8.30pm, Lemon St
I have started painting the night.
I am supposed to be drawing Isaac, but I am painting the night. I take large canvases straight out onto the street at dusk; I hurriedly drag the charred remains of a twig across this dyed sheet of fabric as the sun sets.
Colors only fleetingly grace the sky. Painting their traces is difficult; they are not ordinary light, so they do not provide ordinary light. I mix colors in the gathering darkness, hoping to approximate the shades that themselves tint my gaze.
The result is still far less beautiful than the sight had been; I am conflicted, always, as I tear my eyes away from the changeling sky and scrape the gooey mud across the outlines left by the twig. Standing back, there is an image there; there is an echo of the glory that had been. It is a signed eyewitness account, but just like such an account, it pales beside the event.
Some say art must make a statement. Some say it must teach its audience what beauty is. I think I am not up to either of these tasks. My paintings are humbler; must be, if they are to avoid pretension. They simply declare, "This happened. I was there. I saw it."
Purest of Colors
I glanced out the window.
a cloud, suddenly backlit, arrested my attention.
I began to rationalize. It is merely the beacons on the wings.
But they are red, and this was a pure, vibrant white.
We signaled in hues of vermilion, 'we are here'.
It signaled back, in a blinding, terrifying pure light, 'I have always been here.'
We are visitors here, not the masters. Fly around these clouds, do not dive through them. The currents at work in these vaporous masses easily overpower our leviathan. Best not to tempt them.
We pass silently, skirting around the edge on tip-toe, thinking it best to leave Thor to forge the heavens in peace.
Lights from a Distance
I am flying over Los Angeles, parallel the yellow sliver of the moon.
The city stretches out below, a motherboard or mainframe of immense proportion, strangely dim, obscured by fog and bits of water suspended in air.
We are bits of water suspended in air, in this state of the art machine. The leviathan has provided each of us wireless internet access and free playlists of our favorite musicians. This is progress.
It was a rough takeoff. The body shuddered as the wings struggled to bear it aloft. I saw the city slowly shrink and extend to the vast horizon. I thought of Edison's crazed obsession to create a working lightbulb. Of the Wright brothers, determined to suspend a machine in mid-air. Of Henry Ford. Of Graham Bell. Of Steve Jobs.
It is all useful, but all hollow. All astounding and impressive, but meaningless.
I am in an insane liminal space. Suspended in motion between the lights above and the lights below, traversing this empty no man's land, this Antarctica of the heavens.
I looked out the window and saw only darkness and space. I could easily believe this to be a new space odyssey, bound to transcend the atmosphere rather than merely flirt with its edges.
The Fountainhead and Nietzsche
One of my goals this summer is to read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead; I am 300 pages in now, and while I thought I would be attracted to the radical autonomy Rand advocates, I find myself repelled. Perhaps if I had read the novel before wrestling with Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals things would have been different, but as it is I see her characters' attested passion for life collapse necessarily into the same nihilism that swallowed Nietzsche.
Dominique at one point explains that autonomy requires indifference: "If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted--I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and we're pushed into it by a single desire."
Perhaps so far so good. Bhuddists believe a version of this, too; but their solution is to surrender the self into Nirvana and become nothingness. Rand contends that indifference is instead a bold assertion of the total self, a true existence. In a radically autonomous gesture, Dominique allows herself "the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom. To ask nothing, to expect nothing, do depend on nothing." Yet to be free by not caring you must be mercilessly thorough in your apathy; you must cut yourself off completely. You are then free, it is true, but only free to exercise an apathetic will, nothing more; attempt to do something, dare to be passionate about anything, and you are 'slave' once again to the whole set of ideals, pressures, relationships, and chances that you fought so desperately against.
Nevertheless a number of my friends have said that they find themselves unnervingly attracted to the frigid egoism of Dominique. Especially when contrasted with pandering characters like Peter Kettering and Guy Francon, the self-contained indifference exhibited by Dominique and Roark are appealing. However, I doubt that this is due to the intrinsic appeal of the ideals of which Rand makes them symbols; rather, the assurance and steadiness of their characters is attractive because it resembles the steadiness of a life properly based in love, not indifference.
Rand does not seem to admit the possibility of this middle ground, of a steady identity neither defined by isolation nor by the opinions of the mob. A passage in Thomas Merton's No Man Is An Island describes the sort of autonomy that deserves praise:
A person who lives in this manner is calm. She does not derive her identity or meaning from the approval of others, or any external factors; in this way, she has achieved the autonomy Rand seeks. But she has not sacrificed the world to win this freedom; she has simply risked losing herself. Dominique is just as bound as the others, perhaps more so: almost all actions are forbidden her, and she seeks to find her identity in a persistent abstention from passion. Merton's version is just secure: locating meaning beyond herself (in God), she is free to live and love, yet does not thereby lose herself.
In short: Dominique and Roark are attractive as shadows of this more fulfilled life, an ideal that is attainable only by reliance on God. One must rely on others, on God, or on nothing; of these options, nothing is the most dangerous, most revolting, and most damaging. When seen clearly, I cannot see it as attractive.
Dominique at one point explains that autonomy requires indifference: "If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted--I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and we're pushed into it by a single desire."
Perhaps so far so good. Bhuddists believe a version of this, too; but their solution is to surrender the self into Nirvana and become nothingness. Rand contends that indifference is instead a bold assertion of the total self, a true existence. In a radically autonomous gesture, Dominique allows herself "the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom. To ask nothing, to expect nothing, do depend on nothing." Yet to be free by not caring you must be mercilessly thorough in your apathy; you must cut yourself off completely. You are then free, it is true, but only free to exercise an apathetic will, nothing more; attempt to do something, dare to be passionate about anything, and you are 'slave' once again to the whole set of ideals, pressures, relationships, and chances that you fought so desperately against.
Nevertheless a number of my friends have said that they find themselves unnervingly attracted to the frigid egoism of Dominique. Especially when contrasted with pandering characters like Peter Kettering and Guy Francon, the self-contained indifference exhibited by Dominique and Roark are appealing. However, I doubt that this is due to the intrinsic appeal of the ideals of which Rand makes them symbols; rather, the assurance and steadiness of their characters is attractive because it resembles the steadiness of a life properly based in love, not indifference.
Rand does not seem to admit the possibility of this middle ground, of a steady identity neither defined by isolation nor by the opinions of the mob. A passage in Thomas Merton's No Man Is An Island describes the sort of autonomy that deserves praise:
"In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from effects that are beyond our control and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting an immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition."
A person who lives in this manner is calm. She does not derive her identity or meaning from the approval of others, or any external factors; in this way, she has achieved the autonomy Rand seeks. But she has not sacrificed the world to win this freedom; she has simply risked losing herself. Dominique is just as bound as the others, perhaps more so: almost all actions are forbidden her, and she seeks to find her identity in a persistent abstention from passion. Merton's version is just secure: locating meaning beyond herself (in God), she is free to live and love, yet does not thereby lose herself.
In short: Dominique and Roark are attractive as shadows of this more fulfilled life, an ideal that is attainable only by reliance on God. One must rely on others, on God, or on nothing; of these options, nothing is the most dangerous, most revolting, and most damaging. When seen clearly, I cannot see it as attractive.
Thesis Presentation
Due to the number of requests, I have elected to post my reading copy (below) and final thesis draft (available for download) here. I welcome comments, if you do read the whole paper. If you do not, I understand; it was hard enough for me to pay attention just writing the pages.
Attempts to define the mind have historically served one of two purposes: to analyze the essential features of personhood, aiming through such analysis to provide a warrant for ethical constraints on actions, or to argue that such a project is illusory, as there are no special features that make a being a person as opposed to an object. Some accounts of the mind, such as Dualism, lend themselves almost exclusively to the former project, while others, including many varieties of Physicalism and Functionalism, are more ambiguous and can at least theoretically be used to support either goal.
On the standard account of Substance Dualism, persons are entities composed of a union of a physical body and a rational soul, and consequently any entity lacking a rational soul is not a person. Talk of a ‘soul’ is nearly always taken to be a reference to some form of dualism, but it is not clear that dualism is the only account able to discourse meaningfully about the nature of the soul. It is true that reductive or eliminative physicalist articulations of it are particularly difficult, since these theories claim that a person is “nothing but a pack of neurones[sic].” Consequently, the mind and consciousness are taken either to be empty linguistic concepts, or at most reductively identical to brain states. Though this is the most loudly defended and perhaps most prevalent physicalist thesis, it is not the only one. Non-reductive physicalism is a sort of intermediate between these two theories, and can be roughly characterized by the claim that something more than just physical properties, namely the mind or consciousness, emerges and supervenes on the physical makeup of an individual, such that no analysis of the pure physical makeup will reveal the emergent properties directly. Though it denies the existence of an independent mental substance, non-reductive physicalism may have the resources to offer an adequate notion of ‘soul’ to function as the criterion for personhood.
As I am using it here, the term ‘person’ denotes an entity that
I do not set this out as criteria for determining which entities are persons, but rather take it to be indicative of our meaning when we affirm of an entity that it is a person. Developing the criteria by which to determine which entities are properly termed persons is much more difficult. Because the judgment of personhood determines one’s ethical obligations to the entity in question, there should be some defensible connection between the features picked out by the criteria and a duty to treat the subject as ethically constraining. This has traditionally been accomplished by appealing to metaphysical substance dualism, which posits possession of a ‘soul’ as the relevant feature of personhood. I argue that this work can be similarly accomplished without positing dualism.
Donald Davidson’s account, Anomalous Monism, provides a useful non-reductive statement of the relation of mental and physical within a human being, and will function as the starting point for inquiry. In brief, the view proposes that while there is only one substance, certain events are capable of being described both physically and mentally. It can therefore be said that the mental ‘supervenes’ on the physical, but no strict laws govern the supervenience relation, and hence the mental is irreducible to the physical.
This form of monism preserves the causal efficacy of mental events without having to posit the existence of a separate, mental substance. The theory as presented does not articulate an account of ‘soul’ or outline specific criteria for personhood, but it is not difficult to augment it with a compatible theory that defines the ‘soul’ in terms of the emergence of mind.
One promising account, presented by Warren Brown in Cognitive Contributions to the Soul, contends that the concept has two distinct meanings and uses: (1) immortality of the emergent personality, and (2) foundation of identity and subjective experience. On his view the former is just the ability of a personality to endure death, that is, its ability to be re-created by God. The second understanding of the nature of the soul involves three essential relations,
These emerge in communities following the development of certain foundational capacities. Brown isolates six (person or p-making capacities) that he views as essential for the emergence of personal relatedness, and therefore of an experience of soul. This does not assume that only human persons can possess any of these capacities; on the contrary, a number of them are expressed in non-human animals, particularly among primates. Rather, no non-persons express all of the p-making capacities.
The first among these, systematic language, includes development of a potentially infinite vocabulary, fixed syntax, and complex grammatical structure. The pivotal role of language in enabling community and personal relatedness is obvious: enhanced communication allows individuals to share beyond their immediate plans for needs-fulfillment.
Second are an individual’s meta-cognitive abilities. Meta-cognition, or “thinking about thinking,” is most relevant to personal relatedness in its role in the development of a theory of mind. This is simply the ability of a subject to conceptualize the other as an intentional system, to imagine what another person may be thinking, feeling, or understanding, which allows her to ascribe motives and intentionality to the other. A theory of mind therefore enables understanding of tacit meanings, and provides the foundation for empathy, drama, and complex personal communication.
These two capacities are of most relevance to the current inquiry, and therefore merit more detailed explication than the remaining four. Brown’s additional conditions for the emergence of the soul include episodic memory, since it enables the agent to learn from previous experiences; conscious top-down agency, which is necessary for any meaningful sense of personal responsibility for actions; future-orientation, which permits the agent to act in order to achieve long-term goals or avoid long-term evils; and emotional modulation, which is simply the ability to control one’s reactions to events.
As a theory of how the notion of a soul can be consistent with physicalism, this relatedness account works well; but articulating the soul in terms of capacities is treacherous business. One might well worry that since capacities are expressed to varying degrees among people, any property based on capacities is similarly variable. So, if the soul, and through it the criteria for personhood, is composed of expressed capacities, personhood itself could be a degreed status.
One need not engage in extreme thought experiments in order to find some difficult cases in which individuals are actually impaired in their expression of some of the p-making capacities; most instances of Asperger’s syndrome or Autism are sufficient to create trouble for the ‘personal relatedness’ account as articulated by Brown.
While the severity varies, individuals diagnosed with Autism or Asperger’s syndrome characteristically display significant inhibition in or “failure to develop normal social relationships.” Key analysts attribute this to biological abnormalities in brain development, resulting in inability to develop a theory of mind. Though the finding is not undisputed, the dominant view is that “autistic children are impaired in their intuitive understanding of mental states, such as beliefs.”
This meta-cognitive deficiency has been documented as having a substantial impact on the subject’s ability to understand or respond to others’ emotions, which, in turn, impairs her ability relate to other persons in a normative way.
Autism presents a special problem for a capacities-based view of the soul because it is not a degenerative condition. The challenge it presents is dissimilar from those posed by Alzheimer’s, dementia, and brain injury cases in that individuals with Autism never achieve normative development, since the brain of an autistic individual has non-normative structure from birth. As a result, the usual answers do not apply here; these are not persons who, having previously displayed the requisite capacities clearly, have suffered some circumstance that removes or blocks expression of said capacities. Rather, since they have never been displayed, and in most cases never will be, it is unclear whether the entity actually possesses the capacities at all.
Since autistic individuals appear to lack at least one of the p-making capacities, it seems that the relatedness account cannot escape drawing the absurd conclusion that an autistic individual is consequently less a person, less ‘souled’, or in some respect less ethically constraining than a normative individual. Brown anticipates this objection, and contends that:
Both responses suffer from a common flaw: if an entity receives special status by being related to by another being, human or divine, then it seems that this status is available to anything to which that being chooses to relate. One could counter that the notion of ‘personal relatedness’ necessarily restricts the possibility of being in such a relation to personal entities, but this only begs the question. To determine whether an entity that fails the initial capacities test of personhood can be saved by being personally related to, we must on this view first confirm its status as a personal being.
Though his responses are inadequate, it is possible to supplement Brown’s account and perhaps thereby to redeem the explanatory value of his proposal. The problem lies in the fact that the capacities language in the account is systematically unclear, as it makes no distinction between first and second-order capacities. A capacity should be understood as being first-order if the subject is directly able to exercise it; as second-order if the subject is theoretically able to develop the corresponding first-order capacity.
A precise definition of second-order capacities is not necessary to my argument, but it is useful to set some loose parameters. Broadly speaking, S has a second-order capacity to do y if she could do it given the right conditions, regardless of whether or not those conditions in fact obtain. But in what sense of ‘could’? In discussing second-order capacities we aim to discover the identity of S by talking about all actual possibilities for it, so the conditions must be more restrictive than merely that it be logically possible for S to do y. There is no apparent contradiction in saying that a human (S) could develop in such a way as to be able to move objects by thinking intensely about them, but we certainly would not therefore conclude that humans generally have a second-order capacity to do so.
On the other hand, it seems too restrictive to say that second order capacities are limited to those expressed as first-order by the majority of normatively developing entities in a class. According to Moreland’s articulation, a person who can speak English but not Russian has a first-order capacity to speak English, and the second-order capacity to speak Russian. This allows a very broad understanding of the conditions; given highly specialized circumstances, it is likely that such a person could speak Russian; but it is certainly not the case that the majority of humans developing under normative conditions can speak Russian.
We safely say that the restrictions on relevant conditions for S’s possession of y as a second-order capacity should be more permissive than requiring that y be actualized by the majority of normative entities, and more restrictive than the mere logical possibility of S’s having y.
The capacities articulated by Brown as mutually constitutive of personal relatedness fall easily within these boundaries. It is clearly logically possible for any human S to develop the requisite capacities. In fact, if a human develops normatively, each of these capacities is actualized and expressed as first-order. Thus even on the strictest interpretation, the p-making capacities qualify as second-order.
Unfortunately, second-order capacities are not available to direct scrutiny, since they are possessed as potential, rather than necessarily actual first-order capacities.
At least a partial list can be derived compositely from observation of the expressed capacities of multiple members of the group developing under normative conditions. Justification for this inference is unidirectional. It is certain that if the majority of a class expresses a particular first-order capacity they also possess it as second-order, and it is therefore highly likely that all members of that class possess that second-order capacity though a minority fail to express it. However, one is not quite as justified in inferring that the absence of such expression indicates the absence of the corresponding second-order capacity.
One can therefore make the judgment that an entity can be appropriately judged as ‘having a soul’ and being ethically constraining if it possesses all of the aforementioned capacities as second-order. This allows us to pick out classically recognized persons as ethically constraining, and does not necessitate an appeal to special creation, ‘proper function’, or a conception of the soul as an independent metaphysical substance
In light of this analysis, Brown’s capacities argument becomes: the six p-making capacities identified are all displayed as first order by the majority of normally developed adult human beings. If a subject (S) displays a first order capacity (C), it entails that S also possesses a second-order capacity for (C). So the majority of normally developed adult humans possess the p-making capacities as second-order capacities. Since second-order capacities are established by reference to a class rather than to an individual, one can infer that non-normatively developed members of the class ‘human’ possess the same second-order capacities as normative members.
Therefore, the judgment that a particular individual has a soul or is ethically constraining must be made by referencing the class to which he belongs, rather than by analyzing the first-order capacities of the individual, and hence all members of the class ‘human’ can be said to be equally persons.
This permits Brown to avoid the risk of making the soul a property possessed by individuals in varying degrees, contingent on their success as social beings. As a result, it functions as an answer not only to the objection explored in this paper, but also to a whole family of objections centering on the notion of ‘degreed personhood.’
This is only permissible, though, if it can be successfully established that non-normative humans bear sufficient similarity in significant, relevant ways to the normative members of the class ‘human’ to be considered properly a member of that class. This can be done by showing that (i) it is conceivable that were the abnormal conditions removed or altered, the entity would likely develop into a normative human, and (ii) that such development would not constitute a change in the entity’s essential identity. In the case of an autistic person, it is not difficult to meet these conditions. A series of studies on the physiological causes of autism concluded that the condition results from “a dysfunction in the specific neural substrate for mentalizing.” It is easily conceivable, then, that if the physical conditions for the development of the brain were altered, an ‘autistic’ brain would in fact develop normally. This is helped by two thought experiments:
(A)
Suppose a subject (S) suffered from a rare mental condition wherein, due to the activity of Chemical X on his brain, he was unable to form episodic memories. However, doctors are able to perform a surgery that block the activity of X, thereby allowing (S) to function normatively. Surely by so doing they have neither altered his identity, nor changed his basic classification as human. Rather, they have simply removed a barrier (X) to his ability to actualize a second-order capacity that was always there.
(B)
Suppose an individual (T) is born with a condition wherein the brain produces an excess of Chemical X, with the result that over time, the brain will develop in a way that leaves (T) incapable of forming episodic memory as an adult. If (T) is given regular dosage to control the influence of (X), thereby allowing her brain to develop in normative conditions, it seems such a procedure, despite its extension through time, is similar to (A) in that it neither alters (T)’s identity nor her basic classification.
It is not a stretch to argue that autism is in this way analogous to Chemical X, and should not be taken as determinate of either an entity’s identity or classification. Rather, the entity retains all the second-order capacities belonging to her class, while realizing only the first-order capacities possible given her biological conditions. Since judgment of ethical personhood or ‘souled’ status is one of second rather than strictly first-order capacities, if an entity would develop normally given normal conditions, it is formally indistinguishable from entities that, given normal conditions, do develop normally & thus an entity with autism or Asperger’s syndrome is no less ethically constraining—no less a person—than a normative individual.
One may worry that this is too permissive. After all, what prevents this from being used to prove the personhood of advanced primates? Arguably the thought experiments posit changes similar in scale to a primate receiving advanced capacities (such as a theory of mind and systematic language) via brain enlargement. This is not in fact the case: for the argument to function, the being in question must possess all requisite second-order capacities, a judgment made by appealing to the traits actualized among the majority of entities within its class.
In the case of even the most advanced primate, development of these capacities would either necessitate reclassification, or constitute an identity shift, or both. So long as there remains a clear gulf between classes with respect to at least one of the p-making capacities, such that a non-normative member of class A (humans) is still clearly not a candidate for membership in class B (primates), the argument developed in this paper cannot be used to beyond members of the human class.
It appears then that non-reductive physicalism has sufficient resources to give a satisfactory account of the soul, articulating it in terms of the emergent mind. Supplemented by this distinction between first and second-order capacities, Brown’s presentation of the soul as personal relatedness successfully distinguishes humans as ethically constraining entities without excluding obvious cases of persons.
THE EMERGENT SOUL:
Non-Reductive Physicalism & the Capacities View of Personhood
Non-Reductive Physicalism & the Capacities View of Personhood
Attempts to define the mind have historically served one of two purposes: to analyze the essential features of personhood, aiming through such analysis to provide a warrant for ethical constraints on actions, or to argue that such a project is illusory, as there are no special features that make a being a person as opposed to an object. Some accounts of the mind, such as Dualism, lend themselves almost exclusively to the former project, while others, including many varieties of Physicalism and Functionalism, are more ambiguous and can at least theoretically be used to support either goal.
On the standard account of Substance Dualism, persons are entities composed of a union of a physical body and a rational soul, and consequently any entity lacking a rational soul is not a person. Talk of a ‘soul’ is nearly always taken to be a reference to some form of dualism, but it is not clear that dualism is the only account able to discourse meaningfully about the nature of the soul. It is true that reductive or eliminative physicalist articulations of it are particularly difficult, since these theories claim that a person is “nothing but a pack of neurones[sic].” Consequently, the mind and consciousness are taken either to be empty linguistic concepts, or at most reductively identical to brain states. Though this is the most loudly defended and perhaps most prevalent physicalist thesis, it is not the only one. Non-reductive physicalism is a sort of intermediate between these two theories, and can be roughly characterized by the claim that something more than just physical properties, namely the mind or consciousness, emerges and supervenes on the physical makeup of an individual, such that no analysis of the pure physical makeup will reveal the emergent properties directly. Though it denies the existence of an independent mental substance, non-reductive physicalism may have the resources to offer an adequate notion of ‘soul’ to function as the criterion for personhood.
As I am using it here, the term ‘person’ denotes an entity that
(i) has subjectivity,
(ii) has a proper claim to ethical treatment, and
(iii) can be held responsible for ethically transgressive actions.
I do not set this out as criteria for determining which entities are persons, but rather take it to be indicative of our meaning when we affirm of an entity that it is a person. Developing the criteria by which to determine which entities are properly termed persons is much more difficult. Because the judgment of personhood determines one’s ethical obligations to the entity in question, there should be some defensible connection between the features picked out by the criteria and a duty to treat the subject as ethically constraining. This has traditionally been accomplished by appealing to metaphysical substance dualism, which posits possession of a ‘soul’ as the relevant feature of personhood. I argue that this work can be similarly accomplished without positing dualism.
Donald Davidson’s account, Anomalous Monism, provides a useful non-reductive statement of the relation of mental and physical within a human being, and will function as the starting point for inquiry. In brief, the view proposes that while there is only one substance, certain events are capable of being described both physically and mentally. It can therefore be said that the mental ‘supervenes’ on the physical, but no strict laws govern the supervenience relation, and hence the mental is irreducible to the physical.
This form of monism preserves the causal efficacy of mental events without having to posit the existence of a separate, mental substance. The theory as presented does not articulate an account of ‘soul’ or outline specific criteria for personhood, but it is not difficult to augment it with a compatible theory that defines the ‘soul’ in terms of the emergence of mind.
One promising account, presented by Warren Brown in Cognitive Contributions to the Soul, contends that the concept has two distinct meanings and uses: (1) immortality of the emergent personality, and (2) foundation of identity and subjective experience. On his view the former is just the ability of a personality to endure death, that is, its ability to be re-created by God. The second understanding of the nature of the soul involves three essential relations,
(1) Subjective self-relatedness or self-representation,
(2) Inter-individual relatedness,
(3) Relatedness to God .
These emerge in communities following the development of certain foundational capacities. Brown isolates six (person or p-making capacities) that he views as essential for the emergence of personal relatedness, and therefore of an experience of soul. This does not assume that only human persons can possess any of these capacities; on the contrary, a number of them are expressed in non-human animals, particularly among primates. Rather, no non-persons express all of the p-making capacities.
The first among these, systematic language, includes development of a potentially infinite vocabulary, fixed syntax, and complex grammatical structure. The pivotal role of language in enabling community and personal relatedness is obvious: enhanced communication allows individuals to share beyond their immediate plans for needs-fulfillment.
Second are an individual’s meta-cognitive abilities. Meta-cognition, or “thinking about thinking,” is most relevant to personal relatedness in its role in the development of a theory of mind. This is simply the ability of a subject to conceptualize the other as an intentional system, to imagine what another person may be thinking, feeling, or understanding, which allows her to ascribe motives and intentionality to the other. A theory of mind therefore enables understanding of tacit meanings, and provides the foundation for empathy, drama, and complex personal communication.
These two capacities are of most relevance to the current inquiry, and therefore merit more detailed explication than the remaining four. Brown’s additional conditions for the emergence of the soul include episodic memory, since it enables the agent to learn from previous experiences; conscious top-down agency, which is necessary for any meaningful sense of personal responsibility for actions; future-orientation, which permits the agent to act in order to achieve long-term goals or avoid long-term evils; and emotional modulation, which is simply the ability to control one’s reactions to events.
As a theory of how the notion of a soul can be consistent with physicalism, this relatedness account works well; but articulating the soul in terms of capacities is treacherous business. One might well worry that since capacities are expressed to varying degrees among people, any property based on capacities is similarly variable. So, if the soul, and through it the criteria for personhood, is composed of expressed capacities, personhood itself could be a degreed status.
One need not engage in extreme thought experiments in order to find some difficult cases in which individuals are actually impaired in their expression of some of the p-making capacities; most instances of Asperger’s syndrome or Autism are sufficient to create trouble for the ‘personal relatedness’ account as articulated by Brown.
While the severity varies, individuals diagnosed with Autism or Asperger’s syndrome characteristically display significant inhibition in or “failure to develop normal social relationships.” Key analysts attribute this to biological abnormalities in brain development, resulting in inability to develop a theory of mind. Though the finding is not undisputed, the dominant view is that “autistic children are impaired in their intuitive understanding of mental states, such as beliefs.”
This meta-cognitive deficiency has been documented as having a substantial impact on the subject’s ability to understand or respond to others’ emotions, which, in turn, impairs her ability relate to other persons in a normative way.
Autism presents a special problem for a capacities-based view of the soul because it is not a degenerative condition. The challenge it presents is dissimilar from those posed by Alzheimer’s, dementia, and brain injury cases in that individuals with Autism never achieve normative development, since the brain of an autistic individual has non-normative structure from birth. As a result, the usual answers do not apply here; these are not persons who, having previously displayed the requisite capacities clearly, have suffered some circumstance that removes or blocks expression of said capacities. Rather, since they have never been displayed, and in most cases never will be, it is unclear whether the entity actually possesses the capacities at all.
Since autistic individuals appear to lack at least one of the p-making capacities, it seems that the relatedness account cannot escape drawing the absurd conclusion that an autistic individual is consequently less a person, less ‘souled’, or in some respect less ethically constraining than a normative individual. Brown anticipates this objection, and contends that:
(1) Personal relatedness is also constituted by being related to by other persons.He appears to take these responses as sufficient to put to rest the charge that his account results in degreed souls, but it is not at all clear that they in fact do so.
(2) Personal experience of relatedness to God is always God’s decision, and is probably multiply realizable.
Both responses suffer from a common flaw: if an entity receives special status by being related to by another being, human or divine, then it seems that this status is available to anything to which that being chooses to relate. One could counter that the notion of ‘personal relatedness’ necessarily restricts the possibility of being in such a relation to personal entities, but this only begs the question. To determine whether an entity that fails the initial capacities test of personhood can be saved by being personally related to, we must on this view first confirm its status as a personal being.
Though his responses are inadequate, it is possible to supplement Brown’s account and perhaps thereby to redeem the explanatory value of his proposal. The problem lies in the fact that the capacities language in the account is systematically unclear, as it makes no distinction between first and second-order capacities. A capacity should be understood as being first-order if the subject is directly able to exercise it; as second-order if the subject is theoretically able to develop the corresponding first-order capacity.
A precise definition of second-order capacities is not necessary to my argument, but it is useful to set some loose parameters. Broadly speaking, S has a second-order capacity to do y if she could do it given the right conditions, regardless of whether or not those conditions in fact obtain. But in what sense of ‘could’? In discussing second-order capacities we aim to discover the identity of S by talking about all actual possibilities for it, so the conditions must be more restrictive than merely that it be logically possible for S to do y. There is no apparent contradiction in saying that a human (S) could develop in such a way as to be able to move objects by thinking intensely about them, but we certainly would not therefore conclude that humans generally have a second-order capacity to do so.
On the other hand, it seems too restrictive to say that second order capacities are limited to those expressed as first-order by the majority of normatively developing entities in a class. According to Moreland’s articulation, a person who can speak English but not Russian has a first-order capacity to speak English, and the second-order capacity to speak Russian. This allows a very broad understanding of the conditions; given highly specialized circumstances, it is likely that such a person could speak Russian; but it is certainly not the case that the majority of humans developing under normative conditions can speak Russian.
We safely say that the restrictions on relevant conditions for S’s possession of y as a second-order capacity should be more permissive than requiring that y be actualized by the majority of normative entities, and more restrictive than the mere logical possibility of S’s having y.
The capacities articulated by Brown as mutually constitutive of personal relatedness fall easily within these boundaries. It is clearly logically possible for any human S to develop the requisite capacities. In fact, if a human develops normatively, each of these capacities is actualized and expressed as first-order. Thus even on the strictest interpretation, the p-making capacities qualify as second-order.
Unfortunately, second-order capacities are not available to direct scrutiny, since they are possessed as potential, rather than necessarily actual first-order capacities.
At least a partial list can be derived compositely from observation of the expressed capacities of multiple members of the group developing under normative conditions. Justification for this inference is unidirectional. It is certain that if the majority of a class expresses a particular first-order capacity they also possess it as second-order, and it is therefore highly likely that all members of that class possess that second-order capacity though a minority fail to express it. However, one is not quite as justified in inferring that the absence of such expression indicates the absence of the corresponding second-order capacity.
One can therefore make the judgment that an entity can be appropriately judged as ‘having a soul’ and being ethically constraining if it possesses all of the aforementioned capacities as second-order. This allows us to pick out classically recognized persons as ethically constraining, and does not necessitate an appeal to special creation, ‘proper function’, or a conception of the soul as an independent metaphysical substance
In light of this analysis, Brown’s capacities argument becomes: the six p-making capacities identified are all displayed as first order by the majority of normally developed adult human beings. If a subject (S) displays a first order capacity (C), it entails that S also possesses a second-order capacity for (C). So the majority of normally developed adult humans possess the p-making capacities as second-order capacities. Since second-order capacities are established by reference to a class rather than to an individual, one can infer that non-normatively developed members of the class ‘human’ possess the same second-order capacities as normative members.
Therefore, the judgment that a particular individual has a soul or is ethically constraining must be made by referencing the class to which he belongs, rather than by analyzing the first-order capacities of the individual, and hence all members of the class ‘human’ can be said to be equally persons.
This permits Brown to avoid the risk of making the soul a property possessed by individuals in varying degrees, contingent on their success as social beings. As a result, it functions as an answer not only to the objection explored in this paper, but also to a whole family of objections centering on the notion of ‘degreed personhood.’
This is only permissible, though, if it can be successfully established that non-normative humans bear sufficient similarity in significant, relevant ways to the normative members of the class ‘human’ to be considered properly a member of that class. This can be done by showing that (i) it is conceivable that were the abnormal conditions removed or altered, the entity would likely develop into a normative human, and (ii) that such development would not constitute a change in the entity’s essential identity. In the case of an autistic person, it is not difficult to meet these conditions. A series of studies on the physiological causes of autism concluded that the condition results from “a dysfunction in the specific neural substrate for mentalizing.” It is easily conceivable, then, that if the physical conditions for the development of the brain were altered, an ‘autistic’ brain would in fact develop normally. This is helped by two thought experiments:
(A)
Suppose a subject (S) suffered from a rare mental condition wherein, due to the activity of Chemical X on his brain, he was unable to form episodic memories. However, doctors are able to perform a surgery that block the activity of X, thereby allowing (S) to function normatively. Surely by so doing they have neither altered his identity, nor changed his basic classification as human. Rather, they have simply removed a barrier (X) to his ability to actualize a second-order capacity that was always there.
(B)
Suppose an individual (T) is born with a condition wherein the brain produces an excess of Chemical X, with the result that over time, the brain will develop in a way that leaves (T) incapable of forming episodic memory as an adult. If (T) is given regular dosage to control the influence of (X), thereby allowing her brain to develop in normative conditions, it seems such a procedure, despite its extension through time, is similar to (A) in that it neither alters (T)’s identity nor her basic classification.
It is not a stretch to argue that autism is in this way analogous to Chemical X, and should not be taken as determinate of either an entity’s identity or classification. Rather, the entity retains all the second-order capacities belonging to her class, while realizing only the first-order capacities possible given her biological conditions. Since judgment of ethical personhood or ‘souled’ status is one of second rather than strictly first-order capacities, if an entity would develop normally given normal conditions, it is formally indistinguishable from entities that, given normal conditions, do develop normally & thus an entity with autism or Asperger’s syndrome is no less ethically constraining—no less a person—than a normative individual.
One may worry that this is too permissive. After all, what prevents this from being used to prove the personhood of advanced primates? Arguably the thought experiments posit changes similar in scale to a primate receiving advanced capacities (such as a theory of mind and systematic language) via brain enlargement. This is not in fact the case: for the argument to function, the being in question must possess all requisite second-order capacities, a judgment made by appealing to the traits actualized among the majority of entities within its class.
In the case of even the most advanced primate, development of these capacities would either necessitate reclassification, or constitute an identity shift, or both. So long as there remains a clear gulf between classes with respect to at least one of the p-making capacities, such that a non-normative member of class A (humans) is still clearly not a candidate for membership in class B (primates), the argument developed in this paper cannot be used to beyond members of the human class.
It appears then that non-reductive physicalism has sufficient resources to give a satisfactory account of the soul, articulating it in terms of the emergent mind. Supplemented by this distinction between first and second-order capacities, Brown’s presentation of the soul as personal relatedness successfully distinguishes humans as ethically constraining entities without excluding obvious cases of persons.
Endurance
The end is in sight.
My thesis final draft nears 6,000 words, and I am proof-reading page 11 of 24. When that task is complete, all that remains is to compile the works cited, bibliography, and title pages, then print the paper & formulate a 20 minute reading copy.
Then my undergraduate philosophical work will be essentially complete.
Also, then I will sleep. For a few hours. Then work on my Art Thesis presentation.
!
My thesis final draft nears 6,000 words, and I am proof-reading page 11 of 24. When that task is complete, all that remains is to compile the works cited, bibliography, and title pages, then print the paper & formulate a 20 minute reading copy.
Then my undergraduate philosophical work will be essentially complete.
Also, then I will sleep. For a few hours. Then work on my Art Thesis presentation.
!
I feel like I am in Hopper's house, but have come to visit with Matisse.
The dutch door opens to a grey blue, vibrant sky. I know the ocean is nearby, and wind chimes echo just out of sight.
The light reflects on all the surfaces; the room is quiet, but intense.
But the carpets are a rich green, the woods a rich red, and this place is not haunted by loneliness.
The dutch door opens to a grey blue, vibrant sky. I know the ocean is nearby, and wind chimes echo just out of sight.
The light reflects on all the surfaces; the room is quiet, but intense.
But the carpets are a rich green, the woods a rich red, and this place is not haunted by loneliness.
Watchmen & the Morning
One is calling to me from Seir,
"Watchman, what time of the night?
Watchman, what time of the night?"
The watchman says:
"Morning comes, and also the night.
If you will inquire, inquire;
come back again."
-Isaiah 21:11-12
Psalm 130
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
O Lord, hear my voice.
Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!
If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than watchmen for the morning,
more than watchmen for the morning.
O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption.
And he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.
Isaiah 56:10
His watchmen are blind,
All of them know nothing.
All of them are mute dogs unable to bark,
Dreamers lying down, who love to slumber;
And the dogs are greedy, they are not satisfied.
And they are shepherds who have no understanding;
They have all turned to their own way,
Each one to his unjust gain, to the last one.
You were tired out by the length of your road, Yet you did not say 'It is hopeless.' You found renewed strength, Therefore you did not faint. {Isaiah 57:10}
[note: this verse is in the center of a passage detailing the adultery of Israel; is this sort of endurance a good, or a bad thing? Consider it juxtaposed with this earlier stanza:]
Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth does not become weary or tired. His understanding is inscrutable. He gives strength to the weary, and to him who lacks might He increases power. Though youths grow weary and tired, and vigorous young men stumble badly, yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary. {Isaiah 40:28-31}
Scribblings
Looking at the week ahead, I honestly do not know when I will have the time to write what I think I need to write before I forget it. I will try to carve out that time and make space to write it. Until then, here is an image (and some writing) from my sketchbook:
