Update
Volume 16, Number 1

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Conditional Immortality and Cognitive Neuroscience

Presented at the Jack W. Provonsha Lectureship for the Loma Linda University School of Medicine Alumni Postgraduate Convention on March 7, 2000

It is an honor to be asked to give the annual Provonsha Lecture. I was particularly pleased to have received this invitation when I learned that Dr. Provonsha himself has been interested in the topics I intend to address: mind and matter, freedom and determinism. In addition, Loma Linda University is an unusually congenial place to address these issues, as I'll explain later.

Whenever I begin a lecture on this topic, I make my audience respond to a little survey. Which of the following comes closest to your view of human nature?

1. Humans are composed of three parts: body, soul, and spirit (trichotomism).

2. Humans are composed of two parts: body and soul, or body and mind (dualism).

3. Humans are composed of one 'part': a physical body. (Materialism/physicalism).

4. The question doesn't make sense!

The result I usually get, from a variety of kinds of audiences is about 60 percent trichotomist, 35 percent dualist of one sort or the other, and often only one or two brave souls who will admit to being physicalists at that point.

The results surprised me at first. But what was more surprising was that I should have to do my own crude research to find out what people think on this issue. It's surely one of great importance, not just because of religious implications but simply because a society, it would seem, needs to have a shared idea about what a human being, most basically, is.

Are we really immaterial beings who happen to inhabit our bodies temporarily, and could just as well do without them? Or are we essentially physical organisms, albeit organisms that do philosophy, or practice medicine, that try to live morally, and perhaps pray, as well?

Those of you who deal with the moral issues surrounding sickness and death are probably more acutely aware of the import of this topic than the general population. Is death the cessation of brain activity, or is that only a symptom of death, which is, essentially, the soul leaving the body?

Yet this conflict regarding theories of human nature is seldom discussed in public forums. We can live and work with people for years and not know their position on this issue. Some of you may not even know what your spouse thinks--unbeknownst to you, you may be sleeping with a trichotomist!

Convergence Between Science and Theology

I said I was surprised to find trichotomism the majority view in audiences I address. This surprised me because, whereas Christianity and science are often thought to be regularly at odds with one another, this is an area where biblical studies, philosophy, and science have all been converging in recent years, and they have been converging toward a physicalist account of human nature.

Biblical Studies and Theology

It is well known that Christians, throughout most of their history, have assumed a dualistic view of the human person. In the first Christian centuries, and in the early Middle Ages, a modified form of Platonism dominated much of theology. In the high and late Middle Ages, Aristotle provided the basis for a less radical dualism. But when modern physics and cosmology displaced Aristotle's system, the Western world, now much influenced by the philosopher Rene Descartes, turned again to a radical dualism of mind or soul (the terms were practically interchangeable then) and matter.

What is not well known outside of seminaries and divinity schools (and perhaps I should specify, seminaries more on the liberal end of the spectrum) is that biblical scholars and church historians, for a century now, have been questioning the long-held assumption that dualism is a biblical teaching. It is now widely accepted that the Hebrew Bible views humans holistically and, in fact, was not even interested in the more Hellenistic sort of question, "what are the essential parts or components of a human being?"

The question of human nature is somewhat more controversial when we examine the New Testament. There are a few brief passages that either directly or indirectly suggest dualism. I'm not a biblical scholar so I will not address these.¹ However, a safe conclusion is a negative one: it is not at all clear that the New Testament teaches body-soul dualism, and even less, trichotomism. The questions that the Bible means to address are different from ours today. So most of the biblical authors, if presented with my survey, would choose the fourth option, "the question doesn't make sense."

Biblical scholars and historians of doctrine generally see body-soul dualism as a later development in Christian thought, after the New Testament was written and during the time Christian apologists were adapting the Christian message to the more Hellenized cultures of the Mediterranean world. The main reason this needs to be argued now is that biblical terms have for centuries been translated and overlaid with concepts from Greek philosophy.

Now, I said at the beginning that Loma Linda University is a congenial place to discuss these issues. The reason is that this is a Seventh-day Adventist institution, and one of the distinctive features of Adventism has been its rejection of certain aspects of body-soul dualism. The title of my talk is "Conditional Immortality and Cognitive Neuroscience." Let me explain that first term.

Christianity² has had two very different concepts of life after death. One is the view that at death the person comes apart; the body goes to the grave but the soul, being immortal, goes to be with God. The other view is resurrection. We say "resurrection of the body" but we ought rather to say "resurrection of the person"--the whole person. Resurrection is not mere resuscitation of a corpse, as Jesus did for Lazarus, but resurrection in the sense of a transformation or re-creation of the person in bodily form--glorified, and no longer subject to the limitations of the bodies we have now. These were competing views for the Jews in Jesus' day, along with the view that death is simply death and there is no afterlife.

Most Christians today do not distinguish sharply between immortality of the soul and resurrection of the body because theologians in the early centuries created a hybrid account, according to which the body dies, the immortal soul goes off to God, and at the end of time the body is raised up and the two 'parts' are reunited.

The doctrine of conditional immortality, held by Adventists and by some other Christians as well, is specifically the denial that human souls are naturally immortal.³ The motivation comes from the problem of what God is to do with those who are not saved. If all souls, once created, continue to exist forever, and if humans are free ultimately to reject God, then there must be some eternal destination for those who do reject God--hence the 'doctrine' of Hell.

Conditional immortality asserts, in contrast, that life after death (resurrection) is a gift from God for those who choose it, and final extinction--a much more merciful alternative--is the lot of those who reject God.

Notice that the doctrine of conditional immortality is not an outright rejection of dualism in favor of physicalism.⁴ Nonetheless, holding this doctrine frees Adventists from other theological positions that make physicalism more difficult to accept. In addition, the traditional Adventist emphasis on physical well-being is a good antidote to the body-denying practices that have so often accompanied dualistic Christian teachings.

Cognitive Neuroscience

Now, the second half of my title is "cognitive neuroscience." I stated earlier that there is a happy convergence among theology, philosophy, and science on the nature of the person. I'll say very little about philosophy, except to note that over the past generation physicalism has become the majority position among philosophers of mind, and that the intense interest this subject has received in the past decade or so is due almost entirely to the new light shed on it by rapid developments in cognitive science and the various branches of neuroscience.

So let us consider what these sciences have to offer on the present topic. My thesis, in short, is this: All of the human capacities once attributed to the immaterial mind or soul are now yielding to the insights of neurobiology. Now, in order to defend this thesis, we have to have an overview of the relevant capacities. One of the most elaborate and perceptive accounts of the functions of the soul was that of theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century. He followed Aristotle in recognizing three levels of functioning: (1) that which we share with both animals and plants, (2) that which we share with only the animals, and (3) that which is distinctive of humans.

The faculties attributed to the lowest aspect of the soul--nutrition, growth, and reproduction--have long fallen within the sphere of biological explanation.

A number of the faculties we share with animals have also been understood biologically for some time: locomotion and sense perception. In addition to the five external senses, Thomas Aquinas postulated four "interior senses." One of these is the phantasia or sensory imagination. It is now possible to study visual imagination using PET scans (positron emission tomography), which show the level of activity in various regions of the brain by recording the amount of blood flow. These scans show that during an exercise in visual imagination the visual cortex is active, but not to the same extent as when the visual object is actually present. Another of Thomas Aquinas' interior senses was the sensus communis, the capacity to collate the inputs from the various external senses in order to associate them with the same object. This is now studied by neuroscientists as the "binding problem." The third of Thomas Aquinas' interior senses was the vis aestimativa, the ability to judge something as friendly or unfriendly, useful or useless. One instance of this faculty in humans is the ability to recognize others' emotions. While it has not been possible to determine the exact regions of the brain involved, some victims of strokes or tumors do lose this capacity.

The fourth of Thomas Aquinas' interior senses is the vis memorativa, the ability to conserve memories of friend or foe, of what has given pleasure and what has caused injury. Neuroscientists now distinguish at least a dozen memory systems, and brain structures have been associated with many of them.

The sort of memory Thomas Aquinas refers to here is an aspect of episodic memory, and it has been shown that such memories cannot be formed without the part of the brain called the hippocampus. We also share with animals the sensitive appetite, that is, the ability to be attracted to the objects of sensation, such as food or mates. Neuroscience has made contributions here as well, for instance, in beginning to understand the role of neurotransmitters (the chemicals that conduct electrical impulses in the brain) in producing feelings of hunger or satiation. The emotions, according to Thomas Aquinas, are a product of both the vis aestimativa and the sensory appetite. Emotions, too, are now known to be mediated by physical processes, with the involvement of neurotransmitters.

Among the rational faculties, distinctive of humans, Thomas Aquinas distinguishes the active and passive intellects. The passive intellect is another sort of memory, closely resembling what current neuroscientists call declarative memory, and this has been found to be dependent on the medial temporal lobe of the brain. Active intellect is responsible for abstracting concepts from sensory experience and for reasoning and judging. These latter capacities are less well understood in neurobiological terms. However, they all involve the use of language, and language use and acquisition are an important area of current study.

Two regions of the brain, Wernicke's area and Broca's area, have long been known to be involved in language. Language memory involves a variety of regions; selective damage due to strokes or tumors shows that access to common nouns, proper names, verbs, and even color terms depends on separate regions. Furthermore, syntactic and semantic capacities depend on different regions of the brain.

The third of Thomas Aquinas' rational faculties is the will. This he defines as the capacity to be attracted to goods of a nonsensory sort. Along with intellect, this is the seat of moral capacities. Furthermore, since God is the ultimate good, the will also accounts for the capacity to be attracted to God.

Neuroscience now contributes to our understanding of both morality and religious experience. Antonio Damasio has studied the neural processes that go into practical reasoning--that is, the ability to make both moral and prudential judgments. In his book, Descartes' Error, he reports the case of a 19th century railway worker, Phineas Gage, whose brain was pierced by a metal rod. Gage recovered physically and his cognitive functions (attention, perception, memory, reasoning and language) were all intact. Yet he suffered a dramatic character change after the accident. The doctor who treated him noted that he had become "fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity which was not previously his custom, manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned."⁵

Antonio Damasio's wife, Hanna, was able to determine from the damage to Gage's skull exactly which parts of the brain would have been destroyed in the accident--selected areas of his prefrontal cortices. Antonio Damasio concludes from this and other similar cases that this area of the brain is "concerned specifically with unique human properties, among them the ability to anticipate the future and plan accordingly within a complex social environment; the sense of responsibility toward the self and others; and the ability to orchestrate one's survival deliberately, at the command of one's free will" (p. 10). In short, what Thomas Aquinas described as the "appetite for the good" appears to depend directly on localizable brain functions.

A number of neuroscientists have begun to study the role of the brain in religious experience. For example, patients with temporal lobe epilepsy often develop strong interests in religion, and this has led to speculation that the temporal lobes are involved in certain sorts of normal religious experiences as well.

What are we to make of all this? It is important to note that no such accumulation of data can ever amount to a proof that there is no nonmaterial mind or soul in addition to the body. But if we recognize that the soul was originally introduced into Western thought not from Hebraic Scripture but as an explanation for capacities that appeared not to be explainable in biological terms, then we can certainly say that for scientific purposes the hypothesis has been shown to be unnecessary.

So biblical studies, philosophy, and neuroscience are all pointing in the same direction, toward a physicalist account of the person. Humans are not hybrids of matter and something else; they are simply physical organisms.

It would be easy at this point to fall into the reductionist's error of claiming that "morality" or "religious experience" is nothing but a brain process. But the correct account of physicalism is to say that it is our complex physical organization and our social relations that enable our morality and our religious awareness.

Problems for the Physicalist

But is physicalism, however well attested by these various intellectual authorities, entirely without problems? This is certainly not the case. In this last section of my lecture I will briefly address some of the problems occasioned by a shift from dualism to physicalism.

At the beginning of my lecture, I alluded to the role that the concept of soul has played in moral arguments throughout Western history, especially in arguments regarding abortion and care for the dying and disabled. So medical ethicists need to ask, just as Christian theologians have had to ask, did we ever really need that concept? That is, rather than basing arguments on the existence and value of an immortal soul, could we not instead have couched our arguments for the protection of human life in terms of Jesus' command to care especially for the "least of the brethren"? Or, for a more secular time, in terms of concern for the protection of human life, period?

Much more needs to be said on these issues but I am a philosopher, not an ethicist, and so I turn to a problem from within my own discipline--although one not unrelated to ethics--the problem of free will.

One of the motivations for dualism in the modern period has, in fact, been the problem of free will. If everything material is governed by the laws of physics, then how can a human act freely? The simple solution appeared to be dualism. The body is subject to the laws of nature but the soul or mind is free. This was only an apparent solution, though, because no explanation has ever been given of how this nonmaterial entity could have any causal impact on the physical body.

Physicalism, of course, solves the problem of mind-body interaction--mental functions are brain functions and it is a mere scientific problem to explain how the brain interacts with the rest of the body, not an impossible philosophical dilemma. But the physicalist does have to go back to the drawing board to argue for free will.

Now, some physicalists are willing to give up free will. There is a long philosophical tradition arguing that we can still make sense of notions of moral responsibility without free will. But I think it is essential, not only for moral reasons, not only for theological reasons, but simply to make sense of rational discourse. If all human thoughts are simply determined by the laws of neurobiology, then there is no room for reasons in human life. And, in fact, the determinist's own argument does not look very convincing if he can convince us that one believes it only because her neurons made her do it and not because it is actually true!

Now, I'd like to look at my watch at this point, and tell you that I have actually solved the problem of free will and it's just that I don't have time to explain it all to you this evening. Sorry, my problem is not just the clock. I do not have a neat solution. However, I do think that a number of resources are available for addressing the problem, and these come not from philosophy but from developments in cognitive science. This suggests that while the problem of free will may in fact have been insoluble for earlier generations of philosophers,this was due simply to lack of knowledge about cognitive processes and not to an inherent difficulty in reconciling a law-governed natural order with human freedom. Let us see how far we can get.

The main worry that physicalism presents regarding free will is this: If mental events are really brain events, then aren't all our thoughts and decisions determined by the laws of neurobiology? Some philosophers try to evade determinism by turning to quantum indeterminacy and trying to find a role for it in decision-making processes. I suggest, instead, that we consider two features of human cognitive processes: The first is our capacity for language; the second is what I shall call self-transcendence--the hierarchical organization of cognitive processes that makes it possible for us to attend to our own cognitive processes.

I'm following Terrence Deacon in his reflections on the difference language makes in freeing human behavior from biological drives. (See his book The Symbolic Species.⁶) Animals (higher animals, at least) have what are called "open instincts." That is, they have innate goals such as food and mates. The goals themselves are predetermined by biology, but how to satisfy them is not. Thus, a donkey can choose which tuft of grass to eat, but it can't choose to go on a diet.

What is human free will beyond this animalian open behavior? Part of what is involved is the ability to pursue higher-order goals by detaching our behavior from immediate stimuli. Terrence Deacon describes an instructive experiment. A chimp is given the opportunity to choose between two unequal piles of candy. It always chooses the bigger one. But then the situation is made more complicated: the chimp chooses, but then the experimenter gives the chosen pile to a second chimp and the first ends up with the smaller one. Children over the age of two catch on quickly and choose the smaller pile. But chimps have a very hard time catching on; they watch in agitated dismay, over and over, when the larger pile of candy is given away.

Terrence Deacon says that the task poses a difficulty for the chimps because the presence of such a salient reward undermines their ability to stand back from the situation and subjugate their desire to the pragmatic context, which requires them to do the opposite of what they would normally do to achieve the same end (p. 414).

Now the experiment is further complicated. The chimps are taught to associate numbers with the piles of candy. When given the chance to select numbers rather than the piles themselves, they quickly learn to choose the number associated with the smaller pile. Deacon argues that the symbolic representation helps reduce the power of the stimulus to drive behavior. Thus, he argues that increasing ability to create symbols progressively frees responses from stimulus-driven immediacy. So language is one piece of the solution to the freewill problem. It helps to account for our ability to detach our behavior from biological drives.

A second piece of the puzzle is also illustrated in the experiment with the chimps. What the chimps in the first phase of the experiment are not able to do is to make their own behavior the object of their attention. To do such a thing is what I mean by self-transcendence. That is, I have a goal--to get the most candy. I choose the big pile and it gets taken away time after time. But instead of focusing only on what the experimenter does, I turn my attention to my own behavior, my own cognitive strategy, and judge it to be faulty. This second-order reflection and evaluation quickly leads to an altered strategy that works.

There is no intrinsic limit to these layers of cognition. The next step in self-transcendence might be to notice the fact that I have just successfully adapted my strategy. But then I might observe what a smug and greedy creature I have become and ask myself why I wanted all that candy in the first place. And so on.

Notice a peculiar feature of how we use first-person pronouns. When I'm focused on the candy it is "I" who wants it. When the strategy for getting it comes under scrutiny, then I am the one scrutinizing and the candy-seeker becomes "me"--the object of my scrutiny. And when I congratulate myself for successful solution to the problem, I am the congratulator.

So the ability for self-transcendence allows us to take account of feedback from the environment and to adjust our behavior accordingly in order to reach our goals. More important, this sort of self-observation allows us to call into question the goals themselves. And, finally, the ability to generate internal models of ourselves engaged in various activities allows us to calculate the likely outcome of various actions and to assign an evaluation of good or bad to each scenario. This assignment of value then affects the probability that the behavior will be acted out in the future.

Now, whether these cognitive capacities--language, self-transcendence, running behavioral scenarios in imagination, and reevaluation of goals--amounts to having free will depends in part on what is meant by "free will." Philosophers, of course, have been arguing over this for centuries. One point of disagreement is over the distinction between "liberty of spontaneity" and "liberty of indifference." Liberty of spontaneity requires only that one be free to do what one chooses, regardless of whether one's desires were determined. Free will in the sense of indifference requires that the agent could have done otherwise. This requires, in turn, that the agent's choice or desire or goal was not determined by something else.

The account I've sketched here establishes free will in the first sense, if we recognize that the "I" is identified with the highest-level evaluator. However, a likely objection to this claim would be to point out that this highest-level evaluation isn't itself uncaused. So something is determining its choices, and therefore the person is not really free. This is the objection from the proponent of liberty of indifference, who says that the only real freedom is totally uncaused action.

Now, I can't make a full-scale argument here, but I do want to suggest that this account of freedom--that is, as totally uncaused--is implausible. The alternatives to freedom of this sort are biological determinism, or social determinism, or a combination of the two. But would we want to be completely free of either? That is, our biology has evolved to ensure our survival; social structures have been designed, by and large, for human good. So the goal of being completely free from both biology and social environment is not to be desired.

I suggest that it is better to think of free will not as all-or-nothing, but as a matter of degree. What is wanted is the ability to arbitrate among potential biological and social determinants. And this is exactly what the self-transcendence I have been talking about allows us to do--that is, the ability to evaluate the factors driving my behavior, to envision alternatives, and to reset goals in light of the abstract ideals that symbolic language makes possible. To borrow a phrase from Daniel Dennett, this seems to be the only kind of free will "worth wanting."

Conclusion

It's time to conclude. Scholars in fields as unrelated as biblical criticism and neuroscience are conspiring to undermine one of the staples of Western intellectual history--body-soul dualism. I suppose I'm a sort of evangelical physicalist, but my purpose this evening was not so much to convert you to my point of view (well, not so much), but rather to get out in the open these conflicting views of human nature, to provoke you to think about the implications of the shift from dualism to physicalism for your own line of work--and, of course, for your own life.

What is the good life for humans? The answer depends on whether humans are quasi-angelic beings, just passing through this physical world. Or are we, in the terms of the book of Genesis, children of Adam, made from "adamah" (earth)? We can recapture the pun in the original Hebrew by describing ourselves as humans, made from humus. *

References

1 Paul AL Giem, Scientific Theology (Riverside, CA: La Sierra University Press, 1997), chap. 10.

2 Neil Gillman, The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1997).

3 LeRoy Edwin Froom, The Conditionalist Faith of our Fathers: The Conflict of the Ages Over the Nature and Destiny of Man, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Review and Herald, 1965).

4 Uriah Smith, Here and Hereafter, or Man's Nature and Destiny, 4th ed.; cited in Froom, Conditionalist Faith, II:691

5 Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: GP Putnam's Sons, 1994), 8.

6 Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The CO-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997).

Also see:

Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy and H. Newton Maloney, eds., Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998.

Nancey Murphy, PhD, ThD
Professor of Christian Philosophy
Fuller Theological Seminary

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Biblical studies, philosophy, and neuroscience are all pointing in the same direction, toward a physicalist account of the person.

"I'd like to tell you that I have actually solved the problem of free will. I do not have a neat solution."