Review of The Creation of Self: A Case for the Soul by Joshua Farris
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Whenever the mathematician and metaphysician Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650) is mentioned in books on neuroscience and the brain (at least the ones I have read), the authors apparently want to distance themselves from him. He is like the plague.
Today, Descartes is seen as responsible for Cartesian dualism. If you are speaking to an audience of materialists who argue that the soul is a religious fiction, a defense of dualism amounts to intellectual suicide.
But maybe I have nothing to lose from showing my support for Joshua Farris’ 2023 book The Creation of Self: A Case for the Soul.
Hailed as a leading figure in theological anthropology, Joshua Farris is the daring Christian who wants to defend Cartesian dualism in our modern time period when materialism and physicalism still claim the throne of academic dignity.
Farris is a creationist on the topic of the soul, which is to say that he thinks the creation of the soul is a direct and immediate act of God. As Creationism is already despised among many in secular academia, any defense of Cartesianism is adding insult to injury. I was not aware of any serious scholarly defense of Cartesian dualism until I read Farris’ book.
Though I do not strictly identify with dualism, I agree with Farris in saying that conversations about the soul still matter today. The struggles of the human soul and what it means to be human is the hidden layer beneath all our public and private disputes about “politics, society, race relations, and medicine” (page 53). Intellectual elites may not hold to this dogmatic shibboleth of religion, but belief in the soul can still be found among the general population of ordinary people whose culture is integral to society just as much as the intellectual elites’. If a belief is widespread, it is worth addressing.
Sir John Eccles, Mario Beauregard, and Jeffrey Schwartz are examples of scientists accepting the soul as a reality, as cited by Farris to express the point that materialism has not won the hearts of all professionals in the scientific community (pages 54 & 55).
Farris does not fail to explore the alternative theories many would prefer over his Cartesian dualism. He tackles non-reductive physicalism, emergent dualism, panpsychism, and the various forms of reductionism. Without listing all the worldviews he discusses, his point is to articulate how these alternative theories fail to make all of our phenomenality vanish behind terms about cells, molecules, and neurophysiology.
He denies the naturalism that has “crept into the humanities”, defining it as ultimately unsatisfying as it sees the world as “a closed system of causes” only knowable “through a narrow understanding of empirical science” (page 9).
He defines materialism as the view that the world basically consists of material particles alone. Spirits and ghosts are absent from the picture (page 9).
Although Farris does not devote himself to everything that Rene Descartes believed, Farris is at least devoted to the basic premise that “personal identity” is grounded in the soul which we can distinguish from the body when we rely on intuition and common sense (page 61).
You do not yearn for your loved one’s individual atoms, molecules, and cells. You yearn for them, as a whole person. You want them as they really are, instead of a fake version. If humans are material alone, could you love your family the way you love your car, house, or job? Usually, significant problems occur when we love material wealth in equivalence with or above humans. Most people know this through commonplace experience, and Farris is keen to draw his arguments from those kinds of intuitions, which makes his unfashionable Cartesian dualism rather powerful, even if he is difficult to understand at first glance.
A Quick Look at Farris’ Arguments
Who and what you are (i.e., the concept of I) is assembled by the “self-presenting properties” that are direct and immediate in making you aware of your mental states. For instance, when you feel pain, you know it immediately and do not have to question it. Knowledge and self-consciousness share the same boundaries and endpoints, analogous to countries and states that align perfectly without gaps and overlaps. But we have to remember that is only an analogy since there is no spatial location for these self-presenting properties making up the I, which is an argument that Farris borrows from Roderick Chisholm (page 62).
The ‘I’ or self is a metaphysical simple (i.e., a basic building block of reality that cannot be divided into further parts). The ‘I’ is distinguishable from a complex self (page 62). This is found upon introspection when we sense something within ourselves that is stable and enduring throughout time in spite of all our bodily changes involving brain cells, inner narratives, moral traits, memories, metabolism, etc. This is why people naturally associate themselves with souls or an “immaterial mental thing” instead of individual body parts. Farris explains that while arguing for the ‘simple view’ of the soul (page 41).
Although Farris does not elaborate on machine learning and artificial intelligence, he distinguishes those programmatic and algorithmic, non-human entities from humans whose direct awareness of self is led by common sense and creative thinking. If the quality of life’s essence could ever be defined with quantities, it still would never allow our introspecting minds to honestly see ourselves as computers even if objective, publicly accessible evidence was provided (pages 23 & 24).
The soul has meaning, and we see ourselves as ‘other’ whether we like it or not. Why? Firstly, Joshua tells us it is because each individual has a first-person perspective, which is the exclusive and private understanding of your own thoughts and feelings as you encounter the outside world through your senses. Such exclusivity and privacy is nontransferable to our peers and outsiders. No one is unique like you, and everything you think and feel cannot be clearly communicated based on terms about cells and molecules, alone. First-person knowledge cannot be converted into third-person knowledge that is public, scientific, outward, and detached from human passions and emotions (pages 24 & 25).
Ever wonder why it is so hard to communicate your thoughts and feelings to someone else? Would it not be easier if you could just download your thoughts and feelings into whomever is struggling to understand you? If physicality could fully explain the first-person perspective, or convert it to third-person terms, perhaps there would be no hard problem of consciousness.
In spite of whatever can be argued or doubted about the nature of self, we can always naturally infer that the self can know and think, as demonstrated by Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument which Farris discusses below:
“Mary is a brilliant scientist living in a black and white room who has studied color, the physics of light, its relation to color, and neurophysiology. Yet she has never experienced the color red. When she steps out of her black and white room, she experiences the color red. At this point, she exclaims, ‘I see red.’ At the point that she sees red it is argued that she gains a new concept/mental item of knowledge that is distinct from her knowledge of red prior to seeing red. Accordingly, we know that there is a duality in Mary’s knowledge: one that derives from the physical sciences and one that is subject-grounded.” (page 31)
That transitions nicely into saying knowledge and self-awareness occur simultaneously. When we gain insights about the world around us, we also gain insights about ourselves (page 32).
I think this must highlight the difference between a priori knowledge (i.e., what is deducible prior to observation of the world, based on self-evident principles) and a posteriori knowledge (i.e., what is derivable from experimentation and sensory experience with the world). Perhaps the field of philosophy sees these two types of knowledge based on our commonplace experiences with our brains updating internal models based on mismatches between predicted sensory inputs and actual sensory inputs that are relayed through the brain’s hierarchically organized levels of information (see predictive coding theory).
“It seems that material things do not know red, but I do” writes Farris (page 32). Rocks, trees, oceans, dirt, and metal cannot know things without a sense of self similar to humanity’s even if consciousness permeates the universe. Apparently, only humans have phenomenal consciousness.
What is phenomenal consciousness anyway?
It involves the way things feel, look, sound, and taste privately to you, with no direct access to outsiders. Electrical and chemical signals can be found correlating with the way things feel, look, sound, and taste but are not sufficient to help you understand what it is like to experience those things from a first-person perspective. What it feels like to be me, or you, or Brittney Spears, or a bat is a qualitative feeling that is realized immediately upon self-reflection.
Farris rejects the body view that treats the person and the body as one and the same, since the ‘I’ is believed to be just a “linguistic reference.” Hence, “I am my body” is an awkward statement (page 38).
Farris rejects the brain view that treats a person as identical to their brain, since the brain controls the body. Hence, “I am my brain” is another awkward statement (page 39).
The neural correlates of spiritual experiences can offer us intriguing and helpful insights through the use of neurotechnology. But no specific brain region(s) can be the explanatory end-all, be-all. Such a thing would ignore the variety of factors contributing to the richness and diversity of spiritual experiences.
Farris is honest about dualism’s problems, as he states:
“The dilemma for the dualist is clear. Dualists have an intuitive challenge of supplying an explanation for the interaction between two distinct parts and showing the plausibility for a two-way causation. This is what many philosophers have called the interaction problem because some sort of bridge is needed to explain the interaction.” (page 90)
The interaction problem that makes us think a bridge is lacking between the brain and the soul, as a substance, is perhaps influenced by David Hume's view of causation arguing that “there is a continuous regularity of succession between objects.” The Humean view only assumes, and does not demonstrate, such a regularity. Therefore, materialists are mistaken when they build their refutations against dualism based on an unproven assumption (page 91).
Neuroscience will never identify enough “triggers, pulleys, quantities, mass and charge” to shoo away the hard problem of consciousness. Would it truly help the reductionists to win their case if they convince us that only consciousness exists but phenomenality (i.e., the raw, immediate, experiential feel of ‘what it is like’ to have a mental state) is false or a “fiction written by our brains” (page 107)?
Can I become unconvinced of my phenomenality by diminishing my awareness through anesthetics, sedatives, or narcotics? Such a question may seem strange. But what does it feel like to be asleep, to be suddenly knocked unconscious, or to be numbed? Feeling is not truly absent during those states in spite of the intended effects. Right? And if feeling is not truly absent, neither is phenomenality.
Without using technical neurophysiological jargon, how can I use my first-person perspective to flip a switch and become genuinely convinced that my phenomenality is just a clever fiction?
Farris cites Timothy O'Connor in a statement about how the unity of consciousness has a uniqueness that is unmatched with anything else in nature.
Farris’ goal is to show that all these unsatisfying forms of emergentism should be replaced with a creationist alternative that has the least amount of “liabilities” (page 115).
This is the book for you if you enjoy theology, philosophy, and anthropology of religion. I recommend bringing a philosophy dictionary with you if you are not familiar with technical terminology about mental phenomena in relation to the physical world. For instance, I am used to chemistry’s definition of the term ‘substance’ to mean a pure form of matter with a specific chemical composition. Farris’ philosophical definition for ‘substance’ is a “property-bearer that has causal powers and liabilities.” He defines the word property as “a universal that can be instantiated in multiple and distinct substances.”
He goes on to say:
"All substances bear properties. The physical is a distinct type of substance that is non-mental, public (i.e., it's properties are accessible by persons). Minds are distinct types of substances from the physical, and bear one unique feature (or non-universal property distinct to particular minds), namely, the feature of my having and experiencing my own particular experiences, of which no other substance could have or experience. In other words, my mind or soul as substance is distinguished from other minds or souls as substances in virtue of its being private, and having an insider's perspective or restricted access in virtue of my experiencing my experiences.” (Page 117 & 118)
This blog post covers the first 7 chapters of Joshua Farris’ 2023 book The Creation of Self: The Case for the Soul.
The author of this blog post is Matthew Sabatine, who was born in the United States and raised 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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