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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Bodies and Souls - Lenn E. Goodman, D. Gregory Caramenico
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061238.003.0001
[Emergence and reduction, Persons, Complexity, Mind and Body, Thought and Emotion, Aristotle, Lucretius, William James, Jaegwon Kim, Philip Clayton]
Goodman and Caramenico speak of souls not to name a quasi-physical or pseudo-physical entity. They ground their argument on the premise that what acts is what is real. And souls do act – and feel, perceive, experience and understand, plan, intend, remember and hope. (So the distinction of soul from mind is not just semantic). Consciousness stakes out its ground to constitute itself as an identity, a subject or self, reflexive and reflective, situated in the world and responsive to the risks and opportunities we encounter. The reductive project, aspiring to erase the very idea of the soul in favor of the brain and its processes, runs aground here: As science increasingly succeeds in correlating brain processes with the acts and experiences of our inner life, the facts of subjecthood do not melt away. They remain undescribable in sheerly physical terms, and unexplainable in such terms alone. The agenda here is not separability. This book is not about immortality or ensoulment. The argument is much more direct: that human souls think and feel, believe and choose, reason and discover, not despite the body but by way of its remarkable capabilities. The chief organ, locus, and vehicle of souls is the brain. (pages 1 - 24)
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Perception - Lenn E. Goodman, D. Gregory Caramenico
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061238.003.0002
[Gestalt, Phenomenology, Synaesthesia, Vision, Hearing, Olfaction, Tasting, The sense of touch, Color, Depth perception]
Reductive accounts of the soul took root in ancient and early modern notions that perception is passive, ultimately a matter of mechanical impacts on our sense organs that somehow become signals, “sense-data,” as they were called in the last century, long construed as atomic, even unanalyzable. Yet close study of perception, physiologically and psychologically, reveals active work in the brain and our sense organs themselves in every perceptual experience: Even from the start we integrate, organize, relate, and interpret all that we encounter perceptually. The work of the Gestalt psychologists proves especially relevant here. But so does that of color theorists, linguists, artists and musicians, and the scientists who study olfaction, taste, and touch, depth perception – and the fascinating phenomena of synaesthesia, and our remarkable ability to follow the thread of a conversation, even in a noisy room. Color is not just light of a given wavelength; a tone or chord is not just a sequence of vibrations in the air. To be heard those vibrations must be worked with. To be seen wave patterns in the visible spectrum must be taken up and transformed. The synthetic work of the soul translates physical effects into experiences and ideas. (pages 25 - 84)
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Consciousness - Lenn E. Goodman, D. Gregory Caramenico
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061238.003.0003
[Selfhood and subjectivity, neuronal networks, awareness and attention, qualia, intentionality, theory of mind, Nyaya, Searle, Chisholm, Quine]
Long considered a mystery and still an object of worry among philosophers and neuroscientists for its stubborn refusal to die or just lie down and allow its own reduction to “objective” – third person – terms, consciousness is the explicit, sometimes outspoken side of the soul. Intentionality, the fact that so many of our thoughts are about something outside themselves, points back insistently to a subject with a distinctive (notably limited) perspective. Philosophers speak of qualia. But other facts about consciousness join in to attest to the soul’s active presence: the striking recursivity and implicit self-reference of thought (not least in the moral realm, where reflection begets conscience), our awareness of time and of others’ intentions, our ability to relate what we see to what we touch or hear and to claim both experiences as our own, the sense of connection that binds up our moments, and the simple (or not so simple) biology of selfhood that begins at the boundaries between one organism and the next but grows ever subtler and more versatile until consciousness openly claims one’s thoughts as one’s own and consciousness announces itself as the voice of an emergent person, of a soul. (pages 85 - 138)
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Memory - Lenn E. Goodman, D. Gregory Caramenico
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061238.003.0004
[episodic memory, the engram, neural plasticity, personal identity, collective memory, mnemonics, amnesia, long term potentiation (LTP)]
Memory has long been pictured as a mark, a stored image, even a scar. But the modern search for the “engram” and the files that might house such bits of experience proves fruitless. Memory is far more active and interactive, far more lively, synthetic, and flexible than the outdated storage models suggest. Memories link past, present, and future. They presuppose a subject, yet, even as they do so, help build an identity. Memories, objectified in signs and memorials, can be shared and rendered prescriptive in shared projects and ideals. Losses to personal memory help reveal its anatomy and natural history. So do the changes we make as we recall events, facts, faces, words, enriching our memory with overtones and associations that make each occasion unique and no static sign registered at a single site in some uniform code. The work of memory depends on the constant strengthening or attrition of synaptic connections: Synapses that fire together, as they say, wire together. But human memory is never just its neural substrate. It takes full shape only in the rich texture of experience. Memory keenly reveals the dynamic interactions of body and soul, the brain and the personhood emergent in its work. (pages 139 - 174)
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Agency - Lenn E. Goodman, D. Gregory Caramenico
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061238.003.0005
[Free will, Volition, William James, Benjamin Libet, top-down causality, epiphenomenalism, Robert Kane, Alfred Mele]
Our case for the soul stands or falls with human agency: Do we act, or are we only acted upon? William James, deeply troubled by epiphenomenalism, which made thought no more consequential to action than the whistle on a steam engine, responded (after working things out) that unless thought made some practical difference there’d be no more selective advantage in awareness than evolution imparts to the reflexes of an oyster. Jaegwon Kim has revived the epiphenomenalist claim, arguing that free will violates “causal closure,” by introducing energies into the world unregulated by natural law. But we argue that living beings have ample energies to pursue their interests. The familiar conflict of causal determinism with voluntarism is bogus, since the free will worth having is not indeterminist. It involves self-determination. The readiness potential that Benjamin Libet recorded, we suspect, marks not a pre-choice determination but, as its name implies, a preparedness to act. Much that we do is a matter of habit or routine. But these are often consciously, freely, painstakingly acquired. We may, at times, assign choices to random outcomes. But we remain free agents. We use our brains and are not well described as merely being used by them. (pages 175 - 210)
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Creativity - Lenn E. Goodman, D. Gregory Caramenico
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061238.003.0006
[Invention, discovery, Inspiration, associative psychology, Max Wertheimer, Sharon Bailin, Robert Weisberg]
It’s easy to dismiss creativity as an outcome of chance, or to off-load it by crediting external sources – inspiration or imitation. But creativity, understood as fruitful originality, not mere novelty, is omnipresent in human experience, from the brilliant artistic works, inventions and discoveries that change the course of one life or many to the everyday efforts of problem solving seen in verbal or mechanical wit – or social tact. Creativity, then, is not well explained by the mystique of genius, whether painted in awestruck or more lurid tones. Creative efforts are typically synthetic, finding relevance in seemingly unrelated spheres. Hence the role of chance and play. But, as Pasteur said, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.” Efforts like brainstorming, aiming to socialize creativity seem to slight its inboard side. Creative work does have a social dimension. It builds on past foundations, and it can be interactive. But creativity is not a social game. Its fruits belong to thought, whether minds work in tandem or apart. The reality of creativity, like that of consciousness or agency, bespeaks the reality of subjects who learn from their surroundings, natural and social, but are not mere froth on the waves of their milieu. (pages 211 - 236)
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Afterword: God and the Soul - Lenn E. Goodman, D. Gregory Caramenico
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226061238.003.0007
[philosophical theology, theism and the soul’s emergence]
t has not been our intention in this book to argue from some idea of God for the reality of the soul. We’ve built our case from the ground up, not least relying on the findings of brain science, psychology, and neuroscience. The conclusions we’ve drawn rest on the active and integrative work the brain does in making possible the emergence of the soul. The brain, we’ve argued, is not the soul’s explanatory rival but its chief organ and the chief organizing principle of the activities the soul directs throughout the body. Since we have not argued from theistic premises, our brief leaves room for one to argue without circularity that something as remarkable as the soul – not to mention its intimate, intricate nexus with the brain and the body as a whole – are worthy products of God’s creative, evolutionary handiwork in nature. Such arguments, from effect to cause, are never deductive. They lack the certitude of mathematics. But all arguments, we think, must take that exploratory form, if they aspire to existential conclusions. All of us stand with our feet on the ground, even if our heads are in the air, and our mental gaze soars higher. (pages 237 - 244)
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