A Theory of Soul Consistent with Scripture and Neuroscience - Part 14: Free Will Needs the Substrate of Randomness

              Some time ago I introduced the hypothesis that the soul has an “efferent system” and that one part of this efferent system was responsible for the “soul-to-brain” (or “immaterial-to-material”) interaction.  I suggested that this was the quintessential mystery surrounding the concept of a soul.  Specifically, how does the soul, which (presumably) is immaterial, have an effect on a living thing, which is material/physical?  I said I had a theory about how that happens, and now it is time to dive into that theory.  In today’s entry, I am just going to lay the groundwork of where in the universe we should look for the actual immaterial-to-material action.  With respect to the mechanism itself, we will discuss that in more depth in the future. 

              I mentioned in the entry where I introduced the efferent system of the soul that the problem of how an immaterial thing like the soul could have any influence on something material like the brain, is a long-discussed problem.  If you’d like to get some background on that from a really excellent series of videos, I strongly recommend the series of videos that Jeffrey Kaplan (U North Carolina) has put together.  Specifically, the video about Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia critique of Rene Descartes’ dualism would give you a great basic background, which you can find <here>.

              Today, though, I’d like to start at a more philosophical level.  I’m going to try to address the following three questions:

 

1.  What are the conditions under which an immaterial “willed” thing might influence a physical thing?

 

2.  Why haven’t we already discovered that influence? 

 

3.  Wouldn’t willed actions break the laws of physics?

 

              I’m going to use an illustration that I have partially introduced in the past <here>.  Once we’ve worked through it, then I will go back and show how it provides insight into answers for the three questions I’ve posed.  I think the illustration also answers a common criticism of many opponents of free will, so we will finish up by addressing that issue at the end.

              The illustration I’m going to describe is a theoretical experiment involving some measurements with a penny.  The experiment involves a robot gripper that holds a penny vertically – i.e. the faces of the penny are perpendicular to the surface they are dropped onto.  The gripper is 1 meter above a very solid and flat base.  The apparatus includes an extremely accurate means of recording when the gripper opens (and the penny starts to drop), and when the edge of the penny first hits the table.  Thus, the “time of flight” can be calculated very accurately.  Further the entire apparatus is carefully set up so that when the penny hits the base, it will bounce around and eventually land half of the time with the heads up and half of the time with tails up (and never stays on edge!). 

              For the purposes of this illustration, there are some features that might be hard to duplicate in an actual experiment, but for which we can easily imagine an apparatus that was designed as described.  The experiment will be performed in a total vacuum so that there is no influence of air molecules on the time-of-flight of the coin.  The base of the apparatus will be perfectly flat and hard, such that repeated experimentation does not wear out the base (and, we’ll assume the penny doesn’t wear out either…or that we have an infinite supply of perfectly matched pennies).  Also, the base does not move relative to the center of the earth.  There is no earthquake during our experiment.  I suppose we’ll have to imagine eliminating the gravitational pull of the moon and similar extraneous forces.

              The point of these features is this:  when we calculate the gravitational constant of the penny falling from its 1 meter height, we calculate the constant to be 9.80665 m/s² every single time.  The error in our time-of-flight measurement is less than 5 decimal places, so we never see that error in our reported value. 

              In addition to measuring the time-of-flight for each penny drop, we also record whether the penny lands heads or tails.  As mentioned, the apparatus is designed so that the distribution of heads to tails is 50:50.

              OK, great.  Now we are going to run our experiment in 100 sets of 100 trials, for a total of 10,000 data points.  Remember, it’s a thought experiment, so we can choose anything, and 10,000 data points seemed to me like a sufficiently large sample size to convince ourselves of some “certainties” in the analysis of our data.

              Now, we will average the values for each set of 100 trials for both the gravitational constant calculation and the heads:tails calculation.  The resulting outcome is pretty easy to imagine.  It’s going to look something like this:

 

Trial #            Average Gravitational Constant (m/s²)            Number of Heads

1                                9.80665                                                                      51

2                                9.80665                                                                      48

3                                9.80665                                                                      51

4                                9.80665                                                                      54

5                                9.80665                                                                      50

6                                9.80665                                                                      52

7                                9.80665                                                                      46

8                                9.80665                                                                      47

…

100                            9.80665                                                                      49

 

              We could plot them.  The gravitational constant would be a single point.  The number of heads would have a distribution centered around 50 (approximately) and spread out on either side of 50.  If we did enough trials, eventually we’d have one where there were 100 heads and one where there were 0 heads.  But that would take a lot of trials!

              OK – so what?  I hope this is all very pedestrian to you.  Obviously, this is what is going to happen.  If you don’t believe me, try it yourself.

              Now for the fun and interesting part.  I’m going to introduce a soul into this experiment who will exercise free will.  How, you might ask?  Well, I just happen to have a very willing soul that has free will and is readily available to assist with this experiment:  namely, me!

              So, here is what I am going to do.  Sometimes, as the penny falls, I’m going to grab it and then set it down on the table.  On some trials I will hold the penny for a bit and then set it down.  Sometimes I will actually grab it quickly and slam it down on the table faster than it would normally fall.  Sometimes I’m going to see if I can grab it but still have it hit the table at exactly the time it normally would have in a free fall.  And sometimes I’m just going to let the penny fall without interfering.  I’m not going to tell you how many trials I will interfere with – it could be every trial, or none of the trials, or somewhere in between.  Also, each time I grab the penny I will decide if I’m going to place it on the table with the heads up or the tails up (i.e. I will use my free will – it will not land randomly). 

              Finally, I’m going to place an opaque and soundproof barrier between you and the apparatus, so all you can see is the readout:  the calculated gravitational constant and whether the penny landed heads up or tails up.

              Now, your job is to identify the trials where there a soul intervened with free will, and the trials where the laws of physics were allowed to do their natural, physicalist thing.  For starters, here’s the data from the first ten trials that we did:

 

Trial #            Calculated Gravitational Constant (m/s²)            Heads or Tails

1                                   9.80665                                                                    H

2                                 11.05052                                                                    T

3                                 15.67812                                                                    T

4                                   9.80665                                                                    H

5                                   9.80665                                                                    T

6                                   7.78888                                                                    T

7                                   8.675309                                                                  T

8                                   9.81789                                                                    T

9                                   9.80665                                                                    T

10                               28.05052                                                                    T

 

              Let’s start with the gravitational data.  Can you identify in which trials free will was inserted?  Of course you can.  It is totally obvious, even though all you can see are the numbers.  Trials 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, and 10 are obviously “free will trials.”  I hope you are impressed, though, with trial #8 when I tried hard to match the natural fall of the penny and I got within 10 milliseconds!  That was pretty cool.  Also, you might also be able to identify which trial occurred while I was listening to Tommy Tutone.  The point is this:  it’s obvious which trials have free will in them.  If pennies had free will and could act like this in a purely physical system, there would be no mystery about free will.  Actually, if pennies (or any other inanimate object) had free will, we’d never know that there was a gravitational constant.  We’d just know that the entire universe was unpredictable.  But that is not what happens in a purely physical world:  it is totally predictable and exactly the same.  It is repeatable.  That’s what allows us to perform meaningful experiments.  If inanimate objects had free will, scientific inquiry couldn’t exist.

              OK, fine, now let’s move over to the heads or tails column.  If you did not have the gravitational data – just the heads/tails data – could you identify which trials are “free will trials” and which are not?  Think about it before you answer.

              You cannot tell which trials were the ones I intervened in and which trials I let normal physics play out.  In fact, if I hadn’t told you that I was going to mess with how the pennies landed, you’d never even imagine that there might be free will buried in your column of data.  This is true no matter what “pattern” of coin flips I might decide to use.  In the ten trials shown above, every time I intervened, I placed the coin down on the table with tails up.  But even knowing that information, you still can’t tell which trials are which.  Sure, at some point, if I intervened in every trial and placed the coin tails up 100 times in a row, you might get suspicious.  But regardless of what I did, you could never prove that free will was involved because a random distribution such as this includes the possibility that the coin will land tails up 100 times in a row.

              Let’s say, however, that I don’t want you to know that I’m intervening with the coins on some of the trials.  I can easily do that with a few simple rules.  Let’s say that I only intervene with a few of the 100 trials in each set.  Let’s say two – two out of 100.  And, further, let’s say what I do is decide which side I want up – heads or tails – in the first of my two trials in which I intervene.  Then, just for fun, in my second trial I always place the coin on the opposite side.  So, if I decided this set of 100 trials was going to be my “heads” set, I’d place a heads trial first and then some random number of trials later, I’d intervene and place tails.  You would have no chance of guessing which trials I intervened in.  We could repeat this 100 times…10,000 times…a google times…and you still would have no chance of accurately guessing the trials I intervened on. 

              The point is this:  we know that free will, if it acts at all, acts in a way that we cannot detect with our physical instruments.  We’ve been searching for free will since at least the “swerve” of Epicurus, and we haven’t found it.  So, how could free will have escaped our measurement all this time?  By “hiding” in randomness!  I know that many of you don’t believe that there is such a thing as free will, but I think you would agree that if free will exists, it acts within random events, not determined events.  Otherwise, we’d have observed it in action already.

              Now I’d like to circle back to my original three questions and show how this helps us answer those questions: 

             

1.  What are the conditions under which an immaterial “willed” thing might influence a physical thing?

              Answer:  free will has to have its influence through some existing random process.  In fact, if it can be proven that there are no random processes in the entire universe, then I think you will have proven that free will does not exist.  Randomness is a necessary substrate for the existence of free will (although it is not a sufficient substrate).

 

2.  Why haven’t we already discovered that influence? 

              Answer:  the action of free will within a random distribution cannot be distinguished from the other random samples by any outside observer.  And, at least when it comes to any actions by anyone else, we are always outside observers.

              Is it weird to suggest that free will “hides”?  Almost as if it had…I don’t know…a free will?  Yes, I think it is kind of weird to suggest such a thing, but, the point is, given that human beings have been searching for free will for millennia…and they haven’t found it…that would seem to indicate that it is hidden.  Also, if free will could be predicted, then it wouldn’t be free will anymore.  So, yes, I think free will is hidden – hidden from scientific discovery.  However, on the other hand, free will is the most obvious thing to every human being who exercises it.  If you don’t like something that could hide from science, then I guess you will reject free will along with other very valuable things like love and creativity.

 

3.  Wouldn’t willed actions break the laws of physics?

              Answer:  if randomness truly exists, and free will acts within the bounds of that randomness, then no laws of physics are broken.  No new energy is introduced into the physical system. 

 

              There is one more thing I’d like to mention, which is an argument that opponents of free will often bring up when anyone starts talking about free will living within randomness.  Most often, the free will proponent will say something like “quantum indeterminacy shows that free will could exist.”  The opponent will say “indeterminacy has no will – it doesn’t get you any closer to free will.”  I agree with those opponents.  If the claim being made is that “free will = randomness”, then such a claim is meaningless.  Willed events are not random events.  But the point I’m trying to make here is that free will requires randomness to exist in order for free will to exist, but free will is not the same as randomness.  Fish require water to exist – but that doesn’t make fish the same as water.

              After all this, you might claim that it is suspiciously convenient that this theory of free will makes free will something that can’t be observed, leaves no trace, does not alter the laws of physics, and therefore can never be proven to exist and can never be measured or even caught in the act.  Free will would be just like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  If free will does not “want” to be found, then the outside observer not only cannot find free will in their observation of the data, but they can’t even have a suspicion that free will is hiding in their data.  If I didn’t tell you that I had altered some coins, you’d never think of it.  Free will can make the outcome be totally random within every possible measurement of randomness, thus erasing every trace of its existence.

              I would argue that this description sells free will very short.  Yes, it is true that if free will lives within randomness, you can never find it by outside observation.  But none of us are outside observers in this experiment.  We’re the subject of the experiment.  As the subject of the experiment, you can know that free will exists because you experience it.  Although you would not be able to identify which trials above were “free will” trials and which were not; I, as the subject, had no problem identifying them.  I know which coins I placed and which I let fall randomly – it is not at all hidden to me.  As the subject, I know that I intended to do something, I decided to go ahead and do it, and I did it.  I know I had a choice.  You, as an outside observer, have no way of proving that I made a decision, but I do, because I made the decision. 

              So…is the observer right, or is the subject right?  You’ll have to decide that on your own – you can play each role (assuming you are a human being with free will) and see which side you consider the most reliable.  I can’t prove either side.  But what I want to stress is the following:  if you’re looking for free will, you need to look for a site of randomness where it can live and flourish.  In our next entry, we’ll explore whether it is possible to find the randomness we need within the nervous system.

 

A Theory of Soul Consistent with Scripture and Neuroscience - Part 6: Soul 101, Class #2

 [See here for introductory comments.]

               I theorized that the soul is composed of at least three major components that I referred to generally as Afferent System, Efferent System, and Processing & Memory [see here].  This entry is about the Efferent System of the soul. 

 

The Efferent System of the Soul:  “The Will”

              The efferent, or "motor system", of the soul is basically what we might generally refer to as "the will".  This is where free will is generated and implemented.   The efferent system is where the interaction between the spiritual "soul-world" and the physical "flesh-world" happens.  The efferent system is, at least in my view, the most mysterious component of the soul and probably the most mysterious thing in the entire universe.  To me, the entire “mystery of the soul” really comes down to this aspect.  In fact, I think it is at this point that many people decide the soul is too mysterious for rational belief and they jettison their belief in the soul, and with it, anything supernatural.  They become physicalists, and probably determinists, as they stand at the edge of this great mystery.  Belief in the soul becomes childish in their eyes.  Instead of gazing on this mystery in amazement, they walk away.  I get it.  Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia understood this very problem almost 400 years ago.  It’s not new.  My goal in this series of blog posts on the soul is to get some of you to take a second look at this mystery.  What if the immaterial world actually does influence the physical world?  All I’m asking is for a chance to put forward a concept for consideration.

              As think there are at least two major parts to the Efferent System of the Soul.  One part is the aspect that performs the mechanics of the "spiritual-physical link."  Somehow the decisions made by the soul have to produce an influence on our physical actions.  How in the world is it possible that some non-physical entity could impact what we do?  In fact, as I've discussed elsewhere [here], we can narrow it down much further:  at some point, this action has to affect one or more neurons in the brain.  How?  To be honest, I had some theories on this that I was embarrassed to put into writing, and I thought “surely others have thought about these ideas and have written about them.”  Eventually, after a few years of searching, I found some others who have written about these concepts in the past 40 years or so, and so I feel like I can now describe these ideas and at least I will have company when I am ridiculed.  But I’m not going to dive into those details here – you’ll have to wait a bit for that! <it will be linked here>

              The second part of the efferent system is the actual decision-making component.  This component is the entity that generates an uncaused cause [see here].  This is the entity that generates a decision that is unpredictable, but not random.  And, just like the unity feature of consciousness [here], there is nothing else in the universe (that we know of) that is like this.  There is no other force or condition or outcome that is not either "caused" or "random".  As a result, it is impossible to come up with an analogy without introducing human will into the analogy, thus creating some circular logic.  Some would say that the uniqueness and downright craziness of thinking there could be something that appears random (i.e. unpredictable), and yet is not random, should drive us all to doubt the idea of free will.  But, as I have discussed elsewhere, for me, free will is a given - it is the starting point - because I experience it moment by moment.  I do not throw it out just because it is conceptually difficult, if not impossible, to fully describe.  I can't explain why bumblebees fly either, but I see them flying so I don't entertain the possibility that "since I can't make sense of it, they must not be flying."  I know that there are whole libraries full of books denying the existence of free will.  I’m not going to argue the point here.  My point in this entry is to just say “Here’s where I think free will exists.”

              I actually don't know if it is right to call the efferent component, "the will."  There are a lot of terms used for this concept, often poorly defined (probably because of the circular argument problem).  I think this component might also be analogous to what some refer to as human "agency".  Or, from a spiritual standpoint, it might be proper to call it the "spirit" of a person.  Or even "heart."  Whatever you call it, it is the seat of moral responsibility.  The existence of "the will" is why we can hold human beings responsible for their own actions in a manner different than a dog or a worm or a computer.  Whatever you call it, the general content of our moral decision-making (what kind of a person we are), and the implementation of those moral decisions, is established in this component.    

              How is "the will" or "agency" established in each human?  Are we born with it?  Is it set by God?  Is it just random chance?  This line of thinking, which ends with the idea that you'd have to create your own self in order to have free will, is, in my opinion, a very tough argument for libertarians like me to counter.  It's a body blow that I have to absorb because I can't answer that question.  I take some solace in the fact that the concept of God has the same issue.  Did God create Himself?  If not, then how did He come into being and who decided what God's character was going to be like?  When it comes to God, of course, we simply say that God had no beginning - He always was.  There is no question that God has free will <well…actually, see here>.  So did God freely choose His character?  There's no answer to that.  I have an idea about the infinitesimal "beginning" of human free will, but that will have to wait for some future entry.  But I don't reject the idea of God just because I can’t answer these questions because, in many ways, this whole mystery (how did God create Himself?)  is exactly what makes God, God.  In the same way, the conundrum of "creating yourself" is exactly what makes free will, free.  Like Blaise Pascal, I like this mystery.  To me it is exciting.  More mysterious and exciting and even "spooky" than quantum entanglement!

              I will just say one thing with respect to the question "are we born with it?" in relation to our free will.  I think there are a lot of reasons to believe that this part of the soul grows and matures, roughly analogous to physical development.  I think that the maturing of the soul could provide an explanation for why we persist in thinking there is some kind of "age of accountability" for humans.  This is a common difficulty in raising kids.  At what point are they responsible for their own actions and should be punished or praised accordingly?  There is certainly nothing that happens outwardly that indicates a sudden transition from "not accountable" to "fully accountable."  At some age, kids are "tried as adults."  We pick ages (5...12...18...etc.) for this "transition" because we have no other means of making this determination.  But some kids seem to mature quicker than others.  And what about kids with mental disabilities?  One size doesn’t fit all, but we don’t have good options.  These are all good questions, and a soul - specifically a "will" - that grows and matures over time provides part of a framework for understanding how to address these questions.

              Remember that in my theory of the soul, the efferent system is generally exercised in a manner that is sparse, infrequent, and weak.  This is partly what I was trying to point out in my entry on "It's a Dog's Life."  The brain can run on its own without requiring input from the Efferent System of the Soul, and, I think most of our life operates "physically."  Thus, when we start digging into how the soul actually influences the brain, the mechanics of this influence have to take the "weak and infrequent" nature into account.  However, when we focus on character qualities that are uniquely human - say something like forgiveness or even altruism - we expect the soul is involved.  That's where we should expect to see the action of the immaterial soul on the physical brain.

              I'm going to stop here with this initial description because this takes me back to my purpose:  to present a theory of the soul that is consistent with neuroscience and scripture.  The key thing is that the Efferent System of the soul is the one concept where science could have real explanatory power.  Specifically, I claim the soul exists in each person and is influencing neurons (albeit infrequently).  That concept can theoretically be subjected to experimentation.  If my hypothesis is correct, then this soul-neuron interaction is happening in every human being who is alive at this very moment.  Thus, there are lots of potential study subjects!  At the very least, neuroscience can establish significant guidelines as to where, when, how, etc. this interaction could happen.  That’s why, for me, it is important to have a theory that fits both the Christian concept of a soul but also fits within the guidelines established by neuroscience.

              And now on to the third major component of the soul:  processing and memory.

 

Emergence 6 – Money is Like Water?

              I have been exploring the scientific and philosophical concept of “emergence” (starting <here>).  Summarizing my previous entries in a single sentence:  my contention is that when you really analyze what emergence means when it is used as an explanation for consciousness, it is actually just another word for consciousness, and thus explains nothing.   However, we had to take a detour and address the terms “weak emergence” and “strong emergence” - <here>.  I would recommend reviewing those first, as they are prerequisites to this discussion on the liquidity of water.

              I’m going to contrast two common examples of emergence that have been used in the discussion of consciousness by many philosophers:  1) the liquidity of water and 2) the value of money.  Ironically, the word “liquidity” is more commonly associated with money than with water, at least in this day and age.  There is a strong link between water and money in many ways.  But when it comes to emergence, they make an excellent contrast because they are on opposite ends of the spectrum.

              When I talk about “liquidity of water” in this discussion, I’m not referring to the sensation of wetness (which we have already addressed here).  Today we are referring to water as a liquid, which has properties that are distinct from solids and gases.  Also, water itself, as a liquid, has some properties that are different than other liquids.

              I’m going to start off with a quote from the late philosopher John Searle because it sums up the thinking very succinctly with respect to liquidity and consciousness:

 

Consciousness is “about as mysterious as the liquidity of water, right? The liquidity is not an extra juice squirted out by the H₂O molecules, it’s a condition that the system is in; and just as the jar full of water can go from a liquid to solid, depending on the behavior of the molecules, so your brain can go from a state of being conscious to a state of being unconscious, depending on the behavior of the molecules.” — John Searle

 

              So, given our previous discussion, is the liquidity of water an example of “weak emergence” or “strong emergence”?  One question is whether being a liquid can be deduced by observing the molecules that make it up.  Can you explain a liquid based on the action of the molecules and the laws of physics in terms of the way the molecules interact?  Well, actually, yes you can.  The state of being a liquid has everything to do with how the molecules are interacting with one another.  When water is in the state of being a liquid, the molecules move past one another in certain ways, but are weakly connected due to the polarized nature of the water molecule.  These characteristics result in properties like surface tension and flow.  Being a liquid does not introduce a new law of physics.  Being a liquid does not change what the water molecules would otherwise do based on the fundamental laws of physics.  No fundamental law of physics is violated or modified or reconsidered by the fact that water molecules, when they get together as a group at the right temperature and pressure, act like a liquid with interesting abilities like taking the shape of the inside of a glass or forming raindrops when they fall from the sky.  Reductionism still holds.  The liquidity of water is no different than the fact that two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom get together to create a water molecule in the first place.

              Given this, the liquidity of water is a great example of “weak emergence.”  I suggested previously that this should just be called “emergence.”  The problem is this:  if consciousness is “strong emergence” – a term that has nothing to do with “weak emergence” – then the liquidity of water is not useful at all as an analogy of consciousness.  The two have nothing to do with each other.  Here is a perfect example of how the use of the “weak” and “strong” modifiers is extremely misleading.[1]

              Water is liquid.  Leaves are green.  Diamonds are hard.  These are all emergent properties.  They are all based on the fundamental laws of physics.  And they give us zero insight into consciousness because consciousness is a “strongly emergent”, i.e. “metaphysical” property <see here>.

              Now I want to contrast the liquidity of water with the value of money.  Here’s an example of using the value of money as an analogy (“comparison”) to consciousness by the American philosopher Alva Noe, who has written many many books on the topic of consciousness and related themes:

 

Regarding consciousness…  “As a comparison, consider that there’s nothing about this piece of paper in my hand, taken in isolation, that makes it one dollar.  It would be ludicrous to search for the physical or molecular correlates of its monetary value.  The monetary value, after all, is not intrinsic to the piece of paper itself, but depends on the existence of practices and conventions and institutions.  The marks or franks or pesos or lire in your wallet didn’t change physically when, from one day to the next, they ceased to be legal tender.  The change was as real as it gets, but it wasn’t a physical change in the money.” - Alva Noe, from the book “Out of Our Heads”

 

              In my view, now we have the problem that I started with back when I talked about meaning arising out of letters and the Mona Lisa arising out of colored pixels on a page.  I think most would agree that the value of money is a “strongly emergent” property of money.  The paper, and the ink on the paper, and the molecules that make up both, have no property that can be called “value”.  However, recall that the term “strongly emergent” can be replaced by the term “consciousness.”  Thus, Dr. Noe’s claim is this:  “consciousness can be compared to…consciousness.”  A true statement, for sure, but not particularly insightful!

              But, to be complete, we should work through this strongly emergent property of the value of money in the same way that we walked through the Mona Lisa example <here>.  Dr. Noe has already started us off on that pathway by stating that the value of money is “not intrinsic to the piece of paper itself.”  That is true.  Also, the value of money is not in the reflected photons that travel from the dollar bill to our retinas.  Nor does the value reside in the action potentials travelling along our optic nerve to the occipital cortex.  Nor does the value reside in the neural networks in the brain.  What gives the money value?  The value comes from our conscious perception of the dollar bill.  Our conscious minds give the money it’s value.  It can’t be in our physical brains because we could look at the paper money of another economy, think that it is just play money for kids, and not attribute any value to it.  But then, we could be told that “hey – that’s a Kazakhstani tenge and it’s worth a lot of money.”  Suddenly, we would see the same piece of paper as having value.  The same rods and cones would be activated in our retinas.  The same neurons would be activated in our occipital cortex because the image has not changed.  But, we would now consciously attribute the piece of paper in our hand some value and maybe even marvel at it a bit if we’ve never held such currency in our hands before.  Who values it?  Who marvels at it?  We do, via our conscious perception of it.

              Thus, the value of money is just seen to be conscious perception itself and thus can’t be called a “comparison to” consciousness.  Once again, we find that the statement pretty much boils down to “a really good analogy of consciousness is consciousness.”  And, so, we are back to where we started.

              Dr. Noe is trying to go further by saying that value comes from “practices and conventions and institutions.”  I’ll be honest – I read his book and I could never figure out what he meant.  Practices that are carried out by conscious humans?  Conventions that are established by conscious humans?  Institutions that are created by, and composed entirely of, conscious humans?  Maybe someday I will be able to understand his point and see something new there, but to me it just seemed like a lot of the “cars and traffic” type of analogy where what you are really talking about are conscious humans driving cars, not cars actually doing their own things!

              Before I end this particular discussion, I want to say something about image recognition in computers.  A computer could scan my $1 bill, perform “image recognition” and then put on a display screen that the value of the bill was $1.00.  We don’t even need anything like artificial intelligence to do this – vending machines have been doing this for decades.  Surely the scanner, electronic circuits, and associated software in vending machines are not conscious.  They don’t know anything about the value of money.  It’s all a series of zeros and ones to the machine and that’s it.  The screen that displays the characters “$1.00” doesn’t “know” it is showing $1 - it just shows the pixel arrangement it is programmed to display.  The “value” doesn’t exist until a human being looks at the screen and becomes conscious that the arrangement of pixels has a meaning, and that meaning is “$1”. 

              Oh, and don’t mistake acting on the $1 bill as if it were a $1 bill as being the same as being conscious of it.  The vending machine can take the action of spitting out your candy bar that costs $1 as if it understood that you just gave it $1.  But it does not understand that.  Nowhere in the vending machine does the process rise above a series of binary zeroes and ones, from scanning the dollar bill to turning the metal spiral to cause the candy bar to drop. The vending machine is, in some sense, treating the dollar bill as if it had real value.  But vending machines are not conscious and they have no perception of the concept of value.  “Value” only exists in the conscious minds of human beings.

              In summary, emergence is often used to explain how consciousness can arise from the brain.  I hope you can see that this is misleading.  Either they are referring to “weak emergence”, which is just describing a shorthand method of understanding the fundamental laws of physics and is not analogous to consciousness at all, or they are referring to “strong emergence”, which is the same as saying that consciousness is consciousness.

              I contend that there is nothing else like consciousness in the physical universe.  Nothing even reasonably analogous to consciousness in the physical universe.  I contend that that is why it is so hard to come up with an example of consciousness in order to try to explain it.  There is no other example of consciousness.  Consciousness is unique in the physical universe.

 

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[1]To be fair to Searle, I believe he considered consciousness to be an example of weak emergence because he said that “All of our conscious states, without exception, are caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain.”  Yet, he also believed that consciousness could have a higher level influence on the biological processes, which would fit the definition of strong emergence.  So, I don’t really know what to make of his views. 

I’ll see your Phineas Gage…

            If you’ve done any reading or listened to any talks about the “mind-brain” issue, and especially about the scientific rejection of the concept of a “soul”, there’s one name that you’ve probably heard mentioned in literally every book or talk about the topic.  It’s not the name of a scientist or philosopher or even a theologian.  I bet this never gave much thought to the mind-brain problem.  He certainly didn’t know any neuroscience.  Yet there he is, a central character in the whole discussion.

             His name?  Phineas Gage.  Mr. Gage was a railroad construction foreman who lived in the early- to mid-1800’s.  What makes him famous is a work accident that he experienced.  Specifically, he was tamping down some explosives with a rod and there was an explosion that drove the rod through his eye/cheek and exited the top of his skull, destroying a significant portion of his left frontal lobe.  Miraculously, he survived the accident and lived for more than 10 years after that accident and was able, after some time, to return to employment as a stagecoach driver.  Importantly, some of the physicians who treated him recorded the events in detail and he became rather well-known even during his lifetime.  Key to the “existence of the soul” issue, it was reported that his personality changed significantly after the accident.  This seems to be the first clear evidence that damage to the brain could cause changes to personality, thus localizing personality to the physical brain rather than in some external “soul.”[1]  There is a lot more to the story and a lot known about the whole situation, but I’ll let you read that elsewhere on the internet. 

              This one single event is often given as the definitive “nail in the coffin” for the concept of an immaterial soul or mind or any such thing.  Here’s an example of the finality with which Mr. Gage’s case is presented:

 

“Phineas Gage’s case shattered the myth of an immaterial soul, showing that personality, identity, and decision-making come from the brain. Neuroscience confirms this—damage the brain, and you change. Dualism fails to explain how a soul could control neurons...Unsettling or not, the evidence is clear: we are our brains—nothing more.”  [From an internet post by someone identified as Theitant]

 

              This is just one example and you’ll find this same sentiment expressed in many ways repeatedly throughout the literature.  I mean, it’s obvious isn’t it?  Phineas Gage experienced severe damage to the frontal lobe of his brain and his whole personality changed.  Presumably, if he had an immaterial soul, it would not have been damaged by the very physical spike that passed through his brain.  If personality was determined by the soul, then his personality should have been unaffected by damage to the brain.  Thus, the obvious conclusion is that our personality arises in our physical brain and has nothing to do with a soul.  And, further, if the soul doesn’t have anything to do with our personality, then why even hypothesize the existence of a soul?  Any intelligent person should realize that the brain is all there is – there is no soul and never was.  

              Not so fast.  I have two points I’d like to bring up about this “open and shut” case against the soul.

              First, there seems to be a very simple analogy that calls into question the jump to the conclusion that is made from the Gage case.  I will use the analogy of a radio, which, granted, was not invented for another 50 years after Gage’s accident.  A battery-powered radio is a very cool device, especially if you didn’t know how it works.  Let’s say you lived in Gage’s time and someone travelled back in time and gave you one of these magical devices.  It is a completely enclosed system.  You can hold it in your hands and you can easily see that nothing goes into, or out of, the radio.  But it produces sounds!  You can hear people talking through it and so on.  Where do those sounds come from?  Maybe you hypothesize that the radio has some kind of immaterial thing you call a “soul” that produces the sounds that you hear.  It’s nice to listen to music while you work so you decide to take it with you to your job on the railroad construction site.  While on the job, an unfortunate accident occurs in which an explosion causes a metal rod to be shot right through your radio.  Parts of the radio are missing, but somehow the radio is not totally destroyed.  It still makes sounds, but now the sounds are all staticky and you really can’t make out what people are saying.  The “personality” of your radio is totally different.

              Well, now your idea of a “soul” inside the radio is destroyed.  You know that the physical rod couldn’t have destroyed the radio’s immaterial soul, so the sounds coming from the radio must come from the physical components inside the box.  Obviously, the sounds must have been coming from little people and little bands playing inside the radio, and they got damaged by the spike.  It’s an open and shut case – there is no such thing as a “radio soul.”  Right?

              Of course that’s ridiculous.  The sound that a radio produces are generated at the radio station, which could be miles away, and they are transmitted through the air to the little radio you have next to you.  When the metal rod damages your radio, it doesn’t damage anyone or anything at the radio station.  The transmission is still occurring just fine.  But now the receipt of those signals is disrupted so that the sounds that your little radio produces are no longer decipherable.

              Isn’t that exactly analogous to the situation with Phineas Gage?  Obviously his soul was not damaged, but the instrument through which his soul acts – his brain – was damaged.  I fail to see how this is an open and shut case against the soul at all.  Yes, it does give us insight into how the soul might interact with the brain, in the same way that damage to the radio helps us to have some insight into what kind of transmissions the radio receives.  But there is no way that what happened to Phineas Gage “shatters the myth of an immaterial soul.”  I guess, to me, this analogy seems so obvious that I just don’t understand why the whole case is so famous.

              I’d like to dive into the radio analogy more deeply sometime in the future <here>, but for now I want to go to the second major issue I have with the conclusions drawn from Mr. Gage’s accident and change in personality.

              To explain my second major issue, I’m going to use another analogy.  Ultimately, in the end, I think that the Phineas Gage event actually helps to illustrate a very strong argument for the soul!  Let’s see if you agree.

              I’m going to use the analogy/example of human motor learning, which certainly does happen in the physical brain (and, in my opinion, not in the soul).  Think about learning to throw a baseball.  Just about anyone can learn to throw a baseball.  But how many people can throw 90 mph fastballs for strikes?  Well, there are a few, obviously, and most are highly paid pitchers in the Major Leagues.  But how did they learn to pitch so well?  Certainly, there are various paths that each pitcher has taken to get to where they are, but there is one universal that is never violated:  they all had to practice.  For years they had to practice.  By the time they get to the big leagues, they’ve probably thrown literally millions of pitches throughout their life.  Millions.  There is just no way around the slow process of motor learning via practice.

              What would you say if someone one day picked up a baseball for the first time and started throwing 90 mph pitches for strikes?  I’ll even grant you someone who has been very athletic throughout their life and runs marathons and lifts weights and so on.  That still doesn’t allow for someone to just pick up a baseball and instantly become a big league starter.  That could never happen.  And it doesn’t happen for a simple reason:  such learning requires neurons to learn the proper sequence of firing and for those patterns to get ingrained in the neural networks of the brain and spinal cord.  That is a slow process.  There’s no way to substantially speed that process up.  It takes the time it takes.

              Tragically, though, you could go the other way in an instant.  A major league pitcher could have a stroke or some other kind of trauma and the motor area of their brain could be damaged and they could instantly and permanently lose the ability to throw pitches.  In fact, they could end up with a paralyzed arm that couldn’t even hold a baseball, let alone throw it.  Although this would be tragic, we would not consider it anything out of the ordinary.  That’s how brain damage works.  It’s instant.  But there’s no reversing of brain damage instantly. 

              My point in this analogy/example is that instant changes in the brain occur in only one direction:  they always involve a destructive outcome.  Learned traits are lost.  Personality is changed for the worse.  Memories are lost.  Knowledge is lost.  In order to get constructive outcomes, the process of training the brain is painfully slow.  No one gets hit in the head and suddenly becomes a major league pitcher or a concert pianist or an Albert Einstein.  Negative physical changes in the brain can be instant.  Positive physical changes in the brain are not instant – they take days to weeks to years to happen.  That’s just the way the brain works. 

              With that backdrop in mind, let’s consider for a moment a few people who ought to be much more famous with respect to the mind/brain problem than Phineas Gage.  I’m talking about people who have transformed themselves instantly without brain damage.  If Phineas Gage is evidence that the brain controls our whole personality, and that blowing out a tenth of it causes an obvious change in the personality of an individual…well, then I present to you…

 

Saul of Tarsus,

              or

Augustine of Hippo,

              or

Clive Staples Lewis,

              or…

any of the many many other people who have had a radical, essentially instantaneous personality transformation without having a tenth of their brain damaged!

 

              In fact, their transformations – at least some of them – are more profound, more pronounced, and much better documented – than good old Mr. Gage. 

              Let’s just stick with the story of Saul of Tarsus for the moment – a story I have addressed previously <here>.  Saul was a learned, well-trained Jewish religious leader in the first century AD.  He had made it his goal in life to hunt down Christians and, if possible, get them sentenced to death.  But one day, on his way to hunt down more Christians in Damascus, he had a transforming episode that changed his entire view of life, faith, and life purpose.  The episode lasted less than a few minutes and yet the transformation was drastic and permanent.  He went on to become the leading proponent of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire and wrote major sections of the Christian Bible.

              You may not agree with Saul/Paul’s life purpose, but you have to admit that this transformation was constructive (not destructive), instantaneous (relative to physiological brain changes), and permanent.  Compare that to what happened to Phineas Gage.  The personality changes to Mr. Gage required the total destruction of approximately a tenth of Mr. Gage’s brain.  Where was the explosion in Saul’s brain?  There was none.  After his transformation, he wrote literary works that stand with the best of all time.  If personality is totally determined by the physical brain, then what possible sudden rearrangement of neuronal connections could possibly have happened to cause such change in an individual’s personality?  A conservative estimate is that Mr. Gage completely lost at least 10 million neurons.  How many neurons had to suddenly change their firing patterns in Saul’s brain in order to achieve what was an even greater transformation in personality?

              I suspect that the only argument is to try to downplay the degree of transformation for these individuals.  Spare me.  The documentation regarding Mr. Gage is pretty good, but there is considerable disagreement about the extent of his change in personality.  On the other hand, I have books and books and books describing the transformation of the individuals I mentioned above.  And I could pull out an endless series of other people whose lives have been transformed in an instant.  Many of them are living right now – they could be your neighbors.  The evidence of their transformed lives is often etched in their bodies…tattoos on their skin, scars on their arms, etc. – all clear evidence that they once lived a very different life than they do now!  How does such instantaneous transformation happen in a physical brain?

              My hypothesis would be that the instantaneous transformation happened in the soul, which then became apparent as it worked through the brain.  If you could measure someone’s brain activity during one of these transformations, I don’t think you would find 10 million neurons suddenly changing their firing patterns.  That seems physically impossible, based on what we know of how brains work, how neurons learn.  Yes, the transformation becomes apparent through the actions that happen via the physical brain, but the initial instantaneous transformation occurs in the soul, not the brain.  If you have already rejected the idea of a soul long ago, you won’t agree with me; but at least you have to recognize that the rejection of the soul is premature until there is at least some reasonable hypothesis as to how a positive transformation, on the scale we observe in these cases, can happen in the physical brain alone.

              Maybe you will argue that personality can be transformed significantly by small, progressive changes in just a few neurons of the brain.  You might hypothesize that the neural networks in these individuals were at a tipping point, where a change in one neuron has a broad effect over a whole network of neurons.  Kind of like when the mechanical odometer in old cars would go from 99,999.9 back to all zeroes.  I don’t think I can disprove the “tipping point-waterfall cascade-odometer” hypothesis, but that seems extremely far-fetched and doesn’t fit the evidence we find in these transformed lives.  But, I guess you’ll have to stand confidently on that idea, as weak as it seems, because you surely wouldn’t want to admit that Mr. Gage isn’t the open and shut case against the soul that it is claimed it to be.

              So…I’ll see your Phineas Gage…and raise you Saul of Tarsus!

 

 

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[1] I find it hard to believe that this was the first evidence of the importance of the physical brain in shaping a person’s personality, but it is such a spectacular and shocking story that I think we can at least say that it was the first famous and broadly recognized evidence that the physical brain shapes personality.