The Human Question

Back to the very worthwhile thing that Pinker points out about the corpus callossum: that when the brain is divided there one can be "of two minds" (my pun, not his) and one side seems to rationalize the behavior of the other. It has been quite a while, so I don't remember any more details, but the following big-picture point came to me the other day. First of all, I need to review the passage in Pinker's book to figure out whether he is incorrectly interpreting the data. But let's set that aside for the moment. Pointing out this problem does not suffice to disprove the unity (and hence the existence) of the soul. For it leaves unexplained how even half of the human brain could act in a unified fashion... as more than just the sum of its parts. Even half a brain is all one needs to show that reductionism is absurd.

Pinker uses the fact that a person with a severed corpus callosum will show signs of being of two minds, as it were. One side will act according to one inclination and the other according to another. The side responsible for saying why one acts as one does ingeniously fabricate a pseudo holistic account. I can't get into the details now, b/c it's a while since I heard it, but it's a very worthwhile argument against the position I hold. My question to SP would be, however, as follows: since we use neurons not only in the brain but also in the stomach (to help direct churning activity), does he think that our stomach thinks? Perhaps the maxim "follow your guts" has special significance for Pinker... Furthermore, in basing his theory of mind on this exceptional case, Pinker is behaving like the Chinese astronomers who noted only the exceptional events (e.g., super novae), not the regular ones. He still needs to give an account for the normal unity of human th...

After going through both a book each by Pinker and Dawkins, I note that neither of them talks about emergent properties. Any materialist who notes emerging properties is like the scribe whom Jesus said "was not far from the kingdom of God." In other words, it leads one out of reductionism, and in my opinion, is the first step in a path away from materialism. Apparently Pinker and Dawkins don't want to go in that directions, so they are careful not to take the first step.

When Pinker brings up the infinite creativity of the human mind, his reductionist way of handling it is to use the word "combinatorial": to put it in computer language (not his) it's the nearly infinite number of different combinations of 1s and 0s that accounts for our ability to invent. Such a way of describing creativity leaves out of consideration the intentionality involved therein. If so then humans are creative because they have a really good randomizer, i.e., machine for generating original combinations of 1s and 0s. Actually, it's very easy to create something that is capable of producing an endless variety of 1s and 0s. Surely the fact that humans are creative has to do with more than that. Surely it has to do with the fact that we are turned toward the world in an exceptional way, that we thematize and question being itself, that we can seek truths applicable always and everywhere: what combination of 1s and 0s does he think are sufficient to generat...

16,32, 64, 128: I don't know how many cells make up a blastocysts, but Pinker points out that one can be removed to form an identical twin. So far so good. But he doesn't note that there is something orderly about these stages of life in a human: when there is 4 cells, for example, there is some difference in the material. There is, as it were, a top and a bottom. Not just a messy bunchacells: rather, a non-obvious structural unity. Yes, you can take one away and grow a new human. But you may be able to do that with iPSCs some day.

They make use of the fact that a zygote can become two identical twins, and that two fraternal twin zygotes can combine to form parts of one human organism with different dna here and there. I can't answer the second example at this time (in fact, I'm not sure of what it proves), but responding to the first is easy: if one can take the skin cell of an adult and use it for cloning (and the expectation is that some day it will be possible to do this with iPSCs), then the fact that this can be done with embryos does not demonstrate their non-humanity or non-personhood. The modem tollens would go like this: if clonability demonstrated non-humanity of embryos, then it would demonstrate the non-humanity of adults. But it doesn't. Therefore it doesn't demonstrate in the case of embryos.