Thinking

There are quite a few authors and researchers today who say that our self-awareness is an illusion. They say that a critical mass of advanced human brain neurons and cultural mental tools such as language and mathematics co-evolved to produce a sense of self.

I thought it might be helpful to share a kind of intellectual “selfie” about my mistakes in thinking about consciousness and the immaterial or spiritual. Fr. Conrad Dietz, a professor of Metaphysics and Epistemology, once told his students that it is most difficult to think abstractly. In other words, not just to use images but to think. Ironically, most, if not all, my mistakes in thinking about consciousness and the immaterial was a failure to think abstractly.

When I was teaching high school religion in the 1980's I wanted to give some “proof” to my students of a non-material or spiritual aspect to human life. They were asked to imagine a picture. Then I declared that no chemical or surgical process could “find” that picture in their brain. I was wrong. 

The image we call to mind is as physical as the object imagined. If you dissect a computer's memory storage you will not see the images stored. If you have the right connection to a display monitor you will see the image. Research with brain imaging techniques such as MRIs detail how certain areas of the brain become active in correspondence to an image. As an aside, with this type of investigation, they have discovered that so-called vegetative patients can communicate by thinking of an image.

Having realized what St. Thomas Aquinas already taught in the 1200's (memory is physical), I tried to refine my example. Confidently admitting my earlier teaching error, I proposed a new comparison. On one hand, here is a computer and a monitor that is displaying an image. On the other hand, once more call to mind a picture. Different equipment but a comparable result. Then I delivered the mental “punch line”: Who is looking at the image on the monitor or who is looking at the picture in your brain? A subject must be viewing the images.

I mentioned my new improved image to Charles DeCelles, a retired professor from Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His response was basically that yes, we call something to mind AND THEN WE THINK ABOUT IT. Slowly, I realized that he had freed me from an illusion.

Do not animals see images displayed by the optic nerve? (I am reminded of another foolish forgetting of basic Catholic wisdom, again back in my 1980's teaching. A young student said animals have souls. I defensively jumped to the conclusion that she was elevating animals to the moral level of human life – which some people do – and I quickly answered that they did not. Yet Catholic theologians have held that animals do have souls – a mortal physical soul that ceases by death.) Professor DeCelles threw me back to my earliest training by Professor Dietz – we must think abstractly.

As humans we experience with our senses but we think about the universe with our intellect. Cats and humans can both be physically awake or conscious. Consciousness is not the same as thinking. Self-consciousness or self-awareness differs from merely being awake. And self-awareness is necessary for the process that you are now engaged in – reflection. And self-reflection is necessary for what I hope we are now engaged in – thinking. Thinking is not calling images to mind or even the review of past experience. Thinking occurs when we abstract from experience to arrive at a principle. If someone says that there is no intellect and free will in Man then they are using that intellect to abstract a principle.

Our spiritual intellect and free will depends on the body for information and mental tools. But as spiritual we can make a judgment about reality and a resolution to act according to that judgment. In City of God, book XI, #26 (italics mine) St. Augustine not only dismisses doubt about our existence but affirms our individual soul: “But, without any delusive representation of images or phantasms, I am most certain that I am, and that I know and (I) delight in this. In respect of these truths, I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the Academicians who say, What if you are deceived? For if I am deceived, I am... And, consequently, neither am I deceived in knowing that I know. For, as I know that I am, so I know this also, that I know. And when I love these two things, I add to them a certain third thing, namely, my love which is of equal moment.”