I'm not quite sure how to interpret the question, Bill. I think I've
ventured into this territory before on xmca. In my book _Textual Politics_
I discuss reincarnation as a legitimate case in analysis of the
relationship between our notional constructions of social personae and
those for bodies. By and large I conclude that these two constructions are
essentially independent of one another and that it takes an extra effort,
or leap of faith, to become convinced that they represent two aspects of a
single reality (whether material or not). It is certainly possible, as some
cultures and communities do, to construct a single persona serially across
multiple bodies, or, as in the case of 'possession' simultaneously in
multiple bodies; just as we in our own society construct multiple personas
in a single body (multiple personality schizophrenics).
I don't see any of this however as evidence for 'minds' or 'souls' that are
separable from any body/-ies at all (or any material substrate or
constitutive matter-form at all).
One does get interesting cultural and scientific problems, however. There's
the classic issue of the justice of imprisoning all the social personas in
an M-P body for the crimes committed by just one of the 'personalities', a
dilemma which shows how our legal system and our cultural notions about
'individual' responsibility are caught by the uncritical conflation of
bodies and personas. And to this we can add a sort of complementary issue:
if the persona is distributed among multiple bodies, what happens if one of
the bodies ingests Prozac and the other one doesn't? This is hardly a true
dilemma of course, so long as one does not really believe that a drug can
have a direct causal effect on an essential quality of an interpretive
construct like a persona. There are clearly many different ways in which
communities could shape the outcome of this empirical situation, insofar as
they make sense of it at all.
I have generally found that there are a few useful guiding principles
through these very complex matters:
1. There is no such thing as a 'mind' in some separate realm of the real
from that of matter; it is epiphenomenal if it makes sense at all
2. There are no unique one-to-one correspondences between physiological
phenomena and 'mental' 'personality' or meaningful behavior phenomena; at
least no necessary ones
3. Changes in the material substrate of a system exhibiting behavior
interpreted as meaningful by some community usually leads to some change in
that behavior, but the change may or may not be meaningful in that
community and the meaning of the change is in principle community-, or
culture- specific
One consequence of this view, appropriate for this last hour (in New York)
of Gay Pride Day, is that there cannot be a 'gene' for 'homosexuality', nor
a chemical 'cure' for it, since it is not itself a physiological
phenomenon, but a cultural-interpretive one with a notional basis that
shares almost nothing with that for contemporary physiology. Sexual
orientations and identities are positions in complex multi-dimensional
spaces of interpretations of behaviors and feelings; even the notion that
there is one such phenomenon as homosexuality or being or not-being 'gay'
is too radical an oversimplification to take seriously scientifically,
however important it may be to people's sense of self or to creating needed
political alliances. There are vast numbers of ways, and degrees, of being
what some people would and others would not count as indices of belonging
to such categories. Of course the same deconstruction applies equally to
being heterosexual, or to being White, or American, etc. People don't 'be'
such things, people just do as we do. No biologist is going to get very far
defining sexuality in purely physiological terms.
And likewise I'd have to express a pan-skepticism that there is any
one-to-one relation between emotional states or dispositions, or
personality traits, or emotional or personality 'disorders', defined in
terms of culturally meaningful patterns or syndromes of interpreted and
classified behavior, and the effects of any chemical agent in the human
body. That's not to say that I don't at all times have some chemical state
at various delicacies of description in terms of timescale and level of
analysis, and that these don't change with my mood; just that the
correspondences between the two are inherently very, very loose because
they depend as much on cultural interpretations and learned feeling-states
as they do on chemical concentrations. Moreover, a full multi-scale
analysis from the chemical level up to the organism level passes through a
vast number of filtering and buffering levels of organization in between,
making the direct connection impossible even in purely physiological terms
-- unless you believe my molecules or cells have their own moods.
What can and does happen is that changes in chemistry alter the
dispositions and probabilities on various timescales for higher level
physiological, including neurological, patterns to occur or not occur, or
occur to different degrees. A chemical shift may allow me to be more or
less likely to laugh, more easily irritated or less, more darkly negative
about circumstances or more happily blase; but not in any causally
determinative way, nor universally across physiological differences,
including learned differences (i.e. imprints of experience on the body),
nor universally across cultural variation in what constitutes the possibly
meaningful mood and feeling states that people have.
If you want to know, finally, if I believe in a soul that wanders apart
from my body, I certainly believe that a culture can interpret and indeed
promote phenomena of this sort (say shamanistic bi-location), but I also
believe that I would always construe _some_ material substrate for every
aspect of what was happening. If some part of the organizing pattern that I
call me can exist in another substrate than this body ... be it computer
circuits, the quantum vacuum, or the total material universe as a whole ...
that's fine, but it will most likely be a somewhat different sort of 'me'
with a somewhat different sort of 'consciousness' than the range now
available to me. Perhaps there is an overlap, so that some extreme states
of 'oceanic consciousness' available to me now, reflecting the fact that I
am already materially an integral part of systems larger than my organic
body, are similar to or even identical with states that would be available
in the absence of my current body. But they are not my ordinary persona
states. And of course, finally, it is certainly possible that our
scientific culture is mistaken in identifying the material substrate of who
we are too narrowly with just our material bodies; it surely includes a
good deal more, even if that remainder varies more from moment to moment
(as our conscious states do) than does our physiological organism. In fact
that would seem axiomatic, unless we are organic solipsists. Sense of self
and identity, and so 'soul', certainly belong more to the
meaning-interpretive system than to the physiological system of our
conceptualizations, so according to my general analysis, we cannot identify
them in a unique and necessary way with even the total physiological states
of our bodies.
But ideologically, I am also suspicious of human desires in these matters.
The drive to avoid confronting the realities of death is a strong one.
Speculation on these matters is on safer ground if we are less interested
in what may survive the death of the body and more interested in how body
and soul enjoy one another during life.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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