If, by chance or interest, you
have been following contemporary neuroscience, the expression “Are you
out of your mind?” should be shelved in favor of the expression “Are
you out of your brain?” Or, more accurately, if more cumbersomely, we
should ask, “Are you out of your mind=brain?”
This would bring our language
up to speed with modern neuroscience (it might also, however, confuse
my children and yours). After all, most of the neuroscientists,
philosophers of mind, and others who write about the human brain, speak
of it as the organ that we think with. It is easy enough to
assume the truth of this dubious claim by absorbing, like a sponge,
stories in the media that propagate it.
As if to press the Delete key
on the views of untold numbers of thinkers who have argued, for
centuries, that thinking cannot be reduced to a physical organ of the
human body, or more recently, that thinking cannot be reduced to the
brain and central nervous system, today’s neurobiologists and
neurophilosophers do precisely that: they say that thought can be
explained largely by reference to the brain’s electrical-chemical
processes.
Neurophilosophers such as
Patricia Churchland and Daniel C. Dennett have argued that the mind
equals the brain. Thinking, for them, is simply the result of the
firing of neurons, neural connections, and various material forces
taking place in the brain. As Dennett says, the soul is really a bunch
of “robots” and these “robots” are “the mindless swarms of neurons and
other cells that cooperate to produce a thinking thing—just not an immaterial thinking thing.” Therefore, psychology is really biology for such contemporary brain scientists.
To be sure, thinking presupposes a functioning brain, but it cannot be reduced
to this fist-sized organ. Thinkers ranging from Aristotle (d. 322 BC)
and Aquinas (d. 1274) to Mortimer Adler (d. 2001) and Benedict Ashley,
O.P. (d. 2013), have shown that thinking is a spiritual or immaterial power of the human person (and only the human person), not a material property.
For instance, in the Summa Contra Gentiles,
St. Thomas Aquinas gives five arguments to show why the intellect and
the senses, or, as we would say today, why the mind and the brain are
not the same. They hold up just as well today as when Aquinas
formulated them over 700 years ago, and they have been further
developed and refined by Ashley and others.
First, Thomas argues that both
human beings and animals possess sense, but only the former have an
intellect. The truth of this comes from the observation that animals
act in a determined and uniform way by instinct, whereas humans are
able to act freely in diverse ways for a goal. That is, humans can think
about the best means to realizing the goal they seek and then freely
choose it. This is evidence that intellect and sense cannot be equated
(Ashley deals with recent studies attempting to show that animals can
use language. But he shows that only humans speak a syntactical one;
see Ashley, Healing for Freedom, pp. 183-88).
Second, Thomas notes that while
the sense power is aware of singulars, the intellect is aware of
universals. This is because every sense power knows through individual
species, since it receives the species of things in bodily organs.
Ashley gives the example of how we can think of both five apples and
five oranges (species), but also the number five (universals) (see Healing for Freedom, p. 190).
Third, Thomas observes that our
senses take in only material things. The sense organs do this by being
physically as neutral as possible to a sensible quality (e.g., eye to
color). Thus, I can see red roses without my eyes actually becoming red
roses. Or, I can hear a sound without my ears literally becoming that
sound. Sensible qualities are the proper object of the senses and exist
only in them, not in the intellect. The senses are bereft of knowledge
without these sensible properties. On the other hand, the intellect
knows non-bodily things, such as wisdom, truth, and the relations
existing between things (Ashley notes that this is especially evident
in the use of human language, whereby we can assert and know
propositions as either true or false; see Healing for Freedom, p. 193).
Fourth, a sense knows neither
itself nor its workings. Thomas gives the following example: sight
neither sees itself nor sees that it sees. This self-reflexive power
(or self-consciousness)—i.e., knowing that you know something—belongs
to the intellect alone. Ashley explains this by pointing out that an
extended body cannot have every part of its body be in contact with
every other part. That is why the human brain, as a material thing
having quantity, is unable to have this reflexivity: it is a network of
neurons connecting one point of the brain with as many other points of
the brain as possible. But no matter how much we compress a body (such
as the brain, if that were possible without destroying it) and no
matter how interconnected its points by the transmission of signals, we
cannot place every part in contact with every other part (see Healing for Freedom, p. 198). So, once again, we can affirm that intellect and sense are different.
Fifth, sense is corrupted by
too much of a sensible object. Stated another way, our senses can be
overloaded, e.g., the sun can blind one’s eyes. But intellect is not
corrupted or overwhelmed by thinking about superior concepts. In fact,
knowing abstract and universal concepts makes someone better equipped
to understand lesser things later on. So, while our eyes can have too
much sunlight, our minds cannot have too much knowledge of God. The
sensitive power therefore differs from the intellective power (see
Ashley’s discussion of this argument in Healing for Freedom, pp. 199-203, as well as how he relates it to Goedel’s Theorem on pp. 198 and 202-03).
What causes serious problems
for the materialist view is that the materialist understanding of the
brain makes a mockery of the scientific enterprise itself, in that the
materialist brain researcher holds up his research as proof that we
think with our brains and in fact appeals to this evidence to convince
you and me of the truth of his position. In making this move, the
materialist is appealing to a free will that we, in his worldview,
actually no longer really have—it’s an illusion too. But if freedom is
an illusion, it renders his scientific appeal rather unscientific, as
well as unworkable. He is, in other words, caught in a contradiction.
That is, if he is right to deny
that thinking is an immaterial process, then he can no longer
coherently try to persuade us to “come over” to his way of
understanding things. We are in fact already determined: some of us are
determined to “think” he is right and some of us are determined to
“think” he is wrong, all depending on the particular physiochemical
activity going on in our brains. (An early version of this
“self-referential” argument against determinism, by Joseph Boyle and
his co-authors, is proposed here.)
We are surely not free,
according to this view, either to accept or reject the materialist’s
argument equating the mind with the brain. But if we actually are free,
then we could not in truth equate the mind with the brain,
since free choice, like our ability to know, is a spiritual power not
dependent on anything material. Science then, by the logic of
materialism itself, can no longer be about the rational pursuit of
truth, but about power struggles over fixed, predetermined conclusions.
To borrow a recent expression from American politics, “It’s a bridge
to nowhere.”
I find Gilbert Meilaender’s
expression of the mind-brain relationship much closer to the truth. He
says our thoughts are “both located in the brain and distanced from
it—which is why we are capable of what [philosopher] Thomas Nagel has
called ‘the view from nowhere.’” Nagel, himself an atheist, has gotten
into hot water
lately with his fellow secular philosophers for questioning the very
truth of the materialistic/naturalistic account of mind and cosmos. (See
the Public Discourse discussion of Nagel’s book here.)
Many of the neurobiologists who
deny the immateriality and existence of the rational and intellectual
soul, and who therefore deny the immateriality of thinking, seem never
to have heard the ancient and modern arguments for these truths.
Or, having heard them, they have either forgotten them or rejected
them.
This rejection is often driven
by the atheistic and neo-Darwinian assumptions of the prestigious
scientists who work in this field. These assumptions must be
challenged, however, if science is to retain its rightful place as an
inestimable source of knowledge and wisdom in our society. Moreover, it
is important to note that not all scientists are atheistic
materialists; there are many internationally respected scientists who
are firm believers in God, among them the recently deceased Hungarian
priest-physicist Stanley Jaki who taught at Seton Hall University in
New Jersey.
Science deserves more from its
scientists than scientism. And so do human persons, whose own God-given
dignity depends on the existence (and the acceptance) of the rational
soul and the idea that its “faculties” are the “powers” of knowing and
willing—not the powerful inner workings of our brains. In the end, as
an “embodied intelligent freedom,” to borrow the recent phrase of
Benedict M. Ashley and Kevin D. O’Rourke, man’s marvelous brain serves his thinking; it doesn’t do it for him. If you said it did, I think you’d be out of your mind.
