Part VI: The Subconscious and the
Forgiveness of Sins
Mind versus Brain
IN THE PRESENT
"state of the art," if I am reading the literature
correctly, certain things seem to have come to light regarding
the faculty of memory that were not anticipated; and the connection
between thought and matter, between mind and brain, is as mysterious
1 of 11
It is important within the context
of this present Paper to realize that unless memory survives
the destruction of the brain, a destruction which happens at
death, we have no reason to concern ourselves about the survival
of an accountable self in the hereafter outside of this body,
nor to expect people to concern themselves about a Judgment to
come. I do not think for one moment that any scientific argument
will convince a man about such a prospect. Only the Spirit of
God can bring such a conviction. But the scientific evidence
does, it seems to me, leave the skeptic with less excuse for
What research has shown
thus far is that there is no precise one-to-one relationship
between any fragment of memory and the nerve cells in which it
is supposed to be encoded. These cells can little by little be
replaced by new cells (as happens throughout life), or they can
be destroyed in large numbers or at least have their interconnections
severed (as in Ralph Gerard's experiments with rats), or the
whole cortex can be deliberately put out of action (as in experimental
decerebrated dogs), and yet apparently "memory lingers on."
That there is an originating connection is borne out by
the fact that a decerebrate animal cannot learn any new tricks:
but the fact that it does not forget the tricks it has already
learned when it is deliberately rendered decerebrate suggests
that memory survives the destruction of those physical structures
which are necessary for its origination.
Moreover, animals without "brains"
in the accepted sense, such as planarian flatworms, can learn
and remember what they have learned quite effectively even when
they are chopped up into several
Each segment appears to retain not just a fragment of memory
but the whole of it. Indeed, there is evidence not only of consciousness
but even of deliberate choice -- and therefore of "mind"
-- even in unicellular creatures which are lower still in the
scale of life than the flatworms. These creatures being constitutionally
unicellular obviously do not have a brain, though it is
conceivable that they are brain in some sense. Many students
of unicellular amoeba have found it impossible to describe their
behaviour without assuming that in some way they are "mind-ed"
creatures. In one of the little prefatory collections of quotes
which Sherrington has prefixed to each chapter of his book
Man on His Nature he has the following remark at Chapter
3 by Santiago Ramon-Ramon-y-Cajal: (40)
I remember that once I spent
29 hours continuously at the microscope watching the movements
of a sluggish leukocyte in its laborious efforts to escape from
a blood capillary.
himself speaks of his own strong impression that single cells
do have conscious life of some kind. He speaks of cells moving
towards a source of food, withdrawing if touched, "preferentially"
seizing this particle rather than that, and he comments that
although we may assume this is purely a matter of chemical reaction,
"There are observers of skill who after devoting patient
study to the motor behaviour of such single cells conclude that
microscopic single cell life without sense organ and without
nervous system can learn. . . ." (41) and presumably learning involves some kind of memory.
Elsewhere he speaks eloquently of how, under the microscope,
they seem to jostle one another as they line themselves up, "stop
watch in hand," ready to move with every evidence of purpose
the moment the signal is given. (42)
Then he asks a crucial question.
After admitting that it becomes more and more difficult to be
sure that any inferences are meaningful as one traces apparent
mindedness downward along the scale of being, from multi-cellular
to unicellular creatures, he concludes, "Ultimately, mind,
so traced, seems to fade to no mind." (43) And here is the real problem for the scientist.
At what point does mind become no
40. Sherrington, Sir Charles, Man on His
Nature, Cambridge University Press, 1963, p.61.
41. Ibid., ref.40, p.208. The work of Sten R. Bergstrom
of the University of Uppsala with even simpler forms than Paramecia,
i.e., Tetrahymena, shows that even these creatures have a memory.
See report in New Scientist, Jan. 29, 1970, p.193, under
the heading, "You don't need a brain to be able to learn."
42. Ibid., p.70.
43. Ibid., p.209.
mind? Or, in reverse,
whence does mind arise, and having arisen, can it really be annihilated
by the destruction of the cells?
In animals we either assume that
mind does disappear with the destruction of the cells at death,
or it must be assumed that in some way animals do survive
into the hereafter. In man we know from Scripture that mind,
and with it memory, is not annihilated in death. The destruction
in death of the cells which have initially given rise to it evidently
does not lead automatically to its annihilation. We know this
from many passages of Scripture, and it is worth noting that
in the only picture we have of a conversation between two people
in the hereafter, the man who is suffering torment is invited
to "remember" (Luke 16:25). For a while it appeared
that scientific research stood squarely against any such concept
of memory persistence apart from matter, but even here there
has been a subtle change. And the change is coming about with
Francis Crick (of Double-Helix
fame) has written a book entitled Of Molecules and Men, in
which he resolutely rejects any idea that matter could give rise
to or contain something beyond itself, but in reviewing this
volume, C. H. Waddington cautions the reader: (44)
The thesis that consciousness
or awareness belongs to a different logical realm from that inhabited
by present-day science which deals with observable behaviour,
is, I think, irrefutable.
In the English
Journal Nature Cyril Ponnamperuma wrote an article on
the chemical evolution of life in which he expressed his firm
conviction that life may be considered as an inevitable consequence
of "favourable conditions." Equally inevitable was
the emergence of consciousness. It is all merely a "special
and complicated property of matter, and au fond there
is no difference between a living organism and lifeless matter."
D. F. Lawden wrote to the Editor expressing his disagreement
and underscoring that the real problem was more complex than
Ponnamperuma was apparently allowing. He wrote: (46)
If consciousness is a characteristic
of . . . matter by the principle of continuity it must also be
a feature . . . ultimately of the fundamental particles. If this
were not the case, at some level in the hierarchy (from the fundamental
particles to ourselves) consciousness would arise
44. Crick, Francis, Of Molecules and Men,
University of Washington Press, 1966, reviewed by C. H. Waddington
in Nature, Oct.14, 1967, p.203.
45. Ponnamperuma, Cyril, "Chemical Evolution and the Origin
of Life," Nature, vol.201, 1964, p.337.
46. Lawden, D. F., Letters to the Editor, Nature, April
25, 1964, p.412.
discontinuously and it would be possible
to draw a sharp dividing line separating conscious from non-conscious
matter forms. This would only be a disguised form of the line
earlier assumed to separate living from non-living forms.
Undoubtedly, such mental characteristics
as are possessed by the fundamental particles must be of poor
quality and weak intensity, but unless some such features are
postulated, I fail to understand how consciousness could ever
arise in any matter system, how ever complex.
A system of particles each of which
possesses the known physical characteristics of electric charge,
spin, etc., might very well be designed to behave like
a human being but not to experience consciousness as human
beings undoubtedly do. . . .
We may perhaps hope to explain
human behaviour but our experience of this behavior will remain
unaccounted for. [emphasis mine]
was really saying is that either the very first particle of matter
to be created must have contained within itself some kind of
primitive consciousness, which in due time as larger and larger
aggregates of particles were formed, led inevitably to more and
more complex forms of consciousness as in higher animals, or
consciousness was suddenly introduced into certain aggregates
of matter where it had no previous existence. This in effect
means either that it did not originate with matter or that all
matter, even the simplest molecule, has some kind of elemental
awareness. But he would go further than this by pointing out
that beyond "mere awareness" is an even higher stage
which involves self-awareness.
To some extent, therefore, the
character of the consciousness of both animals and man appears
to be the same. But a little reflection will show that this is
not the case. We hold men to be morally responsible for their
behaviour, but we do not do this with animals. The reason for
this difference in judgment is that the consciousness which animals
have provides them with one kind of memory but the consciousness
which man has provides him with a very different kind of memory.
In what way are these two kinds of memory different?
W. R. Thompson in a Convocation
Address on the work of Henri Fabre speaks of even insects as
having memory, a fact which few will doubt. He says that instinct
enables the insect to manoeuver, "among the contingent events
it encounters." (47) But Fabre believed that the animal also had a faculty
of "memory." By "memory" he did not mean
human memory, the kind of memory which Aristotle called reminiscence,
which recognizes the past as past, but simply the
kind of memory which constitutes mere recognition of what has
been seen or experienced
47. Thompson, W. R., "The Work of Henri
Fabre," Canadian Entomologist, vol.96, nos.1, 2.
before. In other words,
the animal recognizes a place, an object, a source of food, etc.,
for what it is (because he has seen it before), as soon as it
is presented to it. This is merely recognition in the presence
of the object, not in its absence. The animal has no need to
reminisce about it, and probably has no capacity to.
Man, on the other hand, by his
power of recollection can reflect upon the past, a faculty which
not merely allows him but virtually forces him to pass judgment
in retrospect. This is what makes unique the form of consciousness
which man has.
So consciousness seems to arise
out of brain cell activity, but having arisen, in man it then
gives rise in turn to a further stage, namely, self-consciousness.
One of the great puzzles of our present knowledge is how it comes
about that all the individual little consciousness of the individual
cells that compose us can somehow be united into a single whole
that becomes a consciousness conscious of itself. As Edward McCrady
put it: (48)
I, for instance, certainly have
a stream of consciousness which I, as a whole, experience, and
yet I include within myself millions of white blood cells which
give impressive evidence of experiencing their individual streams
of consciousness of which I am not directly aware.
It is both entertaining and instructive
to watch living leukocytes crawling about within transparent
tissues of the living tadpole's tail. They give every indication
of choosing their paths, experiencing uncertainty, making decisions,
changing their minds, feeling contacts, etc., that we observe
in larger individuals. . . .
So I feel compelled to accept the
conclusion that I am a community of individuals who have somehow
become integrated into a higher order of individuality which
somehow coordinates and harmonizes the activities of the lesser
individuals within me.
It might be
supposed that these tiny bits of conscious living matter are
not really conscious but only seemingly so. Perhaps? Yet Seifriz
in his work on protoplasm does not think this is the case. (49) By placing amoeba on the
stage of his microscope where he could probe them with micro-manipulators,
he found that when he prodded an amoeba it would sometimes contract
into a ball, but other times would "run away." Evidently
it had a choice of reactions. If he trapped it by pinching it
somewhere, it would, like the fox which bites off its leg caught
in a trap in order to get free, detach itself from the portion
held and escape. H.
48. McCrady, Edward, Religious Perspectives
of College Teaching: In Biology, Hazen Foundation, New Haven,
1950, pp.19, 20.
49. Seifriz, William, Protoplasm, McGraw Hill, New York,
S. Jennings (50) drew the conclusion that
if an amoeba were as large as a dog we would ascribe to it all
the mental states which we ascribe to the dog, such as fear,
anger, and courage. (51)
So Mind has no size. Indeed, there
are many who believe that it may not occupy space at all, that
it may escape the bounds of space, as the evidence from telepathy
would seem to indicate. In his review of Koestler's latest work
Beyond Reductionism, William Thorpe quoted from von Weizacker
who contributed to the volume as follows: (52)
The concept of the particle
itself is just a description of a connection which exists between
phenomena, and if I may jump from a very cautious and skilled
language into strict metaphysical expression, I see no reason
why what we call Matter should not be "spirit."
Now, in his
Gold Medal Lecture before the Royal Medical Society in London,
Wilder Penfield traces very briefly the changes which have occurred
in the climate of opinion with respect to the relationship between
mind and brain. He says, having referred to Lashley's opinion:
"One must agree with him that, someday, co-relation may
show that (the phenomena of consciousness and the phenomena of
neural activity) are somehow, one. But that 'some day' is far
away. Indeed, in my opinion it may never dawn." (53)
In another of his contributions
Penfield observed: (54)
It is obvious that nerve impulse
is somehow converted into thought and that thought can be converted
into nerve impulse. And yet this all throws no light on the nature
of that strange conversion.
50. After this Paper was written, I came upon
further details of Jennings' views in Leo Berg, Nomogenesis,
MIT reprint, dated 1969, p.28: "Even the most elementary
forms of life are very complex and are not behind more superior
organizations in their capacity for purposive reactions. According
to the researches of Jennings, unicellular organisms respond
to the same stimuli as do the higher animals. Protoplasm, devoid
of a nervous system, responds to the same stimulations as do
the sense organs of Metazoa. Even the naked protoplasm of the
amoeba reacts to all classes of stimuli to which higher animals
react. The nervous system and the sense organs are thus not essential
to the perception of any special kind of stimuli. Voluntary actions,
i.e., modification of activity produced without the application
of external stimuli, occur in Protozoa, just as in Metazoa. The
idea that voluntary actions are confined to the higher animals
only is quite erroneous; activity in Protozoa is fully as voluntary
as in man. There is nothing to prove that the behavior of the
Protozoa and of the lower Metazoa is essentially different. 'The
behavior of the Protozoa is neither more, nor is it less, automatic
than that of the Metazoa. both are governed by the same principles'."
See H. S. Jennings, Behavior of the Lower Organisms, Columbia
University Biology Series X, N. Y., 1906, Chap.13.
51. Jennings, H. S., quoted by William Tinkle, "The Principle
of Uniformity," Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation,
vol.12, no.4, l960, p.l06.
52. Thorpe, W. H., "Reductionism Vs. Organicism," The
New Scientist, Sept. 25, 1969.
53. Penfield, Wilder, "Engrams in the Human Brain. Mechanisms
of Memory," Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine,
Aug., 1968, reprinted by Montreal Neurological Institute,
Reprint no. 934, p.2.
54. Penfield, Wilder: quoted by Susanne Langer, ref.17, p.18.
problem is to form some working model of how something which
is non-physical can interact with something which is physical.
Certainly God interacts with His created order, and perhaps the
reverse is true also. Because we cannot conceive of how such
interaction occurs is no reason for denying the possibility.
Penfield has recorded a remark by Sherrington in which this very
real "limitation" of the scientific method is acknowledged.
That our being should consist
of two fundamental elements offers I suppose no greater inherent
improbability than that it should rest on one only.
"This, to my mind, is the best way to leave the matter."
In other words, two of the world's greatest authorities in this
area feel that in spite of a tremendous amount of experimental
evidence undertaken with every expectation that mind would be
equated with brain the equation has not been demonstrated. Certainly
Penfield's evidence has failed to show that there is a one-to-one
relationship between a particular memory and some little segment
of the cerebral cortex.
One of the great scientific minds
of our time, Michael Polanyi, has in recent years repeatedly
warned against the assumption that the phenomenon of life, which
includes the faculty of awareness, will one day be explained
in chemical terms. (56)
And in an article significantly entitled "Life Transcending
Physics and Chemistry," (57) he spells out this conviction by observing, "When
I say that life transcends physics and chemistry, I mean that
biology cannot explain life in our age by the current working
of physical and chemical laws." If this is true of that
so-hard-to-define phenomenon which we call life, it is equally
true of that equally hard-to-define -- and uniquely human --
phenomenon which we call self consciousness. So the issue is
far from resolved in the minds of those who are best qualified
to express an opinion. Reductionism is not as widely accepted
as it was.
H. H. Pattee of Stanford University
recently wrote at some length on this widespread presumption
that we now know about all we need to know to clinch the reductionist
argument. He said: (58)
In spite of these detailed
factual descriptions of polynucleotide and polypeptide interaction
in the cell, many physicists as well as biologists
55. Sherrington: quoted by Wilder Penfield,
56. Polanyi, Michael: see "Objectivity in Science: A Dangerous
Illusion?" by Harold L. Davis, senior editor., Scientific
Research, vol.4, no.9, 1969, p.25.
57. Polanyi, Michael, "Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry,"
Chemical Engineering News, Aug. 21, 1967, p.54.
58. Pattee, H. H., The Physical Basis of Coding and Reliability
in Biological Evolution, Stanford University Biophysics Laboratory,
Report 193, Mar., 1969, p.21.
remain uneasy. Is this vast amount of
phenomenological description really sufficient to support the
claim, which is now made even in elementary biology textbooks,
that we have a fundamental understanding of living matter in
terms of physical laws. . . .
In the remainder of this paper
I shall attempt to express why this claim that biology has now
been understood in terms of physical laws is not yet convincing.
. . .
is shared by Sir Alister Hardy in his book This Living Stream.
But he carried the logic one step further by giving consideration,
as we feel is inevitable, to the whole question of consciousness
and not merely to the question of the difference between living
and non-living matter. He argues that there is evidence that
not only must we assume that a lot of single consciousnesses
in one body add up to a summation of consciousness which is greater
than the parts, but even that groups of individuals can share
a "larger awareness" in some given situation. (59) He views it as a sort
of species soul or group mind, not altogether unlike the "shared
Unconscious" which Carl Gustav Jung spoke of as belonging
to a whole species. Perhaps in man, as a species, one aspect
of this shared consciousness is the persuasion that God is,
a persuasion which man denies with difficulty. The existence
of such a phenomenon would clearly imply that mind exists in
some kind of free way independently of nerve attachments or synapses.
This, of course is mental telepathy at a subconscious level.
Hardy believes that there is some evidence to support this conception
among animals. For example, a school comprising hundreds of thousands
of small fishes, each with its own little consciousness, will
nevertheless turn as one if they are disturbed. He feels that
it would be impossible to account for this unanimity and absolute
coincidence of movement if one has to suppose that the first
creatures to become alarmed have passed on a signal to those
in their immediate vicinity and they in turn to their neighbours
until the message has spread through the whole school by a series
of relays. It is simpler to assume that in some way the first
alarm is communicated directly and instantly to all other members
of the school. Koestler points out that the Portuguese man-of-war
(an unpleasant jelly fish) is really a very large number of free-living
individuals that have become organized and bound together in
what appears to be a single creature with a single consciousness.
Hardy wrote: (60)
It is possible to imagine
some such pattern of shared unconscious experience; a kind of
composite species pattern of life. It is important to remember
that in the concept of the individual mind we are faced with
59. Hardy, Sir Alister, This Living Stream,
Collins, London, 1965, p.257.
mystery no less remarkable. The mind
cannot be anchored to this or that group of cells that make up
the brain. The community of cells making up the body has a mind
beyond the individual cells -- the impression coming from one
part of the brain receiving sensory impulses from one eye and
that from another part of the brain from the other eye are merged
together in the mind (i.e., as a whole) not in some particular
cells, as far as we know.
This line of
reasoning leads almost inevitably, of course, to the projection
of mind independently of matter, in the form of conscious
mental telepathy as opposed to the unconscious mental telepathy
which may exist for animals.
The very concept of telepathy and
other forms of extra-sensory perception is, of course, anathema
to all scientists, who reject vitalism in any form and must therefore
also reject the existence of mind apart from brain, and any potential
it might have of surviving its destruction. Every claim of investigators
that mental telepathy has been demonstrated in a way that fulfills
the current demands for "proof," is always rejected
in the end by the simple device of setting the standards of "proof"
still higher. It is doubtful if, in the present climate of scientific
opinion, mental telepathy can ever satisfy the conditions of
proof required of it. Yet one suspects that a great many scientists
are more nearly convinced of its reality than current literature
would indicate. The fact is, however, that editors of scientific
journals are reluctant to publish papers which deal with a subject
that so critically challenges modern scientific philosophy. But
once in a while new evidence arises, sometimes quite unexpectedly,
which does find its way into the journals, and when this happens,
it is always interesting to see how in successive issues Letters
to the Editor appear with monotonous regularity purporting to
discover minute flaws in the nature of the evidence presented
such as would never be considered of any importance if the subject
matter itself had not challenged the writer's bias.
Recently the New Scientist
reported evidence of an extraordinarily high scoring rate
in an ESP programme which was randomized by computer. (61) The possibility of unintentional
bias in the experimental set-up is believed to be as nearly zero
as is likely to be achieved. The scores obtained by some of those
taking part were so consistently high that the probability that
they were obtained purely by chance turns out to be less than
one in 500 million. But immediately it was challenged.
One of the major criticisms
of ESP experimental data, a criticism voiced by Price for example,
(62) is that those
who prove to have a great
61. "ESP--New Evidence," editorial,
New Scientist, Oct. 16, 1969, p.107; and also Helmut Schmidt,
"Quantum Processes Predicted?" p.115.
62. Price, George R., "Science and the Supernatural,"
Science, vol.122, 1955, p.359-367.
especially in the matter of prediction (identifying cards before
they are exposed, for example), tend to lose the ability with
practice. The argument is that any human faculty, if it really
is a faculty, will improve with practice, not deteriorate. Therefore,
this is not a human faculty. Somewhere there is a hidden error
in the experimental procedure. But it may be that we now have
an answer to this criticism, since it has been found that certain
animal instincts (particularly "homing") are more precise
and dependable when exercised by the younger animals, who have
had little opportunity to use them, than by the older animals
of the same species which have had a great deal of experience.
(63) It is evident,
therefore, that the exercise of an instinct may lead in some
instances rather to its decay than to its improvement. The decay
of a genuine faculty is therefore possible.
With regard to the possibility
of one mind acting upon another mind at a distance, a remarkable
example, discovered quite by accident, was reported in Science.
(64) It has been known for many years that the alpha
brain wave, which is recorded when the eyes are open, is
very characteristically changed when the eyes are closed. The
difference presumably stems from the fact that closing the eyes
shuts off one avenue of sensory awareness. An experiment was
performed in which the alpha brain wave was being recorded
simultaneously, but independently, from two identical twins who
were in separate rooms. To the surprise of the investigators,
it was found that if one twin closed his eyes, thus changing
the characteristic form of his alpha waves, the wave form
being recorded from the other twin independently responded with
precisely the same change whether his eyes were open or closed.
The discovery naturally created a lot of discussion and in one
of the letters which appeared in a subsequent issue of Science
the criticisms appear almost pathetic. Although no further
reports have been published to my knowledge, it must appear to
any unbiased mind that the original experiments were conducted
in a truly scientific manner and that the discovery is a potent
argument for the existence of some force which is non-physical
and can cause an interaction between two minds separated in space
without any other means of communication. Evidently there is
something more in the constitution of man. Man is not merely
a system of sticks and strings.
We are clearly living in exciting
times, when a change of opinion is
63. Ardrey, Robert, ref.24, p.127.
64. Duane, D. T., and Thomas Behrendt, "Extrasensory Electroencephalographic
Induction Between Identical Twins," Nature, vol.150,
1965, p.367, and Letters to the Editor, subsequently Nature,
vol.150, 1965, p.1240-1244.
taking place in a critical
area of scientific research. The reductionist's edifice is showing
weaknesses in its foundations. But those who would seek to escape
the responsibility of what they are and who lightly set aside
the possibility of survival through death into a Judgment to
come, because they make a direct appeal to the scientifically
based philosophy of reductionism, are gradually being left without
excuse. We do not need proof from science that an essential part
of individual identity, once it has been generated by experience
through the medium of nerve activity, can thereafter continue
to exist in its own right, for Scripture makes this abundantly
clear. But the denial of such a possibility by a rational appeal
to scientific philosophy has not been a healthy thing for man
and it has left him with a dis-ease which he finds himself unable
to heal, because of his refusal to recognize its cause.
Copyright © 1988 Evelyn White. All rights
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