Is the human spir­it mere­ly the result of the evo­lu­tion of mat­ter?

Thomas Hen­ry Hux­ley, Dar­win’s friend wrote in 1863:

No one is more strong­ly con­vinced than I am of the vast­ness of the gulf between…man and brutes…for, he alone pos­sess­es the mar­vel­lous endow­ment of intel­li­gi­ble and ratio­nal speech [and]…stands raised upon it as on a moun­tain top, far above the lev­el of his hum­ble fel­lows, and trans­fig­ured from his gross­er nature by reflect­ing, here and there, a ray from the infi­nite source of truth.

Sev­er­al mate­ri­al­ist sci­en­tists try to explain the high­est spir­i­tu­al process­es, includ­ing self-aware­ness and con­scious­ness as being only the result of bio­chem­i­cal reac­tions. They are called reduc­tion­ists, because they reduce the whole real­i­ty to the lev­el of mate­r­i­al process­es. But there are many oth­er sci­ence experts who do not belong to this cat­e­go­ry, who are aware of the lim­its of sci­ence, who speak about “the won­der and mys­tery of the human self with its spir­i­tu­al val­ues, with its cre­ativ­i­ty, and with its unique­ness for each of us”, like John C. Eccles, Nobel prize win­ner neu­ro­sci­en­tist.¹ He rejects the mate­ri­al­ist reduc­tion­ism and, in co-oper­a­tion with the philoso­pher Sir Karl Pop­per, holds the dual­ist-inter­ac­tion­ist the­o­ry, which says that the Self con­trols its brain while in a close inter­ac­tion they act on one anoth­er.

…the anthrop­ic prin­ci­ple achieves a new dimen­sion in the com­ing-to-be of each of us as unique self-con­scious beings. It is this tran­scen­dence that has been the motive of my life’s work, cul­mi­nat­ing in the effort to under­stand the brain in order to present the mind-brain prob­lem in sci­en­tif­ic terms. I main­tain that the human mys­tery is incred­i­bly demeaned by sci­en­tif­ic reduc­tion­ism, with its claim in promis­so­ry mate­ri­al­ism to account even­tu­al­ly for all of the spir­i­tu­al world in terms of pat­terns of neu­ronal activ­i­ty. This belief must be classed as a super­sti­tion.²

He sees no ten­sion between his life’s sci­en­tif­ic work and the belief in the exis­tence of spir­i­tu­al real­i­ty unap­proach­able for sci­ence:

Since mate­ri­al­ist solu­tions fail to account for our expe­ri­enced unique­ness, I am con­strained to attribute the unique­ness of the Self or Soul to a super­nat­ur­al spir­i­tu­al cre­ation. To give the expla­na­tion in the­o­log­i­cal terms: each Soul is a new Divine cre­ation.…³

We may con­clude by say­ing that bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion tran­scends itself in pro­vid­ing the mate­r­i­al basis, the human brain, for self-con­scious beings whose very nature is to seek for hope and to enquire for mean­ing in the quest for love, truth and beau­ty.⁴

I here express my efforts to under­stand with deep humil­i­ty a self, myself, as an expe­ri­enc­ing being. I offer it in the hope that we human selves may dis­cov­er a trans­form­ing faith in the mean­ing and sig­nif­i­cance of this won­der­ful adven­ture that each of us is giv­en on this salu­bri­ous Earth of ours, each with our won­der­ful brain, which is ours to con­trol and use for our mem­o­ry and enjoy­ment and cre­ativ­i­ty and with love for oth­er human selves.⁵

John Eccles’ opin­ion about death is:

we can regard the death of the body and brain as dis­so­lu­tion of our dual­ist exis­tence. Hope­ful­ly, the lib­er­at­ed soul will find anoth­er future of even deep­er mean­ing and more entranc­ing expe­ri­ences, per­haps in some renewed embod­ied existence…in accord with tra­di­tion­al Chris­t­ian teach­ing.⁶

What is con­scious­ness? If it is noth­ing but chem­istry, mere­ly the func­tion of some mol­e­c­u­lar struc­tures in the brain, who is the “I” who expe­ri­ences the real­i­ty? John Sear­le, mod­ern philoso­pher, writes:

I’m con­scious, I AM con­scious. We could dis­cov­er all kinds of star­tling things about our­selves and our behav­iour; but we can­not dis­cov­er that we do not have minds, that they do not con­tain con­scious, sub­jec­tive, inten­tion­al­is­tic men­tal states; nor could we dis­cov­er that we do not at least try to engage in vol­un­tary, free, inten­tion­al actions.⁷

Descartes, often regard­ed as the father of mod­ern phi­los­o­phy, sug­gest­ed that from our direct expe­ri­ence we know that mind exists and through obser­va­tion and rea­son­ing we per­ceive that mat­ter exists, too. “I think there­fore I am.” He thought there is a con­stant inter­ac­tion between body and mind in a cer­tain uni­ty of the human indi­vid­ual.

I am not lodged in my body as a pilot in a ves­sel, but that I am besides so inti­mate­ly con­joined, and as it were inter­mixed with it, that my mind and body com­pose a cer­tain uni­ty. For if this were not the case, I should not feel pain when my body is hurt, see­ing I am mere­ly a think­ing thing, but should per­ceive the wound by the under­stand­ing alone, just as a pilot per­ceives by sight when any part of his ves­sel is dam­aged.⁸

The Carte­sian dual­ist view has been main­tained and devel­oped in the twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry by sev­er­al sci­en­tists and philoso­phers. Nobel prize-win­ning neu­ro-sci­en­tist C. S. Sher­ring­ton laid the foun­da­tions for the under­stand­ing of the oper­a­tion of the brain. One of his most notable pupil, the Cana­di­an neu­ro­sur­geon Wilder Pen­field start­ed his brain stud­ies as a mate­ri­al­ist, but reached the con­clu­sion that:

It is eas­i­er to ratio­nal­ize man’s being on the basis of two ele­ments than on the basis of one.⁹

We do not want to enter in details in dif­fer­ent mind-the­o­ries, only to point out that real sci­ence can not deny the spir­i­tu­al val­ues of man, but the mate­ri­al­is­tic-reduc­tion­ist con­cep­tion of human nature dan­ger­ous­ly reduces his worth, as Roger W. Sper­ry (Nobel prize win­ner) observed:

Before sci­ence, man used to think him­self a free agent pos­sess­ing free will. Sci­ence gives us, instead, causal deter­min­ism where­in every act is seen to fol­low inevitably from pre­ced­ing pat­terns of brain exci­ta­tion. Where we used to see pur­pose and mean­ing in human behav­iour, sci­ence now shows us a com­plex bio-phys­i­cal machine com­posed entire­ly of mate­r­i­al ele­ments, all of which obey inex­orably the uni­ver­sal laws of physics and chem­istry.… I find that my own con­cep­tu­al work­ing mod­el of the brain leads to infer­ences that are in direct dis­agree­ment with many of the fore­go­ing; espe­cial­ly I must take issue with that whole gen­er­al mate­ri­al­is­tic-reduc­tion­ist con­cep­tion of human nature and mind that seems to emerge from the cur­rent­ly pre­vail­ing objec­tive ana­lyt­ic approach in the brain-behav­iour sci­ences. When we are led to favour the impli­ca­tions of mod­ern mate­ri­al­ism in oppo­si­tion to old­er, more ide­al­is­tic val­ues in these and relat­ed mat­ters, I sus­pect that sci­ence may have sold soci­ety and itself a some­what ques­tion­able bill of goods.¹⁰

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1. John C. Eccles, How the Self Con­trols Its Brain, Springer-Ver­lag, 1994, pp. 33, 176. ↩
2. John C. Eccles, Evo­lu­tion of the Brain, Cre­ation of the Self, Rout­ledge, 1989, p. 241. ↩
3. Evo­lu­tion of the Brain, p. 237. ↩
4. Evo­lu­tion of the Brain, p. 243. ↩
5. How the Self Con­trols Its Brain, pp. 180–181. ↩
6. Evo­lu­tion of the Brain, p. 242. ↩
7. John Sear­le, Minds, Brains and Sci­ence, 1984. ↩
8. René Descartes, Med­i­ta­tions, 1641. ↩
9. Wilder Pen­field, The Mys­tery of the Mind, 1975. ↩
10. Sper­ry, Roger W., Mind, Brain, and Human­ist Val­ues, Bul­letin of the Atom­ic Sci­en­tists, Sep­tem­ber, 1966, pp. 2–3. ↩