He says it’s not–it’s philosophy, but I don’t know how you can make authoritative statements about souls and think that it’s not a religious discussion.

Blogger “Mark” (no idea what the last name is), deigns to educate us on why cryonics won’t work. We are appropriately grateful.

Most, if not all, of the above links, however, make a fundamental mistake in philosophical anthropology by treating the human being dualistically. Cryonics assumes that after death the body that was a human being is still a human being in some way. Cryonics then assumes that there eventually will be a technique of some kind, a Frankensteinian spark that will bring the corpse back to life.

This is a nice set of strawmen.

In fact, cryonicists assume nothing of the kind. First of all, cryonicists don’t accept that a body that’s been properly suspended is dead at all, so the Frankenstein comment (a nice little pejorative phrase, that) is inapplicable.

The best response to this silliness, this tendency toward conceiving of the human being as body and soul, whether it be Platonic or Cartesian or any other variation of dualism, is found in the philosophical tradition that started with Aristotle and culminated in Aquinas.

And the best response to this silliness is a) cryonicists don’t necessarily believe in dualism–in fact, just the opposite, and b) none of those philosophers are infallible, even assuming that they believe what the author claims that they do.

But even though they probably have no relevance to cryonics, let’s see where he’s going with this, at least for entertainment.

In this tradition, a human being is not a body with a soul in it, a kind of ghost in a machine. A human being is not the soul itself, a sort of spirit merely using a body. And a human being is not simply a body, a mechanical, purely material entity. But knowing what it isn?t doesn?t move us much toward understanding human nature. So what then is the nature of the human being? To understand the approach of Aristotle and Aquinas you first need to understand the principles of ?matter? and ?form.?

In his treatise On The Soul, though you?ll find the idea in many other places, Aristotle explains that the everyday things we encounter, rocks, plants, animals and the like are all composed by two principles: a material principle or principle of potency, and a formal principle or principle of act. In other words, everything we encounter in our daily lives (with the exception of things like heavenly bodies for which Aristotle had a different theory) is composed of matter, the principle of potency, potential to be some kind of thing, and form, the principle of actuality, actually being a particular kind of thing, e.g. a granite rock, a geranium, or a gazelle. The matter is only the potential of a thing to be ?this particular thing?; matter does not exist by itself (this sounds strange if you don?t keep the fact that matter is a principle of potency in mind). The form is the act by which a thing is ?this particular kind of thing?; and again, with an exception we?ll see shortly, the form does not exist by itself. It is only in a composite of matter and form that ?this particular thing? exists. The composite of matter and form produces a thing which we can point to and say ?this? thing.

This potency-act, matter-form approach was the brilliant solution Aristotle proposed to escape the many cul-de-sacs of early philosophical thought. What?s important in the cryogenic discussion is the fact that a living thing is a composite of matter and form where the form is a ?soul,? a principle of life. When the composite is sundered at death there is what Aristotle called a ?substantial change? that occurs. Just as wood burns to ash, so a living thing when it dies, when the composite of matter and form that made it not only a certain kind of thing but ?this particular thing? no longer exists, there is an immediate change and the form ceases to exist (with one exception that we?ll soon see). The death of a living thing is a complete and irreversible change because the destruction of the composite is the destruction of its principle of act, its form or ?soul.?

So Mark claims to be able to define and detect the exact moment at which a body goes from living to dead. He claims that this is an objectively verifiable instantaneous change in state. If so, he should write up a description of exactly how to measure this, so we can come up with better means of legally declaring folks dead, instead of the ambiguous and arbitrary techniques that we have today. This is a legal and medical breakthrough.

The reality, of course, is that there is no point in general at which a body passes from a live state to a dead one, except in the case of information death (e.g., being incinerated instantaneously, or smashed into a flattened unrecognizable pulp). Simple death by natural causes, or even violent wounds, if the violence isn’t to the brain, is a gradual process, not a distinct binary one.

Cryonicists accept that the victim of an information death is truly dead, and there’s no point in trying to preserve the remains. However, in most cases, most of the information that constitutes the person remains, and the sooner he or she can be preserved, the more of that information will persist to allow reanimation later. Such a person is not, however, dead.

While a dead body may look like an organic whole, an entity with a single principle organizing it, the truth is that a dead body is a complex of organs and compounds that are themselves undergoing substantial change to less organized elements. Cryonics assumes that after death the ?form? of the body, its organizing principle, remains. But this is not the case. And that?s because the ?form? of a human being is a principle of life, the soul, and when a human being is no longer alive, when the soul no longer ?informs? the human being, the being is no longer human. What made the being human is also what made the human living. You can?t be a human being and not be alive; you can?t be dead and be a human being.

Can our philospher tell us wherein this “soul” resides? Can he show us what instrument we can use to detect its presence or absence, and so determine whether the body is alive or dead?

No.

He simply uses tautological arguments. And again, since the body that he’s describing is not dead, simply in suspension, his equating life with humanity and death with non-humanity is meaningless.

I?ve mentioned that there?s an exception to the fact that when a composite being with principles of matter and form ceases to exist, when a living thing dies, the form ceases to be. For a living thing the form is a soul. So when a living thing dies its soul ceases to exist. The exception, which Aristotle likely didn?t grasp fully, but which is thoroughly worked through in Aquinas, is the human form or soul. Aquinas demonstrated that the human being?s fundamental constitution as a rational creature implied a principle of activity which per se did not require a body. In other words, a human being?s fundamental way of being, thinking, understanding, abstracting, occurred without bodily mechanisms. And since activity follows from existence (i.e. you can?t act if you don?t exist), an activity that does not require a body must derive from something that exists without requiring a body. The technical term for this is ?subsistence.? The human soul, unlike any other soul or principle of life (e.g. orange tree, oyster, orca), subsists even after the matter-form composite corrupts. Aquinas refers to the separated soul as an incorporeal subsistent thing with an incomplete nature (since its nature is to inform a human being in a matter-form composite).

You would think this would bolster the cryonics industry. After all, if the soul is still around isn?t there hope that it might again inform the human being? Well, no. The nature of the soul after death can only be known in sort of a negative way, by saying ?what it is not,? or by extrapolating what we observed when the soul was not separated, since an incorporeal subsistent thing is beyond our senses. But Aquinas suggests that the separated soul exists in a sort of twilight zone. It no longer has sensory input and consequently can only understand (it has to still ?do? something if it exists) in an imperfect way. Still, as an incorporeal subsisting thing it cannot be manipulated by us (nor can it be created by us, but that?s for another post). No matter how long you wait for the wonders of technology, there simply is no way for corporeal beings (that?s us) to influence incorporeal entities like separated souls. Science can?t create a human soul and science can?t cause a soul to again inform the human being it once did. It?s not that we don?t know how. It?s that we are barred metaphysically from doing so. The creation of a human soul would require the infinite power of the Creator since it would require creation of something from nothing. The causing of a separated soul to again inform the human being it once did would require the infinite power of the Creator because it would require the ability to move incorporeal substances.

This may all be true.

It may also be nonsense.

Since there’s no scientific way to determine its validity, cryonicists assume that there is no such thing called a soul, or alternatively, that it will take care of itself or that God will take care of it as needed, but it’s not necessary to be concerned with it in order to suspend and reanimate a person. Any other assumption would be both non-scientific and pointless, until we can come up with the soul detector requested above.

Never mind that the technology is primitive. That?s just a matter of time for cryonic proponents. But cryonics runs into several related fundamental problems of philosophical anthropology ?

1) death is a substantial change and thus irreversible

But since the cryonics patients haven’t gone through that irreversible change, this argument is irrelevant

2) the human being is not present in an organ or in a corpse

This is a partial strawman, since cryonicists don’t believe that the patient is a corpse. However, the first clause is wrong; the human being is present, for the most part, in the brain. At least that’s the operating assumption. It may be wrong, but Mark certainly hasn’t proven it to be so.

3) infusing life into a corpse again would require the ability to control an incorporeal subsistent principle (the human soul) which is not possible for corporeal beings in the land of the living

Since souls are irrelevant to the discussion, and the cryonics patient is not a corpse, this is another strawman.

So, sad as it may seem to some, Walt Disney won?t be watching Teddy Ballgame put the wood on the ol? apple anytime in the future.

Even sadder, Walt Disney was never frozen. This is an urban myth.

Not unlike much of the rest of the posting.

[Update at 9:10 PM PDT]

One more comment. I’ve never before read the words “philosophical anthropology” in conjunction with each other. I think that he’s just making it up, and blowing smoke. This post of “Mark’s” is an excellent example of the old aphorism “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

This is a blog that will definitely not go on my link list.