Christians and Neurology

[frater_domus]

This topic has started to bother me. And I am not speaking as a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but as a Christian first and aspiring medical professional second. My main issue comes with not knowing how much is tied to the body and how much to a non-comporeal entity, namely the soul.
There are plenty of articles from Christian neurologists that show that increased spiritual activities in Christians bring along changes in the brain, which result in changes in behaviour. But aren't those fruits of the Spirit? Or are the fruits inevitably tied to our bodies? In fact, there is nothing biblical that suggests that there is a dualism of body and soul. It even speaks about the resurrection of the body. It speaks about the dualism between desires of the flesh and the spirit, but apparently both are manifestations of the body, of us. The problem is that we have no way of knowing. Neuroscience is very young, and besides, the biblical is written with a spiritual view in mind. We can observe natural truths, but not spiritual ones.

Typically, I am in favour of sciences, if practiced with God. We learn about God's glorious creation and we can see His hands in it.
However, this reasoning stops working for me when it comes to neuroscience. Yes, I know that Gid created the brain and whatever happens there is by His design. Still, this is an irrational fear and thus it is hard to reason it away.
Maybe it is because I feel like my faith is threatened? Either way, I am a little scared of this topic, but I do not want to avoid it, but face it.

Do you have any input on that or anything that can help me be at peace with this topic, that would be awesome. Is there even a duality between body and soul? And if not, what would that mean? As always, biblically based reason and theology is what I am looking for.

Oh, and please leave go easy on the "all sciences are false" angle. God created the world and we observe it. Sciences are not evil, evil people merely use it to ungodly ends. I do not wish to drive the topic in that direction.

 

[Sabertooth]

I take the position that our brains are organic PLCs. They are responsible for managing our sensory inputs, translating our express will into voluntary bodily processes, maintaining involuntary bodily processes and memory. Our souls are at the controls.

Your soul has subjective preferences like color, food, music, etc.

 

[συνείδησις]

So are you afraid that you might find out something about how the brain operates that would threaten your faith? My dad used to tell me how there was no such thing as spirit or heart, and everything was merely a function of the left brain and right brain. The fact is spirit is intelligence and merely uses the brain's circuits to accomplish its tasks. There is no such thing as intelligence apart from spirit.

 

[frater_domus]

I take the position that our brains are organic PLCs. They are responsible for managing our sensory inputs, translating our express will into voluntary bodily processes, maintaining involuntary bodily processes and memory. Our souls are at the controls.

Your soul has subjective preferences like color, food, music, etc.

But even those preferences occupy and stimulate a section of the brain. Or are you saying that not the preferences themselves but the reason for the differences of those, as in "I like green whereas you like red"?

 

[Sabertooth]

..., as in "I like green whereas you like red"?

Yes. Physiologically, we both experience red and green similarly. But our competing preferences are almost completely subjective.

 

[ubicaritas]

I take the position that our brains are organic PLCs. They are responsible for managing our sensory inputs, translating our express will into voluntary bodily processes, maintaining involuntary bodily processes and memory. Our souls are at the controls.

Your soul has subjective preferences like color, food, music, etc.

That's a very dualistic understanding of the human person, sort of like what Descartes believed, that the soul was some kind of homonculus in the brain, the opposite of what frater_domus is driving at, and the opposite of what neuroscience suggests.

 

[Sabertooth]

..., and the opposite of what neuroscience suggests.

Neuroscience can only map out the PLC. If a humanist presumes that there is no soul, they would have to conclude it is strictly a mechanistic function. The organic PLC model is consistent, too.

I believe AI will hit a glass ceiling and bear this out.

Even the will to live and reproduce can't be created artificially. They can be set as objectives, but if a barrier is met, they will be halted without question.

 

[ubicaritas]

Neuroscience can only map out the PLC. If a humanist presumes that there is no soul, they would have to conclude it is a strictly mechanistic function. The organic PLC model is consistent, too.

I believe AI will hit a glass ceiling and bear this out.

Whether AI does or does not has zero bearing on whether there is some kind of homunculus inside a human brain "pulling levers" effectively. I think that's as ridiculous as thinking gravity is due to angels pulling on planets.

 

[Sabertooth]

The only alternative is for our personality to be the sum total of unknown mechanistic processes. That is what AI presumes.

 

[~Anastasia~]

This topic has started to bother me. And I am not speaking as a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but as a Christian first and aspiring medical professional second. My main issue comes with not knowing how much is tied to the body and how much to a non-comporeal entity, namely the soul.
There are plenty of articles from Christian neurologists that show that increased spiritual activities in Christians bring along changes in the brain, which result in changes in behaviour. But aren't those fruits of the Spirit? Or are the fruits inevitably tied to our bodies? In fact, there is nothing biblical that suggests that there is a dualism of body and soul. It even speaks about the resurrection of the body. It speaks about the dualism between desires of the flesh and the spirit, but apparently both are manifestations of the body, of us. The problem is that we have no way of knowing. Neuroscience is very young, and besides, the biblical is written with a spiritual view in mind. We can observe natural truths, but not spiritual ones.

Typically, I am in favour of sciences, if practiced with God. We learn about God's glorious creation and we can see His hands in it.
However, this reasoning stops working for me when it comes to neuroscience. Yes, I know that Gid created the brain and whatever happens there is by His design. Still, this is an irrational fear and thus it is hard to reason it away.
Maybe it is because I feel like my faith is threatened? Either way, I am a little scared of this topic, but I do not want to avoid it, but face it.

Do you have any input on that or anything that can help me be at peace with this topic, that would be awesome. Is there even a duality between body and soul? And if not, what would that mean? As always, biblically based reason and theology is what I am looking for.

Oh, and please leave go easy on the "all sciences are false" angle. God created the world and we observe it. Sciences are not evil, evil people merely use it to ungodly ends. I do not wish to drive the topic in that direction.

Interesting subject.

My experience in neuroscience was only entry-graduate level and some years ago. It changes so quickly that I'm sure much of what I did learn is obsolete. But I'm interested.

I do think it's incorrect to approach man as being a spirit encased in a body. We were created spirit and body, we will exist in eternity as spirit and body once all bodies are resurrected and we are returned to our natural state (albeit the body will not be as it is now since it cannot die again).

When we sin, it is both the body and spirit that sins (in most sins). We are redeemed both body and spirit.

So why should it present a problem if God designed us to work in such a way that they are entwined?

I would also present the idea (which I'm no expert on) that aspects of ourselves exist apart from the gray matter in our heads.

The ancient Christians knew there was something deeper than thoughts that could be felt in the body (usually called "the heart") and people continue to experience that today.

There are also interesting bits of research I've seen (but not looked into) that speak of other parts of the body (frequently the heart here also) that seem to have either a memory or a sense of determination in some things.

Just some thoughts. Not trying to definitively answer the whole issue.

Interesting question.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Hey, don't stress. It looks very different than it really is. I am an Anaesthetist, and Neurology is often grossly oversold by Atheists and such. Especially ideas like consciousness being an emergent property. The fact of the matter is that we do not have a physiological explanation of consciousness.
A big brouhaha is made of certain areas in the brain having certain functions, Exne's area or Broca etc. and how this is supposed to explain where all our 'self' lies. Or fMRI are treated as if we have pinpointed this or that. Step back a bit, and you'll realise we know very little. We are extrapolating quite a lot. Never overestimate Neurology, this is the error that all these 'the brain is a computer' or 'Singularity' types make.

Take spontaneous respiration. We know where the respiratory centre is in the medulla oblongata, or at least we think we do. The dorsal group is supposed to act as the breathing pacemaker, the ventral with expiration, and all kind of hypothalamic, apneustic centre and pneumotaxic centre inputs are thought to be active here. We should be golden. It sounds like we know quite a bit, and we do. But we actually cannot model it at all very well. We draw empiric hysteresis curves, but throw in some induction agents or volatile anaesthetics, and the whole system breaks down. Funny thing is, how we think it should break down, is not the case. Mostly PCO2 influences central chemoreceptors by pH changes, not PO2 (which actually depresses the respiratory centre), but then somehow peripheral chemoreceptors do come into play and PO2 also somehow matters. This is a far more basic pathway than consciousness, and we are confused to no extent what is really happening. We can describe what is happening empirically, but not by what reason, and our presumed physiological explanations aren't really fitting the facts very well. Afterall, we don't even really know how volatiles even induce Anaesthesia.

So the way I like to look at it, is as if we are driving a machine. If I press the break pedal of a car, but the lines are cut, it won't work. Does that mean that 'pressing of the pedal' as a volitional act never happened? Why do we think that lack of external evidence precludes conscious acts, when we cannot explain the existence of consciousness itself, from a material perspective? But this is a wrong way of looking at it. We are the material machine, but not solely it. A composite being, in other words.

For we see in 1 Thessalonians 5:23, that a tripartite idea is implicit - Body, soul and Spirit. This is found in, or related to, OT ideas of Ruach and Nephesh, the latter being 'Living' or dead. Ruach or 'Spirit' seems to be an animating principle, and Nephesh is more than just body, but has an aspect of 'Soul'. The OT does not seem to see man as being a unitary entity, or "just a soul" independent of the body, as many would have it. We are a composite being of these elements. Soul and Spirit aren't nicely differentiated, so you could argue a dual structure too, but the body is part of us, too - at least to interact here. This is why there will be a resurrection of the body at the Parousia, even to judge the wicked, for is there an 'I' without it? We survive by being the Pauline 'dead-in-Christ' having a Spirit that is Christ, and thereby being Living (perhaps Living Nephesh?). Those without Christ, are dead, not whole, lacking. Perhaps the 'dead-in-Christ' have to be 'in-Christ' to maintain some coherence, and only become complete once reunited with matter at the Resurrection of the body - for why do we presume we have anything approaching existence at all without it?

So I personally do not see how we can find a material explanation for consciousness without falling into brute determinism, in which case it doesn't matter what I think, as it is solely preprogrammed physiologic process and cascade of matter at play. This leaves ample place for the soul, but even if we do, we might have a catch-22 on our hands, that physiology only acts that way at behest of something else entirely, but we only perceive the effect, and ascribe it materially.

 

[ubicaritas]

The only alternative is for our personality to be the sum total of unknown mechanistic processes. That is what AI presumes.

I think that's closer to the truth of things. We may never be able to answer whether such an AI is conscious, though (I cannot even prove that you, for instance, are conscious).

I understand the soul as the totality of a person's being, not a homonculus or something like Descartes views of the soul. I also have no commitment to the notion of liberatiarn free will except as a social convention.

 

[Uber Genius]

Bravo on a well-written thread being up many different ideas suggesting mind-body dualism.

I would suggest that the fact that Jesus was preaching while his body lay in the tomb (1 Peter 3:19-20) suggests that mind body dualism is the case.

Secondly, our souls continue after death of our bodies. Suggesting that the two are not inextricable or that they are identical.

In fact it is hard to find any Christian thinker in history that has held that we are just physical, and souls are illusory.

Your statment that there is nothing Biblical to suggest dualism, seems false in every page. I'm not being hyperbolic here. Every time we make a decision that has moral implications we are engaging our souls on dualism. If we chose poorly then we would get judged by God but on physicalism, epiphenoominalism/property dualism there is no such freedom to engage rationality and freedom to choose one course of action over another. On physicalism we operate as a function of programmed responses and predecessor events. There is no room for free will.

Free will jettisoned as a delusion, we recognize we are determined and there is no room for decisions to reform our will to that of Christ. No room for God to judge us as we are automatons doing the bidding of our genetics.

If you read the literature of the alternate inferences other than dualism you will see they are not found in the writing of any of the books.

 

[συνείδησις]

Neuroscience can only map out the PLC. If a humanist presumes that there is no soul, they would have to conclude it is strictly a mechanistic function. The organic PLC model is consistent, too.

I believe AI will hit a glass ceiling and bear this out.

Even the will to live and reproduce can't be created artificially. They can be set as objectives, but if a barrier is met, they will be halted without question.

Such is the vanity of man. They can't even explain what intelligence is, yet they think they can create it.

 

[ubicaritas]

BTW, I'm amazed how some AI researchers keep raising the bar on what is and is not real AI. We now have computer hardware that can largely pass the Turing test easily, something that was a fantasy when I was a kid.

Some researchers keep chasing after the end of the rainbow of machine consciousness, ignoring that consciousness is a serious philosophical, not scientific, problem that applies to humans as much as it does to AI.

 

[Sanoy]

The main focus of thought today is over the parts of existence that are irreducible to matter. Basically our qualia, our thoughts, desires, intentional states etc and additionally our epistemological intuitions.... Those, black box, micro intuitions from which thoughts are constructed and logic is drawn out. (Some intuitions are matter derived)
Our subjective experiences are irreducible to matter, and if they were matter it would undercut the notion that we should be able to even know things about ourselves (why should matter be so aligned and natured to acquire true thoughts? Or even have thoughts)

The main model used in dualism is that of a car and driver, or a piano and pianist. The tool serves the agent. If you smash the piano the music will suffer, because the tool the pianist uses is broken, not the pianist.

The hardest thing to understand is memory loss in a dualistic system. But I think a computer is a good example for understanding it. A computer receives meaning, via semantic statments which are encoded into a machine language that is transmitted to another computer, which turns the machine language into semantic language that produces meaning. So if you break the part responsible for machine language (the brain) then of course it will effect reproduction. I haven't looked into it but J.P. Moreland, who you will want to look into, says the leading person on memory said there is actually no evidence that memory is the Brain. A controversial statement to be sure.

The last part regards people with split brains, those that have their corpus callosum cut. They appear to exhibit two personalities which appears to indicate that we are nothing but our brains. But really all this indicates is that our two brain halves provide a different set of pointers. Those chunks of information that inform our decisions and intuitions. If I cut a picture in half amd ask you to describe how the image makes you feel you will give me two experiences. And that's with a working brain.

Oh another thing to look at is the high functionality of people born with almost no brain at all. Sometimes with barely more than a brain stem. They appear more functional in their lack of brain, than patients who have had brain damage.

 

[drjean]

body--flesh
soul---mind, will
spirit---ethereal entity

Check out epigenetics.

 

[Dorothy Mae]

This topic has started to bother me. And I am not speaking as a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but as a Christian first and aspiring medical professional second. My main issue comes with not knowing how much is tied to the body and how much to a non-comporeal entity, namely the soul.
There are plenty of articles from Christian neurologists that show that increased spiritual activities in Christians bring along changes in the brain, which result in changes in behaviour. But aren't those fruits of the Spirit? Or are the fruits inevitably tied to our bodies? In fact, there is nothing biblical that suggests that there is a dualism of body and soul. It even speaks about the resurrection of the body. It speaks about the dualism between desires of the flesh and the spirit, but apparently both are manifestations of the body, of us. The problem is that we have no way of knowing. Neuroscience is very young, and besides, the biblical is written with a spiritual view in mind. We can observe natural truths, but not spiritual ones.

Typically, I am in favour of sciences, if practiced with God. We learn about God's glorious creation and we can see His hands in it.
However, this reasoning stops working for me when it comes to neuroscience. Yes, I know that Gid created the brain and whatever happens there is by His design. Still, this is an irrational fear and thus it is hard to reason it away.
Maybe it is because I feel like my faith is threatened? Either way, I am a little scared of this topic, but I do not want to avoid it, but face it.

Do you have any input on that or anything that can help me be at peace with this topic, that would be awesome. Is there even a duality between body and soul? And if not, what would that mean? As always, biblically based reason and theology is what I am looking for.

Oh, and please leave go easy on the "all sciences are false" angle. God created the world and we observe it. Sciences are not evil, evil people merely use it to ungodly ends. I do not wish to drive the topic in that direction.

We could discuss this. I work in neurology and will give this some thought. I would not be surprised if certain neurological areas light up when certain thoughts connected with God are dwelled upon by a Christian. But the neurons did not make the Christian dwell on those thoughts. I would not be surprised to find that certain particular areas in the brain light up when a man thinks of the woman he has loved his whole life. But those neurons did not make him think of her. Matter does not determine its own actions. So we are more than matter and yet we need matter at this point. Sometimes I think of the quote, "the body is a machine a ghost can operate." (Something like that.) The brain and the mind are not the same thing. One is material and the other is beyond material. What do you think of this?

 

[NBB]

The soul and spirit are connected to the brain (body) so it make sense that when something spiritual happens the brain could reflect that. Personally i have discerned my soul god showed it to me, and we wouldn't be able to feel the presence of God etc. if we were a brain only.
The spirit can bring life to the body.

 

[frater_domus]

So are you afraid that you might find out something about how the brain operates that would threaten your faith? My dad used to tell me how there was no such thing as spirit or heart, and everything was merely a function of the left brain and right brain. The fact is spirit is intelligence and merely uses the brain's circuits to accomplish its tasks. There is no such thing as intelligence apart from spirit.

So why should it present a problem if God designed us to work in such a way that they are entwined?

I suppose that I feel like the idea of the Holy Spirit is threatened. I read an article from a lead researcher who approaches neuroscience from a Christian angle, being one himself. It said that spiritual activities like prayers and meditating on scripture changes the brain. It promotes the region of the brain that is responsible for good deeds, empathy and love, while inhibiting the part that is reponsible for aggression and anger, along with changes in the frontal lobe. So couldn't the "fruits of the Spirit" simply just be the non-scientific name for the biological changes that the disciples were not aware of?

Then again, refuting my own point here, there is still a difference. Yes, the biology of our brains adapt. However, this still does not explain spiritual experiences, personal messages and wisdom that we perceive from impersonal text as well as faith itself.
There is more reason to believe that spirit and body function in an intertwined manner than to believe in "biologism" or "dualism". The book of nature and the the book of scripture are perfect and do not contradict each other. Our interpretations thereof, namely science and theology, are flawed due to our limited nature. God doesn't make mistakes. We do.

Still, there is that slight remainder of anxiety that modern sciences may turn millenia of theology on its head and we misunderstood the bible and God all along. I know that that is fairly unlikely, because as I said, God doesn't make mistakes, but still, there it is. I realize that it isn't rational, but since when has that stopped any kind of fear