A trinitarian consciousness?
Body, brain and environment converge to create consciousness--but there's nothing "spiritual" about it, one scientist says."The brain is embodied and the body is embedded in its environment," Gerald Edelman, director of the Neurosciences Institute, says in New Perspectives Quarterly. "That trio must operate in an integrated way. You can’t separate the activity and development of the brain from the environment or the body. . . .
"Is consciousness the same as spirit? If you want to call the uniqueness of each individual consciousness a soul, that is all right with me. But there is a problem none of us likes to face. When the body goes, we go."
Edelman here is arguing for the inseparability of soul and matter--a position not entirely inconsistent with Jewish and Christian scriptures.
Within that created matrix, it is the brain's ability to recognize patterns, select specific sequences, and put them together in unique ways that gives rise to the higher levels of human functioning.
"It is this selectional repertoire in the brain that makes each individual unique, that accounts for the ability to create poetry and music, that accounts for all the differences that arise from the same biological apparatus—the body and the brain," Edelman argues.
"There is no singular mapping to create the mind; there is, rather, an unforetold plurality of possibilities."
Research like Edelman's--and that of pastoral theologians David Hogue and Andrew Lester--make it clear that any theological account of what it means to be human in the 21st century must wrestle seriously with the doctrine of embodiment and new understandings of how the brain participates in consciousness.
Simply put, "created, fallen, and redeemed" no longer suffices as a theological anthropology. There's got to be meat on those bones. And that, too, opens a "plurality of possibilities."
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Monday, August 09, 2004
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