Uploading Souls, part 2

to Part 1 Introduction, What is a soul? What about uploading? Why this topic?

Where do new souls come from?

Is the soul separate from the body?

Mind-body?

to Part 3, What about the brain and computers? Computer consciousness? Conclusion

Where do new souls come from?

Charles MacGregor ("Soul: Christian Concept" in Mircea Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion, New York: Macmillan, 1987, pp. 455-457. Quote is from page 457.) tells us that:

Within the development of Christian thought on the origin of the individual soul, three views have been maintained: (1) creationism, (2) traducianism, and (3) reincarnationism. 

Creationism is the doctrine that God creates a new soul for each human being at conception. Upheld by Jerome, Hilary, and Peter Lombard, it was by far the most widely accepted view on the subject in the Middle Ages. . . .

Traducianism is the theory that the soul is transmitted along with the body by the parents. . . . in the Middle Ages it found little if any favor. Lutherans, however, tended to accept it. . . .

To me, reincarnationism, which supposes some previous existence for a soul, does not seem to be a Christian doctrine.

The creationist doctrine summarized above is too simple--"at conception" won't quite do. Identical multiple births result from a single conception. Surely identical twins don't share a single soul? If a soul inhabits a brain, an embryo would have to have developed for at least several days to offer a brain for an abode for a soul.

Presumably, if traducianism is correct, the soul is passed on as part of our genetic inheritance. This means that it is coded for in our DNA.

Although they don't usually speak of souls, but of consciousness or personality, many modern thinkers assume that the soul simply emerges if the organism or the computer reaches a certain state of complexity. (Note the science fiction ideas mentioned above.)

However we get souls, it isn't a problem for God. If computers ever have souls, then that too, won't be a problem for an omnipotent, omniscient God.

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Is the soul separate from the body?

One might suppose that the answer is an unequivocal "yes," or "no," but it isn't unequivocally either one.

Baker's Evangelical Dictionary of Theology and other authorities state that, to Old Testament Jews, there was no such thing as a soul apart from a body, or, as Carl Schulz, the author of the article on "Soul" in Baker's puts it, a "profoundly complex . . . psychophysical being." However, there are certainly Scriptures in the New Testament that indicate a separate existence for the soul, such as Matthew 10:28: 

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. (NIV)

D. M. Lake, in "Soul" in the Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible, volume Five, Merrill C. Tenney, ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1975, pp. 496-498.)  writes: "The OT is not a textbook on human psychology but its doctrine of man seems to involve this polarity: man is a unified being but his being is profoundly creative and complex." (p. 496)

H. Wheeler Robinson, in "Soul (Christian)" in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, volume XI, Janis Hastings, ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958, pp. 733-737.) states: (quoting himself, The Religious Ideas of the Old Testament, London, 1913, p. 83. Publisher not given)

The idea of human nature implies a unity, not a dualism. There is no contrast between the body and the soul, such as the terms instinctively suggest to us. The shades of the dead in Sheol . . . are not  called "souls" or "spirits" in the Old Testament; nor does the Old Testament contain any distinct word for "body," as it surely would have done, had this idea been sharply differentiated from that of "soul." Man's nature is a product of the two factors--the breath-soul . . . which is his principle of life, and the complex of physical organs which this animates. Separate them, and the man ceases to be, in any real sense of personality; nothing but a "shade" remains, which is neither body nor soul. If this seems but a poor idea of human nature, we must set over against it the great redeeming feature, that there is an aspect of this nature . . . which relates man to God, and makes man accessible to God. (p. 733)

Jack Bemporad, ("Soul: Jewish Concept" in Mircea Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion, New York: Macmillan, 1987, pp. 450-454. Quote is from page 450.) 

While the Hebrew Bible distinguishes between spirit and flesh, it does not accept the type of dualism of body and soul characteristic of Greek thought. Hebrew terms for the soul usually refer to an activity or characteristic of the body or to an entire living being. To "afflict the soul" means to practice physical self-denial ([Leviticus] 16:29ff.).

So, at least to the Old Testament Jew, the soul was not truly separate from the body.

Does the soul separate from the body at death? In particular, does the soul go directly to heaven, and await the resurrection of the body? (see Luke 16:19-31; Rev. 6:9-11, which may, or may not, answer the question. One of these passages is a parable, the other apocalyptic.) Although there is a more or less official position of the church, there have been, and are, dissenters: Nancey Murphy writes that ". . . doctrines [were] formalized at the time of the Reformation specifying that the dead enjoy conscious relation to God prior to the general resurrection." She indicates that this was made official Catholic doctrine in 1512, and Calvin made a similar statement in 1542. Luther, she says, believed that the soul does not have a conscious existence after death, until the resurrection. ("Human Nature: Historical, Scientific and Religious Issues," in Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony, Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998, pp. 1-29. Quote is from p. 23.) The use of "sleep" for death, which is widespread in the New Testament, seems to agree with Luther.

Throughout Christian history, there has been a tendency, on the one hand, to over-emphasize the spiritual side, to the neglect of the body. Gnosticism was one such tendency, and many Bible scholars believe that when John wrote "which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes,  which we have looked at, and our hands have touched" (I John 1:1) about Christ, he was attacking the Gnostic idea that Christ wasn't a body, but just a soul. On the other hand, there has also been a temptation to over-emphasize the body, to the neglect of the immortal soul. In this life, and in the life to come, we will have both body and soul.

You might not have been surprised to learn that the question of the separateness, or lack thereof, of the body from the soul is important to religious thinkers. However, it is also important to secular ones.

We are left with a problem. If numbers and other mathematical concepts (unlike trees) are neither material things nor even aspects or properties of material things, what are they? The most reasonable answer seems to be that they are mental things, things that exist in minds. Mathematics is a mental activity. Most schools of thought in the field called "the philosophy of mathematics" adopt some version of this view. But this raises the question of what a "mind" is and what "mental things" are.
To the non-materialist, minds and the ideas they contain can be real without being entirely reducible to matter or to the behavior of matter. To the materialist, however, there can be nothing to our minds besides the operations of our central nervous systems. In the memorable words of Sir Francis Crick, "you are nothing but a pack of neurons." . . . Now, if we say that abstract concepts, such as the number π, exist only in minds, and if we also say, with the materialist, that minds are only the functioning of neurons, then we are left in the strange position of saying that abstract concepts are nothing but patterns of neurons firing in brains. Not, mind you, merely that our neurons fire when we think about or understand these concepts, or that the firing of neurons plays an essential role in our thought processes, but that the abstract concepts about which we are thinking are in themselves certain patterns of neurons firing in the brain, and nothing but that. [Barr goes on to quote from a book on the neurobiology of mathematics to show that some thinkers do, indeed, believe as he suggests they must.] (pp. 194-5, emphasis in original)

Here is another:

There is another problem with the idea that the human mind is merely a computer program programmed by natural selection, and this has to do with two remarkable abilities which the human mind possesses: the ability to attain certainty about some truths, and the ability to recognize that some truths are true of necessity. . . .
There are two aspects to this problem. In the first place, a creature's "evolutionary success" (that is, its success in surviving to reproduce and in ensuring the survival of its offspring) does not require that it know things with absolute certainty or that it recognize truths as necessary ones. It is quite enough for it to have knowledge which is reliable for practical purposes and which is known to be generally true in the circumstances that it has to face. . . .
The second aspect of the problem is that even if it were helpful to their survival for human beings to have absolute certainty in some matters, or to realize that some things are true of necessity, there seems to be no way that natural selection could possibly have programmed us to have that kind of knowledge. Natural selection is based ultimately on trial and error. . . . However, trial and error cannot produce certainty. Nor, obviously, can it lead to conclusions about what is necessarily true. (pp. 200-201)

I find Barr's arguments to be scientifically and philosophically sound, even though his ideas are not popular with the prevailing materialist mind-set.

I would go on to say that even if we are "nothing but a pack of neurons" or a "computer program programmed by natural selection," which both Barr and I reject, that would still mean that we are a very long way from copying all of this hypothetical program so that we could be transferred or uploaded to computer memory. Presumably doing so would have to include replicating all of the neurons, and all of their connections to each other, and any memory molecules they might have inside of them, in some fashion. I suppose that development costs for common application programs, such as Microsoft FrontPage, which I am using to write this, are quite high. They can be recovered by selling enough copies of the program. If each of us is an individual program, it must be at least a few orders of magnitude more complex than FrontPage, and, presumably, much, maybe even all, of everyone's program would be unique to the individual.

Table of contents

Mind-body?

Although I am not clear on what exactly a soul is, I believe, and nearly everybody else does, that it has something to do with the mind, or maybe is the mind, whatever that is. My topic, in fact, could just as well been entitled "Uploading your mind." The mind lives in the body, at least for a time, or it is part of the body.  What is the relationship between the mind and the body? There is a long-standing discussion about this question, in philosophy and psychology,  and the issue is known as the mind-body problem. See the article by Tim Crane in the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences, or Edward P. Kardas's online notes for his general psychology class for a concise introduction. Alan Guelzo's review of several books in Books and Culture: A Christian Review, a sister publication to Christianity Today, discusses several of the issues. (There is an excellent site, On-line papers on consciousness, which links to dozens of papers, mostly by scientists and philosophers, many of them about the mind-body problem.)

Nancey Murphy, in "Human Nature: Historical, Scientific and Religious Issues," in Whatever Happened to the Soul? presents four alternatives, as follows (pp. 24-25):

1. Radical dualism: the soul (or mind) is separable from the body, and the person is identified with the former.

2. Holistic dualism: the person is a composite of separable "parts" but is to be identified with the whole, whose normal functioning is as a unity.

3. Nonreductive physicalism: the person is a physical organism whose complex functioning, both in society and in relation to God, gives rise to "higher" human capacities such as morality and spirituality.

4. Eliminative/reductive materialism: the person is a physical organism, whose emotional, moral, and religious experiences will all ultimately be explained by the physical sciences.

Murphy rules out 1 and 4 as incompatible with Christian teaching. If God the Father and God the Holy Spirit are partly, or wholly, nonmaterial, how can humans be in God's image if they are only material? Therefore, 4 will not do. 1, radical dualism, won't do, either. I Corinthians 15, and other Scripture, indicate that we will have a body, even after the resurrection. John wants us to know that Jesus had a body after His resurrection (Mary is told not to hold on to Him in John 20:17; in John 20:27, Thomas is invited to touch Jesus; John 21:4-14 gives the impression that Jesus ate breakfast with the disciples.) Murphy says that the 2nd possibility is most like historic Christian teaching. The 3rd possibility, which Murphy favors, is a view of a soul which emerges with complexity. She points out that we know more about neurobiology and psychology than we used to, and that this knowledge seems to favor the 3rd view. (The nonreductive part of that name means that the soul cannot be completely explained in biological, chemical, mathematical or physical terms.)

Francis Crick (that's the Crick) wrote a book called The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994). 

He is interested in how the brain processes that support visual perception lead to our being aware of something, to actually seeing it. Can we localize in the brain the processes that underpin conscious awareness? This is a good scientific question, although one that we do not currently know how to answer. Crick grafts onto this purely scientific question a kind of creed about the relationship between the mind and the brain … His so-called astonishing hypothesis is that each one of us is "nothing but a pack of neurones." This is biological reductionism in earnest. Fraser Watts, "Are Science and Religion in Conflict?" Zygon 32:124-138, 1997. Quote is from page 130.

  “. . . the fundamental divide within dualism [is] between the physical body and the nonphysical mind or consciousness, the former a prisoner of the mechanical world-order but the latter the author of uniquely human characteristics such as rational thought and free choice. For Descartes it was the nonphysical mind which rendered a human being unique and which carried the marks of personhood. That nonphysical side of humans--the mind, soul or consciousness--was the critical one, constituting, alongside the body, one of the two basic substances of the world. (p. 250, emphasis in original)

. . . one can almost pinpoint the moment when consciousness once again became a direct scientific target: the conceptualization by Alan Turing of the basic model of the computer and John von Neumann's conclusion that the computations performed by complex, integrated computers are like the functions of the brain. Hence, the brain should be understood, not as the residence of the soul, but as the hardware of a computational device. The proof of this, which became known as the Turing test, was maniacally simple: Any logical function, mathematical or otherwise, can be performed on a Turing machine; complex logical functions merely require the development of more complex Turing machines to copy them artificially; eventually, a universal Turing machine will be able to perform all the logical functions of a human being, and in such a way that an observer will not be able to distinguish between the work done by the human being and the work done by the computer. At that point, the computer will have achieved the same mind state as the human being; or, to put it another way, we will discover that human consciousness is nothing different from the high-level operations of a Turing machine.

To understand the Turing model of 'the brain,' it was crucial to see that it regarded physics and chemistry . . . as essentially irrelevant. . . . The claim was that whatever a brain did, it did by virtue of its structure as a logical system, and not because it was inside a person's head, or because it was a spongy tissue made up of a particular kind of biological cell formation. And if this were so, then its logical structure could just as well be represented in some other medium, embodied by some other physical machinery. It was a materialist view of mind, but one that did not confuse logical patterns and relations with physical substances and things, as so often people did. Alan Hodges, as quoted in The Computer and the Mind: An Introduction to Cognitive Science, by Philip N. Johnson-Laird. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard, 1988). P. 11. (Original source not given)

This opened a direct route toward creating computers so sophisticated that they could beat grandmasters at chess. What was less noticeable at first was that this also opened the direct route to overthrowing Descartes' dualism and demonstrating that consciousness, instead of being the proof of spiritual substance in human beings, is only the by-product of computation—at best, the software of a mental Turing machine. Alan C. Guelzo, "Soulless," Books and Culture: A Christian Review, Jan/Feb 1998.

Turing's paper is available. Raymond Tallis, in his The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness (Macmillan, 1991, and reprinted by St. Martin's, 1999) argues that the best way to explain the mysteries of mind-brain interaction is to not explain it, but to call it the mystery of presence, and, more or less, say that we cannot explain it. Although his ideas have obviously not been universally adopted, his book is thought-provoking and important. He doesn't fit into any of Murphy's four categories. This, of course, was not Turing's approach at all--Turing rather saw the mind as a device which processed information. If that is true, then having a computer substitute for the human brain seems to follow naturally, if that word can be so used in this context. For Tallis' criticism of Turing's approach to consciousness, and approaches that follow from it, see Chapter 4, "Computerising Consciousness."

Guelzo himself is not ready to give up on dualism. Just because a computer can play chess doesn't mean it has consciousness. I agree. Just because humans can build complex computational devices does not mean that that is what we are.

I have not read The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force By Jeffrey Schwartz. A review says that Schwartz argues "that the mind can affect the brain," although, as the reviewer puts it, "Schwartz does not provide iron-clad proof of the mind's ability to rewire the brain, but makes a good preliminary case." (The reviewer is sympathetic to Schwartz' ideas.)

to Part 1 Introduction, What is a soul? What about uploading? Why this topic?

to Part 3, What about the brain and computers? Computer consciousness? Conclusion

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