Where There’s a Will
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
We equate consciousness with rational thought, and we can correlate thought with brain activity. And when there is no brain activity and hence, presumably, no thought, we define a person as dead — brain dead.
But we can act without thinking, and we can think one thing, make a conscious decision to do it, but do something else, even the opposite, surprising ourselves. In other words, the will, though associated with thought and a subject of thought, is separate from it.
Is the brain necessarily the seat of the will?
Language associates will with emotion and intuition and suggests that the will is centered somewhere other than the brain, for instance the heart or gut. Language also associates the will with the vague, but persistent, concepts of “soul,” “self,” “spirit,” and “life force.”
Does the will necessarily cease at the same time that thought does? Might someone who is declared brain dead still have will, including the will to live?
Also, linguistically as well as in religion and myth, the soul or spirit is separate from the body and persists even when the body dies. So why presume that soul/self/spirit/will has a distinct physical location in the body, as thought does?
