Читать книгу Dialogues with Jay - Donald R. Fletcher - Страница 7

For our next time with Jay, Luc brought his daughter Beth, a striking young woman. Some might call Beth beautiful, some not. I’d say that the beauty is in her clear eyes, quickly intense beneath a broad forehead. I was glad that she was wearing her dark hair up, so that it didn’t get in the way of her eyes.

“Jay,” Luc said, when we were comfortably settled, “I was telling Beth about our conversation, and she said she had to come.”

“That is, if you don’t have a younger age limit, or an all-male rule,” she put in lightly.

“Very glad to have you;” Jay said. “Just the perspective that we need.”

“Then let me ask about something coming out of the conversation of the other day, as Dad was telling me about it. We’re creatures of space and time, part of a constantly flowing stream of life; but each of us would like to think that he or she is unique. If we are, what is that something that makes me, me, and makes you, you?”

Jay turned from Beth to her father. “Luc, does science have an answer for us?”

Luc plainly was ready. “At least a partial answer—partial, as in general our answers need to be, because almost always there’s more to be learned. We need to keep pushing out the frontiers of knowledge a bit further. So, about individual personality—what some call personhood—we can consider DNA. We all know that this has been one of the most revolutionizing discoveries of the present era, that we all carry a make-up of genes, complex chemical molecules, that control our physical and mental development. And while there’s an overall pattern—a human genome that is what makes each of us a human creature, as distinct from other forms of life—there are also minute genetic variations in DNA that mark each one as a unique individual.

“As we know, analysis of DNA is proving of immense value for criminal investigation and any situation in which a specific human body needs to be identified; but that is secondary. The fact that stands out here is that in our physical make-up each of us is unique, that uniqueness being generated by the genes that we carry. We were born with them, although they can be subject to mutation in ways science is only beginning to understand.”

Luc paused. “This sounds like an opening lecture for Genetics 201,” he said.

“We’re glad to be in your class,” Jay responded. “Please go on.”

“All right; I’ll try to keep it concise,” Luc continued. “Genes control the development and function of the brain, along with those of the rest of our physical being. Your brain, in turn—how it functions and what it has been given to function with—is who you are. The brain can be modified. There can be injury, disease, chemical substances, or other factors, and such modification may show itself in apparent changes in personality. There is also the use that you make of the capacities of that brain. Such use is up to you, although it may be influenced—even much influenced—by factors of your heritage and environment. You make choices of the images you store in your brain’s memory and the ideas you embrace, pondering them and being shaped by them, as well as competing ideas that you choose to brush aside.

“All of this sets a pattern of function in your brain that is reflected in how you speak and act, and that, as other people see it, becomes part of your personality—part of the person that you are; which means that it is still so: your brain, at any given point in its life development, is who you are.”

Luc stopped, then said, with a smile and a shrug, “Well, then, lecture finished. I thought I heard the bell.”

“Lecture or not, Dad, that was pretty convincing,” Beth said, looking at him with frank admiration.

Then it was Jay, adding, with a cordial smile, “And I’m glad you put it out so well for us. That’s why we’re here together, I trust—to think, and to speak our ideas as clearly and convincingly as we can. We know we won’t always agree, which is healthy, and we know, I’m sure, that no-one will be offended. So, I add my admiration to Beth’s: Luc, that was powerfully presented. You know the human brain best of the four of us, and we can’t negate what you say about it. My own stance would be just to inquire: having said that, have you said it all?”

He paused, and Beth came in, “Is there more to say, I wonder—anything more that makes each of us the unique person that he or she is?”

I’d been wanting to join in; now I said, “Yes, there is soul, or spirit.”

“And what is that?” Beth asked it rather softly. She plainly didn’t want to sound combative.

“I’d say it’s not a what,” I responded. “This is not a thing, as I see it, for which we can give a definition; and that’s because it is not part of the space/time cosmos. Our brain, with its marvelously intricate functioning, is. The brain dies off, whether abruptly or by gradual disintegration. As it dies, thinking dies. Emotions flare and fail. Personality may seem to change. Is the essential person dying off, the individual simply ceasing to be? Neurologically, that’s the way it appears. What proof is there of anything different? No proof; no fact. Factual, scientific proof requires observation, and here there is no possibility for observation. There can be no tools of space and time capable of reaching outside, beyond, to what transcends space and time. We aren’t playing with words here. We’re just recognizing that soul, spirit, or whatever word we give it, is that essential being that most of us are aware of, even while, because it is transcendent, no definition and no proof of it is possible.”

“That’s good,” Beth said. “Thank you. It won’t convince my skeptical friends, but I say that it’s very well put.”

Luc twisted in his chair, but Jay was smiling, nodding agreement.

“We’re not expecting to convince anyone,” he said. “If soul or spirit is real to most of us, so be it. Apparently from far back in the dawning of human consciousness the idea has been there. Now, in these early stages of brain science, we can be pressing to find out where and how the connections may be. Plainly, a good deal may be learned, but I, too, am persuaded that this is not of the stuff of space and time; that it can and does transcend the material cosmos; even though we have no words for describing such transcendence, nor images to picture it. The problem is that our words and images are all just from our present existence.”

“Jay,” I added, “that thought, that the idea of some sort of soul or spirit seems to go back to the dawning of human consciousness, would appear to be linked from very early with some notion of existence after death. Isn’t it so, that from ancient burials and early religious sites on back, humans seem to have believed in an existence after death that wasn’t very different from their present life? We find that ancient people, whether in Egypt, China, or the Americas, buried their dead with provisions for a journey or an after-life, even of some grandeur.”

“All of which supports the perception,” Luc commented, rejoining the discussion, “that the notion of an after-life—including the imagining of it as essentially a continuation of present existence—was and is wishful thinking. Naturally people don’t want to die. Those, in particular, for whom life has been good, who have enjoyed rank and prestige, as well as the best comforts their civilization affords, would like to think of this as continuing in some unearthly future realm.”

“That sounds cynical,” Beth remarked.