My current lunch time reading project is the 2007 book by Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will (Oxford University Press). Although I’ve only just broached the first chapter, I can already tell that I’m really going to enjoy it immensely, and from time to time I might share some of the really good bits as I work my way through it.

The book is basically a defence of the view that there is a plausible physicalist conception of the mind that is compatible with moral responsibility and free will, but along the way you end up getting a great introduction to the position in philosophy of mind called nonreductive physicalism.

Like the authors, I’m a physicalist. I’m not a mind-body dualist like a large number of my Christian peers who believe that we are a combination of two very different and (potentially) independent substances: intelligent, conscious souls, and mundane matter. An observation really leapt off the pages at me today. I can so easily relate to this observation, because I sometimes observe my Christian peers who are mind-body dualists struggle with the idea of physicalism for just this reason.

Mary Midgley characterised physicalism like this:

If certain confusions result from Descartes’ having sliced human beings down the middle, many feel that the best cure is just to drop the immaterial half altogether … The philosophers who favour this programme are known as Physicalists.¹

I suppose technically someone who does this is a physicalist, since he will have to say that people are made only of physical stuff, but I would hate to think that anyone would assume that because I am a physicalist I am committed to this view. In a Cartesian view (i.e the view of Descartes) The mind is the true self, the seat of all consciousness, the marker of personal identity, the active ingredient in the person whereas the body is passive, unnecessary and more of a machine than anything else. Any decent variety of physicalism (and certainly nonreductive physicalism) is not just dualism with the soul removed. Radical dualism and physicalism have very basically different views not just on the nature of the mind, but also on the capacity of the body. If we were to just accept the Cartesian view of the body with the soul stripped away, we would be left with nothing but a machine, something like a zombie – which (although incredibly cool in it’s own way) is nothing like what your average physicalist is likely to believe in.

To use another analogy, I’m reminded of the words of Nursie on Blackadder II when she recounted the birth of Queen Elizabeth I:

Out you popped, out of your mummie’s tumkin and everybody shouting, ‘It’s a boy, it’s a boy!’ And somebody said, ‘But it hasn’t got a winkle!’ And then I said, ‘A boy without a winkle? God be praised, it’s a miracle. A boy without a winkle!’ And then Sir Thomas More pointed out that a boy without a winkle is a girl, and everyone was really disappointed.

It’s obvious what’s wrong here. A girl isn’t just a boy with a missing penis. Every DNA molecule [EDIT: this should read "every cell"] of a girl’s body is different from that of a boy. Remember, physicalists don’t just reject the dualistic view of the mind. They also reject the dualistic view of the body, and physicalism is not just dualism minus the soul.

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I’m in the process of writing the next podcast episode on Alvin Plantinga and his arguments around the idea of belief in God as a properly basic belief. In it, I’m clearly on Plantinga’s side, and I think his work in that area represents a crucial contribution to philosophy of religion (and to epistemology).

I thought, therefore, that I should balance that with the following rather less friendly assessment. I’ve mentioned before that I think that Plantinga’s defence of mind-body dualism is his major weakness (maybe his ontological argument for the existence of God is is second major weakness). Here he is briefly defending mind-body dualism in a talk with Robert Kuhn:

Argument: “It seems to me to be perfectly conceivable that I should exist when my body doesn’t.”

Now, it’s clear to me what Plantinga is getting at, and it’s equally clear that Kuhn has trouble understanding it. Most of Plantinga’s critics at Youtube who watched this clip have the same problem that Kuhn does. Kuhn is getting tangled up in the idea that if something is “possible” then everything in discussion is relegated to a possible world, so we don’t even know if the possibility exists in this world. One of the commentors at Youtube who – ironically – felt that he was competent to assess the philosophical quality of the argument rejected it, saying: “Worst goddamn philosopher ever. Because I can imagine it it’s? true…? .” This is (obviously) wrong, and Plantinga’s argument is a lot better than that. Plantinga’s argument is as follows:

1. If I am identical with B (my body), then absolutely every true statement about me will be true of my body as well (since they are the same thing)
2. “This thing can possibly exist without B” is a statement that’s true of me, but it’s clearly not true of B
3. Therefore I am not identical with B (my body)

It’s not the worst argument in the world, granted, but an argument needs more than that going for it in order to be a good one.

The thought experiment derived from the story Metamorphosis has a couple of problems. For one, beetles don’t have eight legs, they have six. But that’s not the elementary error that matters here – it’s a different elementary problem. Is it really conceivable that I might exist when my body doesn’t? Plantinga’s language reveals a degree of question begging when he says that someone in the story woke up and found himself “in the body of a beetle.” In? It sounds like that description just supposed that we exist independent of a body and can be “in” any number of different bodies. If this is what he really means, then of course only a dualist could find this example even remotely plausible. A physicalist will just look at this thought experiment, if this is what Plantinga means, and say “no, this example is no good. That’s just impossible.”

Of course, the word “metamorphosis” does not at all suggest what Plantinga suggests here. Metamorphosis involves physical change, so what we have here is not Plantinga existing when his body does not. Instead, Plantinga’s form has changed from an upright two legged type form to a black, shiny six legged form. It’s deceptively easy to imagine this scenario just because it’s easy to imagine yourself looking like a beetle. This ease of thought distracts us from the rather significant metaphysical question that we are overlooking, namely that of whether it’s possible to exist apart from our body.

Perhaps an example from the classic horror movie The Wolf Man will suffice to make the point. In the movie, Larry Talbot is the wolf man. He has the curse of the werewolf, and in the full moon he transforms into the terrifying beast that feeds on human flesh. But nobody would take a transformation like this as evidence that Larry Talbot isn’t even a physical being! For Larry, B still exists. It just happens to be a lot hairier than usual.

For Plantinga’s thought experiment to work, therefore, it has to be construed as a case where 1) B is destroyed, 2) there is no causal relationship between B and the beetle body, and 3) There is no truthful sense in which B is the beetle body. But given these constraints, what will the physicalist make of Plantinga’s claim that this scenario is perfectly conceivable? The physicalist will be well with her rights reply, “no, it isn’t conceivable at all.” Verbalising a scenario is not at all the same of really conceiving of it in all of its details. All that Plantinga is really conceiving of, the physicalist will say, is waking up and looking like a beetle.

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I also published this blog entry over at the Preterist Blog.

I’m under no illusions about the fact that my view on the mind-body problem is a minority view in the history of Christian thought. I’m a physicalist. This puts me in the minority because, as well known Christian philosopher of mind William Hasker (himself a dualist of sorts) put it:

By all odds the most influential mind-body theory in Western civilization has been mind-body dualism. Dualism was first developed as a philosophical theory by some of the Greek philosophers, notably Plato. It was adopted by most of the Christian thinkers of the first few centuries and subsequently came to share Christianity’s dominance of European civilization.
Hasker, Metaphysics: Constructing a Worldview, Contours of Christian Philosophy (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1983), 65.

This is not such a terrible indictment on Christian theologians. It’s hard to live in a culture utterly saturated with a certain viewpoint without being influenced by it. As an almost inevitable result, “the Greek Fathers of the first three centuries of the Common Era (c.E.) drew upon various traditions within the Greco-Roman world from as early as Plato and Aristotle in formulating their language and concepts of the human person.” [Ray Anderson, “On Being Human: The Spiritual Saga of a Creaturely Soul” in Warren Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Maloney (eds) Whatever Happened to the Soul?: Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 183.]

As the facts of history would have it in the pre-modern world, physicalism was a quiet voice amidst a loud dualist majority. As the facts of recent history would have it, the tables are turning on this state of affairs. In contemporary Christian philosophy and theology, there is a growing acceptance of physicalism as an expression of a biblical holisitc picture of humanity, evidenced by a flood of scholarly yet conservative books, articles, conferences and so on, advocating a real willingness to question the cultural baggage that Christianity has taken on board and a fresh willingness to revisit what the Bible has to say about all this. Christian dualism is still the majority view, but it is a majority in decline, a fact I take some pleasure in. If you’re a dualist, all of this may be a little unnerving. As Bob Dylan told us decades ago now, the times they are a changin’! I have no intention of dragging you kicking and screaming out of dualism in this fairly short blog entry, so don’t bother preparing for battle with me just now. The purpose of this blog isn’t to promote my views on that issue (however much I think those views would be good for your theology). However, it’s best to lay all my cards on the table right at the outset so you know what I am.

The reason I’m even broaching the subject is to draw attention to how philosophy of mind is related to the hyperpreterist controversy (controversy? OK, so in Christianity in general it’s not even a storm in a teacup, so insignificant is that movement, but you know what I mean). Hyperpreterism is necessarily a very dualistic outlook, even more dualistic than mainstream Christian dualism. Here’s why:
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Although I’m familiar with the view that the Apostle Paul is relating an “out of body experience” at the outset of 1 Corinthians 12, I’m pretty sure that he is not. That’s partly because I’m a physicalist and I don’t think that such things are even possible, but it’s also because the evidence for this claim about the meaning of this passage is pretty weak. I’ll explain why I say this.
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Here’s the next instalment of the “Nuts and Bolts” series, in which I spell out some of the basic terms and concepts used in the various branches of philosophy and theology.

I’ve already written plenty of blog entries (and even a podcast series) on dualism, but a recent online conversation with a couple of Christian bloggers prompted me to write this, because it drove home the fact that plenty of Christians don’t know what the word means, to the point where they will even get into lengthy arguments about not being a dualist when they aren’t yet sure what a “dualist” even is (yes, this actually happened recently). In the interests of being part of the solution, I present: What is dualism?
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Every Christian who decides on a stance to take on the mind-body issue is going to have to live with the fact that there will be certain “problem texts” in the Bible that appear to conflict with the position they take. As a physicalist, I think there is a very small number of such texts for my view, and I think there are plausible explanations for all of them (for example Jesus’ words to the criminal on the cross Luke 23:43, which I discussed recently). What one hopes to do is to settle on a view that has fewer problems than all others, problems that have an explanation in sight.

I think that traditional Cartesian/platonic dualism has a real problem, therefore, when it comes to 1 Corinthians 15, as I think it contains a problem for dualism – a problem with no real solution that I can see. The chapter is a decent size, so I won’t reproduce it here, but go ahead and read it first to make sure I’m representing what it says faithfully. The subject is the resurrection of the dead, and it arises because some of those in the church in Corinth had said that there will be no resurrection. The Apostle Paul makes a number of comments on this, one of which concerns my point here. In doing so he indicates that he cannot possibly have been a dualist.
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Alexander Pruss recently presented this “fun argument for dualism” at his blog:

(Premise) Our embodiment is universally seen as funny.

(Premise, justified inductively by 1) Our embodiment is objectively funny.

(Premise) The essence of the funny is incongruity.

(Premise) If materialism is true, there is no incongruity in our embodiment.

(Premise) If materialism is false, then dualism is true.

There is incongruity in our embodiment. (2 and 3)

Materialism is false. (4 and 6)

Dualism is true. (5 and 7)

My reply: Don’t ever do that again, or anything like it.

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At last, the series ends. Here is part five of the series on the mind/body problem. This episode steps completely away from analytical philosophy and is an overview of some of the biblical material that bears on the subject. Although it’s a comparatively long episode (just under fifty minutes), it’s still a very sketchy overview. The subject is a large one, and at best I can get the ball rolling and encourage you to look further. Enjoy.

 Episode 033: In Search of the Soul, Part 5 [49:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Here’s the fourth installment on my series on the mind-body problem.

In this episode I look at the argument against physicalism from the afterlife. Here, some dualists argue that if physicalism were true, then the resurrection of the dead would be logically impossible. Their argument is:

1. The doctrine of the resurrection of the dead entails that people will be raised back to life who are the same people who died long ago. In other words, they will have the same identity.
2. Sameness of identity requires unbroken metaphysical continuity (that is, the continued, uninterrupted or “non-gappy” existence of whatever thing the functioning person is, whether a physical thing or an immaterial mind).
3. In physicalism, it is logically impossible for there to be unbroken metaphysical continuity between a physical person who died a hundred years ago and a person who will be raised to life in the future.
4. Therefore if physicalism is true, the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead is logically impossible. Stated differently, a physicalist cannot consistently believe in the resurrection of the dead.

How might a physicalist respond to this line of argument? Listen to find out. As promised in the episode, here are a few pieces of work by Trenton Merricks that relate to some of the material I cover:

“How to Live Forever Without Saving your Soul,” in Kevin Corcoran (ed.) Soul, Body, and Survival: Essays on the Metaphysics of Human Persons (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 183-200

“There Are No Criteria of Identity Over Time,” Noûs 32:1 (1998), 106-124.

“The Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting” in Michael J. Murray (ed.), Reason for the Hope Within (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 261-286.

Enjoy.

Oh, one other thing: I’ve added a new feature to the blog: Buy me a beer. So if you like this episode, feel free to shout me a pint!

Glenn Peoples

 Episode 032: In Search of the Soul, Part 4 [48:03m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The podcast is back. Here’s part three of the series on philosophy of mind. We’ve moved from dualism in part one through to physicalism in this episode. I look at epiphenomenialism, reductionism, nonreductive physicalism and a constitution view.

As promised, here’s some suggested reading for those who want to look into the subject futher:

Nancey Murphy, “Nonreductive Physicalism and Free Will” http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10501/Default.aspx

Nancey Murphy, “Is “Nonreductive Physicalism” an Oxymoron?” http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10865/Default.aspx

Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Reflections on Moral Responsibility and Free Will (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Joel B. Green and Stuart L. Palmer (eds), In Search of the Soul: Four Views of the Mind-Body Problem (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2005). This volume includes contributions from Stewart Goetz (Substance Dualism), William Hasker (Emergent Dualism), Nancey Murphy (Nonreductive Physicalism) and Kevin Corcoran (Constitution View).

Joel B. Green (ed.), What About the Soul?: Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology (Abingdon Press, 2001). This volume includes contributions from Bill T. Arnold, D. Gareth  Jones, Joel B. Green, Patrick D. Miller, Charles E. Gutenson, Stuart L. Palmer, William Hasker, Michael Rynkiewich, Virginia T. Holeman, Lawson G. Stone and Malcolm Jeeves.

Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy and H. Newton Maloney (eds), Whatever Happened to the Soul: Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature (Augsburg Fortress, 1998). This volume includes contributions from Nancey Murphy, H. Newton Malony, Ray S. Anderson, V. Elving Anderson, Francisco J. Ayala, Warren S. Brown Jr., Joel B. Green, Malcolm Jeeves, H. Newton Malony and Stephen G. Post.

Kevin Corcoran, Rethinking Human Nature: A Christian Materialist Alternative to the Soul (Baker Academic, 2006).

The website of Timothy O’Connor, featuring a number of articles.

Happy reading, and I hope you find this episode interesting!

Glenn Peoples

 Episode 031: In Search of the Soul Part 3 [54:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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