What Are We, Physical Body or Personal consciousness?

2021

This book is about the nature of human beings, defending a version of substance dualism, similar to that of Descartes, that each of us living on earth consists of two distinct substances—body and soul. Bodies keep us alive and by enabling us to interact with each other and the world they make our lives greatly worth living; but our soul is the one essential part of each of us.

2021

Referring to neurological structures and functions within the brain, as well as thought operations and behaviors coming from the brain, this short paper distinguishes between the Body and the Soul, and between the Soul and the Spirit. Materialists, attempting to describe the fully functioning human being, argue there is only Body. Dualists argue there is only Body and Soul. The Spiritual/Tripartite view is that humans exist as Body, Soul, and Spirit. There are scientific indications, as well as literary/philosophical/theological indications that human beings exist at all three levels. The scientific indications come from brain scans, thought operations, and complex behaviors. The Soul develops from the Body, and the Spirit develops from the Soul, but that does not mean that (once formed) they can be reduced to one another. This paper attempts to move the reader from a “substance” orientation (materialism) to a “functional” orientation (measurable abilities). Reductionistic materialism does violence to the functional integrity of the human being. What hangs over this whole discussion is the materialistic “substance” metaphysics of the 1600s. Unless you can specify a tangible, measurable “substance”, then whatever you are talking or writing about is not really “real.” This position is, of course, nonsense. Anyone who knows about the electro-magnetic forces, clouds, speeds, positions, transformations, sudden appearances and disappearances in particle physics knows that the era of a “single observable stuff universe” is long over. What supplies a much more complete, understandable, and satisfying perspective is a functional orientation, where the focus shifts from “material substances” to “observable functions and outcomes.” This is the descriptive orientation of this paper. Yet, often, if you bring this up this newer orientation, you will instantly be called “unscientific.” What is truly “unscientific” is refusing to question assumptions and refusing to look at life through anything but a “substance” lens. If ever we are to have what Abraham Maslow called “a Science of Persons”, we are going to have to get past our obsession with material “substance” and accept/welcome an Analysis of Functions.

2006

Among the greatest questions ever asked, perhaps the greatest is whether some part of us survives death of the body. Whole religions, individual philosophers, scholars of all types, scientists and ordinary people have all tried to answer this question, so far without any verifiable success. Yet most people continue to believe that some form of a soul survives, but not much more than that is known. This book describes in general terms a new fundamental theory of physics based on a five-dimensional space-time continuum that includes new scientific definitions of life, mind and consciousness, Given these, the book explains a scientific model of the survival of consciousness and mind when the physical body dies. Other cultural beliefs about death are described and their essential points are compared to this new physical model of the afterlife.

Didaktikos: Journal of Theological Education, 2018

In the article, I lay out reasons why the question of human constitution still matters in religious education.

1977

The idea that we may continue to exist in a bodiless condition after our death has long played an important role in beliefs about immortality, ultimate rewards and punishments, the transmigration of souls, and the like. There has also been long and heated disagreement about whether the idea of disembodied existence even makes sense, let alone whether anybody can or does survive dissolution of his material form. I will explore the problem of disembodiment from a somewhat different direction than has been tried before, one that leads to what seem to me more interesting and more definite conclusions about its unintelligibility. Furthermore, the approach I will be taking puts both the traditional mind-body problem and the competing claims of dualism and physicalism in a fresh light that can help us to understand better the nature of our embodied existence.

The vehicle in which we navigate this life, our personal identity and material existence, is the body. The fields of feeling, physiology, memory, habit, the maintenance of relative equilibrium, motility, our conscious and unconscious adaptive strategies for meeting every circumstance are there, in the flesh. With its delicate yet seemingly definite boundary, it obvious we are separate, that there is an immutable boundary between our interior and exterior life. As a temporary collection of energetic process, providing what for all the world appears to be the differentiation between self and other, the body is our personal home, our platform and our refuge. In the body we write our history in time: our negotiation with gravity, injury, trauma, aging, self-care, aspiration, defense, success and failure. It is all there, from the values anchored in our bones to our story written deep in the sinews, to perpetual turning and returning , compensations, aggression and retreat, drama and restraint. We wrap our selves in the record of our actions like the accumulated rings of a tree, layering the extremes of love and loss, pain and recovery, solitude and connection, triumph and tragedy, learning and resolution, the ways we adhere to-or veer away from-our most precious integrity are all there. The body-mind continuum is an endlessly fertile topic of investigation, testing and speculation. For practical purposes, we indulge the idea of separation as a matter of convenience for the sake of distinguishing between body and mind, as if there's some reality to that view. While mind may operate independently of the body, there is constant interplay with the causes and conditions arising in our physical experience, forming and reforming the identity under perpetual reconstruction. In the process, mind is reflected in form. The body speaks its mind. How could it be otherwise? In our time-bound reality, body is telling the story we tell ourselves about who we've been, who we are and who we will become. Physical reality and the dynamics of body-mind are the obscurations of samsara, the realm of suffering. They are luminosity objectified. We are emptiness itself manifesting as us, in plain view. We are Being manifesting as an infinite number of beings, just in time.

Janus Head, 2008

This paper looks at embodiment from a cross-disciplinary perspective. The notion that embodiment is an essential requirement for conscious awareness is explored using both a scientific and religious approach. Artificial intelligence, transhumanism and cybernetics are discussed as they force a pragmatic approach to defining and understanding situated embodiment. The concept of human immortality or extended longevity is also investigated as this further exposes the myths of transcending corporeality and also helps to explain the mission of transhumanism. Janus Head, 9(2),[589][590][591][592][593][594][595][596][597][598][599][600][601][602][603]

There seems to be an inherent compulsion in the human condition to try and understand our own existence. From diverse epochs of human history comes evidence of attempts to make sense of what we are, and how we relate to the world. We understand how earlier humans saw forces of nature, controlled by Gods, as determining human existence and subjecting us to their whim. By enhancing our technical capabilities, the story goes, we gained increasing confidence in our ability to exert control over those forces and impose our own will on nature. In the humanist period of western development, where science advanced and deities held less sway, it even became possible to think of our selves, with our intelligence and skills, as coming to dominate a fickle and violent nature. Indeed, some thinkers came to believe the universe is precisely tuned to the production of human existence — a theory latterly known as the ‘Strong Anthropic Principle’ . Today the possibilities suggested by synthetic intelligence, organic computers and genetic modification are deeply challenging to that sense of human predominance. These developments awaken deep-rooted anxieties about the threat to human existence from technology we cannot control or understand. We know we are capable of creating entities that may equal and even surpass us, and we must seriously face up to the possibility that attributes like human thought may be created in non-human forms. While this is one of our deepest fears it is also the holy grail of the computer sciences. Despite the enormous problems involved, the development of an artificially conscious entity may happen within our lifetimes. Would such an entity have human-like emotions; would it have a sense of its own being? This book argues that such questions are difficult to answer given the redundant concepts of human existence that we have inherited from the humanist era, since many widely accepted humanist ideas about consciousness can no longer be sustained. In addition, new theories about nature and the operation of the universe arising from computer modelling are starting to demonstrate the profound interconnections between all things in nature where previously we had seen separations. This has implications for traditional views of the human condition and for some of the oldest problems in philosophy.

1964

I argue in this paper that philosophers have not clearly introduced the concept of a body in terms of which the problem of other minds and its solutions have been traditionally stated; that one can raise fatal objections to attempts to introduce this concept; and that the particular form of the problem of other minds which is stated in terms of the concept is confused and requires no solution.

Analecta Husserliana