The Atman, Part 8
Part 8 of 10: The Atman is the Definition of Life
The question of what makes something alive has been a difficult and controversial question for millennia. It is a central question in several of the most controversial issues in society. For example, in the debate over abortion, people don’t agree on when exactly a fetus becomes alive. The question of when something is alive is also a central question in debates over animal rights, stem-cell research, and end-of-life issues.
Personally, I think that the defining characteristic of life is consciousness. However, you can be alive without being conscious (like when you’re asleep). And that’s a challenge to anyone who’s trying to define what it means to be alive. If life is consciousness, then what about when you’re unconscious? Should we adopt a purely medical definition of “alive”? Is being unconscious metaphysically equivalent to being dead? Are you still metaphysically alive even when you’re not conscious?
Well, I don’t like the idea of a purely medical definition of “alive”, because I think life is defined by consciousness, and I think consciousness is immaterial. However, I also am very averse to the idea that being unconscious is the same thing as being dead. Therefore, I endorse the third option. Even though life is defined by consciousness, you’re still alive even when you’re not conscious.
The way I choose to address this discrepancy is by arguing that the true defining characteristic of life is not consciousness but the capability for consciousness. Therefore, as I proposed in Part 4, being conscious is a subset of being alive. (But it is an extremely important subset, since without it, life would be pretty stupid.)
But if I argue that being conscious is a subset of being alive, then that still fails to define what it means to be alive. Well, I cannot derive any definition from first principles, so the best I can do is guess. I provided a guess in Part 4. My guess was this: the Atman, the locus of consciousness, is also the definition of life. Something is alive if and only if it has an Atman. And I stated that the Atman is what allows you to be conscious, even though you still have an Atman even when you’re not conscious. I hypothesized that when you’re asleep, your Atman is in a “dormant mode”, under which you are alive but not conscious. It’s not until death that the Atman leaves the body. But again, that is only a guess.
But even though it’s only a guess, it is my conclusion: the Atman is the definition of life. Something is alive if and only if it has an Atman. And while you can have an Atman without being conscious, the Atman is the thing that allows you to be conscious.
Whether or not something has an Atman is a completely black-and-white distinction. Either you have an Atman or you don’t. There is no middle ground. Think about it: the Atman is the thing that allows you to be conscious. It’s the thing that allows you to be, you know, a real living being. You can’t have that halfway; you either have it or you don’t. Therefore, everything in the world either does or does not have a Atman. If it has an Atman, it is alive; if it doesn’t have an Atman, it is not alive.
Let me now explain how this conclusion is relevant to debates over abortion, animal rights, and euthanasia.
1. The Debate over Abortion
The debate over abortion has always been closely tied to the question of when life begins. Now, I have stated something is alive if and only if it has an Atman. Therefore, in my view, the relevant question in the abortion debate is really, Does a fetus have an Atman? And if so, when does it get it?
I do think that by the time a baby is born, it has already acquired an Atman (a. k. a. soul). However, I also think that a freshly conceived fetus (a zygote) does not have an Atman. I have argued throughout this series that the Atman resides in the brain. And since a zygote doesn’t have a brain yet, I find it very hard to believe that it has an Atman. That is, I find it hard to believe that it is truly alive. That’s one of the reasons why I’m pro-choice.
So a zygote does not have an Atman, but a newborn baby has an Atman. And I have stated that everything either does or does not have an Atman; there’s no middle ground. That means there must be a single, specific moment in which the fetus acquires an Atman (a. k. a. the moment of ensoulment).
When exactly does this moment occur? Well, we cannot possibly know. I would think that there must be some requirement that a developing brain must pass before God awards it an Atman.
This is what David Chalmers calls psychophysical laws. Chalmers argues that there must be universal laws, just like the laws of physics that we’ve already discovered, that dictate when something is conscious and when it isn’t (and, if it is, what sort of consciousness it gets). In other words, a developing fetus’s brain must reach a certain property X before it gets to be conscious. To use my kind of terminology, it has to reach a certain threshold of development X before God grants it an Atman.
This immediately raises the question of where the Atman came from. Where was the Atman before it entered a fetus’s brain? Does it come into existence spontaneously as soon as the developing brain reached X? Or, as Plotinus would have it, does it split off from some “World Soul” and enter a fetus’s brain? Or is there a “waiting room” for the Atmans, in which they wait in line for the next fetus to reach X and then they enter its brain? Or, alternatively, is there some algorithm that determines which Atman in the “waiting room” gets to enter which developing fetus?
Obviously, we cannot possibly know the answer to this question. But I do think that the answer, whatever it is, is the key to answering questions like, “If my parents had never met, would I still exist?” If you subscribe to the “waiting room” theory, then the answer would be, “Yes, you would still exist ……… in someone else’s body.” I could write a whole other series about that.
But I am straying off topic. My point is that as soon as a developing fetus’s brain gets developed enough to meet the requirement of X, it is awarded an Atman. But what exactly is that requirement? We will never know. The Atman cannot be observed scientifically, so we cannot know exactly what X is. We will never be able to determine the exact moment at which a fetus gets an Atman.
However, I do feel pretty confident that this moment in time, whenever it is, does not occur until after the fetus has developed a brain. I do not agree with those who say that life begins at conception. I do not know exactly when life begins, but it’s definitely not until some time after conception.
2. The Debate over Animal Rights
Now let’s move on to the slightly less controversial subject of animal rights. Since antiquity, people have debated when (if ever) it is ethical to kill an animal. Often times, the debate boils down to the question of whether or not an animal is truly alive. If an animal is not truly alive (i. e. if it’s just an organism, just an object), most people will be inclined to think that it’s okay to kill it, while if an animal is truly alive, most people would feel some reluctance to kill it.
To be sure, the question of the ethics of killing an animal is not exactly the same as the question whether or not an animal is truly alive. For example, most people would agree that under some circumstances, it is okay to kill an animal even if it is truly alive (although there is much debate as to what those circumstances might be). Conversely, some philosophers might argue that it is immoral to kill an animal even it is not truly alive. Nevertheless, it is clear that these two questions are closely linked, even if they are not exactly the same question.
But what makes an animal truly alive? I have already given my answer: I think that something is alive if and only if it has an Atman. In my view, if an animal has an Atman, it is truly alive, while if it does not have an Atman, then it is just an organism — it is not truly alive, and it cannot have true consciousness.
But not everyone agrees with me on that point. Instead of the Atman (a. k. a. soul, self, mind, etc.), some philosophers have argued that the defining feature of life is the ability to feel pain. One notable philosopher who has promoted this view is Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. In this book, he argues that it is immoral to kill any animal that is capable of feeling pain (and that’s most animals).
But I do not agree with Peter Singer. In my view, pain only matters if there is someone to experience it. If some animal feels pain in the physiological sense but doesn’t have an Atman, then no pain was felt, because there was no one to feel it. The “pain” was nothing but a physical event: there was no Atman (no consciousness) to experience it. Even a p-zombie could feel pain in the physiological sense. But a p-zombie is not truly alive, which means that in reality, no pain was felt. Thus, in my opinion, the true distinction between living animals and nonliving animals is the presence of an Atman, not the ability to feel pain.
The question, then, is which animals have Atmans and which animals don’t. And I stated above that having an Atman is a completely black-and-white distinction: everything (every animal) either does or does not have an Atman. So if we’re asking if animals have Atmans, that leaves open three possibilities.
1. No animals have Atmans (except humans).
2. Some animals have Atmans, but others don’t.
3. All animals have Atmans.
I think most people would agree that #2 is the most plausible answer. But that still leaves open the question: which animals have Atmans?
Well, I would think that the same psychophysical laws that dictate when a human fetus gets an Atman would also dictate which animals have Atmans and which animals don’t. That is, God must have some sort of rule that says, “An animal’s brain must be at least as intelligent as X before I give it an Atman.” (And I would think that X is the same thing that it was for a developing human fetus.) We can think of it as a bar: all the animals whose brains are more intelligent than X are above the bar, and they have Atmans. All the animals whose brains are less intelligent than the X are below the bar, and they do not have Atmans.
Where exactly is this bar located? How many species of animals are above the bar? Well, I do not know. I think that if I started to make specific guesses about which animals have Atmans and which animals don’t, that would reduce the credibility of this series overall. So I will decline to do that. I will just say that the bar is low enough that a dog has an Atman but high enough that a jellyfish does not. (A jellyfish doesn’t even have a brain.)
3. The Debate over the Definition of Death
In addition to the abortion debate and the animal rights debate, there is one other debate that hinges on the question of what makes something alive — or, in this case, what makes something stop being alive. I’m talking about the question of what defines death.
Different people have different opinions about this question. Some take a medical perspective: they may define death as the moment when the heart stops beating, the moment when the brain stops functioning, or the point in time when the majority of the organs in your body have stopped working. Others may define death as the moment when a dying person loses consciousness. Still others come from a religious perspective and define death as the moment when the soul (a. k. a. Atman) leaves the body. I count myself in that category.
Throughout this essay, I have argued that something is alive if and only if it has an Atman. So you should be able to guess how I define death. Death is the moment when the Atman leaves the body.
I don’t agree with defining death using only medical terms because I think life is really a metaphysical phenomenon (the presence of an Atman), not a medical phenomenon. And I don’t agree with the idea of defining death as the moment when you lose consciousness, because you also lose consciousness every night when you fall asleep, and that is obviously not death. Thus, I prefer to define death as the moment when the Atman leaves the body.
We cannot know exactly when this moment occurs, because the Atman cannot be detected by science. But whenever it occurs, it is the true moment of death.
When I speak of the Atman “leaving” the body, that immediately raises the question of where (if anywhere) it goes. In other words, where do we go when we die? Do we just cease to exist? (That is, does the Atman cease to exist?) Or do we experience an afterlife, in which the Atman still exists in some metaphysical realm? Well, nobody knows. Those are questions for another day.
Other parts of this series:
Part 1: Consciousness is Beyond Science
Part 2: Responding to Counterarguments
Part 3: We Need Not Fear Immateriality
Part 4: Definition of the Atman
Part 5: Brain, Soul, Self, Atman, Mind
Part 6: The Views of the Philosophers
Part 7: [under revision]
