Christine,
I was intrigued by your plea:
christine.P said:
Can someone help me on this please.
If human beings are made up of body, mind,and spirit", does each of these have it's own consciousness; or is the mind the only part that carries consciousness?
Thanks Bow. 
The words "
human beings are made up of body, mind, and spirit" connote a (perhaps partial) list of ingredients used in a recipe by some super-chef. It implies that body, mind and spirit are different substances or elements which together compose a person. I suggest that this is probably not the right interpretation.
For comparison, consider the classical list of
elements of matter -- earth, water, air and fire. Today, scientists don't regard these as constituents of matter; rather, they refer to the elements in the Periodic Table as the proper list of potential ingredients. Nonetheless, the ancient analysis remains true in the following sense, all of the ingredients of matter are in one of the following
phases: solid (earth), liquid (water), gas (air), plasma (fire).
Another example, (US) states are made up of Congressional districts, counties, school districts, and fire districts. But this is not a partition of the state into distinct constituents, because the different types of districts overlap. The political behavior of any of these types of districting requires looking at the state from different perspectives, and taking into account different factors.
So while I agree that people have bodies, minds and spirits, I regard each of these as a different way of looking at a person.
One misconception often held by people who follow your analysis is that body (matter) is inert, inactive, requiring the action of mind, spirit or external force to do anything. This view of matter is strongly reinforced by the visual world in which we live. In that world things stay put unless someone acts on them. Nonetheless, that view is in error. Matter is active.
- Subatomic particles are in a constant flux of changing interactions.
- Except in temporary thermodynamically stable situations, atoms move around among molecules and structures following well known laws of behavior.
- Organic chemical interact with one another in living bodies in remarkab le ways.
- The various organs of the body perform their functions naturally, normally without our intervention.
- Ecological processes change the biosphere as various species refine their strategies for survival.
- Geological processes change the face of the planet.
- Astronomical processes change the universe in which the planet is located.
Every one of these levels of matter is in constant flux, following its own laws, and affecting the environment of all the other levels. Isn't it strange that matter (body) is apparently so docile only at our level of perception? Maybe that simplicity was necessary for awareness of the world to evolve. If we had been inundated by stimuli of all of these changes at all of these levels, we (our brains) might not have been able to create a sufficiently simple model of the world for us to begin building a framework for understanding. Fortunately we are separated from the complexity at smaller and larger levels by radically different timescales. Smaller processes occur too fast; larger ones, too slow for us to notice until we are sophisticated enough to measure with instrumentation and clocks.
Once we recognize that matter is active, not inert, it is easy to conclude that
life is a special kind of active matter, with very complex processes, in which multiple levels of organization interact. One consequence of those interactions is
natural selection and its effect on species survival and evolution.
With this background, I assert that a person is a living organism (body), all of whose actions (activities, behavior, processes) involve the interaction of that person's physical and biological systems both among themselves and with other objects, living and otherwise, in the environment. All of those processes operate within the framework of natural laws that the systems and subsystems at all levels.
But this does not yet answer your question. Where do mind and/or spirit fit into this complex of systems? There are two classical answers:
- Mind and/or spirit are distinct substances which in some way reside within our bodies and interact with the physical parts of ourselves to govern some higher parts of our behavior. This interpretation is often called dualism.
- Mind and/or spirit are aspects of our living bodies, manifesting themselves in the way we behave within the framework of our normal, visual universe. This interpretation is often called materialism.
I myself have never seen a satisfactory argument for dualism. Spiritual substances have never cropped up in lists of the things found in scientific analyses of the body. Although absence of proof is not proof of absence, I find the difficulty of discussing how spiritual/mental substance interacts with physical substance utterly overwhelming in the absence of any science of the behavior or spiritual/mental substance.
I am therefore, provisionally, a materialist: I equate the person with his or her living body. But I reject the word "mere" that is often used to castigate that equation. The person is not
mere matter, for as we have seen matter is not mere inactive stuff. People think, hope, start, stop, choose, talk and do a whole lot of other things, all of which involve complex interactions of systems and subsystems within their bodies, and some of which have significant ramifications within the social systems of which they are a part.
The worthwhile question to be asked is not whether our minds are matter, but whether our minds matter. If our bodies physical systems following physical laws, are we not mere machines following inexorable laws that determine precisely what we do? Materialists have often accepted, even embraced, this conclusion; they have become
mechanists.
One who did not was Roderick Chisholm of Brown University. I did graduate work under Chisholm, but knew of him from undergraduate work when I encountered an article by him in Sydney Hook's
Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science, a delightful book that remains in my collection after many decades. Chisholm was superb at precise articulation of philosophical issues. His formulation of this issue of materialism can be paraphrased as follows:
- Either our actions are completely determined by the natural laws that apply to the situations in which we find ourselves (i.e., by their causes), or they are not.
- If they are so determined, then what we do at any given point is not in our control unless we were in control of those causes. But since the same argument applies to the causes, we find ourselves in an infinite regression, leading ultimately to determining situations over which we are clearly not in control.
- If they are not so determined, then what we do is not determined by the situations in which our actions take place, i.e., they are a matter of chance, and again we are not in control of our actions.
- We are responsible for our actions only to the extent that we control what we do.
- Therefore, whether determinism is true or false, we don't control our actions, and cannot legitimately be held responsible for them.
Chisholm's version of the argument is much more articulate, and deserves reading in full, as do many of the articles in Hook's volume.
Chisholm believed that the argument in the form he gave it was valid: if the premisses are true, the conclusion must be true. Since he could not accept the conclusion, he spent much of his career looking for ways to reject one or other of the premisses.
What he was working on at the time I knew him was
agency theory: people control their behavior even though what they do is not strictly determined by what goes on in their brains or elsewhere in their bodies. Chisholm did not rely on any form of dualism (i.e., mental substance) to justify this claim. What he used was an
epistemological argument, i.e., an argument based on what we can know about human decision.
(The form I will give that argument is my own extension of his work. Much of what I learned from him was said in class, and the years are too long to offer textual support for what I concluded from those teachings.)
Mechanism is commonly defended by using
Occam's (or
Ockham's)
Razor: don't multiply objects beyond necessity. In other words, as long as competing theories account for the same phenomena, the simpler is to be preferred. Mechanists appeal to this principle in their claim that since materialism can account for the same behavior, it has pride of place over the more complex dualism. Chisholm's argument addresses this particular aspect of the mechanistic argument.
Given all we know about the brain and other parts of a person's body, we can predict and explain what that person can or might do, but we cannot with accuracy predict or explain
when he or she will do it. If on the other hand we supplement our explanation with information about that person's
psychological states (e.g., what he or she intended or wanted or hoped or feared), we can predict with far greater accuracy what he or she will do. In other words a theory of behavior that includes reference to psychological states is (currently) better at predicting behavior than any theory that does not, i.e., than any mechanist theory.
Psychological theories of the kind Chisholm referred to have a common thread: they explain behavior using evidence that essentially refers to people as the subjects of sentences about the world ("Smith tried to ...", "Brown asserted that ...", etc.) Such theories include people as objects that are essential to their explanations. Any attempt to reduce those evidentiary statements to statements solely about the bodies of those people immediately loses the predictive power of the theories.
Now, as I said, this is purely an epistemological argument. It follows the standard rules for comparing two proposed scientific theories, and concludes that by those rules psychological theories which refer essentially to people have better predictive power than theories that don't. Occam's Razor cannot be used to eliminate people from the list of essential entities in the universe, because our best theories of human behavior make essential reference to them.
Note however that Occam's Razor does at this time seem to justify excluding
minds,
spirits or
souls as separate substances from the scientific explanation of human behavior: there is no cogent theory of behavior that explains behavior in those terms.
But this epistemological theory calls for an
ontological explanation: what in the heck does it mean for people to perform actions that are not made to happen by underlying physical processes?
The general form of this ontology is
emergentism. This is the theory that sometimes when new levels of organization arise, the behavior at the higher level, although
consistent with the laws at the lower level, is not fully reducible to those laws. Events that are relatively improbable at the lower level, might be highly probably at the higher.
To put it another way, systems can take on a life, a pattern of behavior, of their own, making things happen that are essentially unpredictable in the chaos of the lower level. (Compare Doug Hofstadter's discussion of a conversation with an anthill, not with the ants, in his
Godel, Escher, Bach.)
One interpretation of Chisholm's argument is that people are emergent systems, who bring things about that would be physically improbable.
I'm inclined to think that mechanistic rules were too strict for pre-humans to survive in competition with other life forms. Humans (and others) evolved with competing internal systems, each of which told them to do certain things in certain circumstances. All too often those internal systems conflicted with one another. (Do I keep the prey and eat, or do I run away from the predator that wants it?) Consciousness evolved principally as a way to resolve those conflicts by enabling choice among alternatives when there was no determining grounds for any one of them.
But what does that have to do with minds and spirits? They are not separate things with their own consciousness. The language of mind and spirit and consciousness is one of our ways of expressing those psychological attributes that are critical to our recognizing the person as an emergent entity. They refer not to elements or substances in the body, but to emergent characteristics of the body and its behavior. in that language mind and spirit and consciousness are subtly different but heavily overlapping.
What is remarkable about the current systems theoretic view of the universe is the concurrent and interacting evolution of systems at multiple levels. If an explanation of the relationship between mind and body is to be found, it is likely to be there.
Respectfully,
Jim
PS. It should occur to you that consciousness and choice might also emerge at higher levels than the one where people are agents. For example, Lovelock and Margolis assert that the earth (Gaia) is a living organism. Might not Gaia develop a form of consciousness. Some interesting issues would be involved in that discussion.
