Christ’s Mind Separates Our Intelligence from Bacteria

Image credits belong to: mohamed_hassan | Pixabay

Here, I want to discuss Antonio Damasio’s perspective of bioelectrical computations of human intelligence that separates us from the intelligence of bacteria. Though Damasio does not appear to be a non-materialist, I gather from him some non-materialist support for mind/consciousness that I think has some relevance to the Christian spiritual neuroscience of Curt Thompson. This leads me to a conclusion about the importance of having the mind of Christ that should shape our social lives and thinking patterns.

Antonio Damasio is a juggernaut in the field of neuroscience, studying the mechanical and chemical operations beneath human consciousness. I am savoring every word from his latest book titled Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious.  

Here is my interpretation of his brilliant work on pages 35 through 37:

In defeating life’s challenges, human intelligence employs a repertoire of “spatially mapped patterns that represent objects and actions” from the outside world staring at us. 

That is a gorgeous computer metaphor! 

We gaze upon the data of our internal affairs that is looking at the world according to how it appears to us, which is something that Damasio calls ‘mental inspection.’ We “mentally inspect” our own method of measuring our own patterns and their “extensions.” Then, we think carefully about the level to which outside objects mirror or do not mirror us. This defines our human intelligence as “explicit.” 

Feeling and consciousness are the “mind-related developments” using perception, memory, and reasoning in serving the mind that is essential for making our intelligence “explicit.” In defeating life’s challenges, this explicitness is a powerful weapon distinguishing the repertoire of human intelligence from bacteria’s repertoire of intelligence, putting a great chasm between us and bacteria. 

For Damasio, that chasm is defined by the billions of years of evolution between us and them. For me, that chasm is defined by the characteristics that we can observe in real time. 

Human consciousness is distinguished by its ability to reason based on disassembling and then swapping around pieces of our minds in countless different ways during the invention of novelty and the hunt for solutions to problems.   

Our visual, auditory, tactile, and visceral events are sensory events that generate the images that are our road maps or mental patterns that form our minds. 

This is strikingly different from the intelligence of bacteria that is “non-explicit” because its plots and schemes are not observable to our technologically unaided naked eye which only allows us to see the “beginning and the end” or the “question and answer” that stands in our way. That is a macroscopic picture that microorganisms cannot see as they are unable to employ reasoning and images in any kind of self-reflection on objects and actions.

The proportions and dimensions of our human intelligent behavior are made beautiful by the “well-articulated bioelectrical computations whose theater of operation is small–rather than simple–and sits at the molecular level and below, in the physical undergirding of a living organism.” 

And from that “physical undergirding” emerges the mind of the living organism.    

Though this seems to imply generation and dependence of mind on neural activity, thereby appearing to support reductionism and physicalism, I still believe that the emergence of the whole is not defined by its reductive parts. We are not the physical bioelectrical computations dominating our internal affairs, just as we are not the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen that are the 4 elements making up 96.2% of the human body. 

There is more to our minds than mere bioelectricity and computations. 

We must not forget about our relationality and our nature to not exist in isolation, but to live amongst each other and define ourselves in social, poetic terms that ally us with sanity and distance us from madness in the great, internally graphic spiritual war of good versus evil. 

The Mind and Its Relational Process

I would like to make the philosophical point that our first touch of madness is felt in childhood. Our first window into seeing the cruelty of the world starts with our parents. 

Scientific research is regularly building on the idea of how our parenting styles really shape our children, thus illuminating the importance of Proverbs 22:6

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” 

I also think we cannot fully understand the workings of the brain and the flexibility of the human mind until we stop believing in the kind of dogmatic materialism/physicalism that does not allow us to connect with the raw irreducibility of subjective experience and our ability to be intentional, which is the ability to have your thoughts be ‘about’ someone else or something beyond you. Such a property does not feel physical, and because of that, it is hard to discuss the property in such strict physicalist terms of ‘brain states.’

The parent-child dynamic reveals to me a relationality of mind that entails closeness with others, self-disclosure, exchange of mutual benefits, power distribution, and other various dimensions of interpersonal communication that are not best explained by the materialist/physicalist premise that “you are your brain” just acting amongst other brains. 

Since feeling and consciousness are “mind-related developments”, it is important to pay attention to that conscious feeling that does not feel physical. You feel your feelings and not your brain states as you interact with other humans that impact your health and shape your life.  

The brain’s trajectory of health can be determined during its most impressionable years of early development (i.e., “prenatal period through the first years of life”). Children who are surrounded by responsive and dependable adults will build a healthy architecture and circuitry in their brains. For those children who are victimized by repeated and toxic misfortune, this could be a recipe for emotional and cognitive fragility, characterized by dangerous increases in heart rate, blood pressure, and cortisol stress hormones. A child who is unprotected by supportive adults does not know how to manage misadventures (e.g. death of a loved one, natural disaster, poverty, bullying, disappointment, physical injuries, etc.). This is because his/her nervous system is not trained to return its stress responses to a safe baseline, and as these toxic-stress experiences increase in early childhood, they are associated with adult health problems such as alcoholism, depression, heart disease, and diabetes. 

A December 2022 article from Very Well Mind tells us that authoritarian parents, who rarely explain their rules and punishments, may raise groveling slaves of robotic, panicky obedience but those children will score lower in happiness, social skills, and self-esteem, and may tend to lie to prevent future punishment.

The authoritative parents who are more democratic, affectionate, and forgiving in their approach, will enforce a discipline that is confident and assuring instead of “intrusive and punitive.” The authoritative approach that offers ample feedback to the child on why things are happening as they are, will promote social responsibility, cooperativeness, self-regulation, and independence for the child.

The permissive parent who is over-tolerant toward the child’s mistakes and makes few demands, in the spirit of being the child’s friend instead of a parent, will not promote maturity. Though the permissive parent will express warmth and nurturing attention, the child will not be ready for the adult world that makes constant demands and rules. The child will know self-sufficiency and independence but will not know self-regulation. 

In denying materialism and physicalism’s claims against the philosophy of mind and the soul, I want to take some information from board-certified psychiatrist and Christian author, Curt Thompson, who quotes clinical professor of psychiatry, Daniel Siegel: 

“The mind is an embodied and relational process, emerging from within and between brains, that regulates the flow of energy and information.” 

That is from page 29 of Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections Between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices that Can Transform Your Life and Relationships.

Thompson gives the mind its tangible and visible form as it is harbored in the physical self and relies on the body to operate. 

But the mind is not the brain, once we realize how the brain and body work together to provide the flow of energy and information all throughout ourselves. 

To best exemplify that, think of the anxiety involved with an increasing heart rate and the thoughts about that heart rate. Which caused the other? Did your thoughts trigger the anxious experience or did that anxious experience trigger the thought that you are under attack? 

That may seem like a chicken-or-the-egg dilemma that is not worth considering as fight-or-flight events drive you to make forced, premature, snap decisions meant to save you from impending doom. I think the internal causes for anxiety are not always an either/or situation. Instead, it can sometimes be a and/both situation where the mind can cause physical events. 

I find implications of the mind’s impingement on the physical body in a 2013 National Library of Medicine article.  Nerve cells in the brain’s cortex are not functionally fixed. They adapt during processing and change their function according to behavioral settings and events. Their responses seek to conform with whatever the current perceptual task asks of them. The functional properties of cortical neurons are situated early in the chain of command of information processing, and because of that, the “top-down influences of attention, expectation, and perceptual task” have an effect upon the earlier stages of information processing. 

Many people will fixate on the contents of their anger and sadness, with no attention to where exactly in their body they are feeling it. Thompson has addressed this issue with patients. 

He also remarks on something that I have witnessed among my Christian brothers and sisters but never realized it until I read his book. 

He states on page 29:

 “As Christians, we sometimes dismiss our physical experience as inferior to the abstract, ethereal part of our consciousness where we ‘imagine’ or ‘think about’ spiritual matters.”

Thompson makes the significant point that if the Holy Spirit uses our bodies as His temple, according to how the apostle Paul describes, then our spiritual experiences must also involve our bodies. As the mind includes our body, our mission to love God ‘with all our mind’ must also include loving Him with our body. Our gut-feelings are messengers telling us about what is happening to us in our bodily experiences, and we should not ignore them, as those bodily experiences are important to communication with God. 

Going back to how the mind is relational

The mind is dependent on and shaped by our social interactions, beginning most profoundly and foundationally with our parents at birth. Every “facial expression, tone of voice, or scolding glance” will leave a neural imprint on your mind and its direction of functioning, all of which should point us to Christ instead of reducing us down to collected, aimless units of a materialist and physicalist universe.

When I ponder how our minds are molded and shaped by our social interactions, this partly answers my question as to why people leave the Church and may feel traumatically tortured when thinking of the Church. When I ponder how a Christian’s nasty words can have a greater sting than a non-Christian’s words, I am reminded of Jesus’ words saying that the world will identify us by how we love each other (John 13:34-35).

To be identified as a member of His love, I must abide in his love by meditating on his grace that is perfecting me. A daily repentance of sin turns my attention toward His grace that I can extend to others, and together, turn our focus away from resentment and vengeance.

The author of this blog post is Matthew Sabatine, born and raised in the United States as a Christian but left the faith in his early twenties. He returned to the faith midway through 2022. Matthew has some experience in the mental health field as a direct support professional, caring for people with intellectual and development disabilities and people who were in long-term residency/rehabilitation programs. Though Matthew has no formal undergraduate or graduate degree, he has experience co-facilitating therapy groups under the supervision of licensed counselors. Matthew currently works in sales/marketing by day and blogs on his free time at night.

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