… Or, What It Is Like To Be a Neuron:
Start with definitions:
- A spirit is a substantial living being – a being that is and has and suffers a life, a being that feels. There is something that it is like – something that it feels like (as in, What is it Like to Be a Bat?) – to be such a thing. It may or may not be aware of living, or of itself qua self, or of itself as aware. But it is at least aware of – sensitive and respondent to – its environment – which is to say, of its past actual world, including its own past states. This de minimis awareness is necessary for coherence in consistent form of any actuality as time unfolds. So is it necessary a fortiori for homeostasis, and so for all biological – and, indeed, chemical (which is to say, electronic) – processes: events must have access to the data of their own past (if any) and that of their environments if they are to respond thereto in orderly fashion. One cannot revert to a mean that is nowise apprehended or felt; that is not, i.e., realized in past actual events. And only events that respond to others in orderly fashion are capable of together cohering in a consistent world. Thus some minimal sensitivity to the past is needful for occasions that can take a proper and orderly place in any ordered scheme of being. Spirits then are ubiquitous throughout the created order; they are the basic substances of creation.
- A soul is the (Platonico-Aristotelian) form of a living being – of a spirit – whether or not that being is mindful or rational – or corporeal. Trees, men, amoebae, and angels all have souls: are, that is to say, formed as just the beings that they are, and not as any others are formed. Things that are not alive have forms, too; but they don’t have souls. Pyramids and heaps have forms, but are not alive; so, their forms are not souls. I leave it as an open question, NB, whether or not some buildings have souls – whether, that is to say, some buildings, and for that matter such things as mountains, canyons, rivers, watersheds, storms, weathers, seasons, times, ages, you get my drift here I hope, for all such things are built of other things – are, i.e., alive. They may be.
- A mind is a spirit that is aware of itself as distinct from the environmental inputs arising from its actual past. Some minds are aware that they are aware (many are not); they are reflective, such that they take their own previous operations as data of their present operations. Spirits can be more or less mindful: a man in a deep coma is not (so far as we know) mindful, but he is aware – he is, i.e., a spirit, a living being – or else, he would be just dead.
- As physical facts, states of brains – and likewise of other organic control systems (immune systems, neural control systems, endocrine and intestinal microbial systems, axonal, dendritic and synaptic gap equilibria, intracellular, intramitochondrial, and intranuclear systems, and all other information processing systems (as, e.g., markets, cultures, nations, families, cities, firms, hives, flocks, herds, schools, ecologies, languages, and so forth: organisms in general)) – are artifacts of previous acts of spirits (states of computers, likewise; albeit, not those of the computers themselves, but rather of the spirits who designed, built, and programmed them, and then fed them data and energy). Facts can’t generate themselves (for, nothing can cause itself; only what is already generate and thus actual can be something definite, so as to exert effects (NB: not even God can cause himself; but then, he need not, for he is uncaused)). Nor do they arise from their pasts deterministically and nowise bidden, as would be the case if there were no acts – which is to say, no events at all, strictly speaking; so, no facts. No acts → no facts. Facts are finished acts.
The theory is implicit in the definitions of its terms.
Excursus: This is normal. Terms then are nowise philosophically idle. Like acts, they have consequences, albeit only logical, and not in themselves actual. The definitions of terms define their relations to other terms, and in any sufficiently large and consistent set of terms, the structure of those relations taken as a whole cannot but pretend to a model of reality, more or less apt, more or less comprehensive, more or less adequate. Were it otherwise, the system of those terms could not be to anyone anyhow valuable, or therefore anywhere extant. Nobody would bother with them.
A language, then, is a massively well tested and durable model of reality. It is both an implicit theory about reality and so a proposal for action apt in respect thereto; and in any proposal, a project is implicit. Indeed, in any sufficiently complex model, several projects (at least) must be implicit. Viz., the project proposals implicit in global climate models. That project proposals are implicit in models, or for that matter in any logistical calculus, suffices to show that propositions have all hedonic, aesthetic characters, that are more or less alluring or repellent, and so urgent and indeed compelling, whether considered in isolation or as integral with their implications. It feels a certain way to believe in God, e.g., and it feels another way to disbelieve in him. Again, and by exactly the same token, the basic propositions of the integral calculus have an essential and inherent appeal, which to certain sorts of minds renders them impossible to controvert. Once one has understood the basic idea of calculus, its propositions are irresistible. So, likewise, with theism.
Because languages are implicit models of reality, it can make sense to ask, what are the main projects of English? That sounds like the topic of a fairly long book. I have some preliminary notions about that, derived mostly from Shakespeare, Bede, Addison, Milton, Chaucer, Donne, Herbert, the Cloude of Unknowyng, the Book of Common Prayer, the Declaration, the Constitution, Blackstone, Filmer, Bunyan, Burke, Tolkien, the Imitation, Mallory, Beowulf, Lewis, Hymns Ancient & Modern, Smith, Hobbes, Locke, Orwell, Lawrence, Pound, Eliot, and indeed even Joyce and Twain – and so forth. I’m sure there are projects unique to other languages, too, but apart from what I have gathered from a weak and dilatory acquaintance with French and Latin, I have no notion of them.
What is the world that English proposes to us? I think all of us native English speakers have some dim vision of it, or perhaps a memory of a homeland we have never seen, which is shewn forth in all that we have seen (whether in East Anglia or in West Texas). But has it ever been put into words, as such? I don’t know. But it seems we do all have it. Only thus might we find ourselves at all disappointed with the motions of our leaders, to whom its just enaction is enjoined as a duty of their offices.
Indeed, only thus might we find ourselves all moved to happy peaceful tears by The Lord of the Rings or It’s a Wonderful Life.
The question about English (with its tributary streams from Welsh, Gaelic, French, Norse, Danish, Saxon, Dutch, Latin, Greek, and so on) boils at bottom to this: what is the Cult of Britain?
Which (holding the Normans in abeyance for the nonce, as late newcomers to the same basic question) is to ask: how did Druid Britain come to agree with Christ (the Normans, of course, came to that same agreement, long before 1066, albeit by a different emphasis peculiar to their own heritage)? I.e., and to be more specific and plain: how did Druid Britain realize that she was in the Gospel fulfilled and completed, so that her basic tragedy, common to all merely pagan life, was by the Gospel fulfilled, filled out, transposed, translated, and transcended … into comedy.
Comedy, NB, is tragedy transposed by and in a final consummate and all consuming, all resolving victory – in which there is (as in Midsummer (and, more darkly, in the Tempest)) a feat happy ending and fit fecund restoration for all of life as everyone intuits it ought to be, a common joyful arrival at a mutual and proper equilibration, a return to the Golden Origin wherein true Justice lies and rules, and the achievement of a true and natural Golden End; so that everyone then lives happily ever after, in a meet and restful peace.
Comedy is tragedy redeemed – and at its apotheoses, baptized – by Truth, and so by Justice, thus Peace.
I am here stumbling in the dark … but nevertheless confident to suggest that no cultural or national, or indeed even any familiar or individual project, can hope, or therefore possibly succeed, except insofar as it comprehends (however vaguely, dimly, as through a glass darkly) and intends its natural, logical, righteous, holy, proper, and gorgeous lovely consequends, as carried into practical act in the lives of a people.
I am not now much interested in spelling out the basic theory implicit in the terms I have defined, for it is both fairly and straightforwardly obvious (to me, at least; let me know if I should flesh it out more), and also the basis and groundwork for some apparent corollaries I find these days much more interesting. These have to do with the interactions between spirits and brains – specifically, between the spirits natural to those brains (as the spirit of Kristor is natural to the brain of Kristor), and the spirits unnatural to them: angels and demons, in particular, but also the sorts of spirits we more often discuss, such as the zeitgeist, the sensus fidei, neuroses, the Jungian archetypes, egregores, fads, memes, notions, ideologies, and so forth.
Under the latter category, I put our relations with each other: with other human spirits, who can in ways mysterious take up an odd and more or less healthy occupancy and activity in our own internal ecologies (e.g., not just codependence, pathological family systems, Stockholm Syndrome, and the like uglinesses, but also love, sacrifice, devotion, care). For, each such other is to us present in our experience as a joint congeries of forms, each of which bears to us a more or less attractive influence, and so an implicit proposal for our own subsequent acts. E.g., when my wife indicates (among other things that she indicates, and in ways mysterious) that she thinks I should soon take out the trash, taking out the trash then looks to me more evidently advantageous, just in hedonic terms, and indeed looks proper, and righteous altogether. What, shall I propose to neglect the taking out of the trash, when obviously (she indicates) it wants taking out?
The basic question then is this: how do spirits (whose acts, per the definitions above, are precorporeal) interact with corporeal bodies, so as to affect their subsequent configurations (which we with our instruments and senses can measure, and which we can phenomenally apprehend).
The first thing to understand is that the acts of a spirit are not disparate from their sequelae in the body thereof (if such there be – not all spiritual acts have corporeal sequelae). The corporeal sequelae of spiritual acts are rather no more, or other than, the outward objective aspect – for us men, the corporeal aspect – of those acts. They follow from spiritual acts, not temporally or causally, but rather logically. Thus it is not so much that I feel angry and so then a moment later act angry, with the feeling and the act being two disparate substantial occasions, the former causing the latter – even though such be the phenomenal case in our ordinary experience (which, since we are rational minds, is first of all logical). Rather, I feel angry, period full stop. The subsequent angry act of my body (whether it be registered in the tangible motions of my limbs and larynx, or only in the flux of my hormones, my neurotransmitters and their receptors, up and down the hierarchy of my neuronal control systems as I quietly absorb and respond to the hurt) is the sign, outwardly and objectively apprehensible, of my inward and invisible spiritual anger.
The spirit of anger as experienced is to us manifest all at once in our feeling of anger, in fight or flight, and in our motions accompanent. We do not find ourselves angered beyond restraint, then choose to feel agitated to fight or to flight, then decide to act angrily – to fight. It comes to us rather all at once, in a single moment of our continued becoming.
Were it otherwise, we could not later come to regret our angry acts. Only ex post can we begin to see that our angry reactions and acts might not quite altogether have pertained; might have been inapt – or, to put it plainly, might have been wrong. In the hurry and bustle of life, there is no option but to act right now upon the available information, so far as we understand it. Later, upon reflection, we may come to understand our errors in so doing.
Where does all this leave us?
In a nutshell: The living concrete spirit acts at time t in greater or lesser accord with its fundamental essential form – with its soul, that distinguishes it from all others of its sort – and vis-à-vis its environing world, to greater or lesser hedonic effect for all subsequent moments in its life (if such there should be) and in the lives of all its worldly subsequents. Its act is manifest in its body; in its corporeal aftereffects, which are the way it seems to all its subsequents – which are to them its aspect as an object of apprehension. The condition of the body at time t then is a function of the condition of its spirit at t – 1. Thus the state of the brain at t is its corporeal manifestation and outward aspect to all other entities (including the subsequent events of its spirit and of its brain) of the state of its spirit at t – 1.
There is much more to say, but I shall leave it at that for the time being. Suffice for now to say that this scheme is competent to admit a coherent simple understanding of angels, demons, egregores, archetypes, obsession, oppression, and possession, and what is more important than all else, the life of the Christian in Christ – in the mind of Christ.
From that, all ecclesiology, soteriology, and sacramental theology – indeed, all Christianity – follows straightforwardly.
If readers are interested in all that stuff, I shall do my best to expatiate.
The Orthosphere 
Dear Kristor
Given that “fact” comes “from” “factum”, which used to be defined as “a thing done” up to about 1550, you are surely up to something. (Interestingly the change came from legal reasoning, in the sense of criminal processes, which are about figuring out who done what act, so are about facts in this sense, started using the word “fact” for a state of things used as evidence, like a bloody knife found here and bloody clothes there, purely registering what was found, the pure empirical evidence was called “fact”. Instead of that, such an evidence should be called a datum: i.e. a given. So maybe we have yet another reason for disliking lawyers: they confused our philosophy.)
Still I feel confused. Our usual way of learning about things is taking them apart and seeing how their parts interact. Thus chemistry explains biology and physics explains chemistry, the lower explains the higher because the higher is a complex combination, a set of moving parts made out of the lower. Thus small dead things explain bigger living things. (Even in the lawsuit, the part, the lower, the bloody knife found somewhere, explains the higher, the actual deed done.)
Your proposal sounds to me like instead of explaining rabbits with atoms, explain atoms with rabbits. I don’t understand it. Or maybe… I explain why these atoms are in this rabbit and not in somewhere else by the rabbits parents act of procreation?
Or is it more like, instead of explaining the rabbit from below, looking at what moving parts it consists of, explain it from above: what is the rabbit’s part in the ecosystem as a higher, arguably “more alive” (because more complex) unit?
There is something in reductionism that feels like wearing horse blinders. On the other hand, taking things apart in order to understand them by seeing what parts they have and how they interact is a method that worked very well for a lot of purposes.
Perhaps we need to do both, explain the car from below, like how the cam belt works, and from above, like what role it plays in the life of a family or the economy.
“Thus the state of the brain at t is its corporeal manifestation and outward aspect to all other entities (including the subsequent events of its spirit and of its brain) of the state of its spirit at t – 1.”
But in this case it is very hard to see why the state of the spirit would cause a certain state in the brain and not any other. Suppose we do brain scans and a certain area of the brain shows excess activity every time we are angry. Suppose we stimulate that part of the brain with electricity and the patient becomes angry. Suppose we study people who have brain damage in that area and find they cannot get angry. That makes the brain -> spirit causality fairly clear. But how do I even begin to study the exact nature of spirit -> brain causality?
OK ignore the brain damage part, that is not important. Clearly me shooting arrows from a bow is caused by me wanting to, and not the bow making me do it. And me not shooting arrows when the bow is damaged and hence I cannot is no evidence that the bow makes me shoot. But if you can manipulate the bow in some way so that every time you can make me shoot arrows from it, then clearly the causality comes from the bow and not from my decision.
Thanks for your interest in this topic, Dividualist, and for the work you have done in preparing your comment. I did not intend in the essay to object to proper reductionist explanations (albeit that I have often objected to improper reduction). Moreover I agree that reduction must work both ways if it is to work at all: top down as well as bottom up. Indeed, if the explanandum be an actual concrete, then bottom up reduction thereof strictly implies top down reduction: if the rabbit is real, then he *can’t* be nothing but dead particles configured in a certain set of ways (for in that case there would be no rabbit, ergo no explanandum, rendering the explanans otiose); and, likewise, if the rabbit’s molecules are real, they *can’t* be nothing but bits of the rabbit.
But the essay wasn’t about that. Rather, it argues that the observable brain at t is the outward and visible aspect of the spirit at t – 1. Not, NB, that the spirit at t – 1 *causes* the brain to be what it is at t, but that the brain at t *just is* the way that the spirit at t – 1 looks to observers. At t – 1, the spirit is apparent only to itself, and inwardly, as an occurrent feeling of what it is like at that moment to be the spirit. It is not yet apparent to others at that point. Only as past – as a completed occasion of feeling – is it fully definite, and thus observable. Thus the spirit at t – 1 and the brain at t are not disparate things, but rather aspects of one integral thing, as apprehended from different perspectives: that of the thing itself as it completes its process of becoming definite, and that of some other thing that can then observe it.
The influence of the state of the brain at t upon the state of the spirit at t + 1 follows straitly from the theory: what it is like to be the spirit at t + 1 depends massively on the data apprehensible by the spirit at t + 1, *including the previous states of the brain, and of the spirit* (and of the rest of the actual world at that moment). So, the previous states of my brain influence my life right now; so do the previous states of my life; and in turn, the present state of my life influences the future states of my brain and of my life.
I hope that clears things up a bit.
The mathematical formalisms describing how particles move through space and time obviously do not produce subjective experience as an emergent result. They don’t even produce the observed motion of rabbits as an emergent result; “pure” quantum mechanics predicts that a rabbit in state A at time T should be in a superposition of states A1, A2, A3, etc. at time T+1. That a rabbit is actually observed in state A2 (rather than A1, A3, or A104926) is something known particle physics has no explanation for. That the rabbit is ontologically prior to its atoms is a (conceptually) simple explanation that I see no reason to exclude a priori.
It’s not at all clear that the experiences people report while having their brains shocked are the same thing as normal emotions. Such experiments (conducted mostly by people ideologically committed to materialism) usually just report what part of the brain was shocked and the name of an emotion. When subject descriptions are reported, they’re sometimes unusual, e.g. an emotion coming from a particular part of the body.
It’s not clear (to me) why subjective perception should be necessary for any physical process other than animal life. Nor why perception of the past (with or without subjectivity) is required for inanimate processes.
Physical processes – such as a transaction between a photon and an electron – don’t need to be mediated by conscious entities in order to proceed. The photon and electron need not be aware of each other, let alone aware of themselves, or aware of their awareness. But the photon and electron must take account of each other somehow in order to interact. The electron must feel the effect of the arrival in its vicinity of the photon, and so must the photon feel the effect of the electron it has encountered, and for a moment joined. If the two particles did not suffer each other, they could not be changed by each other, and we could never have noticed their interaction.
To be real is among other things to be capable of affect; to be, i.e., open to suffer the effects of other beings.
As for apprehension or registration of the effects of past events, all contingent being continges upon prior beings.
If we prescind from ascribing affect to apparently inanimate entities such as electrons, we run right up against the Hard Problem of consciousness. So that’s one reason to suppose that electrons (e.g.) suffer affects. Another is that the only evidence we have for what it is like to be consists entirely, and can only consist, of our own experience of what it is like to be. Every jot of that experience indicates that there is something that it is like to be!
There’s an ambiguity in the word “feel”. Certainly, for e.g. a photon and an electron to interact, there must be some mechanism by which they respond to each other’s presence. That doesn’t necessarily mean they must subjectively “feel” their environment, even in an extremely primitive way.
In addition to our own inner lives, we also observe other people in the world who seem to have inner lives comparable to our own. Moreover, we observe animals that seem to have inner lives of a sort, albeit vastly inferior to our own. OTOH, even in our own bodies, there are many things happening over which we have no conscious control or even awareness. To explain our own bodies (or those of animals), it’s necessary to posit (in addition to consciousness) other casual factors as well. It seems easy to imagine a substance in which those other factors (which need not be exclusively microphysical) are present, but consciousness isn’t.
Regarding time, it’s possible to explain such things as quantum electrodynamics solely in terms of particles (or fields) responding to the state of their environment at a given moment. Past events are only casually needed as historical explanations.
You are correct about all that. That does not warrant an inference to a supposition of the fundamental stupidity of nature, upon which lives suffered, experienced, felt, are somehow or other mysteriously layered, or from which they inexplicably emerge, with a wave of the hand, hey presto.
Yes, the fact that electrons react to impinging photons does not mean that electrons must have the same sorts of experience that we do, or anything like them. But they do suffer the impingements of photons – we know this because we can measure their responses to those impingements – so it must be that they experience those impingements *somehow or other.*
The generalization is from our experience of suffering effects to suffering effects in general; it is also from suffering effects in general to our experience of suffering effects. The notion is that effect by definition must have some affect, if it is to be effective: agents must be able to affect others, if their acts are to have any meaning, any consequence, outside themselves.
So, yes, there is studied ambiguity in the term “feel.” This is so, NB, of all terms; from that ambiguity, terms derive much of their descriptive intelligence; connotation conveys worlds of meanings that strict denotation loses – or, rather, foregoes. What exactly is force, forsooth? What is it, i.e., that in defining it we are trying to define? Surely it is what is taken up in the feelings of pushing and of being pushed, no? If we had no such feelings, “F = ma” would be to us wholly unintelligible. It would be to us as a definition of mimsy borogoves.
“Feel” means at bottom only “suffer effects.” When the electron suffers the effects of the photon, that is one sort of feeling. When I suffer the effects of the arguments of STA, or of Mozart, that is another.
Yes. Exactly. Past events are needed as explanations. The present state of a system at a given moment cannot be understood *concretely* except as an output and sequel of previous states of that system. I mean, sure, we can (in principle) formally specify the state of the system at t to an exhaustive degree. But that’s kind of like saying of the body of Julius Caesar, late on the 15th March, “here’s a dead guy.”
If you want to really understand the present state of the rabbit – as opposed only to specifying it – you must reckon with the actual history of the rabbit, and of his world.
Is the claim that all substances possess subjective experience on some primitive level, or that they possess some quality that is analogous to (but of different species) from subjective experience?
I agree that awareness of history is necessary for us to say anything useful about a system. But that doesn’t mean that “awareness” (either literal or analogous) of the past is required for the system to simply exist; even if particles actually have subjective experience, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they have memory.
The notion is that all substances are subjects of experience of some sort; most are probably so primitive that we would have a hard time recognizing them as such (although, who can say what the life of an electron might be like, any more than any man can say what the life of an angel is like?). A man in a deep coma is still a subject of experience, after all. He is not aware of himself as a subject, indeed he is not even aware of his experiences (although some of his subsidiary intelligent systems – his immune system, e.g. – might be), but still he experiences.
I doubt that particles remember their past, as plants and animals do. Nevertheless, their present state is a derivate of their immediately past state, in which all past events are coherently integrated with each passing moment, so that there is a world with a history. Their immediately past state is a trace of that whole history. This is to say only that the particle eventuates in an actual world, of which in its act it takes account, thus generating in and as itself a novel integration of that world, and an addition thereto. That taking account is a literal recollection.
One philosophical payoff of this ontological proposal – which I would characterize as properly reductive – is Ockhamian parsimony: we avoid multiplying altogether different sorts of things in our account of the world, and so we avoid the subsequent problem of explaining how those altogether different sorts of things can affect each other. That difficulty, lately influential first in the ontology of Descartes – how do (indeed, how *can*) res extensa and res cogitans affect each other? – is the spring of many intractable problems that have afflicted us since about AD 1600.
Panpsychism doesn’t avoiding the problem of explaining how the physical and the mental interact though. Unless the theory is that minds alone exist and interact with each other directly, then you still have the problem of how a mind influences the matter of its body and how it perceives its environment.
If the theory is that minds alone exist, then the obvious question is, why don’t we have complete conscious control of our bodies?
The theory is that minds *just are* bodies. Chalmers calls it dual aspect theory: the mind is what it is like to be a body; the body is what it looks like to be a mind. The mind is the body’s inward aspect; the body is the mind’s outward aspect. So, there is no interaction problem peculiar to the relation between bodies and minds, inasmuch as bodies and minds are integral. This accords with Aristotle, and with orthodox Christian anthropology.
It is not quite panpsychism, for it does not suggest that all bodies are mental (e.g., billiard balls are not); whereas it does suggest that (in our world) all active minds are bodies of some sort – and that many bodies we commonly suppose to be inert are in fact active. I.e., electrons behave stochastically *and homeostatically* in response to environmental conditions so as to maintain the electronic structure of the molecules in which they find themselves. They don’t act like pebbles or marbles.
This is not to suggest that electrons ratiocinate or deliberate or mull. Not consciously, anyway. Notwithstanding that, electrons must on this account perform some internal calculations, in rather the way that quarterbacks and running backs do calculus on the fly in order to complete a pass. I.e., not consciously, but rather as an integral aspect of what they do, and so then are; of the way that they do their own sort of being.
Bear in mind also that not all minds constitute persons.
Blake put it better (and put in the voice of the devil):
From the fact that there are really 2 principles manifest in Man it does not follow that those principles are in Man themselves instant in 2 different sorts of actual being. That error – the dualist error – is in fact characteristic of certain Gnostic sects that rejected lots of the Bible, and which compounded their error by asserting that the Body is evil per se.
The Bible teaches per contra that those 2 principles are both instant integrally in Man, as one being. So Blake is simply, badly wrong in saying that all Bibles and sacred codes cause the dualist error.