Among the most interesting cases of out-of-body experience are those where some person spontaneously leaps from the body when anticipating death—as in auto accidents and in mountain-climbing falls. Sometimes the body isn’t even damaged—but the mind evidently thought it would be—and finds the ejection switch. Some kind of linkage must remain, however, because people return to their bodies again and therefore we have these accounts from them.
We do not know what happens in those more drastic case when the body is destroyed—when it doesn’t roll free of the wreckage or the ropes don’t snag on stone and the mountain climber isn’t “caught,” still alive. In those cases, presumably, the last link is broken, and the soul, having made a hasty exit, sees that it’s time to move on.
The body-soul duality is alive in well in ordinary thought. People do not think of themselves as chemical machines—or of the mind as a secondary product of brain function alone. As for what life is, they haven’t a clue. The orthodox scientific explanation is that it arises from chemistry. But let’s suppose that it’s the other way about. Suppose that what we call soul is life—or that life is the most primitive expression of soul. What we certainly know is that a corpse is dead—no soul is manifesting. And that alert people jump out of their bodies occasionally when it looks like the end has arrived.
Aristotle offered us the primitive soul, calling it vegetative. The animal has both a vegetative and an animal soul. Humans have both and, in addition, what Aristotle called the rational soul. Aspects of the same essence in successively developed stages?
Looking at these two concepts, soul and life, our habits of thought blur things. We think of souls as individual, of life as a broad phenomenon. To be sure, each manifestation of life, at whatever scale, is individual. Life, therefore, is a broad generalization of enormously large numbers of individual instances of it. We also think we have a soul—much as we have a body—but what if we are the soul?
Today’s “grown-up” explanation is a form of physicalist monism. There is no soul independent of bodies—no such thing as jumping out of the bodies. Consciousness is neural functioning. It’s chemistry, stupid. Grow up.
At the pace of a slow snail, this view is changing; but it will probably take another century or more before elite thought will have returned to a more comprehensive view in accord with experience and observation. In the lead are people who have unquestionable standing in the field of science, like Charles S. Sherrington (1857-1952) and John Eccles (1903-1997), both neurophysiologists and Nobel Prize winners. It’s difficult to expel them from the reservation, with such credentials, hence a more polite form of disagreement is noted. They are called dualists. To these I might add Wilder Penfield (1891-1976), a neurosurgeon with significant research achievements in the field. I will conclude with two quotes from him. Other prominent voices are those of Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994), a philosopher of science, and Roger Penrose (1931-), a mathematical physicist. And there are quite a few others.
Throughout my own scientific career, I, like other scientists, struggled to prove that brain accounts for the mind. But now, perhaps, the time has come when we may profitably consider the evidence as it stands and ask the question: Do brain-mechanisms account for the mind? Can the mind be explained by what is now known about the brain? If not, which is the more reasonable of the two hypotheses: that man's being is based on one element, or on two? (p. xiii)
Since every man must adopt for himself, without the help of science, his way of life and his personal religion, I have long had my own private beliefs. What a thrill it is, then, to discover that the scientist too can legitimately believe in the existence of spirit. (p. 85)
No comments:
Post a Comment