Body and soul: Their relationship

Here, Benjamin Wiker provides a working definition of the relationship between the body and the soul, by the distressing route of ... vice:

We are, to repeat, a real unity of body and soul. Consequently, what we do with either our body or our soul affects both our body and our soul. We become what we do; we are what we have done. Repeated sinful actions literally reform our body and soul according to the sin, so that the actions come to define our very nature by becoming second nature.

The development of this second nature is called a habit, and since it is destructive, a bad habit, or more compactly, a vice. As the vice becomes more engrained, we increasingly lose our freedom, our power, to act well. The vice then defines our entire being, both body and soul.

To put it in St. Augustine's concise terms, sin is its own punishment.

Thus, a woman who gambles becomes a gambler, a human being entirely defined by a particular kind of self destructive activity that has become her second nature. A man who views internet porn becomes a creature who can do nothing else, who thinks about nothing else, who is entirely defined by this self- and other-destructive activity, body and soul, mind and heart, eyes, fingers, and brain. What they originally chose to do, and what earlier on they could have much more easily chosen not to do, now becomes the master who ruthlessly in-habits them, changing every aspect of their intimate soul-body union.

Hat tip: The Sheepcat

Antidepressants: Definitely not the "death of the soul"

In a seminal essay in 1996, Tom Wolfe announced, "Sorry but your soul just died." In those days, people - including Wolfe - assumed that a person's mind could be completely manipulated by chemical concoctions.

Well, they - and he - were wrong.

Look at the results from a recent study:

Prescribing anti-depressants to the vast majority of patients is futile, as the drugs have little or no impact at all, according to researchers.

Almost 50 clinical trials were reviewed by psychologists from the University of Hull who found that new-generation anti-depressants worked no better than a placebo – a dummy pill – for mildly depressed patients.

Even the trials that suggested some clinical benefit for the most severely depressed patients did not produce convincing evidence. Professor Irving Kirsch from the university’s psychology department said: “The difference in improvement between patients taking placebos and patients taking anti-depressants is not very great.

“This means that depressed people can improve without chemical treatments. Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe anti-depressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients.”

Does anyone remember when anti-depressant pills were little round gods? Never for me, as it happens, but certainly for people I knew.

Obviously, if people are suicidal, they need help, and maybe antidepressants will help. But the idea that a pill is a big "answer" is obviously wrong.

The soul: Folk views vs. philosophical reflections

Christopher Howse muses in Britain's Telegraph on the soul, while considering the work of the late philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe:

I'm not sure it matters all that much if people imagine that their souls are nebulous entities, like a better class of ghost. For at the same time, we seem quite capable of realising that it is each one of us who at heart acts well or despicably, and may be bound for heaven or for hell.
So we seem torn between the idea that our soul is something else (amorphously attached to us as bodily creatures), and the idea that our soul is the real us, which survives our bodily death to get its deserts in a future life.

Anscombe, who died in 2001, was a formidable Catholic interpreter of Wittgenstein.

Materialist neuroscience: "The mind is what the brain does! ... ?"

Recently, materialist cognitive scientist Steve Pinker wrote a letter to Commentary magazine, excoriating an article by bioethicist Leon Kass,

This point, the foundation of my field, cognitive science, is one that I have made repeatedly, at length, and with all the expository power I can muster. The mind is not the brain but it is, as I say, “what the brain does” (Mr. Kass’s parsing overlooks the crucial word “does”). By this I mean the brain’s ability to manipulate information in ways that mirror logical, statistical, and other normative principles. As many philosophers have shown, this dissolves the apparent mystery that the brain is a physical object but can traffic in abstract ideas involving meaning and truth.

and making the point that

Mr. Kass is free to use the word “soul” to refer to the software of the brain, but he is mistaken if he thinks that this equation, free of any conception of divine provenance or survival after death, is compatible with the way the vast majority of people use the word. Nor is it clear how invoking a soul illuminates any intellectual problem beyond slapping a label on what we feel we do not understand.

The uselessness of soul-talk is particularly evident in the thriving science of consciousness, the study of “inner states” that Mr. Kass decrees to be impossible. ...

Kass replies,

In the course of my critique of reductionism, I accused Steven Pinker of arrogance and shallowness. I am tempted to say that his letter provides further evidence for the charge, especially as it progresses quickly from science (about which he knows a lot) to philosophy (about which he knows a dangerous little) to the Bible and religion (about which he knows less than the village atheist). But some substantive points should be made.

One of which is,

In my article, I took him to task for the following remarks:

The supposedly immaterial soul can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, turned on or off by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or a lack of oxygen. Centuries ago it was unwise to ground morality on the dogma that the earth sat at the center of the universe. It is just as unwise today to ground it on dogmas about souls endowed by God.

I am happy to learn that Mr. Pinker denies saying that the “mind is the brain”—he says instead that "it is what the brain does," a position deftly skewered in Brian Beckman's letter. But one can hardly be blamed for thinking the man a simple materialist. Someone who boasts, even for rhetorical effect, that “the supposedly immaterial soul can be bisected with a knife” simply does not see that thought and awareness, like all powers and activities of living things, are immaterial in their essence and therefore cannot be so carved.

Biran Beckman's letter? Regarding the notion that the mind is the software of the brain (implying that it is easily accommodated by materialism), reader Brian Beckman of Newcastle, Washington, notes,

Steven Pinker’s idea that “the mind is what the brain does” is about as useful as saying that “software is what your computer does.” Is your word processor nothing more than a pattern of electrons in transistors? How about the letter from a friend that you read on a computer screen? Much more than a ghost in the machine, software activates the machine; but it is, itself, a purely spiritual thing.

... Software is just the latest example of immaterial but very real things like songs, ideas, emotions, and human souls. It is particularly apt, though, for shocking adherents of scientism because it is embodied in that trophy of science, the computer.

It's good to see Commentary getting into this debate. Read the whole thing and enjoy!

Anyway, there's little doubt about what Steve Pinker thinks about the soul. Here's what he wrote for Time Magazine (January 19, 2007):

Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.

[ ... ]

And when the physiological activity of the brain ceases, as far as anyone can tell the person's consciousness goes out of existence. Attempts to contact the souls of the dead (a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago) turned up only cheap magic tricks, and near death experiences are not the eyewitness reports of a soul parting company from the body but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain.

[ ... ]

And when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Just remember the most famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11.

If there were such a thing as oral quotation marks, any time Steve Pinker used the word soul, it would be in oral quotation marks. Of course he is entitled to his opinion, but not to indignation when people take him at his word and doubt his account of reality.