I figure a nice discussion of the existence and nature of the human soul is just the kind of light topic we need to kick off a Tuesday morning. Actually, an interesting discussion on the subject erupted in the comments of the George Carlin post, and I thought they deserved front page treatment.
But, when I sleep, I dream some of the time. There is still something going on in my brain.
If there is nothing after death, then the last electrons firing though my brain would be the onces carrying the pain of my organs failing. Not restful, nor peaceful.
The term “Rest in Peace†usually refers to a soul, not the decaying corpse of a former mammal.
The suffering you describe happens whether there is an afterlife or not. The “pain of organ failure†can happen for weeks, month, or years. Ask a diabetic with peripheral neuropathy causing incessant leg pain, or someone with emphysema fighting for breath for years. Christian or atheist, their suffering is often at its least in the few moments before death, compared with the time leading up to that point.
Rare is the occasion where I’m witness to someone actively painfully fighting death, or exhibiting pain. In many cases, organ failure prior to death seems to have its own narcotic and analgesic effect. Renal failure and respiratory failure blunt awareness. The most common scene I see is the family huddled around a loved one who has been unresponsive for several minutes to hours, taking possibly a last breath, a long pause (sometimes twenty seconds or so), followed by another breath. And then none. And then a peace that is final, and yet not much different from the moment before where there was just unconsciousness, a heartbeat, a rare breath, and an otherwise still body.
If in a particular case, the last moments are painful, anxious, or filled with fear, then the moment that that ends would peaceful. I just can’t honestly recall a hospital or nursing home death that was like that. Trauma cases probably differ, and someone like an ER physician would be witness to that.
I could see someone believing a soul travels out of the body at death, but I have trouble believing that someone “can’t image†it being possible that such a thing isn’t so. I know things that I see. There’s a bit less of a dead dog on the side of the road each day, until eventually there’s nearly nothing there to indicate it was ever there. But we saw it there so we know it was. But what is the evidence for the notion that an invisible life essence of some kind survived the death, left the body, and traveled to parts unknown at the time of death? And how can it be that such a notion is nearly universally accepted (at least in the case of dead people–opinions about dead dogs vary, I imagine), so that it’s “unimaginable†that it isn’t so?
Is the finality of death “unimaginable†because it’s so sad or cruel that it just can’t be allowed to be true? Is it unimaginable because the evidence for an afterlife is just too compelling to ignore? Or is it unimaginable because that’s what we’ve been told down through the ages, and nothing’s more compelling than someone professing to having received the gift of a revelation?
I think the need to imagine a soul comes from the difficulty in perceiving the difference between a live body and a dead body in a way that explains the functioning in the former and the lack of functioning in the latter.
Traditionally, humans have used the supernatural to explain that which they couldn’t understand. Death is/was one of the most important of those things.
Hence, you get the soul. Or maybe, if your an ancient Egyptian, you’d explain it as the ka.
The Egyptians believed that Khnum created the bodies of children on a potter’s wheel and inserted them into women’s bodies. Depending on the region, Egyptians believed that Heket or Meskhenet, was the creator of each person’s Ka, breathing it into them at the instant of their birth as the part of their soul that made them be, alive.
In the modern day, you have Descarte wrestling with a distinction between mind and matter and Leibniz positing a conglomeration of minutely aware monads – the stuff of which matter and mind is made of jointly. There are a pantheon of great minds wrestling with the idea.
As our knowledge of physics, mechanics, electronics, etc. has gotten better; it’s less of a mystery as to how a complex system like the human body can go from functional to non-functional. Still up in the air is how the machine goes from unaware to self-aware.
Doug said:
I’m excited about that. I think the more we learn about things like this, the more it will show evidence of the existance of a soul. Once you have that, you have a whole mess of questions to deal with.
I think one aspect of peoples’ belief in the “soul” comes from an attempt to deal with the loss of loved ones. Fear of one’s own demise factors in, too. And the relative brevity of life on earth. Also, if your time on earth isn’t going so well (you’ve had physical afflictions, or bad luck, or a lack of love, security, justice, etc., in your life), then you at least have something to look forward to in the future. I think most people who think about the soul do it in that light. The big concern in almost every religion is what will happen to YOUR soul at death? That’s the biggie, week in and week out.
For me, though, the question is from where does awareness arise. Doug hits on that above. For me, it’s all about the brain.
Think about the organs and their function a moment. The heart just pumps, day after day. Other than when it stops, there’s not much reason to take notice of it. There’s also not a lot of variety among us in how our hearts do what they do. Same with the lungs. Air in, air out. Bloods runs through them, and oxygen and carbon dioxide diffuse down their gradients across a thin membrane. These are a couple of vital systems whose functioning can be understood by most people after a short discussion.
The brain, on the other hand, does the work of processing the imputs of all of our senses, constructing visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, proprioceptive (feeling the earth under your feet, the position you are in, etc), and tactile models in our head of all that is around us. It commits a lot of these moments to memory–sometimes for up to a century (with varying degrees of accuracy and durability of those memories), and integrates past experience, instructions from formal learning, and sometimes reasoned guessing to decide what to do a ridiculous number of times each day. It also is the home of emotional connections, love, loyalty, devotion, and devotion. Besides these higher functions it also is the processing center for the autonomic nervous system that lets our bodies conduct themselves without our thought, and gives us that accelerated heart rate and breathing, and that feeling in the chest when a “new love” interest is near and we’re just discovering we’re interested. That all happens in that one, amazing organ. Not to mention language, music, improvisation, dreaming, etc. And the ability to then transmit these thoughts to others. All of the qualities that I can think of that are considered those of a “soul” reside in the brain.
At this point we don’t always know precisely how chemical, electrical, or other events allow all of these things to occur. But we do know specific areas where a lot of these things happen. If a stroke wipes out Broca’s Area in the cerebral cortex, there went language. If your brain gets cluttered with neurofibrillary tangles, say goodbye to short-term memory because you now have Alzheimer’s. Depression and anxiety are treated with medications that prolong the action of neurotransmitters in the brain, literally changing one’s emotional responses to their surroundings, events, and circumstances. Specific brain tumors (pituitary adenomas, for instance) can change your temperature, pulse, appetite, etc. So, manly through disease processes we’ve learned in many instances WHERE specific aspects that some might attribute to a “soul” occur, and often HOW they occur also.
So, in a relatively brief time, we’ve learned a ton about how it is that we achieve awareness, and use that awareness consciously and unconsciously to conduct ourselves from moment to moment. I figure we’ll progressively know more and more, such that at some point what we DON’T know will pale in comparison to what we do know and understand about these things. These explorations captivate me in a way that chalking it up to a nebulous, invisible, teleportation-capable essence (especially one whose fate is subject to a one-time, up or down vote resulting in either unimaginable unending paradise or eternal unspeakable torture) doesn’t.
As a pscych major in college; I agree with what T is saying-to a point. I, too, am excited that more and more of this complex organ in our body is being discovered each and every day. One of the tough things with the brain, though, is the way that injury/illness/ etc. can affect different people. My former organist has Alzheimer’s. In her case it is progressing slowly and has taken away much short-term memory stuff. She is unable to lead worship anymore (she still asks if she can, and I have to tell her no) because she’ll start reading a piece of music we’re singing and then get another song stuck in her head and start playing it instead. And yet she can still remember pieces of conversation she had with her son two days previous. She and her husband are able to live in assisted living; with nurses providing their daily medicine and daily meals provided in a cafeteria. I have another woman who has Alzheimer’s and she is constantly telling me that her mom loves my sermons, but she can’t get her dad to church because I refuse to do the service in German. (Which is a good thing considering I know about four words of German!) (BTW the woman is in her upper 80’s-and I can confirm her parents aren’t ready to be in the Guiness Book of World Records!)She knows who I am, but often has me placed in serving the church she was a member of 40 years ago. She is in the lockdown unit at our Lutheran Nursing Home, so she won’t wander away and be a danger to herself. With injuries I’ve seen people, like my mom, who has suffered a fairly major concussion come back to show little residual effects over time. (Except that she was afraid to drive out of town before the injury and will now drive to either my house or T’s house alone at the drop of a hat-a drive of about 4 hours to each.). I’ve seen others who have had profound injuries, and have remained at that same state for the rest of their lives.
I had a woman a few weeks ago, nintey years old, who suffered a major stroke. I was with the family most of the day as medical decisions were being made. Throughout most of the day, they had hope that not much damage had been done; but that hope was brought to reality when the doctor told them the extent of the damage. He told them that he even thought that the brain stem was affected (her cognitive side was destroyed) and that she might even die immediately when removed from life support-considering the respirator was doing most of the breathing for her. The family conferred together and decided, based on mom’s wishes, to remove all extrodinary means of life support and do just pallitive care. Dang if she didn’t start breathing on her own right away and last almost a week to the minute before her final breath! I’m not saying the doctor was wrong (he did an awesome job explaining everything in terms the family understood, and had a terrific bedside manner-and he was dead on about the fact she’d remain a vegetable hooked up to machines-or at least a feeding tube-to remain alive); just that we are still breaking the surface on what there is to understand about the brain.
I love studying the organic functions of the brain, and am grateful that science has figured out some of the many complexities of our lives. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am glad that they have figured out how to help chemical depression, as I was genetically blessed with that ailment. Lexapro does wonders–and thanks to my insurance company being idiots–I got to experience a few days without it last week and can tell the major difference.
However, with that in mind, I have to say that the part of psychology that has always interested me is the part that will never be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt. What made Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer the people they were? Was it nature? Was it nurture? (Probably both). And how much of each was in play? Would they have been different people if they had been raised in different homes? How do we offer support networks to families that are dealing with a family member who has a chronic/fatal/genetic disease-like cystic fibrosis? How do they deal with the guilt of knowing their genes caused their kid to be sick? (And at some point all parents in that situation do have to come to terms with that question). How do we treat an illness of the mind where we have put the person on all the latest medicines and have tried all the behavioral modification therapies out there; and yet nothing works? And I tend to think that there’s more there to emotions that just the firing of synapses; not that they don’t play a part in how we respond to those emotions-increased breathing, etc.
Many of the theories of pshychological treatment rests on a science that cannot be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. A way of getting people to rethink a new paradigm in their life seems to work-so we’ll use it for now. A new school of thought comes out, and we start using that method. Insurance companies are willing to pay for that kind of treatment.
It was out of that scientific backgroud that I was able to be comfortable with a hypothesis I know cannot be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt until I die-namely that we have souls. It’s not that I can’t imagine it being the other way around; it’s just that I don’t. I’ve always looked at and been amazed by that which is abstract-that you can’t quite place your finger on its full meaning. I have a linograph print from my next-door-neighbor growing up that I look at every day. And I still find new meaning in the images he put to paper. (And I’ve looked at that particular print for over 30 years-many of them while that print was hanging in his house-I told my parents which print I wanted for Christmas). I don’t fully know what Shelby’s inspiration was for making that print-I know a bit of the back story-but I wonder at why he made the print he did and find new meaning in it all the time.
When it comes to death, I have been at the bedside of many different people at the moment of death. I consider that a holy moment. T-you mentioned in a post yesterday about the anagesic effects of organs shutting down-and yes, I have witnessed that. One of the blessings of hospice is that they walk families throug the physiological processes that are going on and help them to see that this is a good thing. It is easiest on the person-and often toughest on the family-when the person reaches this stage. Now one thing I have witnessed, that is different than what you have witnessed, is a few cases in which the cancer has grown at a far more rapid rate than the body is capable of shutting down. In other words, the kidneys, lungs, etc. are still functioning at normal capacity up until death. Had one woman who had bladder cancer (she was a smoker) who was talking to me and her daughter in the hospital. All of a sudden her breathing changed. Her daughter asked if she should call her dad, and I said yes. Fifteen seconds later she was gone, before the duaghter could even pick up the phone. (When I cam home my in-laws were visiting. They made me take a shower and put on clean clothes before they’d let me in their car to go out to dinner b/c I had cradled a dead body-but that’s their hang-up.) Anyway…I digress….The point is I have witnessed the moment of death many times; and for me there is something holy and sacred about that moment. Have I ever felt a person’s soul pass through my body? No. Have I ever seen it escape from their mouth, or other orifices? No. Have I ever weighed the body right before and right after death to see if it is 9 grams lighter? No. (Family would probably banish me from their lives for doing so!) And yet my hypothesis is that we have souls.
I’ve never pictured the soul as being equivalent to the brain; rather I’ve pictured the soul as being the essence of who we are. Our soul is in every fiber of our being. The way I see it, science will be able to prove so much about life and the world we live in, but will eventually reach a roadblock. There will come a point in which we will learn all there is to learn and then have to say-now what? That roadblock is where faith comes in.
Put me down as a soul man!
My posting about statistics got me thinking about this topic again. When I was working in that psych lab was at the same time my grandmother was in the final stages of ovarian cancer. I remember one morning before I left for classes, my parents called me to tell me that she was now in a coma. They told me to prepare myself with my profs that the funeral could be any day now.
Well, I was in that psych lab, working with a girl who had become a good friend that semester. We were talking about our daily lives, and I mentioned to her that when I got back to my apartment I hoped to have a phone message saying that my grandmother had died.
She went off! I had never seen her so mad! She told me I was an awful person. How could I wish my grandmother to be dead. Was I sick? After she calmed down, I shared with her my views on life, death, and life after death. I also told her that I saw no point in her suffering being prolonged; she could no longer communicate with anybody. It didn’t change her point of view…if I remember right she was reformed Jewish, and her belief was the longer the person is dead, the longer they had to sleep in their graves until the coming of the Messiah…but at least in the end she didn’t think I was some kind of “sicko.”