No easy lodgings in brains without brawn
In an experiment with creepy overtones scientists at Yale have found a way to keep brain cells healthy in pigs’ heads 36 hours after they were decapitated. The pigs did not regain consciousness, but the experiment was said to open the door to keeping human brains alive outside the body.
It is impossible not to be reminded of the pig’s head in Lord of the Flies, or the head in That Hideous Strength, the novel by CS Lewis. But there have been attempts to wrest the experiment from the realm of horror stories.
A philosopher at Nottingham Trent University commented on it. “Even if your conscious brain were kept alive after your body had died, you would have to spend the foreseeable future as a disembodied brain in a bucket, locked away inside your own mind without access to the senses that allow us to experience and interact with the world,”
Benjamin Curtis told The Conversation, an online periodical.
“With absolutely no contact to external reality it might just be a living hell.”
Dr Curtis is, by his own admission “a committed Humean”. Not a human, but a Humean, a follower of David Hume. I’m not sure how one can be committed to a philosopher rather than convinced by one, but our business here is to worry about the poor old brain in a bucket.
To think that it is easier to live forever in a brain separated from the rest of the body betrays, I think, an incoherent view of Homo sapiens. There are lots of ways of talking nonsense about being a human being. One is by taking literally the metaphor of a computer. The brain is taken to be the hardware and thoughts the consequence of some sort of self-writing program.
Another unhelpful but ambiguous suggestion is that to be a human is a matter of consciousness. “Consciousness” is taken either to be consciousness of surroundings, as if looking out from inside a pillar box, or to be selfconsciousness: the feeling that we are ourselves. Self-consciousness is a particularly slippery notion, because it is easy to imagine that we each have direct knowledge of our own separate identity. It is harder to realise that knowledge of the world around us leads us to realise our own place in it.
I’d recommend a return to the idea of Homo sapiens as a rational animal. As animals, we breathe and move voluntarily and know things, as Dr Curtis notes, by sensing the world. It is certainly no help to be reduced to being a brain in a bucket.
As for being rational, what is that about? I think the big clue is our use of universal concepts. We use language not as labels for an infinite number of things about us (as if each had its own name: Jim, rather than a chair; Gwen, rather than a banana). Language is useful because it identifies kinds of things. We take an aspirin because it has the property of dulling pain. Its property follows the kind of thing it is. A pill of chalk has no such analgesic effect.
Ability in marshalling immaterial universals hints at an immaterial aspect of our minds. That aspect cannot decay. Indeed Plato’s followers think the real human is a prisoner in the body. It seems to me more reasonable to think, with Aristotle’s followers, that the soul is the form (in the technical sense) of the body.
So death means a soul surviving but unable to know externals or even imagine things. No fun, as Dr Curtis says. Only God’s intervention can comfort it. That’s why the clause in the Creed about the “resurrection of the body” is not an optional bolt-on.