Maverick Philosopher

Soul as Homunculus? On Homuncular Explanation

The following quotation is reproduced verbatim from Michael Gilleland's classics blog, Laudator Temporis Acti: 

Augustine, Sermons 241.2 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 38, col. 1134; tr. Edmund Hill):

They could see their bodies, they couldn't see their souls. But they could only see the body from the soul. I mean, they saw with their eyes, but inside there was someone looking out through these windows. Finally, when the occupant departs, the house lies still; when the controller departs, what was being controlled falls down; and because it falls down, it's called a cadaver, a corpse. Aren't the eyes complete in it? Even if they're open, they see nothing. There are ears there, but the hearer has moved on; the instrument of the tongue remains, but the musician who used to play it has withdrawn. (emphasis added by BV)

Videbant corpus, animam non videbant. Sed corpus nisi de anima non videbant. Videbant enim per oculum, sed intus erat qui per fenestras aspiciebat. Denique discedente habitatore, iacet domus: discedente qui regebat, cadit quod regebatur: et quoniam cadit, cadaver vocatur. Nonne ibi oculi integri? Etsi pateant, nihil vident. Aures adsunt; sed migravit auditor: linguae organum manet; sed abscessit musicus qui movebat.

Read uncharitably, Augustine is anthropomorphizing the soul: he is telling us that the soul  is a little man in your head. This uncharitable eisegesis is suggested by inside there was someone looking out through these windows. A couple of sentences later the suggestion is that the open eyes of a dead man see nothing because no one is looking through these un-shuttered windows -- as if there had to be someone looking through them for anything to be seen.

The uncharitable reading is obviously false. The one who sees when I see something cannot be a little man in my head. There is obviously no little man in my head looking through my eyes or hearing through my ears.  Nor is there any little man in my head sitting at the controls, driving my body.  Neither the thinker of my thoughts nor the agent of my actions is a little man in my head. And even if there were a little man in my head, what would explain his seeing, hearing, controlling etc.? A second homunculus in his head?

A vicious infinite explanatory regress would then be up and running. Now not every infinite regress is vicious; some are, if not virtuous, benign.  The homuncular regress, however, is vicious. It doesn't get the length of a final explanation, which is what we want in philosophy.

Charitably read, however, the Augustinian passage raises  legitimate and important questions.

Who are the seers when we see something?  Who or what is doing the seeing? Not the eyes, since they are mere instruments of vision. We see with our eyes, says Augustine, likening the eyes to windows through which we peer. There is something right about this inasmuch as it is not my eyes that see the sunset, any more than my glasses see the sunset. Put eyeglasses on a statue and visual experiences will accrue neither to the glasses nor to the statue. Eyeglasses, binoculars, telescopes, etc., are clearly instruments of vision, but they themselves see nothing.

But then the same must also be true of the eyes in my head, their parts, the optic nerve, the neural pathways, the visual cortex, and every other material element in the instrumentality of vision. None of these items, taken individually or taken collectively, taken separately or taken in synergy, is the subject of visual experience.  Similarly for ears and tongue. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. But it is not these auditory transducers that hear; you hear and understand -- or else you don't. You cannot speak without a tongue, but it is not the tongue that speaks.  You speak using your tongue.

Question is: what does 'you' refer to in the immediately preceding sentence?  Who are you? Who or what am I?  Substituting a third-person designator for the first-person singular pronoun won't get us anywhere. I am BV.  No doubt. But 'BV' refers to a publicly accessible animated body who (or rather that) instantiates various social roles.   You could of course say that the animal bearing my name is the subject of my experiences. That would involve no violation of ordinary language. And it makes sense from  a third-person point of view (POV). It does not, however, make sense from a first-person POV. I see the sunset, not the animal that wears my clothes or bears my name.

And please note that the first-person POV takes precedence over, since it is presupposed by, the third-person POV.  For it is I who adopts the third-person POV.  The third-person POV without an I, an ego, who adopts it  is a view from nowhere by nobody. There is no view of anything without an I whose view it is.

So I ask again: who or what is this I?  Who or what is the ultimate subject of my experience? Who or what is the seer of my sights, the thinker of my thoughts, the agent of my actions, the patient of my pleasures and pains? Two things seem clear: the ultimate subject of my experience, the transcendental subject, is not this hairy beast sitting in my chair, and the ultimate subject, the transcendental subject, is not an homunculus. 

Should we therefore follow Augustine and postulate an immaterial soul substance as the ultimate subject of visual and other experiences? Should we speak with Descartes of a thinking thing, res cogitans, as the source and seat of our cogitationes? Is the res cogitans literally a res, a thing, or is this an illicit reification ('thingification')? On this third approach, call it Platonic-Augustinian-Cartesian, there is a thing that is conscious when I am conscious  of something, but it is not a little man in my head, nor is it my body or my brain or any part of my brain.  It cannot be my body or brain or any part thereof because these items one and all are actual or possible  objects of experience and therefore cannot be the ultimate subject of experience. And so one is tempted to conclude that, since it cannot be anything physical, the ultimate subject of experience must be something meta-physical. 

This third approach, however, has difficulties of its own. The dialectic issues in the thought that the ultimate subject of experience, the transcendental ego, is unobjectifiable. But if so, how could it be a meta-physical thing? Would that not be just another object, an immaterial, purely spiritual, object? Are we not, with the meta-physical move, engaging in an illicit reification just as we would be if we identified the ultimate subject with the brain or with an homunculus? And what would a spiritual thing be if not a subtle body composed of rarefied matter, ghostly matter, geistige Materie. Reification of the ultimate subject appears to terminate in 'spiritual materialism,' which smacks of contradiction.

But maybe there is no contradiction. There may well be ghosts, spooks made of spook stuff.  I told you about my eldritch experience in the Charles Doughty Memorial Suite in which, one night, someone switched on my radio and tuned it to the AM band that I never listened to.  Maybe it was the ghost of the bitter old man who had recently had a heart attack and who had threatened to kill me.  But who was the seer of that ghost's sights and the agent of his actions?   

Do you see the problem? The regress to the ultimate subject of experience is a regress to the wholly unobjectifiable, to 'something' utterly un-thing-like composed of no sort of matter gross or subtle.

Should we adopt a fourth approach and say, instead, that the ultimate subject of experience is no thing at all whether physical or meta-physical? If we go down this road, we end up in the company of Jean-Paul Sartre and Panayot Butchvarov.  

But there is fifth approach, homuncular functionalism, which cannot be explained here. The idea is that there is a regress of stupider and stupider homunculi until we get to a level of homunculi so stupid that they are indistinguishable from mindless matter.  See here and here. 

Soul Survivalism

Vita mutatur non tollitur.

Jeffrey Long, M. D. on Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)

Here (under 5 minutes).

'Coded' as used by Dr. Long in this video clip is medical jargon. For a patient to 'code' is for the patient to suffer cardiac arrest. 

It is a mistake to think that if an episode of experiencing is real, then  the intentional object of that episode of experiencing is also real. The question I want to pose is whether Dr. Long is making that mistake. But first I must explain the mistake and why it really is a mistake.

Consider a perceptual illusion.  I am returning from a long hike at twilight. I am tired and the light is bad. Suddenly I 'see' a rattlesnake.  I shout out to my partner and I stop marching forward. But it turns out that what I saw was a twisted tree root. This is a typical case of a visual perceptual illusion.  (There are also auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory illusions.)

What I initially 'saw' is what I am calling the intentional object. The intentional object, the object intended, is distinct from the act  (occurrent episode) of consciousness directed upon the intentional object. Act and intentional object are obviously distinct; but that is not to say that the one can exist without the other: they are, necessarily, correlates of one another.  No act without an intentional object, no intentional object without an act. 

Now not all episodes of consciousness are object-directed, or consciousnesses of something (the 'of' to be read as an objective genitive). But some conscious states of a person are object-directed. These mental states exhibit what philosophers call 'intentionality.'  (Bear in mind that 'intentionality' as here used  is a term of art, a terminus technicus, not to be confused with more specific ordinary-language uses of 'intend' and 'intentionality.') Intentionality, then,  is object-directedness.  One must not assume, however, that every object of an intentional mental state  exists. Some intentional objects exist and some do not. 

Philosophers before and after Franz Brentano have repeatedly pointed out that the intentional object of  (subjective genitive) an object-directed state of consciousness  may or may not exist.  Intentionality, we may say, has the 'non-inference property.'  From 'S is conscious of  an F,' one cannot validly infer, 'there exists an x such that x is an F.' For example, if I am imagining, or hallucinating, or dreaming, or simply thinking about a centaur, it does not follow that there exists a centaur that I am imagining, or hallucinating, or dreaming, or simply thinking about.

In my hiking example, the snake I 'saw' did not exist. But there is no denying that (i) something  appeared to me, something that caused me to shout out and stop hiking, and that (ii) what  appeared to me did not have the properties of a tree root -- else I would not have shouted out and stopped moving.  I have no fear of tree roots. The intentional object had, or rather appeared to have, the properties of a rattlesnake. So in this case, the correlate of the act, the intentional object, did not exist. And this without prejudice to the reality of the act. 

If we agree that to be real = to exist extra-mentally ('outside' the mind), then in my example, the visual experience was real but its intentional object was not.

Suppose now that a person 'codes.' He suffers cardiac arrest. Oxygenated blood does not reach his brain,  and in consequence his EEG flatlines, which indicates that brain activity has ceased  and that the patient is 'brain dead.'  Suppose that at that very moment he has an NDE. An NDE is an occurrent episode of experiencing which is, moreover, intentional or object-directed.  The typical intentional object or objects of NDEs include such items as a tunnel, lights, angels, dead ancestors, and the the heavenly realm as described in Long's video, and as described in innumerable similar accounts of NDEs.  But from the occurrence and thus the reality of the near-death experiencing it does not follow that the heavenly realm and its contents are also real.  Their status might be merely intentional, and thus not real,  and this despite their being extremely vivid. 

Yes or no? This is the question I am raising.

Is it logically consistent with the patient's having of that near-death experience that he not survive his bodily death as an individual person who 'goes to heaven'?  Yes it is.   That he had a real experience is not in question. The patient was near death, but he was alive when he had the experience.  He is here to answer our questions. The patient is honest, and if anyone knows  whether he had an NDE, he does. He is the authority; he enjoys 'privileged access' to his mental states. 

But unless one confuses intentio and intentum, act and object, experiencing and the experienced-qua-experienced, one has to admit that the reality of the experiencing does not guarantee the reality of heaven or of angels or of dead/disembodied souls or one's  survival of  one's bodily death.

For it could be -- it is epistemically possible that -- it is like this. When a patient's EEG flatlines, and he does not recover, but actually dies, then his NDE, if he had one, is his last  experience, even if  it turns out to be an experience as of  heaven. Perhaps at the moment of dying, but while still alive, he 'sees' his beloved dead wife approach him, and he 'sees' her reach out to him, and he 'sees' himself reach out to her, but he does not see her or himself, where 'see' is being used as a 'verb of success.'  ('See' is being used as a verb of success if and only if 'S sees x' is so used as to entail 'X exists.' When 'S sees x' is used without this entailment, what we have is a phenomenological use of 'see.'  Note that both uses are literal. The phenomenological use is not figurative. Admittedly, the point being made in this parenthesis needs defense in  a separate post.)

If this epistemic possibility cannot  be ruled out, then there is no proof of an afterlife from NDEs. In that case we cannot be objectively certain that our man 'went to heaven'; we must countenance the possibility that he simply ceased to exist as an individual person.

Finally, can Dr. Long be taxed with having committed the mistake of confusing the reality of the experiencing with the reality of the experienced-qua-experienced? I think he can. The video shows that he is  certain that there is a heaven to which we go after death, and that the existence of this heaven  is proven by the very large number of NDEs that have been reported by honest people. But he is not entitled to this certainty, and he hasn't proven anything.

Am I denying that we survive our bodily deaths as individual persons? No! My point is merely that we cannot prove that we do on the basis of NDEs.  There is no rationally coercive argument from the reality of NDEs to the reality of an afterlife in which we continue to exist as individual persons.  

Soul a Mere Life-Principle? How then Explain Conscience?

Aristotle, and following him Aquinas, thinks of the soul as the life-principle of a living body, that which animates the body's matter.  A natural conception, but a dubious one, as it seems to me, one not up to the task of accounting for conscience.  We humans are not just alive, we are also conscious both in the mode of sentience and in the object-directed mode as when we are conscious of this or that. The philosophers' term of art for this object-directed type of consciousness is  intentionality. A special case of object-directed consciousness is knowledge of things and states of affairs. Beyond this factual knowledge there is presumably also moral knowledge, knowledge of right and wrong. Whether or not conscience is indeed a source of knowledge, it is a faculty of moral discernment and evaluation.  An exercise of this faculty results in an occurrent state of consciousness which is a state of conscience. 

So life, consciousness, and conscience are all different. Panpsychism aside, something can be alive without being sentient, a unicellular organism, for example, and of course anything sentient is conscious.  Now we are not merely sentient, but also conscious of this and that.  Beyond this, we command a faculty of moral discernment and evaluation which is what conscience is. 

It is clear that to be alive is not the same as to have a conscience. Plants and non-rational animals are living things but have no conscience. My cats, for example, are alive, and moreover they are conscious, but they cannot tell right from wrong. If they think at all, they do not think in moral categories. They do not evaluate their actions or omissions morally. They lack the capacity to do so. Humans have the capacity for moral discernment and evaluation, if not at birth, then later on, whether or not they exercise it, and whether or not their consciences have been well formed.

Now the soul is presumably the seat of conscience:  it is in virtue of my having a soul that I have a conscience, not in virtue of my having a body.*  But then it would seem to follow that the soul of a man cannot be a mere life-principle. For it is not in virtue of my being alive that I have a conscience. The argument, then, is this:

1) Being alive and having a conscience are different properties. Therefore:

2) It is not in virtue of my being alive that I have a conscience. 

3) It is in virtue of my having a soul that I have a conscience. Therefore:

4) The soul cannot be merely the life-principle of my body. 

Possible Objection

At best, what you have shown is that the soul cannot be merely a life-principle. But what is to stop this principle from doing other jobs as well?  However it is with non-rational animals, in a human being, the soul is not merely (i) a life-principle but also (ii) the locus of conscience, (iii) the subject of intentional states, and (iv) the free agent of one's actions.

In a later entry I will  respond to the objection.

__________

*If there is post-mortem judgment, it will be the soul that will be is judged, and judged morally, not the body, which implies that the soul is the seat of conscience and free agency. "What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world but suffer the loss of his immortal body soul?"

 

Are the Souls of Brutes Subsistent?

Aquinas says No but his argument is inconclusive.

Substack latest.

Reader Zacary writes,

I am just a layman who likes studying Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy, and recently I haven’t been studying the issue of animals in the afterlife. I stumbled across your post from many, many years ago (all the way back in 2009!) that was about the unity of consciousness argument and the subsistence of animal souls. 

Thank you for writing, Zacary.  That post from 2009 left a lot to be desired, so I rewrote it almost completely and published the result over at Substack. I have no time now to respond  to the rest of what you wrote, but if you read the Substack entry and have questions or objections I will try to answer them here.

A Test for the Religious Sensibility

You have it if these two books speak to you.

Substack latest. 

With a bit of discussion of a recent book by Peter Kreeft on Augustine.

Mortalism

Does the soul die with the body? 

Top o' the Stack.

Four Attitudes Toward Embodiment

Am I ineluctably trapped in a dying animal? Is embodiment an axiologically negative state of affairs or is it an axiologically positive one?  Here are four possible attitudes toward having a material body. They may be loosely associated, respectively, with the names Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Benatar.

a) To exist is good, but it would be better to exist without a gross material body subject to decay and dissolution. The body is an impediment, a vehicle for sublunary roads that it would be better not to have to travel.  I am neither identical to my body, nor dependent on it for my existence; I am a soul temporarily incarcerated in a body from which I will be released upon death. I have fallen from a topos ouranios into a spatiotemporal matrix and meat grinder extrication from which is both possible and desirable.

b) To exist is good, but a gross material body is necessary to exist as a conscious and self-conscious being, whence it follows that embodiment is at least instrumentally  good. I am not (identically) a soul; I am a soul-body composite, both components of which are necessary to exist at all.  

c) To exist is good, but only with a 'resurrected' and perfected body supplied by a divine being that needs no body to exist.

d) To exist is not good because possible only with a gross body.  (See my Benatar category.)

De Anima

David K. writes,

I need some help.  I have been exploring the concept of the 'soul' over the last few months. I've meant it to be a fairly wide open review.  I have 'rounded up the usual suspects' philosophically and worked my way through a great deal of the biomedical writings.  Presently, I am in the middle of two works:  The Soul of the Embryo by David Albert Jones and Soul Machine by George Makari.  I am looking for a contemporary philosophical treatment of the topic.  I have searched the categories on both your blogs but wonder if there is a direction you can point me to as well.   

With pleasure, David.

For a high-level contemporary treatment by a distinguished philosopher of religion, I recommend Richard Swinburne, Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford UP, 2019.  The Soul Hypothesis, eds. Baker and Goetz, Continuum 2011, is a collection of essays by analytic philosophers. For a hard-core old-time  Thomist treatment, one that is probably not quite in line with your current interests as a medical doctor, but still highly relevant given your Catholic upbringing, take a gander at  Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Life Everlasting and the Immensity of the Soul (no bibliographical details in my copy!).  More relevant to your biomedical interests is Norman M. Ford, When Did I Begin? Cambridge UP, 1988. 

Directly relevant to your concerns is  the mercifully short Were You a Zygote? by G. E. M. Anscombe. Also of interest is Erich Klawonn, Mind and Death: A Metaphysical Investigation, University Press of Southern Denmark, 2009.

I'll add further titles if they occur to me. Comments are enabled  if anyone wants to make suggestions.

Finally, here is a review by Thomas Nagel, no slouch of a philosopher, of the Swinburne volume mentioned supra.