Mind and Brain

One of the courses I am taking involves heavy reading on recent finding concerning the way our brains work and how that relates to traditional conceptions of the mind (a la the common Western philosophical distinction between mind and body). For example, the case can be made for how the root of our emotions are not amorphous feelings but actually an important part of how the brain functions in connection with the body. Similarly, there are social aspects to the brain. We have neurons in the brain that respond to social stimuli. Needless to say, this has been an intellectually interesting experience. (aside: if anyone knows of quality apologetic work that attempts to deal with these more recent findings, I would be interested to know about it. I was stunned by how unprepared I was to think about the implications of cognitive science for Christian belief.)

The reason this seems such an important question is in how the function of the brain may or may not relate to consciousness and what we would likely refer to as the soul. If the brain itself is mechanically responsible and/or linked to stimulating the sensations we have and even some of the thoughts that arise out of our subconscious, then where is the soul ultimately lodged? What role can it play and how does it all work?

To a certain extent, this isn’t a new problem. We have had, for as long as there has been faith, needed to deal with certain persons whose physical condition limits (or limits our access to) their cognitive ability. Brain damage is not a new concept and we know that when the wheels stop spinning properly upstairs, it changes the entirety of ones subjective experience. So what do we do about this?

Well, there are a few things I have concluded after four weeks of working on this: (1) there remains a significant gap between what scientists have discovered about the way the brain works and what needs to be accounted for given the way minds and society work, (2) there is still a difference, if not as much as a dichotomy, between mind and brain, and (3) there is an important underlying bias to the whole field of neuroscience.

The gap I am talking about has to do with the very nature of what science seems able to talk about. While neurology can find the parts of the brain that activate emotion, social sense, etc, they do so in a very basic way. While some neurologist (namely the ones I have been reading) seem to push for causal links between what our brain is like and how we act, it is not clear that things work that way. While we have the physical capacity for the things we experience (which in and of itself doesn’t sound like that novel a concept), our behavior and experience actually change the physical constitution of our brains. Though damaging parts of the brain seem to cut out certain functions (i.e. emoting, action-consequence mechanisms, etc.) it seems we might even be able to compensate for this. At best, neuroscience has found the basic mechanisms that are involved with how the brain functions and how they link to the mind; they do not explain the mind.

The second thing I realized is that, given the distance between what we know of the brain and how we experience the mind, while the two might not be distinct things, they are apparently not one thing either. We were talking about this in terms of something called “intersubjectivity.” The idea is that a person has intersubjective experience when they can understand/assume/feel from another person’s perspective. Literally, that they experience another as subject and not simply object. Recent work on something called “mirror neurons” point to a physical ability to experience intersubjectivity. When others around us emote, we can pick up on it at a pre-cognitive level (we feeling it without have to think about it). This is what is happening when a smiling baby elicits a similar response in an adult. There is actually something going on in the brain that recognizes the positive emotion and reflects it. But the problem we run into is that there is much more to intersubjectivity. As I wrote in a question for class: “This seems, in some way, to again dichotomize mind and brain by presenting the intersubjectivity of human minds as a tautology: you are only as intersubjectively attuned as you believe yourself to be?” We see this most clearly in cases where people dehumanize others (a mind action) and then feel no sympathy (apparently a brain action) when they treat others as less than human. There are two levels at play and the upper can overpower the lower. If we deny our intersubjective experience, we seem able to turn it off. This implies that, at best, the research we have done on the brain is far from melding mind and brain into one.

Lastly, there is an underlying belief that necessitates the outcomes mentioned above. Now, I am not just talking about the fact that most scientists would reject the notion of the soul and therefore never look for it in cognitive experience. My point is related, but not the same. When talking about the effect of one thing on another, we usually use the language of “causal direction” (i.e. X causes Y). Given the assumptions that most scientists have for how evolution must have worked in the development of our brains and how our minds are simply and outcome of that process, the causal direction must go from brain to mind. More specifically, the things that happen in the mind must be products of what is taking place in the brain. I will mitigate this by stating that the effect of the mind on the brain is accounted for (i.e. thinking bad thoughts or not developing your mind has physical consequences) but the mind must be accounted for as something that issues from the brain. Whether that is a justified position or not isn’t even important in understanding the simple fact that such a belief will determine the limits of what can be found in one’s scientific studies. Such assumptions of objectivity are the exact limiting factors that can fix a research paradigm in place, a la Kuhn.

This is not meant to debunk neuroscience. The work of science deals with fact. How those facts are interpreted (and they are interpreted) is what is at question. Regardless of whether I have this nailed down (and I likely don’t) this will hopefully raise good questions and an informed consideration of these questions is definitely needed.

Theology of Sociology

Mead claims that the self can only emerge through interaction, that without language and socialization the self would never come to be. This prompts interesting questions: could we conceive of a person without language and who is never socialized? Would they, then, not have a self? What does that mean ontologically?

From a Christian perspective, this creates an interesting problem for it is hard to imagine the self in a way that seperates it from the Christian concept of the soul. One might even posit that the two are one and the same. Extending Mead’s argument, then, would raise the question, “If one has no language and is never socialized (ie. if they never interact with other people) would they then not have a soul? Is a soul something that develops in this way?” Good questions.

This becomes a problem only if we maintain that it is only inter-human interaction that leads to the development of the self (read: the soul). If that is not the case, then a rather remakable truth emerges. The existence and development of the soul (seperating those two functions so as not to claim that one could exist and yet not have a soul) depends on the fact that all souls interact, in their creation, with God. In the same way that the being of the Trinity is enhanced* and defined by its relational quality, so our being is enhanced and defined by our relationship with God. No one can avoid at least a minimal amount of relating to God – otherwise we could not exist.

This line of thinking does have interesting implications for conceptions of our need for and the working out of the Gospel. For example, though all people have at least that minimal required interaction with God necessary for our existence (perhaps common grace also figures into this concept as well), we all sever that connection and thus lost the source of interaction most crucial for the development and health of our soul. Salvation, then, could be conceived of as the reestablisment of that connection by which our souls can yet again develop as they ought, heaven becomes the fullest form of that interaction and thus the full blossoming of our self – our souls – through our interaction with God, hell is the punishment of eternal banishment from that presence through which our selves regress into near nothing – the death of the soul.

This all, mind you, is merely the consideration of a question and not meant to imply a definite understanding of a theology of sociology. However, it does raise the question as to whether such a venture might be, in some way, worthwhile.

*This is not to imply that God, in trinitarian form, is some how “better” than God in some other form, as if such a form were plausable option. God is by his nature both good and in trinity thus implying a completeness and absoluteness that could not be otherwise (ie. if God is good and is in trinity then any other form would neither be good nor would it be God). I use the term primarily to bridge the relational aspects of God and man.

Durkheim and Religious Belief

Sociology, as a discipline, is not particularly friendly to religious faith. The framework of 'methodological atheism' makes it impossible to address the question of whether the things people believe in are actually true. In keeping with the desire to be a "science," sociologists admit that the reality of the objects of belief are beyond what we can measure and analyze. Or, it should be that we merely admit that and move one, whereas many are those who take the exclusion of the supernatural from the debate as a fitting opening to cut it out of our universe of possible realities. As students of the social, we look to root everything in the social.

Please remember that. It is a crucial fact. It is not that sociology is an unbiased discipline; it is a particularly biased one. Similar to how historians must conceive of the world leaving the role of God to the side, sociologist only bring in the supernatural to the extent that they are silent about it, omit it, or confuse it.

Take, for example, Durkheim's theories on the origins and functions of religion. Theorizing with the role of society in the place of supremacy, Durkheim doesn't try to overturn the ideas that notions of "the something greater than the individual" and divisions between the sacred/holy and the profane are not common to nearly all people; rather he re-roots them. The concept of God/the divine, he notes, is certainly rooted in a belief that there is something outside of the individual that is more powerful, more imposing, than he is, but that something is not the grandeur of nature, the stars, universe, or creation in general. Those views were common to evolutionary concepts of religion -man observes the "greater than himself" and conceives of the idea of deity. Durkheim changes the foundation point. The origin of that feeling is actually something greater than the individual: it is the social. As society wields some intangible power over the individual and his actions, often in ways imperceptible even to the most astute of observers, the individual absorbs the sensation of that power and thus is led to project the idea of deity. This is a clever little theoretical coup.

Durkheim's vision of the sacred is similarly intriguing. He again notes that there is a universal presence of concepts of the sacred - that all cultures and societies make separations between what is mundane and what is set apart as special, other, and revered. The otherness of the thing revered is reflected in the actions of separation and otherness that become ritualized parts of community religious life (and of social life in general).

On the surface, these are both quite intelligent arguments that make a lot of sense. But remember that, when approaching such arguments from a theistic, and in my case Christian, perspective, you don't accept the conclusions because you know you are playing with more cards than the scholar you are reading. What does that mean, practically? It means that, though Durkheim's mechanism may be quite useful, his premise makes this argument unconvincing. I can believe that the ritual action is crucial in the expression of sacredness in society or that society is the primary means through which divinity is expressed, but i am not bound to believe that sacredness and divinity are the products of society. For, if the first premise is that sacredness and divinity exist independent of either society or the individual, then both mechanisms become and expression of a built in compulsion. All cultures have concepts of the divine and sacredness not because they all have societies, but because they are common to all societies (which also helps explain why we sacrilize the things that aren't even sacred).

That is a little flip, but it does to things: (1) it maintains, or might even improve, the argument for the origins and function of religious belief, and (2) it brings sociological theory into a place where it is not directly contesting with faith. It works with, and not against, the faith structures that are valuable to those being theorized about. And that certainly makes me happier.

What this doesn't do is also two-fold: (1) it doesn't adhere to methodological atheism (which is why you will never see something like this in a work of sociology or an academic journal), and (2) it doesn't violate the bound of the data. There is nothing in Durkheim that proves he is right (which is why, at the end of the day, this is all just theory).

So, dear readers, read critically. Use what is useful; discard what is not.