Berkeley and authority over bodies

A friend asked me how Berkeley can be refuted. I am fond of ethical insights as epistemically primary. Here is an ethical insight: I have a special authority over my body. But on Berkeley’s view, my body is co-constituted by my ideas and everybody else’s ideas. My ideas are a part of me, yours are a part of you, and so my body is partly constituted by my parts and partly by your parts, Now it is difficult to see why I have special authority over it.

One might say that I have more in the way of perceptions of my body than you do, because I have kinesthetic sensation, introspection, etc. While that is typically true, it is only typically true. If you are doing neurosurgery on me, and I am unconscious, then my body is not constituted at all by my ideas at the time, and you have a lot of perceptions of my body that I never do.

Disconnected bodies and lives

We can imagine what it is like for a living to have a spatially disconnected body. First, if we are made of point particles, we all are spatially disconnected. Second, when a gecko is attacked, it can shed a tail. That tail then continues wiggling for a while in order to distract the pursuer. A good case can be made that the gecko’s shed tail remains a part of the gecko’s body while it is wiggling. After all, it continues to be biologically active in support of the gecko’s survival. Third, there is the metaphysical theory on which sperm remains a part of the male even after it is emitted.

But even if all these theories are wrong, we should have very little difficulty in understanding what it would mean for a living thing to have a spatially disconnected body.

What about a living thing having a temporally disconnected life? Again, I think it is not so difficult. It could be the case that when an insect is frozen, it ceases to live (or exist), but then comes back to life when defrosted. And even if that’s not the case, we understand what it would mean for this to be the case.

But so far this regarded external space and external time. What about internally spatially disconnected bodies and internally temporally disconnected lives? The gecko’s tail and sperm examples work just as well for internal as well as external space. So there is no conceptual difficulty about a living thing having a disconnected body in its inner space.

But it is much more difficult to imagine how an organism could have an internal-time disconnect in its life. Suppose the organism ceases to exist and then comes back into existence. It seems that its internal time is uninterrupted by the external-time interval of non-existence. An external-time interval of non-existence seems to be simply a case of forward time-travel, and time-travel does not induce disconnectes in internal time. Granted, the organism may have some different properties when it comes back into existence—for instance, its neural system might be damaged. But that’s just a matter of an instantaneous change in the neural system rather than of a disconnect in internal time. (Note that internal time is different from subjective time. When we go under general anesthesia, internal time keeps on flowing, but subjective time pauses. Plants have internal time but don’t have subjective time.)

This suggests an interesting apparent difference between internal time and internal space: spatial discontinuities are possible but temporal ones are not.

This way of formulating the difference is misleading, however, if some version of four-dimensionalism is correct. The gecko’s tail in my story is four-dimensional. This four-dimensional thing is connected to the four-dimensional thing that is the rest of the gecko’s body. There is no disconnection in the gecko from a four-dimensional perspective. (The point particle case is more complicated. Topologically, the internal space will be disconnected, but I think that’s not the relevant notion of disconnection.)

This suggests an interesting pair of hypotheses:

• If three-dimensionalism is true, there is a disanalogy between internal time and internal space with respect to living things at least, in that internal spatial disconnection of a living thing is possible but internal temporal disconnection of a living thing is not possible.

• If four-dimensionalism is true, then living things are always internally spatiotemporally connected.

But maybe these are just contingent truths Terry Pratchett has a character who is a witch with two spatially disconnected bodies. As far as the book says, she’s always been that way. And that seems possible to me. So maybe the four-dimensional hypothesis is only contingently true.

And maybe God could make a being that lives two lives, each in a different century, with no internal temporal connection between them? If so, then the three-dimensional hypothesis is also only contingently true.

I am not going anywhere with this. Just thinking about the options. And not sure what to think.

Brains and animalism

Animalists hold that we are animals. It is widely accepted by animalists that if a brain were removed from a body, and the body kept alive, the person would stay with the bulk of the body rather than go with the brain.

I wonder how much of the intuition is based on irrelevant questions of physical bulk. Imagine aliens who are giant brains with tiny support organs—lungs, heart, legs, etc.—dwarfed by the brain. I think we might have the intuition that if the brain were disconnected from the support organs, the animal would go with the brain. In the case of beings that dwarf their brains, it feels natural to talk of a certain operation as a brain transplant. But in the case of beings that are almost all brain, the analogous operation would probably be referred to as a support-system transplant. Yet surely we should say exactly the same thing metaphysically about us and the aliens, assuming that the functional roles of the brains and the other organs are sufficiently similar.

This isn't a positive argument that we'd go with our brains. It's just an argument to defuse the intuition that we wouldn't.

What about cerebra? Here's a widely shared intuition. If the cerebrum is removed from the skull of an animal and placed in a life-support vat, the animal stays with the rest of the body.

But now suppose that we granted that the animal goes with the whole brain. Let's say, then, that I am an animal and sadly become a brain in a life-support vat, losing the rest of my body. Suppose that next my brain is cut and the upper and lower brains are placed in separate life-support vats. It does not seem particularly plausible to think that the animal goes with the lower brain. (Maybe the animal dies, or maybe it goes with the upper brain.) So once we've granted that the animal would go with the brain, the primacy of the lower brain for animal identity seems somewhat undermined.

Maybe, though, one could accept both (a) the common intuition that if the cerebrum were removed the human animal would go with the rest of its body, and (b) my intuition that if the human animal were first reduced to a brain, and the brain then cut into the cerebrum and lower brain, the animal would go with the cerebrum. There is no logical contradiction between these two intuitions. Compare this. I have a loaf of bread. Imagine the loaf marked off into five equally sized segments A, B, C, D and E. If I first cut off the 2/5 of the loaf marked D and E, it's plausible that the loaf shrinks to the ABC part, and DE is a new thing. And then if I cut off C, the same loaf shrinks once again, to AB. On the other hand if I start off by cutting off the AB chunk, the loaf shrinks to CDE. So the order of cutting determines whether the original loaf ends up being identical to AB or to something else. (We can also make a similar example using some plant or fungus if we prefer a living example.) Likewise, the order of cutting could determine whether the animal ends up being just a cerebrum (first remove brain, then cut brain into upper and lower parts) or whether it ends up being a cerebrumless body.

We might have a rough general principle: The animal when cut in two tends to go with the functionally more important part. Thus, perhaps, when the human animal is cut into a brain and a rest-of-body, it goes with the brain, as the brain is functionally more important in the brainier animals. When that brain is subsequently cut into upper and lower brains, the brainy animal goes with the upper brain, as that's functionally more important given its distinctively brainy methods for survival. On the other hand, if the human animal is cut into a cerebrum and a cerebrumless-rest-of-body, perhaps (I am actually far from sure about this) the animal goes with the cerebrumless-rest-of-body, because although the upper brain is more important functionally than a lower brain, the lower brain plus the rest of the body are collectively more important than the upper brain by itself. So the order of surgery matters to identity.

It is not good for a man to be alone

Christ is in heaven, with a glorified body. Glorification does not destroy what is essentially human. A glorified body, thus, has a mouth, eyes, ears, and all that. There is more to it than that. But what normal human beings have, Christ has in heaven. But there would be something unnatural, something lacking in the glorification, if Christ had a mouth and ears, but there was no fellow human being there for him to talk to. Our bodies exist in large part for interaction with others (that our bodies are signs of our being-for-others is a central insight of John Paul II's theology of the body). A single embodied human being just does not make all that much sense.

But if there is a fellow human being in heaven for Christ to be in human communion with, then who is this fellow human being? It is right and proper to confer honor upon our parents. Thus, his mother is a very plausible candidate. There would be something unfitting about his conferring that honor on someone other than his mother, and not on his mother, given the commandment of filial devotion, unless his mother were not a disciple of his—which, the Christian tradition insists, she was. (Indeed, I think it is right to read the New Testament as presenting her as the paradigmatic disciple.)

Objection 1: This argument proves too much. For a glorified body also includes reproductive organs, and so a parallel argument would show that to live a full, glorified human life requires reproduction.

Response: Probably, reproduction is only a natural function of a human being for a limited portion of the human being's life. Moreover, there is a way in which we can transcend the physically reproductive life through spiritual reproduction—through devoting our lives in celibacy to spreading the Gospel. But some form of bodily interaction with other human beings—whether through talking or hugging or just looking in another's eyes—seems essential to a naturally fulfilling human life at just about all its mature (and maybe even immature) stages.

Objection 2: The need for bodily communion is satisfied through Christ's giving of himself to us bodily in the Eucharist.

Response: Christ's giving of himself to us in the Eucharist does not seem to make use of any of the natural faculties of his glorified body. There is a kind of natural bodily communion with others that is called for.

Objection 3: Mary survived at least some time past Christ's ascension into heaven. So if Mary is the only one assumed into heaven, for a while Christ was bodily alone in heaven, only surrounded spiritually by the souls of those he brought out of Sheol.

Response: Maybe then we have to say that more people were assumed bodily into heaven. Moses and Elijah are good candidates on Scriptural grounds. But the argument that it would unfitting for Mary not to be assumed as well if anybody is, given the special honor to be paid to parents, still remains. Or, maybe, we should say that there is nothing deeply unnatural in a human being's being alone for a while, even for a couple of years. But to be alone for a significantly greater amount of time would be unnatural.

Objection 4: Maybe time runs at a different rate in heaven, and it'll only be five minutes of heavenly time between Christ's ascension into heaven and the Last Judgment.

Response: Could be. I think such a difference in the rate of time, though, weakens the way in which Christ is in human communion with us. But I acknowledge that the different-rate hypothesis is a viable one, and hence weakens the argument.

Fittingness arguments, like the one I offer, are not meant to be conclusive. But they do increase the probability of the claim. Or, at least, the argument could help explain why it is that the doctrine of Mary's assumption is not something weird, unexpected and ad hoc, if the doctrine actually can be seen as helping to solve a genuine problem, the problem of Christ's bodily aloneness.