> >
> > Idea: If the *end* of a human person's life is the cessation of brain activity, might not the beginning of human life be the beginning of brain activity? If a human being is defined by thoughts, emotions, memories, the soul, and if all our evidence suggests that the soul is, if not generated by the brain, at least depends on it for its connection to the body (how I prefer to think of it) and that a body without brain activity is by any reasonable definition soulless (no possible emotions, no possible thoughts, no possible humanity).
> >
> The definition of me is in my soul, which physically resides in my brain.
> >
>
> What evidence suggests that our soul is generated by the brain? Where are you getting this? Is this just part of your idea? You take a great leap in attaching an intangible to a tangible while claiming it to be fact. How can something intangible, like a soul, physically reside anywhere and how could that be proven or even disproved? Sorry, but I don't buy it and would personally have to re-think things if this were the basis for my foundation of an argument.
>
> Ferrick


I guess this stems from a misconception about the word "soul".

Okay, granted. If by a soul you mean specifically "that physically indetectable entity that survives after a human being dies", then you're right; by definition I can't associate a soul with a physical entity.

My soul could be in my large intestine, or my left kidney, or my thumb, or the patch of hair behind my left ear. Who knows? Maybe the next time I get a haircut I'll lose it and become soulless.

But that's not how I choose to think of a soul. The only reason I even *believe* in a soul is because of things such as will, intelligence, thought, emotion, memory, etc., that I believe to stem from a higher-than-physical source. So I think of a soul as the metaphysical analogue of the thoughts and emotions I experience myself and I observe in other people.

Yes, I believe that this bundle of thoughts and emotions survives after death and it has a higher nature than the physical. But that doesn't mean it *lacks* a physical nature. Any more than because love is an abstract concept and its existence cannot be scientifically proven I can't detect the presence or absence of love. Ditto justice, beauty, truth, etc. They're abstract conceptualizations of an actual, physical phenomenon.

That's my problem with reincarnation; to me, if you take a soul and strip it of its memories, personality, unique identity, etc., then you *don't have a soul anymore*, because to me that's what a soul *is*. I don't believe a soul is some mystical greenish-blue fluid slowly leaking out of your astral organs, or some little "spark of life" that can hop from body to body, unique individual to unique individual, or even into inanimate objects and still retain its "soulishness", or that it's some undefinable Abstract Concept that we shouldn't peer into, think about, or apply to any daily reality.

A soul is *more* than a continuous brain-wave process, but that doesn't change the fact that on one level it *is* a continuous brain-wave process. Just like love is *more* than a biochemical reaction in the brain triggered by the sight and recognition of a certain individual, but that doesn't change the fact that on one level it *is*.

I think this pretty much can be proven. There have been experiments done where a heart has been removed from a dead body and kept alive in nutrient solution hooked up to an artificial pacemaker for *years*. Is that heart alive? By a scientific definition, yes; it takes in food, excretes waste, regenerates lost tissue... Is it human? It has human DNA, it came from a human body, heck, it's even from a part of the human body pretty vital to most of us, without which a person cannot live... Is it a person? Does it think, feel, understand? Does it have a soul? Does it have human rights, protection under the law?

You can answer yes to the last three questions if you want (after all, ultimately you have to define for yourself what a human person is and what a human soul is), but I'm willing to bet most of us would say "no". I think most of us do, to some extent, understand that human personhood comes from more than just DNA or biological life; we just differ on where we draw the line.

So what if it wasn't just a heart? What if it were, say, the whole chest cavity? Does that make a difference? What if it were the whole torso? What if we attached limbs? Or a skull? Eyes, nose, ears, tongue and lips? What if we attached every single thing except a brain?

Even if it had eyes, it couldn't see; if it had ears, it couldn't hear; if it had nerves, it couldn't feel; if it had legs, it couldn't walk; if it had genitals, it couldn't experience sex or reproduce itself; if it had all the parts of the body besides the brain, it might be a fully functioning body, but it would not be *human*, and it would not be alive in the sense that a *human* is alive.

Come from the other direction. What if a person has one of her limbs amputated? In the purely physical sense, she is not a "complete" human being, but would you take away any of her human rights? Any of her legal property? Would you deny the presence of a soul in her body?

What if she's quadruplegic, and all her limbs are amputated? What if her heart breaks down and we give her an artificial one? (Not entirely unfeasible with current medical technology.) What if her lungs break down and we hook her up to a respirator? Her kidneys break down and we hook her up to a dialysis machine? Her eyes break down and she goes blind, her ears break down and she goes deaf, her muscles deteriorate and she becomes paralyzed, etc., etc., etc.? Are any of these losses of human faculties, alone or in combinations, enough to make someone not a human being anymore?

Okay. I didn't think you'd say yes. No doctor would; the medical community considers a human being legally alive up to and beyond the old standard of cardiac arrest right up to brain death.

But if the brain dies (I mean *dies*, not is damaged), all research shows it's unrecoverable. (Yes, I looked at the chicken story. Notice that right up to its death most of its brain stem remained intact. Chickens' brains aren't identical to human brains; a chicken has a much smaller cerebrum and cerebellum than a human and depends much less on its "higher" brain, so Mike was brain *damaged* to some extent but by no means brain *dead*. Chickens are not humans; the average decapitated human will not be running around for any time at all. A better argument might be that insects can survive for over a month without any head or brain at all, but then they don't have brains as such, just big clumps of nerves, and, coincidentally, I don't believe they have souls either.) If the brain dies, the person will no longer function as a person in any meaningful sense *at all*; I don't mean that they will function at lower capacity or that they won't function in the most convenient or visible sense, they *will not* function unless you hook the body up to a machine to pump food and oxygen in and out. They can live for years, but they won't be legally alive and they won't be human beings. No state considers it murder to turn off the respirator once brain death is declared.

Now, no one says you *have* to make the leap (it is a leap; creating any definition through induction is a leap), but if you don't, you have to deal with the question of how we define human personhood using some other standard than the most obvious one (that of human consciousness, creativity, intelligence, emotion, in short the ego); you run into all kinds of nasty difficulties like "Are twins two people or one, since they have the same DNA?"; "Are *conjoined* twins two people or one, since they have the same DNA and share parts of the same body?"; "How long are we supposed to keep a brain-dead body alive, then?"; "What do we do with that heart in the nutrient solution; if we take it out, isn't it murder?", etc., etc., etc.

So, if you think about it, it's not that much of a leap at all to say that our brainwave activity is the physical manifestation of the soul or at least the soul's connection to the body; notice that in any of the cases people use to demonstrate that thought can be "interrupted" and resumed to prove that potential thought and not thought determines life, while *conscious* thought or high-level brain activity may be interrupted (in comas, unconsciousness or even non-REM sleep), the brain activity never ceases. It's always running, even if it can be reduced to low levels; if it stops, it stops for good. I think (and I'm not an expert, so don't quote me on this, but from what I understand of the brain, little as that is, it makes sense) of the mind as software and the brain as hardware. The RAM in a computer can store a system state indefinitely, running programs in the background, carrying out its last instructions, receiving inputs and creating outputs, right up until its power runs out. If the power is interrupted, the system state, the computer's "mind", all that data and information and processing, vanishes as though it never were. Unless it's been copied and stored in a different form on disk, you won't find any trace of it in the hardware; though the hardware supports the software, the software leaves no physical trace or physical changes in the hardware; the software existed not as changes in the hardware but changes in a complex electrical pattern that the hardware made available.

That's how I see the brain and the mind; people have looked and found no detectable differences between the brains of psychopaths and pacifists, mentally disabled and geniuses, romantics and realists, leaders and followers, women and men, Europeans and Asians, white-collar workers and blue-collar workers, mountain dwellers and valley dwellers, or even, after a certain point, children and adults (we do know complexity keeps increasing with age, as well as size, but no one knows if this comes with additional knowledge and memories or just growth to keep up with the rest of the body). No one can point to a single neuron and say "this neuron stores such-and-such a memory" or "this neuron performs such-and-such a thought process", yet it has been proven, extensively, that when neurons are damaged the memory is damaged and the thinking processes are disrupted; the physical brain *is* linked to the mind, like it or not, and though the mind can adapt to brain damage it cannot truly remain unscathed from it or achieve total recovery from it. (If I smack your computer hard enough with a hammer I can crash any program you might care to run.) The evidence seems to suggest that the constant flow of impulses through the neurons, the uninterrupted brainwave activity we carry through life, *is* the mind, or at least in the way the electrical current flowing through the motherboard is the software or the blobs of dried ink on paper fibers are words. And so a physical receptacle or generator of such activity wouldn't in and of itself be a mind any more than a deactivated computer has any software running on it or a book of blank pages is a novel.

Of course you can disagree with me, and I won't try to tell you you're 100% wrong, because, ultimately, I don't think the definitions of "human being" or "mind" are provable things; they're one of those axiomatic moral principles we have to start with in order to formulate everything else. But I think my definition makes the most intuitive sense, to me, anyway; you could try to define the soul as something residing in the spleen, or six feet above the head, or inside a special box in the heart of the Earth, or nowhere at all, but these definitions would seem to conflict with our intuitive, everyday understanding of what "soul" means and would lead to interpretations of reality and guidelines for action most of us would find difficult to comply with. (What would we do if we *had* to keep every body alive as long as, say, its heart was beating? And if you were allowed to call someone legally dead as soon as their heart *stopped* beating? This is why the advent of CPR and defibrillator machines led to a shift in the legal definition of "life". As for the soul resting in DNA, well, DNA is tiny little strands of chemicals scattered through every single cell in your body that can be taken out, played with, massaged, spliced, sliced, irradiated, mutated, etc., and some or all of these things happen to it within the course of a normal human lifetime or even a single normal day. You *can* juggle the definition to make DNA the definition of a human person, but to me the ramifications are too numerous and too complex.)

So, true, I understand your point, but I hope you understand why I, weighing the evidence, see the brain as the seat of the soul. That has tended to be the official opinion of most Christian medical professionals in this century, pro-choice and pro-life; they don't always mean the same thing by it, obviously, but I hope you see my point. After all, which would you rather have; an artificial heart or an artificial brain? :)

Ar"look at me, brain the size of a grapefruit and they have me debating abortion"thur