This week’s TED talk is by Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist who is most well known for his book, Descartes Error, and his research on the importance of emotions to cognition. In the talk, Damasio describes consciousness as the combination of your mind, which is a flow of mental images, and the self, i.e. your “you.” Consciousness occurs when “self comes to mind” (see screenshot from the talk below), which just happens to be the name of his most recent book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain.
Although it’s a bit dry, I really, really enjoyed this talk and am looking forward to reading the book when my mind catches up to my self! One issue I struggle with when considering monism vs dualism and my current position of non-reductive physicalism (or emergence) is how the self can be maintained when the material within our bodies is constantly turned over and made new. Damasio poses in this talk that it’s the connections between the body, brainstem, and cerebral cortex that constitues self and that his model explains why some self-like behavior is observed in animals.
Great and informative talk. Enjoy!
A biologist's view of science & theology 
Thanks!
You might want to listen to the Christian philosopher Glen Peoples’ podcast “Say Hello to my Little Friend”. His 5-part series titled “In Search of the Soul” is very helpful in understanding physicalism, emergentism, and other views of anthropology. Although I wasn’t quite persuaded to his point, I felt he did a huge service in clearly describing the alternatives.
http://www.beretta-online.com/wordpress/
-Wm
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Sounds like a good resource. I’ve read a fair amount on the topic and would fit in the bon-reductive physicalist camp. But I’m not anchored there. Thanks!
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Yes, he’s also in (a section of) that camp — but he explained it so well that I, a dualist, became persuaded that my view was too narrow. I didn’t understand what was being proposed before.
I’m not precisely converted; but I really didn’t need to be. I was always a minimalistic dualist, since I assigned no functional role to the spirit. (That means that I believe humans think with their brains, not their spirits, and also that the “intermediate state” in the time between death and resurrection cannot be particularly significant to salvation.) It’s actually quite possible that I’m not actually a dualist ;-).
Anyways, thanks for your posts.
-Wm
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What about the soul? Is this all material? What is your reason for including the spirit as something separate? Just interested…
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Justin, that’s newly a problem for me… I don’t know what the soul is constituted by. I used to think I did. When you look at the Bible, you see that “my soul” is another word for “me”, and the Law gives a procedure for cleansing oneself after touching a “dead soul” (nephesh), which of course can only mean a dead body.
I used the word “spirit” above because I wanted to make it very clear that I was talking about what any non-conditionalist dualist must see as the part of man that lives on after death. Some dualists (perhaps most) see the soul as universal to all life, man and animal, above a vague level of complexity.
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You don’t need to believe in a separate spirit to believe that we live after death, do you? If you want to hold to a dualism where the is something separate that lives on outside of the body, that’s one thing, but what about belief in a resurrection body?
I agree on the soul part. We don’t HAVE souls, we ARE souls. Certainly the Biblical portrait put forth by many nowadays, especially those that are physicalists.
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Justin, that’s a good question. If you’re a physicalist of any kind, you must believe in life after death ONLY as life after the resurrection. Dualists MAY believe this, but may also add belief in life immediately after death. I used to firmly believe in life after death immediately following death (and therefore physicalism was incompatible with my other beliefs). *Now* I’ve come to realize that what I believed in (an intermediate state) isn’t clearly taught in the Bible, so I’m having to reevaluate my previously firm rejection of physicalism.
I agree with your last paragraph, obviously; but note that when many dualists say that, they mean to imply the additional statement “…and I am not a body, I *have* a body.” Of course, that claim isn’t in the Bible.
Thanks for tossing this around with me… I’m having to rethink a lot of things, and it’s nice to have a conversation with someone on the other side. Er, not on the other side of the veil, I mean on the other side of the issue ;-).
Here’s a question for you. What does it mean to be present with Christ after death? Paul says “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” Other passages seem to imply immediate colocation and relationship after death. Now, I confess that this cannot be physical location; but there seems to be some kind of personal presence. Do you take this to refer only to presence after the resurrection, so that Paul is requiring that the intermediate state be a complete absence of experience, so that I die and then open my eyes “immediately” in the resurrection? (I don’t know if I have a problem with that; I’m trying to figure it out.)
-Wm
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