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We ask Jimmy Akin, apologist and host of Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World, whether there is a Catholic way to understand the mind. Jimmy reviews some of the current thinking about what the mind is, and explains what a Catholic can, and cannot, accept.
Cy Kellett:
What is a mind anyway? Jimmy Akin is next. Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host, very glad you are here with us. Hey, right up front, let me just say if you could maybe like and subscribe if you’re watching on YouTube, that really helps to grow the podcast. If you’re listening on one of the podcast services, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, then this would be a great time to subscribe so you’ll be notified as new episodes come out and if you’re willing, give us that five-star review and a few nice words. That helps to grow the podcast.
Cy Kellett:
This time, we talk with Jimmy Akin about the mind. One of the strange things about being humans is we can’t exactly for sure say what we are. We get a lot of insight from faith. We get a lot of insight from reason. God has revealed certain things to us through the scriptures and through the person of Jesus and the prophets and all that about what it is to be a human, but essentially we are mysteries to ourselves. We come very close to the mystery. We kind of get a sense of how intense the mystery of our own selves is when we start to try to answer the question, “What is my mind?” In the modern era, there has been a tendency to drift towards a materialist view of the mind, but even many what you might call hardcore materialists are realizing more and more that there’s problems with how would a material or even a set of material realities create what is clearly a nonmaterial thing called the mind and how would they interact with one another.
Cy Kellett:
So as the materialist view still struggles for its answers, it hasn’t lost its confidence. The materialists are fully confident they know that the mind is a product of the brain and the brain is a product of evolution and on and on. They know all that stuff even though they can’t explain how or why. So who do you ask about this kind of stuff? When I have questions like this, I ask Jimmy Akin and I thought maybe you’d enjoy a conversation with Jimmy about what does Christianity have to say about the mind. How can it help us kind of find our place on the spectrum of modern different theories of mind? What can we say for sure and what can we say is definitely not true about the mind? Here’s what Jimmy had to say.
Cy Kellett:
Jimmy Akin, thanks for doing this with us.
Jimmy Akin:
Oh, my pleasure, Cy Kellett.
Cy Kellett:
The mind, it’s a terrible thing to waste. I don’t know what it is however. Is there anybody who knows what the mind is?
Jimmy Akin:
Well we all have an intuitive experience of what the mind is because we all have one, and it’s not just something that we talk about in English. Every culture in the world has terms for what we would call the mind, and the terms vary a little bit and they can overlap. Even in English, we have differences between the mind and consciousness and reason and those all overlap in different ways, but they’re all-
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
… gesturing at the same thing. Other languages have that too. There are a bunch of different terms in Greek that refer to different parts of the mind or that overlap in this way. It’s a human universal. It occurs in every culture and every language. There’s some way of talking about mental phenomena and how they’re different from the physical phenomena we see in the world around us.
Cy Kellett:
The mind is not identical with the self, but we think of ourself as indistinguishable from our mind.
Jimmy Akin:
Well certainly our mental phenomena seemed to be essential to us in a way that other things aren’t.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
I mean I can cut my fingernails, I could trim my hair-
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
… and I still feel like I’m the same person, but if I didn’t have my mind, if I had your mind, I wouldn’t be the same person.
Cy Kellett:
No. Right.
Jimmy Akin:
So it does seem that the mind is particularly essential to us.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So I would guess that if I were to say to you is there a Christian theory of the mind, you would say there’s no official one. Is that correct or is there?
Jimmy Akin:
I think it’s going to depend on what you mean.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
There’s not a specific highly detailed theory-
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
… that all Christians would be expected to adhere to. There’s questions that there can be differences of opinion on, ironically since opinions are mental things.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
But there are certain basic things about the mind that not only are church teaching and essential to the Christian faith, but that have been infallibly defined.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
For example, the Council of Vienna back in the 1300s infallibly defined that the rational soul is the form of the human body. This was something that there was a debate at the time about is that the case or not. What is the form of the body? Here, by form, we don’t simply mean shape.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Right. This is a tough one.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, this is a term that goes back to Greek philosophy and specifically to Plato, but the way Plato and Aristotle … They had different ideas about it, but basically a form in this sense is like the principle of the body.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
It’s what keeps the body together, makes it alive, things like that. There was a debate in Medieval philosophy about what exactly is the form or principle that integrates and makes alive the human body. Now, we have scriptural precedents for this where, for example, the letter to James says that as the body without the spirit is dead, so is faith without works dead. So that-
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
… represents our spirit is what makes our body alive, our soul, and so consequently, Christian philosophers over the next 1300 years would discuss exactly how does our spirit relate to our body and they brought in the idea of forms from Plato and Aristotle which they found helpful in articulating this. But there was a discussion about do our bodies have just one form, and you had different opinions on that. They would also look at other creatures, plants and animals and so forth, and say, “Well they’re alive too. If it’s the soul that makes our body alive, well that would suggest that plants and animals would have souls too since they’re also alive.” So they began to talk about the different kinds of forms or souls that these other creatures would have, and they would say, “Okay. Well plants can grow and reproduce so they would have what’s called vegetative soul-”
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
“… that lets them grow and reproduce. Then animals go beyond just growth and reproduction. They also have the ability to sense things and so they had what’s called a sensitive soul because they have senses like vision and-”
Cy Kellett:
Right. Right.
Jimmy Akin:
“… smell and so forth. Then humans, because we have the gift of reason, have what’s called a rational soul.” So you had some philosophers, and Thomas Aquinas would be an example of this, who would say, “Well humans have only one soul and it incorporates the functions of reason and sensation and growth and reproduction. So it includes all of the functions, but it’s just this one form.”
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
Other philosophers like John Duns Scotus, for example, would say, “No, actually the human body has more than one form.” So Scotus in fact would even say each one of our organs has its own form because they all have different functions-
Cy Kellett:
Right. Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
… and they’re distinct from each other and they’re integrated somehow. Then the Council of Vienna comes along and says, “Okay. Here’s how. Regardless of how many forms you think are in the human body and whether each organ has its own form or not, it’s the rational soul that integrates everything and makes us alive. So if that leaves, you’re dead and your body starts deteriorating.”
Cy Kellett:
Now as I hear you say this, it occurs to me that the modern kind of physicalist or materialist tendency would maybe be incapable of hearing any of that, would say, “There’s no spirit that keeps us alive. Life is just physical processes and when the physical processes cease, I’m not alive anymore.” So how do we … Are we just talking past one another? Because we don’t deny that, that physical processes are keeping us alive.
Jimmy Akin:
There are different views on this. In philosophy, the area that studies this is called philosophy of mind or at least the part that we’re dealing with with the mind.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
There are different views within that. Sort of the three basic views are called idealism, dualism, and materialism. Idealism says that what’s ultimately real are the mental phenomena and physical matter is just derivative of mental phenomena. So mind is fundamental. Then materialism says no, matter is what’s fundamental and mind is some kind of property of physical matter or at least it can arise from physical matter, but ultimately matter is all that’s real. Then dualism says no, both are real. There’s both mental phenomena and physical phenomena. Mind and matter are real and they’re two different things, but even within that, there’s a discussion of what mental phenomena are. One view is called substance dualism and it holds that the mind is a separate substance from matter. It’s made of fundamentally different stuff.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
The other alternative within dualism is called property dualism. Property dualism holds that mental phenomena are not a separate substance from matter, but they are a property that emerges from matter. So if you have a physical system that’s complex enough and of the right kind, it will give rise to mental phenomena. So this is how property dualist who are materialists would account for the mind. They’d say it’s an emergent property. That’s something that I guess we can clarify fairly easily what an emergent property is. An emergent property is something that emerges from lower phenomena that don’t have that trait. For example, your shirt is blue.
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Jimmy Akin:
But if you zoomed into the level of atoms, none of the atoms are blue.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
What blueness is is it’s a quality of a set of atoms that reflect blue light.
Cy Kellett:
Got it. Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
So blueness is an emergent property from the way the atoms in your shirt are arranged, but none of those atoms are themselves blue. In the same way, an emergentist with the mind would say, “Well if you get atoms together in the right shape, they can not only be blue, but they could also give rise to consciousness,” and that’s what our brains do.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So of the three main ones, before we distinguish or get into the two types of dualism, of the three main ones, the materialism, idealism, or dualism, it seems to me from what you’ve said from what the church has declared that the Christian can neither be a materialist nor an idealist.
Jimmy Akin:
I don’t know that it’s quite that simple.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
What the church teaches is that there’s a real difference between the material world and the spiritual world.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
But if you wanted to say there’s some underlying thing that accounts for both, that’s a question I don’t think the church has addressed. As long as you say, “No, no, there is a real difference between body and spirit,” exactly how you explain that difference is something that I don’t think the church has a definitive teaching on.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. The other thing just from your description of those three things is I get the sense as you describe it-
Jimmy Akin:
Although obviously souls are not made of atoms.
Cy Kellett:
Right. So the materialist view would be out?
Jimmy Akin:
Well the materialist view is definitely out, yes.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
Although interestingly, there was a set of experiments performed 100 to 200 years ago where they attempted to weigh the soul. What they did was they had people who were alive and then they died and they measured the weight of the person before and after that on the idea that if you soul is something that departs, maybe we can measure how much it weighs. If I recall, I think they came … I’d have to look it up, but if I recall correctly, I think they concluded it weighs like a few grams, like maybe the weight of a piece of bread. Then further study revealed, no, this isn’t because of the soul departing. Your weight actually does change because of how gases and things like that work.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right. Okay. Okay. Whether you took an idealist then or a dualist view, just the fact that you have to have these very kind of high level philosophical distinctions made constantly and it requires so much work suggests an intimacy between the physical and the spiritual. Do you see what I’m saying?
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
They’re so close that it’s very hard to make the distinction.
Jimmy Akin:
Well it’s hard to define exactly what the distinction is.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. Fair enough.
Jimmy Akin:
But I think that we all have an intuitive experience of mental phenomena that they’re quite different than physical phenomena. I mean if I have the idea in my mind of a 12-inch ruler, my thought is not 12 inches long.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
So there’s very clearly a difference between mental things and what they represent in the physical world.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
Also, we only have immediate access to our own thoughts, at least under normal circumstances, whereas we have common access to the world around us. So there are clear differences between mental phenomena and nonmental phenomena. One thing that a lot of people think about when they’re thinking about the difference between mind and body is there’s kind of a native tendency to think about them as being radically separate.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right.
Jimmy Akin:
A ghost in the machine-
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Jimmy Akin:
… is a common example, but if you try to hold that rigorously and say, “Well the body just has nothing to do with the mind. Maybe the body is the mind’s puppet-”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right.
Jimmy Akin:
“… but that’s all there is to it,” you find out no, that’s not the case because you can do things to alter the brain, for example, that will then produce different mental phenomena. There’s a famous case from back in the 1800s of a guy who was a railroad worker and there was an accident and he had a railroad spike driven through his head. He survived, but it damaged parts of his brain that changed his personality. So he previously had been a thoughtful, responsible guy. Now, he was very irritable and irresponsible.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
There are other things that can happen like when a person has a stroke-
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
… can affect their ability to use language or things like that. There’s a part of the brain called Wernicke’s area. It’s kind of right about here and it deals with the ability to process language. So people who have damage to Wernicke’s area have trouble responding appropriately to questions.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
This is a phenomena known as Wernicke’s aphasia. So for example if you said to me, “How do you like being here in San Diego,” and if I had Wernicke’s aphasia, I might say, “Yes, I am.” I wouldn’t be-
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
… adequately processing what you’d said to me. So it’s clear that you can make changes to the body that will affect mental function, but that’s nothing new. We’ve known that since forever.
Cy Kellett:
Sure, yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
I mean as far back as human history.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
Obviously when our bodies get tired, things happen with our minds.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
Similarly, people have been ingesting substances of interesting natures-
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right. I forgot about that.
Jimmy Akin:
… all the way down through human history whether it’s alcohol or [inaudible 00:18:08] or opium or whatever it may be and it’s very clear that you introduce certain physical substances into the body, it’s going to alter mental function. So the Medieval philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas for example were well aware of this and St. Thomas Aquinas held that there was a very tight union between the mind and the body such that the mind didn’t require the brain or the body for its existence, but in this life and under natural circumstances, it would require them for its function. So on Aquinas’s view, once you die, your mind continues to exist and can still reason, but it no longer has the physical structure of the body and the senses to feed it new data. So it needs God to infuse data into it.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
So that’s St. Thomas Aquinas’s explanation for how the saints are aware of our prayers because they don’t have physical senses anymore. So God has to infuse the information into them. Now, that’s not the only theory. You could suppose also that the mind has an equivalent of the senses that it can use so it’s not exclusively dependent on God for direct download. It maybe has the ability to sense some things on its own, but nevertheless there is, and this has been recognized in Christian thought all the way down, that there is a very close relationship between the mind and the body.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So if Thomas sees this all the way back in the-
Jimmy Akin:
1200s.
Cy Kellett:
… 1200s, but this is a problem … I just want to tell you today, you have people like the neuroscientists and intellectual Sam Harris-
Jimmy Akin:
Is he a neuroscientist?
Cy Kellett:
I don’t know. I thought so. I thought he had a degree in neuroscience.
Jimmy Akin:
Might have to look that up.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
But he’s certainly a materialist and a skeptic.
Cy Kellett:
Right. So he says most scientists who study the human mind are convinced that minds are the product of brains and brains are the product of evolution. Now, that suggests to me that modern science doesn’t credit what Aquinas would say is this … Sure, obviously the brain matters to the functioning of the mind because, as you just said, it’s as if the existence or maybe it is the case that the mind exists without the brain and the body, but it doesn’t function without them. It needs them to function properly, but it seems to me that Harris is missing that completely and saying no, it’s obvious because you touch this part of the brain, you get this effect, that the brain produces the mind. So how do we maybe break down that wall of misunderstanding?
Jimmy Akin:
So there are three basic ways of doing it at least that occur to me. The first one is we can bring faith-based data to the discussion. I mean scripture teaches that the soul exists and that it’s distinct from the body, but Harris isn’t going to buy that because he’s an atheist.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
So that’s not the most productive line of discussion. The second would be philosophical discussion and you can argue, as philosophers both Christian and non-Christian have, that this is a real distinction and that we need to take substance dualism seriously. Harris has already … I don’t know the extent to which he studied those, those arguments, but if he has, he hasn’t found them persuasive. Now, of course whether you can convince Sam Harris, I mean he’s considered one of the four horsemen of the new atheist apocalypse.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right. Right.
Jimmy Akin:
So he’s pretty committed to his position. I don’t know that you could ever convince him, but in principle, you could approach someone on purely secular terms and say, “No, let’s consider this philosophically,” and you could try to establish it that way. Then there is another … Now, there’s a problem there because he’s talking about scientists and actually scientists are all over the map. I mean there are a lot of Christian scientists not in the [crosstalk 00:22:40].
Cy Kellett:
People who are scientists, yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
There are Jewish scientists. There are Muslim, Hindu scientists. There’s lots of scientists who don’t have a problem with this, but for those who are materialists, there’s another approach. Let’s science. Let’s see whether the science actually supports that you can explain everything in purely material terms. There are problems there. One of the problems is what’s known as the hard problem of consciousness because it’s clear that consciousness exists and we have absolutely no idea how to begin to explain it in scientific terms.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
You can say it’s an emergent property of matter the way the blueness of your shirt is.
Cy Kellett:
But you can’t show how it is.
Jimmy Akin:
We can’t show it is. We can for blueness. We cannot for consciousness.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
This is considered an extremely hard problem which is why it’s known as the hard problem of consciousness.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
But then you can go beyond that and you can say, “Well wait. If we could find things that we can document scientifically that cannot be explained simply by the brain, then that would give us evidence that the mind involves more than just the brain.”
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Jimmy Akin:
One example of this is scientific studies of near-death experiences.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, really?
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, because when someone has clinically dies, their heart stops beating and it therefore stops sending blood to their brain. Without blood pumping through the brain, the brain is not able to process information and it loses consciousness. So what some scientists have done like Sam [Parnia 00:24:22], he’s a medical doctor, is they’ve set up projects to study near-death experiences where people are in full cardiac arrest. So their heart is just stopped. There is no way for their brain to process information and they nevertheless are able to come back when they’re revived from clinical death. They’re able to come back with information that they shouldn’t have access to like, “I saw you or I heard you thinking about this while I was dead or I saw, my mind went to this other part of the hospital and I saw this happening.” They’ve even begun to do experiments where they will put an iPad showing images on its screen up on a shelf where the patient who’s down on the table cannot see it.
Cy Kellett:
Could not see it.
Jimmy Akin:
People report being above their bodies and looking down. Can they see anything that was on the iPad?
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Jimmy Akin:
So based on preliminary evidence, there is evidence that some people are able to come back with true information even though their brain was totally shut down.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
That would suggest that there’s more to the mind than just the brain. There are other experiments as well. Parapsychologists have various experiments that accomplish the same thing-
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
… even without the clinical death part, but it’s possible to do scientific studies that would indicate that the mind is not simply limited to the brain.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So even if Harris were correct, and I myself doubt whether he is, that scientists in general say that the mind is just the product of the brain-
Jimmy Akin:
Well materialist ones do.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right. But it’s in the nature of science to constantly be revising itself and you’re saying, “Okay. Let’s take the challenge. Let’s study. See what we can come up with.” So maybe just to kind of conclude because I do feel like of all that we’ve discussed, it’s such a fascinating problem, the image you gave from Thomas Aquinas of the existence and the functioning of the soul or of the mind being two different things. So it seems very, very helpful to me. I didn’t know either about that the church had kind of certain doctrinal definitions about this, of these matters. So what could we confidently say or what might a Christian say if someone said, “Well what do you Christians think about the mind? What is the human mind? What’s going on there? What is that?”
Jimmy Akin:
Well I’d say it’s a mystery that still has a lot to be explored, but from a Christian perspective, I’d say that the mind is not a purely … Is not a phenomenon that’s purely material or purely spiritual. It involves both. It’s at the intersection of our spirit and our body because there are aspects of mental function that will change when you change the body, but then there are also aspects of mental function that go beyond the body like in the near-death experience cases or our own experience of ourselves. It’s just different than our bodies.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Right. Okay. Thank you, Jimmy. I really appreciate you taking the time.
Jimmy Akin:
My pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
It’s a fascinating topic.
Cy Kellett:
I really enjoyed talking with Jimmy Akin about things. He thinks so deeply and so clearly about things. I found that very helpful myself. I wonder if you did. You can send us an email and let us know if that was helpful or if you need us to maybe dig down deeper on this or that. We love getting your emails, focus@catholic.com. Focus@catholic.com. As I said to Jimmy during the conversation, I really felt like the most helpful thing that he said in all of that or really helped me was what Aquinas had to say about the mind being the work of both the brain and the soul or the body and the soul, but the existence of the mind being one thing and its operation being another thing because we know that our mind can operate sometimes at a higher level, sometimes at a lower level. Sometimes it’s not operating at all when we go into deep, deep unconsciousness or at least it seems not to be operating at all. So the relationship between the soul, the rational soul, and the body is a very intimate one, each bringing out the capabilities of the other, when they are separated, not having the same full human capacities that we have.
Cy Kellett:
I found that one very helpful because that explains … Well first of all, it doesn’t get rid of my soul as the materialist wants to, but it explains many of the things or at least puts a framework around a possible explanation for many of the things that the materialist worries about like how can the mind be anything other than just physical because I know that if I poke the brain here, I get this reaction and if I shoot a little electricity there, I get that reaction. I can change emotions. I can even change personalities by making changes to the brain. I think Aquinas is very helpful in that. I found Jimmy very helpful in it. Again, love to hear from you. If you’d like to give us money to keep doing this, you can do so at givecatholic.com. Leave a little note that says why you gave the money. Givecatholic.com. We really appreciate it. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. We’ll see you next time right here on Catholic Answers Focus.