The idea of the mystical body of Christ has always been one of great interest to me, as there was always something about it at odds with the mentality in which I was raised: "Be yourself", etc. was (and remains) the mantra of the day, and the whole idea of being but a single part of something larger did not always sit well. I remember being a ten-year-old watching as the Borg stripped Captain Picard of his identity and "assimilated" him into their collective (his pronoun "I" replaced with "we").¹ And of course the Borg were an enemy to be resisted.

Years later, I recall reading Ayn Rand's Anthem (1938) and slowly realizing that the "we" narrating the story was really a single individual, living in a dystopian future scrubbed of the concept of "I" and living under the control of an oppressive, collectivist society. Examples like these would color my view of Plato's Republic the first time I encountered it, as I began my career as a philosophy student, but I've since learned to enjoy Rand's book as an interesting science fiction tale. Not regarding it as quality philosophy, I have instead placed it on the shelf with other, similar works like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1931) and Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952).

Plato's Republic shows us a society (Plato's idea of a perfect one, in fact) where the individual is not considered to be self-sufficient, but a vital part of her or his community, with a role to play as a tradesman, worker, or soldier/guardian. Plato imagines people not as individuals in their own right, but as components in something larger: In Book II of the Republic, Plato tells us that individual humans are the same kinds of things as cities. Human bodies are a collection of living parts (cells, organs, and systems) that work together to accomplish a goal (a successful, healthy life).² Cities, meanwhile, are collections of living parts as well (individual people, families, and institutions). Cities are made of different organizations: schools, energy providers, waste disposal services, businesses providing food and clothing, etc. If you think about it, the human body has systems that perform similar tasks for itself ... and all these systems working together properly give rise to a healthy human being. Plato's argument, therefore, centers on the idea that society comes before the individual.

The individual too, in Plato's view, may be regarded as a kind of collective (a miniature city, according to his analogy), a composite soul made up of cooperating parts. These parts, like people, find themselves at odds and in pursuit, at times, of conflicting goals; Plato sees such internal disagreement as the explanation of temptation.³

Plato's words certainly resonated with me, especially when it was pointed out to me that this was actually quite similar to what St. Paul described when he said of the Church: "For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many" (1 Cor 12:13-14).

This is the mystical body of the Church, which is the mystical body of Christ. The members of the Church act not on their own, but as parts of a larger organism, directed by Christ as their head, and each individual serving a specific role in the service of the whole. As St. Paul explains, "there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6 and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone" (1 Cor 12:4-6).

In this view, being a part of a collective and effectively losing one's self to relations with and service for others who also lose themselves is not necessarily an idea to be resisted. Either that, or the collective communities as individuals described by Plato and Paul are dressing the bland reality of Borg life in a more attractive package (something that sounds lovely, but is ultimately the same soul-killing system Ayn Rand imagined in Anthem).

The question, then, is whether we can find reason to accept the Platonic/Pauline ideas of individual life-as-community life as reasonable and accurate. If we could try to objectively consider what individual existence is, without any opinions or preferences regarding our statuses as individuals, what would we discover? A look will shed some interesting discoveries. And as I have the benefit of writing on Plato's city-soul analogy for my doctoral thesis, I have done quite a lot of reading on this question already.

One of the most interesting observations I had the pleasure of reading about comes from the Dutch trauma psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk (2014), who observes that our brains are built to help us function as members of a tribe. In fact, he says, “barely exist as individual organisms”.⁴ This is something we cannot escape, he says, even if we go off on our own and avoid contact with others (Van Der Kolk works with victims of trauma, including victims of childhood abuse who deliberately avoid contact with others in adulthood, as a form of self-protection). He explains: “We are part of that tribe even when we are by ourselves, whether listening to music (that other people created), watching a basketball game on television (our own muscles tensing as the players run and jump) ...”⁵ Most of our energy is devoted to either connecting with others, or in response to the work, actions, or behaviour of other human beings.

Tragically, those of us who do find ourselves withdrawing from the community of others face unfortunate consequences: "[A]lmost all mental suffering involves either trouble in creating workable and satisfying relationships or difficulties in regulating arousal.”⁶ In Van Der Kolk's view, the best way to deal with human suffering comes from dealing with how our problems "interfere with our functioning as members of our tribe."⁷

This unity of experience also has an aspect that ties this idea back to Plato’s Republic. The Dutch philosopher C.A. Van Peursen (1966) describes the “diffuse” existence of the individual (individual existence being secondary to the existence of the community). In and by himself, Van Peursen says, an individual cannot be “cut loose from the social pattern within which alone he comes to be himself.”⁸ In fact, Van Peursen also observes that the word “I” is not even employed in tribal societies; it is only used in relation to another person: “’I-father’, ‘I-uncle’, and so forth.”⁹ Individual identity arises from the group, family, or tribe, and one’s relationship with the others.

In conclusion, the idea of being a part of a collective is not necessarily something to be resisted, if properly understood. When St. Paul describes the Church as such, presenting us with a thing so very much at odds with the attitudes of our time, it may be a great stumbling block toward accepting the Kingdom of God. Also, in teaching Plato's Republic many times over the years, my explanation of the city described by Socrates is often greeted with looks of disbelief and silent head shakes. Yet both ideas might be seen as acceptable (even desirable) if we better understand the nature of the neural "machinery" actually working right now within each of our heads, and how our relationships form us into the people we become. By focusing lesson who we are than what we can do for others, we become less selfish and, somehow, both less and more ourselves. Our identity changes as our focus shifts, but our individual role in the service of others flourishes, breeding a new individual identity.

This idea is nicely summed up, in this story adapted from a famous Japanese folktale. 

"Contrary to popular belief
the tables of Hell are laden
with the most exquisite dishes of food.
Whatever you could possibly desire:
soups, salads, stews, sauces, curries
if you want, fruits, succulent meats
(grilled to order), pastries, ice cream.
The single unusual factor being that
one must eat with a fork three feet long.
Holding it close to the tines you could manage
to eat, but when you do so, a demon immediately
slaps you (or pokes you with his fork),
and says, "Hold it at the other end!"
So getting the food on the fork up to your mouth
is quite impossible, alas, though an abundance
of delicious food is readily available.
 
"In heaven the situation is exactly the same:
same long tables covered with tasty dishes,
same long forks.
The only difference in heaven
is that people feed the person sitting across the table from them."¹⁰

The lesson of this story is this: if we could become less concerned with our own happiness and more concerned with the happiness of our neighbors, it would be a happier world. Rethinking our place among our fellows is the key. One has only to be assimilated willfully; “Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

I recently read, with fascination, Michael F. Flynn's article at Strange Notions, entitled "St. Christopher, ET, and the Middle Ages". There, Flynn discusses (among other things) the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the question of what it means to be "human" (is it a matter of evolutionary descent or something else?). He makes a very interesting case by referring to written Medieval encounters with a race of dog-headed people, which include even the strange story of St. Christopher, who some believed had been one of them (changing to human form, I believe, only after being baptized ... making his conversion a particularly life-changing experience).

What I liked best about the article was the fact that Flynn didn't try to explain what these dog-men might have been. Instead, Flynn gets to the more philosophical question of our identities as human beings, and how we can consider beings so different from us (whether dog men or extra-terrestrial intelligences) to be like likes, and capable of receiving and benefiting from GOD's message and presence in the world.

Of course, this is not really a new question. C.S. Lewis famously considered it in his Space trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet and its sequels), and Europeans had to grapple with the discovery of entirely unknown (and in their minds inexplicable) people in the Americas (the subsequent enslavement of the American Indians is a sadly forgotten chapter in U.S. history). In light of this, it is when Flynn discusses the nonetheless human nature of these strange dog-headed people that things get particularly interesting. I quote him:

"When a medieval said that the Dog-Heads were 'degenerated descendants of Adam,' they had in mind that they were rational beings, not that they belonged to a biological species, although "common descent" is implicit in it. Which brings us back to 'St. Christopher the Dog-Head.' Why was it that no ones seemed to be any more outraged that a Dog-Head could be baptized ... ?"

These questions may be speculative, but they are relevant, even in our time. And not because, even if there are no dog-headed people, there may be aliens or other forms of intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos. I think that we can already ask such questions of creatures perhaps less exotic, though certainly interesting (and familiar) to most of us: The great apes, such as the orangutans of Indonesia.

“I Wanna Be Like You”

Anyone who has seen the Disney animated classic The Jungle Book (1967) remembers King Louie, the orangutan who desires to be human. In his memorable song, he sings to Mowgli, the feral child he has kidnapped:

"I wanna be a man, mancub

And stroll right into town

And be just like the other men

I'm tired of monkeyin' around!"

King Louie hopes that Mowgli can teach him the secret of making fire, he says to him, "So I can be like you". Interestingly, since Mowgli was raised by wolves (literally), neither does he know the secret of making fire. Yet does this make Mowgli less than human in King Louie's eyes? ... Let's move on.

Orangutans probably didn't descend from Adam the way these dog-headed people were believed to have been. But the question I am interested in right now is this: What makes a rational being “rational”? What counts as a uniquely "human" thought or ability? What makes a dog-headed convert to Christianity human, yet is somehow denied King Louie in the Disney film?

With King Louie in mind, let's look at orangutans.

Physiologically, orangutans share a long list of similarities with Homo sapiens, as recounted by anthropologist Lyn Miles, which include, she states,

"a similar gestation period, brain hemispheric asymmetry, characteristics of dentition, sexual physiology, copulatory behavior, hormonal levels, hair pattern, mammary gland placement, and insightful style of cognition".¹

Orangutans have also been observed to stand and walk fully upright while occupying tree branches, using their free hands to pick fruit from overhanging limbs otherwise beyond their reach.² This has lead anthropologists such as Susannah K. S. Thorpe to theorize that a similar bipedal stance was common to all tree-dwelling apes up to five million years ago, until diminishing forest lands in Africa imposed changes onto the apes that would serve as the ancestors of present-day gorillas, chimpanzees, and Homo sapiens.³

The conclusion of such a view is that while the ancestors of Homo sapiens eventually regained their ability to stand fully erect, as other African great apes advanced no further than knuckle-walking, the Asian ancestors of the orangutans preserved this ancient ability.⁴ The orangutan thus serves as an important link to Homo sapiens' most distant prehistoric past, for it retains both a lifestyle and physiological features once possessed by both their common ancestors, abandoned by every other species of great ape. This sentiment is reiterated by Miles, who notes,

“Both the fossil data and comparisons of DNA and other biochemical measures suggest that the orangutan is the most conservative, or primitive, of the great apes. They are most like the ancestral hominoid (ape-like primate) living about twelve million years ago that later gave rise to apes and humans. Orangutans have retained more of the characteristics of this hominoid than have the African apes. As a result, orangutans have been labeled a 'living fossil', and thus are a kind of time traveler."⁵

In addition to such physiological traits as bipedalism, the observation of orangutans in both their natural habitat and in captivity has revealed startlingly Homo sapiens-like behavior and abilities. While orangutans in the jungles of Sumatra and Borneo have been observed to build shelters and teach one another to use simple tools,⁶ orangutans in captivity have been taught to tie knots,⁷ make stone tools (specifically blades out of flint), and put them to practical use.⁸ The facts of physiological and behavioral similarity, common ancestry, and capacities for culture and tool use all point to the conclusion that the orangutan should be viewed as an ideal candidate for consideration in the quest for humanity beyond the species Homo sapiens.

Of course, the power of speech is one thing which orangutans obviously lack. While their vocal chords are not suitable for spoken language,⁹ the red apes of Sumatra and Borneo have nevertheless demonstrated linguistic abilities through experiments in which captive individuals were taught to use American Sign Language. Lyn Miles was the first anthropologist to conduct such an experiment with an orangutan. Miles, for over a period of nine years, instructed and observed a young orangutan named Chantek, whom she raised from infancy as she would have a human child.¹⁰ At the age of ten months, Chantek began to demonstrate his understanding of the signs being taught to him by signing to his caregivers on his own.¹¹ As time passed, Chantek displayed an ability to use 150 different words.¹² He also showed himself to be capable of understanding the corresponding terms for the signs in spoken English, as his teachers often vocalized the words they signed when they addressed him. Chantek demonstrated this ability to recognize spoken words by performing the signs corresponding to words he recognized while listening to the radio.¹³

Chantek also demonstrated the ability to sign for things which were not in front of him, like ice cream (showing he retained the idea of things even after they were no longer in view and could signal his desire for them), and the ability to lie (he would take little objects he wanted to keep, like pencil erasers, hide them, and then claim not to know where they were).¹⁴

Of course, Chantek is just one orangutan, but as mentioned already, many orangutans have been observed to skillfully carry out intelligent actions, such as, again, making stone tools and shelters. But one other orangutan deserves a mention, because his story is so interesting (and as a native Nebraskan, I am happy to share it).

In the 1960s the Omaha zoo gained the addition of a baby orangutan named Fu Manchu. In due time, Fu Manchu became notorious for his habit of escaping from his cage. The first time it happened, head zookeeper Harry Stones discovered Fu Manchu and several other orangutans lounging about in trees outside their habitat, the door connecting his habitat/exhibit to the furnace room wide open. At first, the zookeepers assumed that it had been left unlocked by accident, until it happened again and again. Jobs were on the line ("I was about to fire someone," Stones said), as it was assumed that the staff were being negligent about securing the orangutans after feeding them.¹⁵

Finally, though, Stones was able to catch Fu Manchu in the act. Hiding one day and watching the orangutan exhibit after hours, Stones watched as Fu Manchu jumped up and climbed the air vents. He reached the furnace room door, forced a gap open, and then slipped the piece of wire into the gap to unhook the latch on the other side. Until then, no one had noticed the wire Fu Manchu used because Fu Manchu had bent it to fit between his lip and gums, where he concealed it in between his escapes.¹⁶ 

“Tell them that is human nature”

Now, what does all this mean? This is where I have to stop and leave you to speculate. After all, I have no answers, only questions. If the rational human soul is thought to be in evidence by the intelligent behaviour of its possessor, where do we draw the line? What about human beings who lack the abilities of the orangutans I have just discussed, due to developmental disabilities? How can we deny the humanity of one while defending the humanity of the other?

While the medievals had no concept of species as we do today in contemporary biology, the fact that the dog-people were descendants of Adam (and thus of the same "kind" as us, regardless of their appearance) means they had a familial understanding of human nature (that being human includes being descended from another human being).

Is it reasonable to expand the definition of "humanity" to include other apes? Do we do this already when we regard now extinct members of the genus Homo as humans, like Homo erectus or Homo neanderthalensis (better known as the Neanderthal)? Of course speculating on their human nature matters very little to them, at this point, for all this is left of them are their bones and tools.

This is not to say that the question is not important, though. In fact, it is critical. For as their environment is destroyed and as poachers diminish their numbers, the continued survival of our surrogate "dog men", orangutans and the other great apes, becomes ever more unlikely. If they are humans after all, would it make a difference in how we treated them? (Knowing humans--that is, knowing Homo sapiens--perhaps not).

Finally, one last thing to consider. The question of extraterrestrial life is a fascinating one, and our response to its possibility may also influence our decision here, regarding the nature of the apes with whom we share this planet. If we can imagine aliens being intelligent and receptive to God's Word and presence (like the beings in C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet), then we would imagine that their souls come not from Adam and Eve, but through a separate Creation by God. And surely we could, if we use our imaginations now, imagine God bringing new people to life from the stones on the ground outside (or make dragons and have their fallen teeth rise up as human beings).

If aliens can have souls, is it any less of a stretch to imagine that kindred species could have souls as well? Or perhaps that Adam and Eve were in fact not Homo sapiens at all, but an earlier species from which we, and all other apes, are common descendants? (Recall again Miles' remark that orangutans have retained more of the characteristics of more ancient ancestral apes than have gorillas, chimpanzees, or ourselves.)

What began as idle speculation becomes much more serious when we consider the plight of the great apes of our world, gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans alike, and if we wish to protect them from extinction.

Perhaps King Louie was already one of us?
 
 
(Image credit: Disney)

Last summer I had the pleasure of writing my first article for Strange Notions, on the topic of bodily resurrection. Some time later, I came across a discussion group on another blog that happened to be focused on my article! Naturally intrigued, I took a few minutes to look around and read what the readers there had to say. It was nothing good. Among the snarky remarks was this gem: "I had fish for lunch. I wonder which of us is going to get resurrected from our (now shared) atoms."

Today I'd like to address that topic. I mentioned it vaguely in my original article, when I noted that the bodies of the dry bones Ezekiel saw in his dream had been picked clean by the carrion birds, and that a human body's atoms might be dispersed by earthquakes, dynamite, or a hungry bears. But the question is a really intriguing one, and I think trying to answer it presents a rather daunting challenge. What follows is my attempt.

Recycle, Reuse, Reduce?

The problem here basically involves recycling. Dead bodies not only decompose but "spring to life" again in other forms. They are not raised up in their former forms, but their components are inevitably integrated into new living systems. Compost in the garden. A dead antelope feeding a lion (a lion whose body is composed, in part, of antelope meat). Imagine first century Romans feeding Christians to wild boars, and then feasting on the pigs themselves in a post-persecution barbecue. Thanks to the miracle of digestion, we could imagine someone's body becoming part of a pig's body, and then in turn becoming part of another person's body. As the particles composing the former pass on to nourish the latter, resurrection suddenly becomes a very messy business indeed.

My last article, again, suggested that quantum entanglement might (possibly) allow a continuity of experience to be preserved, maintaining one's identity beyond death and decomposition. But "recycling" makes things trickier; if the experiences of one body's parts were to become integrated into the experiences of some other body's parts, whose identity will be preserved when the day of resurrection comes?

Canadian Cannibals

In the eighteenth century Voltaire, cheeky as always, gleefully described such a problem when he proposed the following situation. He asked that we imagine a French soldier who has traveled to Quebec and finds himself lost in the woods far away from his station. Starving, he does the unthinkable: he kills and eats a native Iroquois whom he meets in the forest. One man has eaten another, but the problem is even greater than we realize. For Voltaire goes on to tell us, “The Iroquois had fed on Jesuits for two or three months, and a great part of his body [i.e., the Iroquois's body] had become Jesuit” (qtd. in Morley, 1901/2012, 5.2).

Because the Iroquois in Voltaire's example had been eating missionaries for such a long time, we can imagine our French soldier to have a body composed (in part) of the body of an Iroquois, whose own body had been composed (much more substantially) of Jesuit bodies (several of them!). Even if entanglement somehow preserves the subjective experiences of the dead Iroquois within the body of the French soldier (might we imagine two souls in one body?), what about the experiences and identities of those Jesuits whom the Iroquois had been eating? Are we to say that all these men live on in the French soldier’s body?

What a confusing mess!

An Old Question

But it turns out Voltaire’s question, as well as the one asked by the blog commentator whom I mentioned at the beginning, is nothing new. About 1,300 years before Voltaire wrote about his starving soldier, the question of "which is who?" had already been asked by St. Augustine in The City of God. Augustine suggested that if human flesh were ever eaten (directly via cannibalism or indirectly by an animal eaten by another human being), then that flesh would on the Day of Resurrection, “be restored to the man in whom it became human flesh” (Bk. XXII, Ch. 20). That is, whoever had it first will have it restored to him or herself when all the dead are raised up.

Not simply dismissing the question there, Augustine then goes on. He supposes that any recycled flesh “must be looked upon as borrowed by the other person, and, like a pecuniary loan, must be restored to the lender” (Ibid.). It is "owed" to him or her, in that case, and must be given back on the last day.

If this is correct, then even someone who was eaten, rather than buried, remains the true “owner” of the particles which had once composed his or her body!

A Closer Look

A second response to Voltaire comes from the seventeenth century, just twenty years before Voltaire’s birth.  In 1674, when the English scholar Humphrey Hody considered this recycling problem himself, he had another question to ask. How much of a living body actually becomes the body of the thing that eats it? According to Hody, the percentage of a body actually capable of nourishing the body of a cannibal (or other carnivore like a lion or bear) is negligible. Most of the structure comprising a human body is either inedible, or else not very nourishing. One cannot digest bones or tendons, for example, and these would not be part of the cannibal's meal even if he (or she!) were especially hungry. And if indeed none of these parts were eaten, even if by cannibals, then there is very little chance that one could ever have a body comprised entirely of someone else's body.

The dead may rest in peace, wherever their bits might be scattered.

Hody goes on to point out that there are a lot of examples of “indirect” cannibalism:  “from the bodies," he says, "of the dead springs up grass, this when eaten by the ox, is turned into flesh; this we eat, and the flesh of the ox becomes ours” (qtd. Kaufman, 2008, p. 202). Yet even when this happens, a very tiny bit of what was once "cow" (or "ox" ... only about 2% of the flesh that is actually eaten) makes it into the body of the person who eats it. Even if we were to imagine a carnivorous cow who was feeding directly on human bodies, this would make little difference. And especially since I have never heard of a carnivorous cow to begin with, I rest assured that little of such a cow would be formerly human, thus giving me little reason to worry about “second hand cannibalism” as preventing the bodies of the dead from being raised up.

Bringing the scattered parts back together is one thing (and a tall order for the skeptical!), but at least as far as the recycling problem is concerned, it would appear that Voltaire was exaggerating. When it comes to eternal life, we have nothing to fear from cannibals.

Sources

Augustine, The City of God from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 2. Philip Schaff, ed., M. Dods, trans. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co. Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight., First edition published in 1887.

Kaufman, D. 2008 “The Resurrection of the Same Body and the Ontological Status of Organisms: What Locke Should Have (and Could Have) Told Stillingfleet” in Contemporary Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy., P. Hoffman, et al., ed. Peterborough: Broadview Press.

Morley, J. 2014. The Works of Voltaire, a Contemporary Version. Adelaide: The University of Adelaide Library. First published 1901.
 
 
(Image credit: Genealogy Religion)

Not too long ago Patrick Schultz wrote a most interesting article for StrangeNotions.com on the nature of the “self” (or rather, the lack of one) if we attempt to describe human beings in material terms. Specifically, he says, when materialists try to explain the human person, “something quite puzzling (and frightening) occurs—human subjectivity disappears; that which makes humans human is explained away. The personal pronoun ‘I’ is swallowed up.”

Shultz then illustrates this idea through the words of one of my favourite popular science writers, Carl Sagan. A materialist himself (he famously imagined human beings as “stardust”), Sagan once described himself as “a collection of water, calcium, and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label.”¹ When talking about himself, Sagan does not describe a single entity, but a collection of many diverse particles, piled five feet and eleven inches high (or so Google told me when I asked it how tall he was). I might refer to Sagan, were he alive and standing near me today (along with myself), as a particular assortment of chemical compounds, the sum total of all those little “parts”.

But this is of course contrary to my intuitive experience, and I’m sure the same is true for you as well. As a matter of fact, I happen to be standing in front of my computer right now typing these words, just as (a bit later from my point of view) you now happen to be reading them. In either case, “I” and “you” are singular pronouns, and I certainly experience this moment as a single united experience: there are my thoughts as I write, the movement of my hands across the keyboard, the David Bowie album I happen to be listening to (1976’s Station to Station), my simultaneous Facebook chat with a good friend (Hello Paulina!) and the sight of these very words as they appear on the screen. All these things, occurring simultaneously in this present moment, are part of a single noisy, busy, (yet somehow) unified experience, which I am now living.

But how can that be? How can I be, if I am really nothing but an assemblage of collected chemical compounds, or (perhaps better), a mobile bag of (mostly) water? Where am I located, in the midst of all these collected bits and diverse streams of experience? It seems strange that I should be only “one”, experiencing the world as a single thing (my “self”), for the many particles composing my body are not one, and water molecules are not conscious (otherwise, since the brain is about 75% water, we might hope to increase our intelligence by drinking more of it). Schultz ends his article with the illustration of the Iron Man’s empty suit (sans Tony Stark), and asks us to imagine that materialists are essentially saying that this is all human beings really are (though I prefer the more timeless idea of an empty suit of knight’s armor. But I digress). So has Schultz pointed out the Achilles’ heel of materialism? After all, how could something so absurd be true?

Even though Schultz and I certainly play for the same team, theologically speaking, I would have to disagree with him. Because the reality, I think, is so much more complicated. The self does indeed exist (it would be silly to deny such a thing, for one must have a “self” if one is to deny it, accept it, or try to imagine it). And so the question is this: Where does the “self” come from? Put differently, how can I understand my “self” in relation to the particles composing my body? What I would like to do with the remainder of is article, then, is to consider these questions.

Mind and matter and matter and mind

One fact that we must take into account, if we are going to explain the existence of the mind, is its apparent dependence upon the “stuff” of the brain. Neurons, the pathways between them, and the activity in which they engage, all seem instrumental and necessary if we hope to think, act, or interact with the world. Drop a brick on my head, damage or destroy a part of the brain, and my abilities will become impaired.

The correspondence between damage to the brain and cognitive ability was noted famously over 150 years ago by the French physician Pierre Paul Broca, and the discovery he made while doing the autopsy of a man known as “Tan”. Tan had been hospitalized for many years, and had almost completely lost the ability to speak; the only word he could say, in fact, was “Tan”, and he repeated it over and over as he attempted to communicate. Following Tan’s death, when Broca removed and studied his brain, Broca found extensive damage to the frontal lobe of its left hemisphere, to an area known today as “Broca’s area”. Later studies confirmed that this particular brain region was responsible for producing spoken language. Damage it, and you would destroy anyone’s ability to speak.²

This, and many other cases (such as the famous example of Phineas Gage, whom I would recommend you read all about) suggests a definite correspondence between my subjective experience and abilities, and the particles composing my body (and more specifically, my brain).

Do You Want to Build a Snowman?

Another idea I would like to consider, as we contemplate the nature of the mind (and of the self) is the idea of “emergence”. This is basically the idea that things can in fact be more than the sum of their parts. In other words, I can be made of all the things Carl Sagan listed (water, calcium, and organic molecules), and yet still be more than that, as a unique, living, thinking being.

Consider water, for example. Not only does the stuff comprise most of our bodies, but it is itself comprised of two distinct components (hydrogen and oxygen). Hydrogen and oxygen are two completely different things, each with its own chemical and physical properties. And yet when they combine together, as two hydrogen atoms bond with an oxygen atom, they produce something new (water!), with chemical and physical properties all its own. And so the many combine into one, and the one is different from those components out of which it is comprised. Water behaves in a way in which hydrogen or oxygen alone never would. Other chemical compounds behave differently with one another, then, than they otherwise would. And this may be something important to keep in mind (no pun intended).

Sagan may have described himself as a collection of chemical compounds, but it’s important to realize that these compounds may behave in distinct and unexpected ways when in “close quarters” (or held together by the same skin and skeletal structure). Perhaps self-awareness and intelligence are very unusual (even miraculous) sorts of chemical reactions arising from compounds composing the human body?

A simple illustration. I cannot build a snowman out of one hydrogen atom, or even a the contents of a tank filled with hydrogen, but bond a hydrogen atom to an oxygen atom (many times), accumulate a large amount of water, freeze it under the right conditions, and make the proper deliberate actions (rolling the snow into balls and stacking them) and I can! I can hardly accurately describe my snowman as a collection of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. After all, the temperature, the structure and properties of snowflakes, and my wish to build a snowman have all combined to create something which is more than just the sum of its parts.

The point is, a suit of armor (or Tony Stark’s suit) is indeed inert and “nothing-buttery”; it is only a fancy hunk of metal, so long as there’s no one inside it. But the human body is very different from a suit of armor; it is active and alive, containing a plethora of varied chemical compounds that act and interact with one another. My “self”, then, could be such an emergent property, arising from the structure, properties, and interactions occurring between my own component parts.

I am Large; I Contain Multitudes

Let’s put all this together now, with one other interesting fact about the brain, as I think it will shed some new (and surprising) light on the nature of the mind. We’ve been searching for the one “self” amongst the bits and pieces and particles composing the body (and especially the brain). But what if the truth were more complicated? 160 years ago the poet Walt Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes.”³ And though he could not have known it then, Whitman may have been literally right. While treating patients suffering from epilepsy, neurobiologist Roger Sperry cut the nerves connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain. This experimental surgery was done to prevent seizures from spreading from one side of the brain to the other. But then something incredible happened: each half of the brain, severed from the other, appeared to take on a life of its own. Each hemisphere became the source of a separate mind, each one of equal intelligence but differing in abilities.⁴ Dr. Michael Gazzaniga, who worked under Dr. Sperry at that time, describes what happened:

In later experiments with other patients, we put assorted objects within reach of the left hand but blocked form view. A picture of one of the objects was flashed to the right hemisphere, and the left hand felt among the objects and was able to select the one that had been pictured. When asked, “Did you see anything?” or “What is in your left hand?” the patient denied seeing the picture and could not describe what was in his left hand. In another scenario we flashed the picture of a bicycle to the right hemisphere and asked the patient if he had seen anything. Once again he replied in the negative, but his left hand drew a picture of a bike.⁵

But Gazzaniga does not suggest that every human being is in fact a pair, or two minds sharing one body (recall Aristophanes’ story from Plato’s Symposium). Rather, Gazzaniga goes much further than that, suggesting that each hemisphere is composed of many smaller “minds”, and that these little minds (or sites of particular mental process) connect together to form larger and more complex structures capable of doing and understanding more and more. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, growing larger and larger as it accumulates more and more snow. Smaller brain structures connect together to form the two hemispheres, which in turn connect together to form a whole brain and a single “self”. ^[vi] Out of many, one.

Though a strange idea, it isn’t really all that new. Long before Walt Whitman, Plato suggested the same thing in The Republic. There we can read Socrates’ comparison of the human being to a city, and his suggestion that the former is just a smaller version of the latter. After all, our bodies are composed of cells which perform specific tasks, and so too are cities composed of people who go to do their jobs every day. Human bodies are “cities” built up out of cells, their tissues which are made of cells, their organs (made of tissues), and systems (made of organs), thus making the body a complete whole of cooperating interdependent parts. Plato thought our cities were built the same way: our countries are formed of similar units: people instead of cells, families and associations composed of individual people, institutions made of families and associations, and society as a whole. As above, so below.

Conclusion

So we might be able to understand the “self” as a real thing that nonetheless depends on a very specific combination of chemical compounds, chemical reactions, structure, and environment (since human bodies would not survive on the surface of the sun, for example). Naturally, though, plenty of mysteries remain, as the complexity of this structure and the nature of all the chemical reactions taking place within our bodies continue to lie beyond our present understanding. We can remain open to the mystery of how such a remarkable thing as the “self” could have ever arisen in nature (if we are naturalists, that is. Theists, of course, already know the answer to that mystery). And we can marvel at the nature of the “self” that emerges from such a remarkable set of circumstances and is capable of doing so much (music, art, novels, pyramids, rocket ships, roller-coasters, and everything else we can create).

One last thing deserves a mention. I would like to remind readers that the idea of the “self” as a result of environment, structure, and chemical reactions does not invalidate the idea of the soul. Not at all. Already, I have noted the similarity of Gazzaniga’s idea of the mind as a collection of smaller minds to the idea of the human being described in Plato’s Republic. And any student of Aristotle knows that the soul is best understood as the form (or the “living structure”) of the body. According to Aristotle’s understanding, the soul is the power a human being has to grow, move, or think. Even if the “self” is indeed the result of a collection of chemical compounds or an assemblage of particles, I don’t think Schultz has any reason to worry.

I am still here.
 
 
(Image credit: New Statesman)

The Question

 
In the year 587 BCE, the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and brought many of the Jews back home as captives. Among them was the prophet Ezekiel. During this dark period of Israel’s history, God promised Ezekiel that Israel would rise again. We can read about it in the Book of Ezekiel, where God leads His prophet out to a battlefield in a valley, strewn with the dry, dusty skeletons of Jerusalem’s fallen army. There, God makes Ezekiel a strange request: He tells him to command the bones to live again. Ezekiel does as God says (telling his silent audience to “Hear the word of the Lord!”), and as his voice echoes through the valley, the earth begins to shake. The scattered bones reassemble themselves, and are covered with knotted lines of sinew. Over them grow new layers of flesh, skin, and hair. The breath of God, carried by the wind, blows over the bodies, and just as breath animated Adam, so too do the rebuilt bodies lying on the dust of the battlefield rise up, awake. By the power of God, “a great and immense army” now stands on its feet. Israel will rise again (Ez. 37:1-14).

The Bible offers many other examples of death and resurrection, written in the centuries following Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones. There is the resurrection of Lazarus (John 11:38-44), the dead saints who emerged from their tombs at the hour of Jesus’ death (Matt. 27:52), and of course Jesus himself (Mark 16:9, John 20:14). These are all easy enough for us to picture in our minds; Lazarus and Jesus were both dead for only a very short time, their bodies bound up securely in folds of linen. Though Lazarus’ family had feared a stench when Jesus asked that his tomb be opened up, we can still imagine some process reversing his dead state or somehow rejuvenating him. The same goes for the dead arising in the tombs in St. Matthew’s gospel; though perhaps dead for many years, their bodies had remained undisturbed in their tombs until the day of Jesus’ death. And the same is true for the bones in Ezekiel's vision: Though the dead men Ezekiel saw being raised up were nothing but dust and dried bone, the remains of those soldiers slain on that battlefield remained (more or less) together.

The Challenge

 
Christianity is predicated on the possibility of resurrection, and the belief that on Easter, Jesus defeated death once and for all. More than that, He had the power to extend His new life to others, allowing them to share in His immortality. This is why, once the early persecutions of the Christians were underway, the Romans went to great lengths to discourage the belief in bodily resurrection. According to Eusebius of Caesarea, one group of Christians executed by the Romans had had their corpses left to rot for a week, unburied (so that they would be denied proper funerals). The remains were then cremated, and finally dumped into the Rhone River. As the ashes washed downstream, one of the overseers remarked aloud, “Now let us see if they will rise again!”

While the Romans might have worked hard to destroy the bodies of Christians, they really need not have bothered. In reality, just as human remains decay, so too do they disperse. In the valley Ezekiel saw in his vision, birds of prey would have already picked the bones of Jerusalem clean, carrying parts of the dead soldiers away with them in their beaks and bellies. And if the bones had remained lying there longer, they would have eventually crumbled into dust and been blown away in the wind, or washed out by the rain.

Now, think of all the people who have ever lived, and what has become of most of them over the past 200,000 years. Their tombs are lost, their bones long gone, consumed by predators, floods, landslides, at the mercy of the elements, or (perhaps) lying beneath the foundations of modern cities. With a very few exceptions (such as the Pharaoh Tutankhamen, whose untouched tomb was discovered in 1922, some 3,200 years after he was laid to rest) the inevitable, natural process of decay has utterly destroyed what remains of anyone who lived more than a few centuries ago. The Romans of Lyon need not have tried so hard!

Atheists are right to point out that this poses a serious problem for most Catholics alive now, who hope for resurrection and eternal life in the future. There are of course exceptions, examples of people who lived long ago, whose bodies remain intact until today: Pharaoh Tutankhamen, of course, the bog-people preserved in the medieval swamps of northern Europe, and the incorrupt bodies of a few special saints. But what about the rest of us? Our remains might one day be scattered across the planet, be consumed by worms, fertilize the grass, be consumed by cows, and be consumed by eaters of hamburgers.

If Catholics really believe in the possibility of resurrection, and wish to convince atheists that death is not the end of life, they must find a satisfying answer to this question. Explaining the "mechanics" of resurrection indeed poses a formidable challenge.

A Possible Solution

 
In 1935, Albert Einstein and two of his younger colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathen Rosen, proposed one of the most famous thought experiments in modern physics. The paper they wrote (with the lengthy title, "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?") describes a quality of physical reality known as "locality". Because of locality (location in the physical world), a domino at the front of a line cannot directly knock down a domino at the end of the end; it can only do so indirectly (via the movement of all the dominoes standing in between).

In the EPR paper (so named because of the initials of its authors), though, a perceived "fatal flaw" of quantum physics is revealed, in which locality plays a crucial role. But it is, in fact, not a flaw at all—it is a mystery! The paper describes a bizarre paradox that seemingly flies in the face of common sense (a paradox upon a paradox, as those familiar with Schrodinger's cat already know), yet which has been since verified many times in the laboratory.

To explain the paradox, let's keep talking about dominoes. Suppose I randomly take two dominoes from a pile and look at the number of dots on each. Let us say one has no dots at all, and the other has twelve. I shake the two dominoes in my hands, mix them up, and then look at the one on top. I see that it is the one that has twelve dots, and automatically know (even though I am not looking at it) that the one I cannot see has no dots.

This makes sense, until we start thinking about a similar situation on a quantum level. A quantum particle called a pi meson decays into a positron and an electron, which spin off in opposite directions. But their spins are not independent; they correlate with the original state of the pi meson before its decay. As a result, a physicist observing the electron will automatically know the state of the positron, just as I (in the above example) can tell you the number of dots on the domino I cannot see, so long as I am looking at the other one.

How is this a paradox? Well, in quantum physics (and the example of Schrodinger's cat), the state of a particle depends upon the presence of an observer. The properties of a particle (its position and momentum, for example) are undefined until an observer observes them (like Doctor Who's Weeping Angels, who have no definite, solid existence unless they are being watched ... don't blink!). Particles have no definite position or momentum until they are observed, yet by observing the electron a physicist can also know the state of a positron. Einstein, Podolksy, and Rosen, then, had apparently found a contradiction within quantum theory: the properties of particles really do exist, even if no one is looking at them.

The only other possibility would be what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance": the idea that an observation here can affect reality there. But that would be impossible, Einstein, thought, because of locality (just as knocking over a domino at this end of the line does not directly cause a domino to fall at that end of the line).

Or is it?

As I said already, this "spooky action" has been empirically verified many times in the 80 years since the EPR paper was written, perhaps most effectively by the Swiss physicist Niculus Gisin and his colleagues at the University of Geneva. In 1997, they sent pairs of entangled photons through a network of fiber-optic tubes to locations eleven kilometers apart, one north and the other south of Geneva. And yet even at that distance (keep in mind that these are subatomic particles!), the behaviour of one particle correlated with the behaviour of the other; when the paths of each member of the pair were compared, they were symmetrical. Though there had been many possible pathways through the tubes, what one particle had done, the other had done as well. Even though the two particles were separated by a large distance and had no way of influencing with or "communicating" with one another, the movement of one affected the movement of the other, from a distance.

This is the phenomenon of entanglement. Entanglement occurs constantly, everywhere. While we do not consciously perceive it with our senses, it nevertheless ties together all the most fundamental particles composing reality. Whenever two things, whether photons (light particles), electrons, or atoms interact, they are tied together, sharing a single "experience" and losing their separate existence. On the everyday, human level, these entanglements do not endure for very long; in our bodily experience, new interactions inevitably occur, resulting in new entanglements of new, shared experience. But these interactions have been observed and tested on both microscopic particles and macroscopic objects.

This shared relationship was demonstrated recently with diamonds large enough to be seen by an unaided eye. Physicist Ian Walmsley and his colleagues at the University of Oxford were able to cause two diamond strips to vibrate simultaneously across a fifteen-centimeter gap. This may not sound terribly impressive at first, until we realize that the experiment was conducted at room temperature; the heat of the laboratory and the air particles filling the room would have interfered with the entangling connection between the two diamonds (most entanglement experiments deal with atoms or subatomic particles at temperatures approaching absolute zero, in order to prevent atoms from jostling one another. Walmsley’s experiment involved macroscopic objects at, again, room temperature). Ultimately, Walmsley’s experiment showed that the ties of entanglement may continue to bind particles together, on a larger scale and in spite of outside interference.

A Speculative Conclusion

 
What does this have to do with resurrection? It suggests that particles may somehow remain united, regardless of the amount of space separating them (for entanglement is a non-local phenomenon, unaffected by distance).

This opens the door to two exciting possibilities. First, it is conceivable that a particular living body could continue on in some form, even after it has died and its component particles have decayed and/or physically separated (whether by an earthquake, a stick of dynamite, or a hungry bear). Second, entanglement suggests that particular events leave a lasting “mark” upon their subjects, right down to the subatomic level. Events unite particles together, whether the spin of a progenitor particle (like a pi meson), or (perhaps!) the shared participation in a particular living body.

So the efforts of the Romans to prevent their Christian victims from being raised up might have been fruitless, after all. While much more investigation is required before we can speak more definitely about this sort of thing (investigations which I will leave in the hands of physicists, though I will watch and listen with great interest), quantum entanglement offers a fascinating response to an important challenge posed to the possibility of resurrection.

In the meantime, incorruptible saints, bog bodies, Egyptian mummies, and dry bones will continue to lie in wait.
 
 
(Image credit: Planet Science)