What Are We, Physical Body or Personal Consciousness?

Didaktikos: Journal of Theological Education, 2018

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

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.

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.

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.

2004

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.

Advances in cognitive psychology / University of Finance and Management in Warsaw, 2013

We examined lay people's conceptions about the relationship between mind and body and their correlates. In Study 1, a web survey (N = 850) of reflective dualistic, emergentistic, and monistic perceptions of the mind-body relationship, afterlife beliefs (i.e., common sense dualism), religiosity, paranormal beliefs, and ontological confusions about physical, biological, and psychological phenomena was conducted. In Study 2 (N = 73), we examined implicit ontological confusions and their relations to afterlife beliefs, paranormal beliefs, and religiosity. Correlation and regression analyses showed that reflective dualism, afterlife beliefs, paranormal beliefs, and religiosity were strongly and positively related and that reflective dualism and afterlife beliefs mediated the relationship between ontological confusions and religious and paranormal beliefs. The results elucidate the contention that dualism is a manifestation of universal cognitive processes related to intuitions about ...

Journal of Religious Thought, 2017

Some Christian philosophers, including lynne Rudder Baker, have a physicalistic account of life after death. Baker believes that her constitution viewpoint about Personal identity is more compatible with the Christian view of the afterlife. According to her viewpoint, the property of having the First Person perspective is the criterion of personal identity. Therefore person will remain after death, because of remaining this property which continues with a kind of body that is suitable for the other world which created by a wondrous divine action. This paper seeks to explain baker’s viewpoint concerning the relation between constitution view and personal identity and her justification about her view’s compatibility with the Christian teachings, and criticizing her view after that. Some of the points that we have put them under criticism are some Internal contradictions and philosophical problems, like the reduction of personal identity to a property, and incompatibility between Baker’s viewpoint with some religious doctrines. This kind of problems indicate that Baker’s theory has failed to explain the afterlife according to the physicalistic approach and Christian doctrines. Keywords: Constitution View, Afterlife, First Person Perspective, Physicalistic, Lynne Rudder Baker