am an enduring I who was and is (and will be) present as the owner of all the experiences in the series.

These two facts—I am the owner of my experiences, and I am an enduring self—show that I am not identical to my experiences. I am the conscious thing that has them. I am also aware of myself as a simple, uncomposed, and spatially unextended center of consciousness. In short, I

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am a mental substance. Moreover, I am “fully present” throughout my body; if my arm is cut off, I do not become four-fifths of a self. My body and brain are divisible and can be present in percentages (there could be 80 percent of a brain present after an operation). But I am an all-or-nothing kind of thing. I am not divisible; I cannot be present in percentages.

3.2 The Soul, the Indexical I, and the First-Person Perspective

Consider the following argument:

1. If I were a physical object (e.g., a brain or body), then a third-person physical description would capture all the facts that are true of me.

2. But a third-person physical description does not capture all the facts that are true of me.

3. Therefore, I am not a physical object.

4. I am either a physical object or a soul.

5. Therefore, I am a soul.

A complete physical description of the world would be one in which everything would be exhaustively described from a third-person point of view in terms of objects, properties, processes, and their spatiotemporal locations. For example, a description of an apple in a room would go something like this: there exists an object three feet from the south wall and two feet from the east wall, and that object has the property of being red, round, sweet, and so on.

The first-person point of view is the vantage point that I use to describe the world from my own perspective. Expressions of a first-person point of view utilize what are called indexicals—words like I, here, now, there, then. Here and now are where and when I am; there and then are where and when I am not. Indexicals refer to me, myself. I is the most basic indexical (the indexical I ), and it refers to my self that I know by acquaintance with my own self in acts of self-awareness. I am immediately aware of my own self and I know to whom I refers when I use it: it refers to

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me as the self-conscious, self-reflexive owner of my body and mental states.

According to a widely accepted form of physicalism, there are no irreducible, privileged first-person perspectives. Everything can be exhaustively described in an object language from a third-person perspective. A physicalist description of me would say, “There exists a body at a certain location that is five feet eight inches tall, weighs 160 pounds,” and so forth. The mere-property dualist would add a description of the properties possessed by that body, such as “the body is feeling pain” or “thinking about lunch.”

But no amount of third-person descriptions captures my own subjective, first-person, indexical acquaintance of my own self in acts of self- awareness. In fact, for any third-person description of me, it would always be an open question as to whether the person described in third-person terms was the same person as I am. I do not know my self because I know some third-person description of a set of mental and physical properties and also know that a certain person satisfies that description (namely, me). I know myself as a self immediately through being acquainted with my own self in an act of self-awareness. I can express that self-awareness by using the term I.

I refers to my own substantial soul. It does not refer to any mental property or bundle of mental properties I am having, nor does it refer to any body described from a third-person perspective. I is a term that refers to something that exists, and I does not refer to any object or set of properties described from a third-person point of view. Rather, I refers to my own self with which I am directly acquainted and that, through acts of self- awareness, I know to be the substantial uncomposed possessor of my mental states and my body.

3.3 The Soul and the Unity of Consciousness

Here is a related argument that focuses on the special type of unity that consciousness has:

Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2025-02-04 15:06:46.

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1. If I am a physical object (e.g., a brain or a body), I do not have a unified visual field at a given time (or a totalizing, unified conscious state at a given time).

2. I do have a unified visual field at a given time.

3. Therefore, I am not a physical object.

4. I am either a physical object or a soul.

5. Therefore, I am a soul.

More than anyone else, William Hasker has championed this argument for substance dualism.4 By the unity of consciousness, say, of one’s visual field, many philosophers mean two things. First, there is what Tim Bayne and David Chalmers call subsumptive phenomenal unity: all of one’s experiences are subsumed within a single, totalizing state of consciousness. This totalizing state is a conscious state in its own right, and there is a what- it-is-like to be in that state.5 For example, consider states A (sensing a chair) and B (sensing a lamp). There is a what-it-is-like to be in A, a what- it-is-like to be in B, and a what-it-is-like to be in A and B together. The total-phenomenal-unity thesis says that there is always a single phenomenal state that subsumes all of one’s other phenomenal states at a time.

The notion of “subsuming” is a bit unclear, so we should look at the second thing often meant by the unity of consciousness. According to Bayne, an atomistic theory of consciousness states that the phenomenal field is composed of “atoms of consciousness”—independently conscious states.6 By contrast, Bayne accepts holism: the components of the phenomenal field are conscious only as components of that field (it is interesting to note that diachronically, consciousness changes as a continuous flow, but the brain changes states in a discrete, atomistic way). One way to unpack holism is it to view the phenomenal field as a whole in which subsumptive components are modes or inseparable parts of the whole field (or, more likely, of the substantial soul).

Now consider the following principle: (F) For any complex object (one with a plurality of separable parts) O, if O performs function F, then O’s performing function F consists in parts p1–pn and subfunctions/activities

.

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f1–fn, such that p1 performs f1, . . . pn performs fn. For example, a computer performing function F just is a certain set of its parts performing their own subfunctions. Principle F can also be stated in terms of properties such that an object O having some property P consists in each part having some property or other. This is clearly the case with additive properties, for example, mass. It does not, however, rule out emergent properties. Given the reasonable assumption that supervenience for simple, emergent properties is local (the supervenient simple property obtains and is dependent on what is going on right there at the subvenient base), the principle disallows emergent properties exemplified by complex objects like O taken as an irreducible whole. But it does not disallow each of the relevant parts of O to have an emergent property.

The following argument, then, is an attempt to show that the unity of consciousness cannot be explained if one is a brain (or a living body), because a brain is just an aggregate of different physical (separable) parts. It is only if the self is a single, simple subject that it adequately accounts for the unity of consciousness.

To grasp the argument, consider one’s awareness of a complex fact, say, one’s own visual field consisting of awareness of several objects at once, including a number of different surface areas of each object. One’s entire visual field contains several different experiences, for example, being aware of a desk toward one’s left side and being aware of a podium in the center of one’s visual experience of an entire classroom. Corresponding to such an experience, numerous different light waves bounce off of different objects (and off of different locations on the surface of the same object, say, different areas of the desk’s top side), they all interact with the subject’s retinas, and they all spark signals that terminate in myriad locations of the brain, breaking objects down into constituents.7 If we add local emergence, then we could hold that each relevant part of the brain instantiates an atomistic sensory experience.

Accordingly, a physicalist may claim that such a unified awareness of the entire room by means of one’s visual field consists in a number of different physical parts of the brain each terminating a different wavelength, aware only of part—not the whole—of the complex fact (the entire room). But this cannot account for the single, unitary awareness of the entire visual

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field. There is a what-it-is-like to have the whole visual field. If we terminate our search for an explanation for this with a holistic phenomenal field, then two problems arise. First, it is hard to see how myriad atomistic parts could give rise to a single, nonatomistic, holistic field; we are owed an account of this within the constraints of subject physicalism.

Second, a basic datum of our experience is not simply this or that item of awareness in the room, but that I have and am not identical to the totalizing state. In the history of philosophy, classic substances have served to unify things in this way, and, arguably, this ontology provides the best answer for how we could have a totalizing, unified field of consciousness. The very same substantial soul is aware of the desk to the left, the podium at the center, and, indeed, each and every distinguishable aspect of the room. But no single part of the brain is correspondingly activated as a terminus for the entire visual fields. Only a single, uncomposed mental substance can adequately account for the unity of one’s visual field or, indeed, the unity of consciousness in general.

The most prominent physicalist rejoinder attempts to explain objectual phenomenal unity in terms of synchronicity: all the different locations of the brain processing electrical signals associated with different aspects of the object of perception (e.g., color, size, shape) fire together at the very same time, and this explains objectual unity. Unfortunately, a growing amount of empirical evidence refutes this thesis.8 And, philosophically, the connection between synchronicity and objectual unity is unclear. Consider Eric LaRock’s analogy: “If five chefs are located in separate kitchens and each chef is consciously aware of only part of the same recipe, it does not follow that any one chef is consciously aware of the recipe as a whole— even if all of the chefs are consciously aware of their respective recipe parts at the same time.”9 The synchronicity solution, then, seems to fail.

3.4 The Modal Argument

The core of the modal argument for the soul is fairly simple:

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1. I am possibly disembodied (I could survive without my brain or body).

2. Neither my brain nor body is possibly disembodied (they could not survive without being physical).

3. So I am not my brain or body.

4. I am either a soul or a brain or a body.

5. So I am a soul.

The most controversial premise is (1), and defenders of the argument have typically taken two strategies to support it. First, those like Stewart Goetz defend what is called the simple argument (I am aware of myself as a simple substance and of my body as a complex thing, so I am not identical to my body) to serve as an epistemic support for (1): since I know I am not my body, then it is metaphysically possible that I exist without it in the absence of overriding defeaters, of which there are none.10 Second, those like Charles Taliaferro defend (1) on the grounds that most people can conceive of and have the basic modal intuition that one could exist disembodied.11 Interestingly, there is a surprisingly large amount of credible data to support Taliaferro’s defense of (1): the existence of numerous, credible, well-researched near death experiences (NDEs; these should be called death experiences because there is nothing near about them; in most cases, the person’s heart stops beating and brainstem activity goes silent).

NDEs aren’t rare. A Gallup poll and other studies report 4 percent of Germans and 4 percent of Americans have had an NDE (one out of twenty- five). Nine to twelve million Americans have had an NDE and an estimated 200 to 300 million worldwide have had such an experience. Interestingly, the core elements of an NDE are remarkably the same across various cultural and religious traditions going back to the ancient Near East.12

Moreover, nine hundred journal articles about NDEs have been published in the scholarly literature. Finally, most NDE researchers were skeptics before they did their research, and many of them have PhDs or MDs.13

The evidence derived from actual NDE cases is powerful and persuasive. For one thing, NDEs happen to little children who know

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nothing about heaven, dying, or the afterlife, yet they learn things while dead they could not have known were the NDE inauthentic.14

For another, in what are called evidential cases, the person undergoing the NDE comes to see and know certain facts that (1) are impossible for the person to know if the NDE was not a real case of the person leaving his or her body and (2) are independently verified by other people. For example, a young woman critically injured in a car accident died during surgery and was successfully resuscitated.15 She awoke in an animated manner, claiming to have seen her father on the other side. Her dad told her he had just died and exactly how it had happened. She was so animated that she could not stay still, preventing surgeons from working on her. One surgeon went to meet the many family members in the waiting room, who all said the father was still alive. One of them had even talked to him that morning, and he was feeling well. This information did not affect the resuscitated woman. The surgeon asked the family to call the father, to put the whole thing to rest. After numerous phone calls, the family discovered that the father had indeed died just prior to the woman’s surgery, and his manner of death exactly fit the description the young woman had presented.

In another well-documented case, Katie, a young girl, drowned at a YMCA pool. She was found floating face down.16 During the three days before she recovered, she claims an angel took her through a tunnel to meet Jesus. The angel also took Katie to her home, where she wandered for a while. She saw her brother push a GI Joe in a Jeep around his room and her sister comb a doll’s hair while singing a popular tune; she drifted into the kitchen and saw her mother cook roast chicken with rice; she saw her father on the couch staring blankly ahead. After her recovery, she described every‐ thing in vivid detail, including the clothing each family member wore. All of this was confirmed by the shocked family during an interview with the attending physician.

Again, consider the case of Maria who suffered a cardiac arrest and experienced an NDE at Harborview Hospital in Seattle. She reported leaving the hospital apart from her body, seeing a shoe on a window ledge not viewable from her room.17 Courageously, Kim Clark climbed out on the ledge, carefully walked around the corner of the building, and found the shoe just as Maria had described it.

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Finally, in another case, a nurse removed the dentures of a hospitalized, comatose man, putting them in a specific crash cart. Unknown to her, he had left his body during the coma and witnessed the whole thing.18 During the next week, he remained in a coma and numerous nurses attended to him. On the seventh day, he came out of his coma and the nurse who had removed his dentures just happened to be on duty. He told her he had seen her remove his dentures and noted the exact place they were stored (and demanded to have them back!), watching the entire scene from above, near the room’s ceiling, and he accurately described the room at the time the dentures were taken, including those who were present. The nurse confirmed every thing he had said.

NDE experiencers often learn medical details about their resuscitation attempts by viewing the scene from above, and their reports are incredibly accurate. Speaking about a man named Pete, cardiologist Michael Sabom notes: “He told me he had left his body during his first cardiac arrest and had watched the resuscitation. When I asked him to tell me exactly what he saw, he described the resuscitation in such detail and accuracy that I could have later used the tape to teach physicians.”19 Sabom did a study of cardiac arrest patients whom he placed into two groups: those claiming an NDE and those who made no such claim.20 In the former group, twenty-six could not describe their experiences in enough detail to compare to medical records, though none of them made an error in stating what they did see. However, six in this group described their resuscitations in stunning detail, and these descriptions conformed in virtually every detail to the medical records. By contrast, when asked to describe a resuscitation procedure, 80 percent of the twenty-five in the non-NDE group made major errors.

Carefully researched cases exist in which people born blind gain sight during an NDE only, and they describe, with limited vocabulary, their rooms and what is happening outside; they return to being blind when they reenter their bodies.21

Too many people who have had NDEs and too many carefully researched cases exist for people just to dismiss their veridicality out of hand. Additionally, no naturalistic explanation exists. The collaborative evidence confirmed by other people seems to show beyond a reasonable doubt that NDE experiencers leave their bodies and see and/or hear things.

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Moreover, as noted above, there is worldwide consistency to the core components people experience during an NDE.22 These events are widespread and frequent; they happen to atheists and very young children; the deaf hear and the blind see and the colorblind see colors. They have enhanced consciousness when they should have no consciousness at all, and incredible life changes result from them.

Physicalists argue that the modal argument establishes only the epistemic or conceptual possibility of disembodiment (for all we know, disembodied existence could be possible), not metaphysical possibility (disembodied existence is really possible). But this is just a question- begging assertion, since its only “evidence” requires a prior commitment to physicalism. The reality of NDEs, or even the metaphysical possibility of their being true due to the complete coherence of the accounts, adequately demonstrates the metaphysical possibility of disembodiment, and according to the argument presented earlier, this supports the truth of some form of substance dualism.

3.5 Free Will, Morality, Responsibility, and Punishment

Consider the following argument:

1. If I am a physical object (e.g., a brain or a body), then I do not have free will.

2. But I do have free will.

3. Therefore, I am not a physical object.

4. I am either a physical object or a soul.

5. Therefore, I am a soul.

When we use the term free will, we mean what is called libertarian freedom. I can literally choose to act or refrain from choosing to act. No circumstances exist that are sufficient to determine my choice. My choice is up to me. I act as an agent who is the ultimate originator of my own actions. Moreover, my reasons for acting do not partially or fully cause my actions;

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I myself bring about my actions. Rather, my reasons are the teleological goals or purposes for the sake of which I act. If I get a drink because I am thirsty, the desire to satisfy my thirst is the end for the sake of which I myself act freely. I raise my arm in order to vote.

If physicalism is true, then human free will does not exist. Instead, determinism is true.23 If I am just a physical system, there is nothing in me that has the capacity to freely choose to do something. Material systems, at least large-scale ones, change over time in deterministic fashion according to the initial conditions of the system and the laws of chemistry and physics. A pot of water will reach a certain temperature at a given time in a way determined by the amount of water, the input of heat, and the laws of heat transfer.

Now, when it comes to morality, it is hard to make sense of moral obligation and responsibility if determinism is true. They seem to presuppose freedom of the will. If I “ought” to do something, it seems to be necessary to suppose that I can do it, that I could have done otherwise, and that I am in control of my actions. No one would say that I ought to jump from the top of a fifty-floor building and save a baby, or that I ought to stop the American Civil War in 2014, because I do not have the ability to do either. If physicalism is true, I do not have any genuine ability to choose my actions. Further, free acts seem to be teleological. We act for the sake of goals or ends. If physicalism (or mere-property dualism) is true, there is no genuine teleology and, thus, no libertarian free acts.

It is safe to say that physicalism requires a radical revision of our commonsense notions of freedom, moral obligation, responsibility, and punishment. On the other hand, if these commonsense notions are true, physicalism is false.

The same problem besets property dualism. There are two ways for property dualists to handle human actions. First, some property dualists are epiphenomenalists. A person is a living physical body having a mind, the mind consisting, however, of nothing but a more or less continuous series of conscious or unconscious states and events that are the effects but never the causes of bodily activity. Put another way, when matter reaches a certain organizational complexity and structure, as is the case with the human brain, then matter produces mental states as fire produces smoke, or the

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structure of hydrogen and oxygen in water produces wetness. The mind is to the body as smoke is to fire. Smoke is different from fire (to keep the analogy going, the physicalist would identify the smoke with the fire or the functioning of the fire), but fire causes smoke, not vice versa. The mind is a by-product of the brain, which causes nothing; the mind merely “rides” on top of the events in the brain. Hence, epiphenomenalists reject free will, since they deny that mental states cause anything.

A second way property dualists handle human action is through a notion called event-event causation.24 To understand event-event causation, consider a brick that breaks a glass. The cause in this case is not the brick itself (which is a substance), but an event, namely, the brick’s being in a certain state—a state of motion. And this event (the brick’s being in a state of motion) was caused by a prior event and so on. The effect is another event, namely, the glass’s being in a certain state—breaking. Thus one event (the moving of a brick) causes another event to occur (the breaking of the glass). Further, according to event-event causation, whenever one event causes another, there will be some deterministic or probabilistic law of nature that relates the two events. The first event, combined with the laws of nature, is sufficient to determine or fix the chances for the occurrence of the second event.

Agent action is an important part of an adequate libertarian account of freedom of the will. One example of agent action is this typical case: my raising my arm. When I raise my arm, I, as a substance, simply act by spontaneously exercising my active powers. I raise my arm; I freely and spontaneously exercise the powers within my substantial soul and simply act. No set of conditions exists within me that is sufficient to determine that I raise my arm. Moreover, this substantial agent is characterized by the power of active freedom, conscious awareness, the ability to think, form goals and plans, to act teleologically (for the sake of goals), and so forth. Such an agent is an immaterial substance and not a physical object. Thus libertarian freedom is best explained by a substance dualism and not by physicalism or mere-property dualism.

Unfortunately for mere property dualists, event-event causation is deterministic. Why? For one thing, there is no room for an agent, an ego, an “I” to intervene and contribute to one’s actions. I do not produce the action

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of raising my arm; rather, a state of desiring to raise an arm is sufficient to produce the effect. There is no room for my own self, as opposed to the mental states within me, to act.

For another thing, all the mental states within me (my states of desiring, willing, hoping) are states that were deterministically caused (or had their chances fixed) by prior mental and physical states outside of my control, plus the relevant laws. “I” become a stream of states/events in a causal chain that merely passes through me. Each member of the chain determines that the next member occurs.

In summary then, property dualism denies libertarian freedom, because it adopts either epiphenomenalism or event-event causation. Thus property dualism, no less than physicalism, is false, given the truth of a libertarian account of free will, moral ability, moral responsibility, and punishment. Our commonsense notions about moral ability, responsibility, and punishment are almost self-evident. We all operate toward one another on the assumption that they are true (and these commonsense notions seem to assume libertarian free will). However, if physicalism or property dualism is true, we will have to abandon and revise our commonsense notions of moral ability, responsibility, and punishment because free will is ruled out.

3.6 Sameness of the Self over Time

Consider the following argument:

1. If something is a physical object composed of parts, it does not survive over time as the same object if it comes to have different parts.

2. My body and brain are physical objects composed of parts.

3. Therefore, my body and brain do not survive over time as the same object if they come to have different parts.

4. My body and brain are constantly coming to have different parts.

5. Therefore, my body and brain do not survive over time as the same object.

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6. I do survive over time as the same object.

7. Therefore, I am not my body or my brain.

8. I am either a soul or a body or a brain.

9. Therefore, I am a soul.

Premise (2) is commonsensically true. Premise (4) is obviously true as well. Our bodies and brains are constantly gaining new cells and losing old ones, or at least gaining new atoms and molecules and losing old ones. So understood, bodies and brains are in constant flux. Let us assume that (8) represents the only live options for most ordinary people. This leaves premises (1) and (6).

Let’s start with (1). Why do some philosophers believe that ordinary material objects (i.e., mereological aggregates) composed of separable parts do not remain the same through part replacement?25 To see why this makes sense to many philosophers, consider five scattered boards, a-e, each located in a different person’s backyard. Commonsensically, it doesn’t seem like the boards form an object. They are just isolated boards. Now, suppose we collected those boards and put them in a pile with the boards touching each other. We would now have, let us suppose, an object called a pile or heap of boards. The heap is a weak object, indeed, and the only thing unifying it would be the spatial relationships between and among a-e. They are in close proximity and are touching each other. Now, suppose we took board b away and replaced it with a new board f to form a new heap consisting of a, c-f. Would our new heap be the same as the original heap? Clearly not, because the heap just is the boards and their relationships to each other, and we have new boards and a new set of relationships. What if we increased the number of boards in the heap to one thousand? If we now took one board away and replaced it with a new board, we would still get a new heap. The number of boards does not matter.

Now imagine that we nailed our original boards a-e together into a makeshift raft. In this situation, the boards are rigidly connected such that they do not move relative to each other; instead, they all move together if we pick up our raft. If we now took board b away and replaced it with board f, we would still get a new object. It may seem odd, but if we took board b

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away and later put it back, we would still have a new raft because the raft is a collection of parts and bonding relationships to each other. Thus, even though the new raft would still have the same parts (a-e), there would be new bonding relationships between b and the board or boards to which it is attached.

Now think of a cloud. From a distance, it looks like a solid, continuous object. But if you get close to it, say flying on a plane, it becomes evident that it is a very lose collection of water droplets. The boundaries are vague, and for any droplet near the “edge,” it is pretty arbitrary whether it is a genuine part of the cloud as opposed to being a droplet outside the cloud. The cloud is like a heap of boards or like a raft. If new droplets are added and some removed, it is, strictly speaking, not the same cloud.

Now, consider our bodies and brains and assume they are mere physical objects composed of billions of parts. From our daily vantage point, they appear to be solid, continuous objects. But if we could shrink down to the level of an atom, we would see that, in reality, they are like a cloud—gappy, largely containing empty space, and composed of billions of atoms (molecules, cells) that stand in various bonding relations between and among those parts. If we were to take a part away and replace it, we would have a new object. The body and brain are like the cloud or our raft. Besides the parts and the relationships among them, there is nothing in the body or brain to ground its ability to remain the same through part replacement. This is the fundamental insight behind the view that the body and brain cannot remain the same if there is part alteration.26 Since the body and brain are constantly changing parts and relationships, they are not the same from one moment to the next in a strict philosophical sense (though, for practical day-to-day purposes, we regard them as the same in a loose, popular sense).

So much for premise (1). What about premise (6)? Why should we think we survive as the same object over time? Suppose you are approaching a brown table and in three different moments of introspection you attend to your own awarenesses or experiences of the table. At time t1 you are five feet from the table and you experience a slight pain in your foot (P1), a certain light brown table sensation from a specific place in the room (S1), and a specific thought that the table seems old (T1). A moment later at t2

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when you are three feet from the table you experience a feeling of warmth (F1) from a heater, a different table sensation (S2) with a different shape and slightly different shade of brown than that of S1, and a new thought that the table reminds you of your childhood desk (T2). Finally, a few seconds later, t3, you feel a desire to have the table (D1), a new table sensation from one foot away (S3), and a new thought that you could buy it for less than twenty-five dollars (T3).

In this series of experiences, you are aware of different things at different moments. However, at each moment of time, you are also aware that there is a self at that time that is having those experiences and that unites them into one field of consciousness. Moreover, you are also aware that the very same self had the experiences at t1, t2, and t3. Finally, you are aware that the self that had all the experiences is none other than you yourself. This is pictured in figure 13.1.

Figure 13.1. Basic experience of the self

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Through introspection, you are aware that you are the self that owns and unifies your experiences at each moment of time and that you are the same self that endures through time. This is pretty obvious to most people. When one hums a tune, one is simply aware of being the enduring subject that continues to exist during the process. This is basic datum of experience.

Moreover, fear of some painful event in the future or blame and punishment for some deed in the past appear to make sense only if we implicitly assume that it is literally I myself that will experience the pain or that was the doer of the past deed. If I do not remain the same through time, it is hard to make sense of these cases of fear and punishment. We would not have such fear or merit such punishment if the person in the future or past merely resembled my current self in having similar memories, psychological traits, or a body spatiotemporally continuous with mine or that had many of the same parts as my current body.27

Finally, some have argued that to realize the truth of any proposition or even entertain it as meaningful the very same self must be aware of its different parts (e.g., those expressed by the associated sentence’s subject, verb, predicate). If one person-stage contemplated the subject, another stage the verb, and still another the predicate, literally no self would persist to think through and grasp the proposition as a whole.

For these and other reasons, some argue that we are warranted in believing that the I or self survives over time as the same object. Admittedly, this argument is controversial and not all accept it. Some argue that it just seems absurd to think that if a tree loses a branch or leaf, it is not the same tree. Advocates of the argument respond that if we take the atomic theory of matter seriously, then there is a difference between the manifest world (the world of common sense with ordinary sized objects that are available to the senses) and the scientific image (“objects” in the manifest world are largely filled with empty space and are made up of billions of atoms and molecules). Given that the scientific image is right about all objects without souls, then those objects are actually mereological aggregates that are subject to mereological essentialism. Thus science requires us to give up our commonsense intuitions based on the manifest image. Others argue that all living things have a “soul” in the sense that there is a unifying metaphysical principle of life in trees, dogs, and so on

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that render living things substances and not mereological aggregates. Thus, regarding living things, they do survive alteration of parts. In sum, this argument is controversial, and philosophers are divided about its value.

4—THREE VERSIONS OF SUBSTANCE DUALISM There are three versions of substance dualism (remember, we are using this to mean that there is an immaterial self/soul/mind/I and it is not identical to its body; we do not necessarily mean a dualism of two substances, though some versions of Cartesian dualism hold to this) that are currently most popular: Cartesian dualism, which stands as an heir to Descartes’s dualism, Thomistic/Aristotelian dualism, and Haskerian dualism, named after the contemporary philosopher William Hasker. The first two versions of dualism have several different subversions that cash out the main view in different ways.

4.1 Cartesian Dualism

4.1.1 The Mind Replaces the Soul

Cartesian dualism is the name given to a group of closely related versions of substance dualism that all stand downstream from Descartes. Contemporary Cartesian dualists are Richard Swinburne, Stewart Goetz, and Charles Taliaferro. Prior to Descartes, Aristotelian dualism (see below) defined the soul as an immaterial substance that contains consciousness and animates/makes living its body. However, Descartes and contemporary Cartesians reduce the soul to the mind (i.e., a conscious thing) in this sense: for Cartesians, the mind is an immaterial substance that contains consciousness (exemplifies mental properties). Descartes’s reduction of the soul to the mind brought about an identification of the person with a purely conscious substance or at least a substance with the ultimate capacities for consciousness. The mind does not animate or enliven the body.

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4.1.2 The Body

Descartes viewed the body as a physical machine. His substance dualism involved a dualism of two separable substances—mind and body. For modern Cartesians, the mind is a substance and the body is a purely physical property-thing or mereological aggregate. Either way, the body is a physical object totally describable in physical terms.

4.1.3 The Mind-Body Relationship

The Cartesian notion of the body includes the idea that the sole relationship between the mind and the body is an external causal relationship. What makes body B belong to mind A is that when something happens to B (e.g., it is stuck with a pin), A feels the mental effect—a pain. And when certain things happen to or in A (A wills his arm to rise in order to vote), the effect occurs in B (B’s arm rises). The Cartesian notion of the mind-body relationship also includes three different ways to locate the mind relative to its body. Some hold the body is not spatial in any sense. Others claim that while the mind lacks spatial extension, like an unextended mathematical point, the mind is located at some specific place in the body. Still others hold the mind is holenmerically in the body—fully present to the body as a whole and fully present at each spatial point within the body’s boundary.

All the arguments for generic dualism count in favor of Cartesian dualism.

4.1.4 Three Arguments Against Cartesian Dualism

Jaegwon Kim has raised three arguments against Cartesian dualism.28 First, there is what is called the causal pairing problem. Suppose two guns—A and B—are simultaneously fired, causing the simultaneous deaths of Adam and Bob. What makes it the case that firing A caused Adam’s death and firing B caused Bob’s death and not vice versa? Kim’s response is that the solution here must appeal to spatial orientation and relation, thus these spatial features are necessary conditions for causality; they solve the causal pairing problem. It is because gun A is spatially oriented in Adam’s direction and we can trace a spatial path of the bullet from A to Adam that we can explain why A hit Adam and not Bob. And the same explanation

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resolves the problem of pairing B with Bob. But spaceless Cartesian minds lack these spatial features; thus they fall prey to the pairing argument.

We offer four responses to the causal pairing problem. First, it seems question-begging and just plain false to assert that spatial features are necessary conditions for causality and causal pairing. There are clearly conceivable possible worlds with no space at all in which God the Father could cause a thought to occur in God the Son’s center of consciousness and not the Holy Spirit’s (setting aside problems of omniscience, which are not relevant here), or one angel could communicate a thought to a specific angel and not another angel. Indeed, certain cases of physical causation fail to satisfy Kim’s spatial conditions. Consider two closely associated electron guns such that each fires simultaneously an electron through a slit. Suppose further that the probability spaces for the electrons overlap each other. If we assume quantum indeterminacy is ontological, then there is no reason why one electron’s landing counts as being caused by the first gun instead of the other electron’s landing.

Second, some (e.g., Timothy O’Connor) have argued that there may be a nonspatial, metaphysical analogue to space—a sort of metaphysical grid —that provides a nonspatial “location” for each soul, and this location is all that is needed to pair a given soul to a given body.

Third, philosophers distinguish general causation, which holds between types of events due to their properties and, therefore, can be expressed in the form of a law (e.g., smoking-type events cause cancer-type events), from singular causation, which holds between particular events precisely as individuals. It could be argued that the types of spatial examples used by Kim (gun A hitting Adam) are examples of general causation (the type of event of being a gun firing with certain types of spatial features causes the type of event of being a hitting event). But the causal interaction between a spaceless Cartesian mind and its body is a case of singular causation. In this case, as a matter of brute fact, there just is a causal tie between a specific mind and a specific body. If theism is true, it may well be that God created a specific soul to be related to a specific body and there is nothing further to say.

Finally, most Cartesians do not believe the mind is spaceless. While they do believe the soul has no spatial extension, most hold that the soul exists at a precise point within its body or is holenmerically present in its

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body. This may well solve the pairing problem, but it leads to Kim’s second criticism of Cartesian dualism.

According to Kim, if one locates the mind (which is like an unextended mathematical point) in the body, then it must be at one exact point only. It does not make sense to say it exists at several points within the body simultaneously. But now Cartesianism seems arbitrary. Where is this point, and why is the mind located there and not some other place? And if we hold that minds are subject to spatial exclusion (only one mind per location), why not just treat them as odd material objects?

One may respond to Kim that he offers no argument for why a mind/soul cannot exist at several points at once, and millions of people through the ages have found this idea perfectly intelligible. While there are different ways to understand God’s omnipresence, one is to hold that God occupies space holenmerically by being fully present at each spatial location. We may not be able to picture this, but so what? We can’t picture humanness or triangularity, but these are perfectly intelligible notions. Without a good argument against holenmerism, we feel no compulsion to say it is unintelligible.

Further, if we say the soul is located at exactly one location only, it is hard to see much of a defeater in our inability to know where that place is. If we have good reasons to believe in the soul, and to hold it is located at exactly one point only, then it just may be the case that our cognitive powers are not up to the task of knowing where that point is. This sort of thing happens all the time. We often know much about some object while, at the same time, we seem unable to know other features of the object. Indeed, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle claims that we cannot know the simultaneous exact position and momentum of a particle, but this does not mean we have no reason to believe the particle exists or that we know a lot about it. And what about the question, why this point and not another? This sort of question is a bad one because it is iterative. The question arises for each point at which we locate a mind (why there and not some place else), so it is in principle unanswerable.

Finally, the reason we hold the soul to be immaterial even if spatial exclusion applies to it is quite simple: a thing is what it is in virtue of its properties, and the properties of a Cartesian mind are spiritual and not physical.

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Kim’s third argument amounts to the claim that if the soul is a spatially located mathematical point, how could it have enough structure to engage in all the causal work it performs?

It is hard to see much of a point to this problem. Think of it this way. The structure of the soul is constituted by an immense, interrelated ordered set of properties/inseparable parts and not a single property of the soul requiring spatial extension to be exemplified. By contrast, if something is to exemplify a color, say red, it must have spatial extension. But being a sensation, a thought, a desire, a belief, a volitional choice does not involve spatial extension. In particular, one’s various powers to do different things are not located such that one power is to the left of another, or one thought is on top of another! The obvious lack of a need for spatial extension for mental properties to form the structure of a soul or spirit is why in the history of monotheism people have been clear that God’s inner life is a complicated structure of mental states even though God is not spatially extended. So it seems that Kim has created a problem where one does not exist.

4.2 A Thomistic/Aristotelian-like Dualism

There are many different versions of Thomistic/Aristotelian dualism. Contemporary Thomistic dualism of one sort or another are held by Ed Feser, Eleonore Stump, and Peter Kreeft. The version presented here draws heavily from the late medieval Aristotelians.29

4.2.1 The Soul

The human soul (hereafter, simply soul) is a simple (containing no separable parts), spatially unextended substance that contains the capacities for consciousness and for animating, enlivening, and teleologically developing its body. In this way, the body is actually a mode of the soul (e.g., the soul could exist without the body, but not vice versa because a “body” without a soul is not a body, it’s a corpse). The essence of the soul may be thought of as information or a blueprint: it contains a precisely ordered set of internal dispositions or powers that, when actualized, direct

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the development of its body. Thus many advocates of this view claim that the body is in the soul in the sense that the body is an actualized structure that corresponds to and is a manifestation of the isomorphic, internal structure—the essence—that resides in the soul. Thus most of the soul’s powers (e.g., the power of sight) can be actualized only by the development of the proper organ (e.g., the eye) on which that power depends during embodiment.

Further, the essence of the soul is constituted by determinate/determinable properties, namely, human personhood. Thus, being a human is a sufficient condition for being a person. The faculties of the soul (e.g., the mind, will, spirit, emotions, powers to produce and enliven a body) are inseparable parts/modes of the soul containing a group of naturally resembling powers/capacities. The essence of the soul grounds membership in a thing’s natural kind and should be understood in terms of Aristotelian essentialism. Thus it is because Joe has the essence human personhood that he is classified in the class of human persons instead of, say, penguins.

The late medieval Aristotelians (1225–1671) drew a distinction between a thick particular (the entire concrete organism including the body; the thin particular plus accidents) and the thin particular (the essence/ form, the nexus of exemplification, and an individuator, in their case, prime matter).30 On this version of Thomistic/ Aristotelian dualism, the human person is identical to his soul (the thin particular) and his soul contains three metaphysical constituents—a human essence, exemplification, and an individuator.31 The individuated essence is the ground, developer, unifier, and coordinator of the various modes that are seated as faculties (natural groupings of potentialities/dispositions) within it.

4.2.2 The Body and the Body-Soul Relationship

According to this version of Thomistic/Aristotelian dualism, which we will call metaphysical Aristotelianism, living organisms are not mereological aggregates/systems composed of separable parts, bundles of properties, or concrete organisms construed as some sort of whole. Rather, the consensus during this period was that the living organism is a thin particular, namely, an essence exemplified by an individuator (usually prime matter) that

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stands under (substands) the accidental features of the organism, including its body.32 The thin particular is identical to the organism’s soul, it is mereologically simple (not composed of separable parts) yet metaphysically complex (containing a complex essence, exemplification, and an individuator), and it is holenmerically present throughout the organism’s body (fully present to the body as a whole and fully present at each part of the body). In this way, according to some models of omnipresence, spatially speaking, the soul is to the body as God is to space in general.

There are four central metaphysical roles played by the thin particular: (1) It grounds the special sort of deep, synchronic unity of living things, especially in comparison to mereological aggregates/systems. (2) It grounds a living thing’s ability to be a continuant, sustaining strict, absolute identity through certain changes (including part replacement in the organism’s body). (3) It provides the ontological ground for placing the organism in its natural kind and unifying that kind. (4) It unifies and develops over time in a lawlike way the various modes of the substantial soul, including the body.

Another feature of metaphysical Aristotelianism is the central importance of the body for the functioning of the thin particular’s (soul’s) powers in the normal course of things and in the actualization of the soul’s various capacities. Speaking of the human soul, Dennis Des Chene observes that “the human soul is not merely joined with the body in fact. It is the kind of soul which, though capable of separate existence . . . nevertheless by its nature presupposes union with a body, and moreover with a particular kind of body, a body with organs, in order to exercise all its powers—even reason.”33 Elsewhere, Des Chene notes: “Even the intellect requires, so long as the soul is joined with a body, a certain disposition of the brain.”34

Thus the search for specific neurological causal/functional/dependency conditions associated with the actualization of the soul’s capacities for consciousness is not only consistent with but also entailed by metaphysical Aristotelianism. Such a search would not provide information about the intrinsic nature of the capacity or the property it actualizes (e.g., pain) nor about the possessor of that capacity (the soul, not the brain). But it would provide information about the bodily conditions required for its actualization. This form of dualism is quite at home with the existence of contemporary neurological findings.

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As Pasnau notes, a further feature of metaphysical Aristotelianism is the view that the soul “plays a straightforwardly causal role, explaining both the behavior and the physical structure of an animal’s body.”35 In this sense, not only is the soul the formal/essential cause of the body, but it also becomes (1) an internal efficient first-moving cause of the development and structure of the body (2) and the teleological guide for that development and structure (thus function determines form).

Here, the soul is a substance with an essence or inner nature that contains, as a primitive unity, a complicated, structural arrangement of capacities/dispositions for developing a body (and, of course, the other faculties or modes). Taken collectively this entire ordered structure is unextended, holenmerically present throughout the body, and constitutes the soul’s principle of activity that governs the precise, ordered sequence of changes that the substance will (normally) go through in the process of growth and development. The various physical/chemical parts and processes (including DNA) are tools—instrumental causes—employed by higher-order biological activities in order to sustain the various functions grounded in the soul. Thus the soul is the first efficient cause of the body’s development as well as the final cause of its functions and structure, which are internally related to the soul’s essence.36 The functional demands of the soul’s essence determine the character of the tools, but they, in turn, constrain and direct the various chemical processes that take place in the body as a whole. In this way, metaphysical Aristotelianism implies that the organism as a whole (the soul) is ontologically prior to its bodily parts. This understanding of the soul’s essence, along with the soul’s holenmeric presence in and to the body, makes such an essence very similar to the notion of information as it is used in biology today.

Moreover, an organism’s parts are inseparable parts that stand in internal relations to other parts and to the soul’s individuated essence; they are literally functional entities constituted by their role in the organism as a whole. The body is developed and grows in a teleological way by means of a series of lawlike developmental events, rooted in the internal essence of the soul. The first-efficient cause of the characteristics of an organism’s body is its soul (which contains a blueprint or information in its individuated essence); the various body parts, including DNA and genes,

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are important instrumental causes the soul uses to produce the traits that arise. This sort of view, along with the holism with which it is associated, is also gaining ascendency in biology.37

In summary, according to this version of the Thomistic/Aristotelian view of substance expressed in metaphysical Aristotelianism: (1) the organism as a whole (the soul) is ontologically prior to its inseparable parts/modes; (2) the parts of the organism’s body stand in internal relations to other parts and to the soul’s essence; they are literally functional entities (the heart functions literally to pump blood); (3) the operational functions of the body are rooted in the internal structure of the soul; in this way, the internal structure or essence is the blueprint, the information that is responsible for the body’s structure and functions; (4) the body is developed and grows teleologically as a series of developmental events that occur in a lawlike way rooted in the internal essence of the human soul; (5) the first efficient cause of the characteristics of the human body is the soul, and various body parts, including DNA and genes, are important instrumental causes the soul uses to produce the traits that arise; (6) the body is a mode of the soul (the soul could exist without the body but not conversely; a body without a soul is a corpse), and as such it is an ensouled physical structure; thus there are two aspects to the body—a soulish, immaterial and a physical.

4.2.3 An Objection to Thomistic/Aristotelian-like Dualism: It is a Form of an Abandoned Vitalism

William Hasker has forcefully raised the objection that this form of dualism is actually a version of vitalism that has rightly been rejected by scientists for a long time.38 In response, it should be pointed out that vitalism has been misunderstood frequently because the concepts of that debate have been used in many different ways. For example, during its zenith as a scientific research program, there were several distinct forms of vitalism. The more crude forms of vitalism have rightly been rejected because of their tendency to depict the individuated essence as either a spatially located vital entity, a force, or a fluid (like caloric or phlogiston) viewed as a mechanistic entity alongside other mechanical parts. This strategy reduced the living organism to a special sort of mereological aggregate with just another mechanical (though immaterial) part.

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The version of dualism being described in this section is more like what biologists call organicism or holism, and it is making a comeback today among biologists. According to Thomistic/Aristotelian-like dualism, along with the soul’s holenmeric presence in and to the body, this understanding of the soul’s essence makes it very similar to the notion of information, as used in biology today.

While scientists can usually tell you what (nonpropositional) information does or how it is measured, they find it difficult to define. At a minimum, information is the reduction of possibilities.39 If Scott tells you he lives in California, for example, that small bit of information leaves open many possibilities. But if Scott gave you his town and street address, this new information eliminates a significant number of possibilities. In addition, biologist Jonathan Wells claims that information is a sui generis, an irreducible entity that is an immaterial, unextended, multifaceted blueprint for organismic development. As such, information is present/available to the organism as a whole, and fully present/available to each cell integrated into the organism (organisms have numerous bacterial cells that, while they play an important symbiotic role with organisms, are not, strictly speaking, “parts” of the organism) and, as such, teleologically guides the organism’s development towards maturity.40 If information is not identical to an Aristotelian essence, it seems at least to be very close. A minority of biologists, then, are returning to a type of Aristotelian essentialism.41 And a growing minority of biologists are reintroducing irreducible teleology into the field.42

4.3 Haskerian Substance Dualism

4.3.1 Hasker’s View

According to William Hasker, when matter reaches a certain level of complexity (e.g., a certain sort of brain and nervous system), a new substance emerges—a soul—that exercises libertarian freedom, is a genuine continuant, and under God’s sustaining power can survive the death of the body.43 Thus the soul is an emergent individual. And just as a magnetic

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field is an emergent entity with different properties from those characteristic of what generates the field, the soul has mental and not physical traits.

Moreover, Hasker claims that the soul is spatially extended for a distance at least as wide as the parts of the brain with which it interacts. For Hasker, extension is primitive—an amount of extension is not built up out of separable, spatial parts—and, in this way, the soul is simple. But since it is extended, a Haskerian soul is capable of being divided into different selves, perhaps when the brain is split.

Finally, Hasker claims that at least two advantages accrue to his view. First, it is more in keeping with science than other versions of substance dualism because it is a version of emergentism, and a growing number of philosophers and scientists think emergent phenomena fit nicely into the developing scientific worldview. Second, in certain cases, experiments are done on people whose corpus callosum connecting two hemispheres is severed to some degree. These people seem to exhibit phenomena that can be interpreted as there being two selves present, and since a Haskerian soul is spatially extended, it could divide two selves associated with what appear to be two streams of consciousness.

4.3.2 A Response to Haskerian Substance Dualism

What should we make of Haskerian substance dualism? First, while there are many examples of structurally supervenient properties (e.g., the jawbone of an ant is simply a new structural arrangement of the parts and properties that exist at the subvenient level), there are almost no uncontroversial examples of genuinely emergent properties (new kinds of properties) that appear at the higher level that do not characterize the entities at the subvenient level. There are basically three examples usually offered as emergent: secondary qualities (colors, smells, sounds, etc.), mental properties, and normative properties (e.g., a human person having intrinsic value). Let us deal with the latter two examples. When a new kind of property appears in the world, it may be emergent, but it may also signal the presence of a new substance where the substance is not an emergent entity and the new property simply belongs to the new substance. Many substance dualists will say that the appearance of mental properties signals a new nonemergent substance—the soul—and not an emergent substance. And they will say the same thing of normative properties—for example, a

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new substance (a human person) simply possesses intrinsic value according to its nature, so that property is not emergent from a subvenient base on which it depends. Secondary qualities are a bit more difficult to analyze, and interacting with the various strategies is not possible here. At a minimum, if there is only one sort of uncontroversial emergent property, it is going too far to say that treating the self as emergent fits a general pattern that appears in science.

Regarding split-brain phenomena, some argue that Tim Bayne has provided a better solution to these phenomena than Hasker’s more extreme two-self view.44 Before we describe a split-brain experiment, a few preliminaries are in order. Recall that a phenomenal conscious state (e.g., seeing a rose) is constituted by the what-it-is-like of that state. Further, if one has a phenomenal state of seeing A and another such state of seeing B, then the phenomenal unity of consciousness thesis implies that there will also be a totalizing, unified state of seeing A and seeing B that has its own what-it-is-like to it. Finally, the left hemisphere controls verbal reporting and right hand movement while the right hemisphere controls the left hand. Now, in a split-brain experiment, the two hemispheres are isolated such that no electric signals or other physical interactions between the hemispheres are possible. The experiment is set up such that the patient’s left eye can see only the right visual field within which the word ring appears. And the patient’s right eye can see only the left visual field within which the word key appears. When asked what he sees, the patient, relying on the left hemisphere, will report seeing ring and point to it with the right hand. But while relying on the right hemisphere, the patient sees key, points to it with the left hand, but does not verbally report seeing key. In this case, it seems that phenomenal unity is destroyed (there is no unified what-it-is-like to see key-ring), there are two independent streams of consciousness, and if a stream of consciousness requires a self, then there are now two selves that result from splitting the brain.

What should we make of such experiments? The first thing to notice is that, outside the very specific confines of the experiment, split-brain subjects exhibit normal, phenomenally unified behavior in their normal lives. Metaphysically speaking, it is hard to see how an act of removing an experimental apparatus has the effect of causing one self to cease to exist,

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that is, of reducing two selves back to one. Surely we should interpret these experiments so as to avoid this problem. Second, recalling the distinction between phenomenal consciousness (conscious states for which there is a what-it-is-like to be in that state) and access consciousness (where a mental state is available for verbal report, reasoning and guiding behavior), it may well be that split-brain subjects retain phenomenal unity—so there is just one self present—but that self undergoes access disunity due to the abnormal situation that characterizes these experiments.

Is there a better interpretation of split-brain phenomena? Many think so, and Bayne has offered a promising solution called the switch model. Here consciousness (we would say the self that has consciousness) switches from one hemisphere to another, back and forth, in rapid succession. Consciousness does not occur simultaneously in (or by means of) both hemispheres. So there is a kind of fluctuating extinction (e.g., when the left hemisphere is activated or employed, stimuli in the right visual field win the competition for entry into consciousness at the expense of what is available to the left visual field). Rapid switching gives the impression that the subject is aware of more than is actually the case (e.g., being aware of key- ring as a whole). Interhemispheric activational switching marches in step with the subject’s attentional focus, so the subject is never aware of key-ring at a given time. Behavior might suggest such a simultaneous awareness (by reporting ring based on left hemisphere activation while at the same time pointing to key based on right hemisphere activation), but this can be explained by the rapidity of the switch from left to right and so on. So the switch model preserves the unity of phenomenal conscious and, for us, the presence of a single self, and that is to be preferred to Hasker’s solution.

We conclude this section with three more problems for Haskerian dualism. First, while human persons may be divisible and come in degrees with regard to their functioning (I may lose 25 percent of my mental functioning if subjected to a disease or accident; in split-brain experiments, people may be divided in their functioning), it is highly counterintuitive, to say the least, that they can be divided in their being. Persons and souls are all-or-nothing entities—there is either a soul or person present or there is not—they do not come in degrees like a physical object. One can split a table in half and have two halves, or cut part of the table off and have 75

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percent of a table left. But it hardly makes sense to think of people this way. Since Hasker’s view says people are divisible, this counts against his view.

Second, when virtually anything else is divided—a rock, a methane molecule—it does not always end up with equally existing results (two exact halves of a table or a methane molecule). Most objects can be divided into a wide variety of percentages. So why is it that when a Haskerian soul is divided, given its spatial extension, the result is two full souls each with its own stream of consciousness? Why don’t we sometimes get one division product as 85 percent of a person and the other 15 percent of a person? It seems arbitrary to say simply that this is a brute fact, and in this case it appears to be better to say that persons just aren’t divisible at all, and go on to find a better solution to split-brain phenomena or cases of multiple personalities.

Finally, Haskerian dualism suffers in light of a problem of gradual loss of body parts. Remember, for Hasker, a new soul emerges at just the point the brain reaches an appropriate level of parts and complexity. Call this point E. Now it is clearly the case that a new soul would not emerge if a brain-type object with just two neurons appeared. Call this point M. Now if we were to take just one atom away from the brain at point E to form point E-1, surely E-1 could give rise to and sustain an emergent soul. But if we considered removing one atom at a time, at some point before we reached point M, if we removed just one tiny atom, as a matter of ontological fact, we would be at a place where no soul could emerge. But now we have a serious problem. How could such a tiny, almost insignificant cause (the removal of that last atom) have such a massive, significant effect (causing the soul to pop out of existence). Or consider E versus E-1. A soul comes to be at E but not at E-1. But how could this be, given that the difference between them is the presence or absence of one tiny atom? Indeed, the distinction between E and E-1 seems utterly arbitrary, yet Hasker’s view seems stuck with these sorts of issues.

So much for analyzing versions of substance dualism. It is time to turn to offering a characterization of human and animal souls.

5—HUMAN AND ANIMAL SOULS

Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2025-02-04 15:06:46.

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The soul is a very complicated thing with an intricate structure. In order to understand that structure, we need to grasp two important issues: the different types of states within the soul and the notion of a faculty of the soul. The soul is a substantial, unified reality that informs its body. The soul is to the body as God is to space—it is fully “present” at each point within the body. Further, the soul and body relate to each other in a cause-effect way. For example, if I worry in my soul, my brain chemistry will change; if I will to raise my arm in my soul, the arm goes up. The soul also contains various mental states within it, for example, sensations, thoughts, beliefs, desires, and acts of will. This is not as complicated as it sounds. Water can be in a cold or a hot state. Likewise, the soul can be in a feeling or thinking state.

5.1 The Human Soul

5.1.1 Five States of the Soul

Let us review the different states of consciousness that take place within the soul (the states of the soul). As we have already seen, there are at least five different states contained in the soul. A sensation is a state of awareness, a mode of consciousness, for example, a conscious awareness of sound or pain. A visual sensation like an experience of a tree is a state of the soul, not a state of the eyeballs. The eyes do not see. I (my soul) see with or by means of the eyes. A thought is a mental content that can be expressed in an entire sentence and that only exists while it is being thought. Some thoughts logically imply other thoughts. For example, “All dogs are mammals” entails “Some dogs are mammals.” If the former is true, the latter must be true. Some thoughts don’t entail, but merely provide evidence for other thoughts. A belief is a person’s view, accepted to varying degrees of strength, of how things really are. If a person has a belief (e.g., that it is raining), then that belief serves as the basis for the person’s tendency to act on that belief (e.g., one gets an umbrella). At any given time, one can have many beliefs that are not currently being contemplated. A desire is a certain inclination to do, have, or experience certain things. Desires are either

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conscious or such that they can be made conscious through certain activities, for example, through therapy. An act of will is a volition or choice, an exercise of power, an endeavoring to do a certain thing, usually for the sake of some purpose or end.

5.1.2 Faculties of the Soul

In addition to its states, at any given time, the soul has a number of capacities that are not currently being actualized or utilized. To understand this, consider an acorn. The acorn has certain actual characteristics or states —a specific size or color. It also has a number of capacities or potentialities that could become actual if certain things happen. For example, the acorn has the capacity to grow a root system or change into the shape of a tree. Likewise, the soul has capacities. I have the ability to see color, think about math, or desire ice cream even when I am asleep and not in the actual states just mentioned.

Capacities come in hierarchies. There are first-order capacities, second- order capacities to have these first-order capacities, and so on, until ultimate capacities are reached. For example, if I can speak English but not Russian, then I have the first-order capacity for English as well as the second-order capacity to have this first-order capacity (which I have already developed). I also have the second-order capacity to have the capacity to speak Russian, but I lack the first-order capacity to do so. Higher-order capacities are realized by the development of lower-order capacities under them. An acorn has the ultimate capacity to draw nourishment from the soil, but this can be actualized and unfolded only by developing the lower capacity to have a root system, then developing the still lower capacities of the root system.

The adult human soul has literally thousands of capacities within its structure. But the soul is not just a collection of isolated, discrete, randomly related internal capacities. Rather, the various capacities within the soul fall into natural groupings called faculties of the soul. In order to get ahold of this, think for a moment about this list of capacities: the ability to see red, see orange, hear a dog bark, hear a tune, think about math, think about God, desire lunch, desire a family. The ability to see red is more closely related to the ability to see orange than it is to the ability to think about math. We express this insight by saying that the abilities to see red or orange are parts of the same faculty—the faculty of sight. The ability to think about math is

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a capacity within the thinking faculty. In general, a faculty is a compartment of the soul that contains a natural family of related capacities.

We are now in a position to map out the soul in more detail. All the soul’s capacities to see are part of the faculty of sight. If one’s eyeballs are defective, then the soul’s faculty of sight will be inoperative just as a driver cannot get to work in his car if the sparkplugs are broken. Likewise, if my eyeballs work but my soul is inattentive, say I am day dreaming, then I won’t see what is before me either. The soul also contains faculties of smell, touch, taste, and hearing. Taken together, these five are called sensory faculties of the soul. The will is a faculty of the soul that contains my abilities to choose. The emotional faculty of the soul contains one’s abilities to experience fear, love, and so forth.

5.1.3 Mind and Spirit

Two additional faculties of the soul are of crucial importance. The mind is that faculty of the soul that contains thoughts and beliefs along with the relevant abilities to have them. It is with my mind that I think, and my mind contains my beliefs. The spirit is that faculty of the soul through which the person relates to God (Ps 51:10; Rom 8:16; Eph 4:23).45 Before the new birth, the spirit is real and has certain abilities to be aware of God. But most of the capacities of the unregenerate spirit are dead and inoperative. At the new birth, God implants new capacities in the spirit. These fresh capacities need to be nourished and developed so they can grow.

5.2 Animal Souls

5.2.1 The Fact of Animal Souls

It is sometimes a surprise to people to learn that the Bible teaches that animals, no less than humans, have souls. In the Old Testament, nepeš (soul) and rûaḥ (spirit) are used of animals in Genesis 1:30 and Ecclesiastes 3:21, respectively. In the New Testament, psychē (soul) is used of animals in Revelation 8:9. Moreover, it is a matter of common sense that many animals (we set aside amoebae, bacteria, insects, and the like) are not

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merely unconscious machines. Rather, they are conscious, living beings with sensations, emotions (like fear), desires, and, at least for some animals, thoughts and beliefs. The history of Christian teaching is widely united in affirming the existence of the “souls of men and beasts” as it has sometimes been put. Finally, matter is not the sort of thing that can contain consciousness, but the soul is (e.g., it provides an adequate unifier for consciousness). As you may recall, it seems that, necessarily, conscious states are owned by the subject that possesses them. There are no ownerless conscious states! So if animals are conscious, then they have a subjective owner, and the best candidate for this owner is the soul. But what is the animal soul like? Can it survive the death of the animal? Let us consider these two questions in the order in which they were just raised.

5.2.2 How Do We Determine the Nature of Animal Souls?

How do we decide what an animal’s soul is like? Obviously we cannot inspect it directly. We cannot get inside an animal’s conscious life and just look at its internal states. The best approach seems to be this: based on our direct awareness of our own inner lives, we should attribute to animals by analogy those states that are necessary to account for the animal’s behavior, nothing more and nothing less.46 For example, if a dog is stuck with a pin and a short time later it howls and holds up its paw, we are justified in attributing to the dog the same sort of state that happens in us just after such a stick and just prior to our own form of grimacing. The dog feels pain. Now the dog may also be having thoughts about the morality of sticking animals with pins, but there is no adequate evidence for this if we stick to what we observe about the dog’s behavior. Such an attribution would be unjustified.

An interesting implication of this approach is that as we move down the animal chain to creatures that are increasingly unlike humans, for example, from primates to amoebae, insects, or earthworms, we are increasingly unjustified in ascribing a mental life to those animals. Now an organism either does or does not have a conscious life; for example, a worm either does or does not feel pain. But we have more grounds for ascribing painful sensations to primates than to worms according to the methodology above. Thomistic/Aristotelian dualists, but not Cartesian or Haskerian dualists,

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would say that all living animals have souls if they have organic life, regardless of the degree to which they are conscious, but we are justified in attributing less and less to the animal soul as the animal in question bears a weaker analogy to us.

5.2.3 The Nature of Animal Souls

In light of this methodology, what can we say about animal souls? Obviously, our answer will vary depending on the animal in question. But it seems reasonable to say that many animals have certain sorts of sensations, for example, experiences of taste and pain. Many if not most animals seem to have desires as well, say a desire for food. Some animals appear to engage in thinking and have certain sorts of beliefs. For example, a dog seems to be able to engage in means-to-ends reasoning. If he wants to go through a specific door to get food, and if the door is closed, he can select an alternative means to achieve the desired end. Many animals also engage in willings; that is, they will to do certain things, though there is no adequate evidence to suggest that they have libertarian freedom. It is more likely that the animal will is determined by its beliefs, desires, sensations, and bodily states.

There are several capacities that animals do not seem to have. We have already mentioned libertarian freedom of the will. Animals also do not seem to have moral awareness. Animals do not seem to grasp key notions central to morality, for example, the notion of a virtue, of a duty, of another thing’s having intrinsic value and rights, of universalizing a moral judgment, and so on. They cannot distinguish between what they desire most and what is most desirable intrinsically. Alleged altruistic behavior can be explained on the basis of animal desire without attributing a sense of awareness of intrinsic duty to the animal.

Animals, therefore, do not seem to be capable of having a conflict between desire and duty, though they can experience a conflict between desires (e.g., to bite the chair and to avoid being spanked). Animals do not seem to be able to entertain various sorts of abstract thoughts, for example, thoughts about matter in general or about love in general or even about food in general. Moreover, animals do not seem to be able to distinguish between true universal judgments (all alligators are dangerous) and mere statistical

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generalizations (most alligators are dangerous), nor do they have a concept of truth itself.

While this is controversial and we may be wrong in this judgment, animals do not seem to possess language.47 One problem that keeps people from getting clear about this is certain ambiguities about what language is. More specifically, the question of animal language cannot be adequately discussed without drawing a distinction between a sign and a symbol. A sign is a sense-perceptible object, usually a shaped thing like banana or a sound (the utterance of banana). Now if an animal (or human infant for that matter) comes to experience repeatedly the simultaneous presence of a sign (the visual presentation of banana) and the presence of a real banana, a habitual association will be set up such that the animal will anticipate the sense perception of a real banana shortly after seeing this shape: banana. In this case, banana does not represent or mean a banana, so it is not a symbol. Rather, banana is merely a certain geometrically perceived shape that comes to be associated with a banana in such a way that the latter is anticipated when the former is observed.

By contrast, real language requires symbols and not mere signs. When language users use the word banana, it is used to represent, mean, and refer to actual bananas. Now the evidence suggests that animals have certain abilities to manipulate and behaviorally respond to signs, but it is far from clear that they have a concept of symbols. One reason for this claim is the lack in animals of grammatical creativity and logical thought about language itself that is present in real language users.

Finally, St. Augustine once noted that animals have desires, but they do not have desires to have desires. They may have beliefs, volitions, thoughts, and sensations, but they do not seem to have beliefs about their beliefs, they do not choose to work on their choices, they don’t think about their thinking, and they are not aware of their awarenesses. Nor do they seem to be aware of themselves as selves. In short, they do not seem to be able to transcend their own states and engage in reflection about their own selves and the states within them.

Animals are precious creatures of God and ought to be respected as such. But the animal soul is not as richly structured as the human soul, it

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does not bear the image of God, and it is far more dependent on the animal’s body and its sense organs than is the human soul.

CHAPTER SUMMARY This chapter began by providing a metaphysical framework or lexicon for understanding the rest of the chapter. Next, we defined and defended generic substance dualism by presenting six arguments on its behalf. Then we analyzed three versions of substance dualism—Cartesian, Thomistic/Aristotelian-like, and Haskerian—and presented arguments for and against each view. Next, the chapter described the difference between human and animal souls in terms of states and faculties of the soul, and a methodology was presented for determining what sort of soul a given animal has.

CHECKLIST OF BASIC TERMS AND CONCEPTS act of will

agent action

belief

capacity (higher and lower)

Cartesian dualism

causal pairing problem

complete in species

conceptual possibility

corpus callosum

desire

epiphenomenalism

Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2025-02-04 15:06:46.

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epistemic possibility

event-event causation

faculty of the soul

first-person point of view

generic causation

generic substance dualism

Haskerian dualism

holenmerism

holism

indexical I

inseparable part

libertarian freedom

mereological aggregate

metaphysical Aristotelianism

metaphysical grid

metaphysical possibility

mind

modal argument

mode

near death experience

organicism

sensation

separable part

sign

Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2025-02-04 15:06:46.

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simple argument

singular causation

substance

subsumptive phenomenal unity

spirit

split-brain phenomena

state of the soul

symbol

synchronicity

switch model

thick particular

thin particular

Thomistic/Aristotelian dualism

thought

totalizing state

unity of consciousness

vitalism

Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2025-02-04 15:06:46.

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