I'll accept that there is no "ghost in the machine" (nor did Descartes think so. The line is a critique of his dualism, which dualism was nothing more than an attempt to ground Catholic theology of the soul in what were then contemporary philosophical terms. The Church still held considerable social and political (and legal) influence in Descartes' day.). But there is a question I used to ask my students, trying to get them to think critically, and in reference to the use of "sleep" as a metaphor for death in the sonnets of Shakespeare ("Death's second self, which seals up all in rest") and Donne ("From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be").
What is the difference between a sleeping person and a corpse?
It's a question that vexed American minds in the mid-19th century. Poe cashed in on it (as he did on all matters in the headlines at the time. He was trying to sell his work just as Shakespeare was trying to sell tickets to his theater in Elizabethan times.) with his story of "The Premature Burial." People were lapsing into comas in a time when "coma" was not a medically defined term (now we induce them as a matter of healthcare). Was the patient dead? Alive? Asleep? If the last, why didn't they wake up? And if not asleep, weren't they dead? Today we rely on brain wave activity (except when we didn't, as in several nationally famous cases in the earlier part of this century, 150 years after Poe). Because the difference between a sleeping person and a corpse is a simple one:
The sleeping person is going to be animate again. They will wake up; walk; talk, eat. The dead person is just a corpse. And the question is: what's missing?
There were stories in the '60's of dying people on scales (? How did that happen?) so sensitive a slight shift in weight could be detected at the moment of death. This led to much speculation about a "soul" which apparently had weight and mass even as it invisibly escaped the body. Most likely it was just gas, to be honest. At death, or shortly after, muscles relax, gases held back escape; sometimes shit even leaks out. So it goes.
But what is the difference between not just a corpse and someone asleep, but between a fetus and a dead body. Why can we transmit life in one case (the fetus, which is a "living" group of cells if not a living "self," and will certainly remain alive if conditions allow (they don't; often. Nature is her own abortionist.)? We can reproduce, in other words: create a new being that is alive. But we cannot "give life" to a corpse. Why not? What goes missing that we cannot replace?
Making babies is the easiest thing on earth. That's the problem, of course; both social and environmental. And killing people is remarkably easy, too; sadly. We can make it impossible to life functions to continue with an AK-47, shredding bodies into particles. Nature, as I say, can cancel the birth of a child in utero, because (as one doctor explained it to me), the conditions for viability don't exist. The child can't develop, won't "make it." Nature steps in to clean up the failure so a new try can be assayed. (Nature is not very considerate of human feelings but, as Annie Dillard put it, it wastes nothing.) So we can make babies easily, and we can easily identify the conditions that make life unsustainable any longer.
We aren't that careful about those conditions, either. I don't mean the mass shootings we "can't do anything about," I mean people dying in old age. My father died of what the coronor called a brain tumor. Maybe that actually killed him; maybe it was something else. Who cares, really? My mother was in stage four kidney failure (I was always surprised she never got put on dialysis); her diabetes was so advanced she had to take insulin four times a day and stick rigidly to an eating schedule; she also had congestive heart failure, controlled by a pacemaker. The death certificate said she died of pneumonia. I'm not sure she wasn't just exhausted. I saw her the day before she died in the night. I could tell something about her temperament had changed. I wasn't that shocked by the call in the night.
How did they really die? Who really knows? But more interestingly: why are they dead? Why are they inanimate? Because "life functions could no longer be supported"? What does that mean? It's kind of like saying my car won't run anymore because...my car won't run anymore.
There is a mystery there our language cannot cleave and open and reveal. And I don't mean because it is ultimately "mystical" or "spiritual." This is not a dodge; it's a critique. Because materialism teaches there is a material answer, but the "material" is the corpse. The non-material is whatever animated that corpse.
In early 20th century European intellectual circles the popular explanation was the "elan vital." Virginia Woolf wrote an incisive essay on the topic, an essay in which she observes a moth in the window of her study, dying. The "life force" she attributes to the moth is the "elan vital," but she cannot say where it goes, or why it leaves. In the end, the only material thing is the corpse of the moth. Isn't that the whole moth, though? It's just now a dead moth (as Virginia Woolf is a drowned body). Isn't it? Is it even right to speak of a "moth corpse"? Doesn't "corpse" convey something almost significant, a space recently vacated and never to be occupied again?
Whether it should, or shouldn't, have that connotation is another issue for another day. Maybe from here on in we should talk of a "dead body," but that's an odd qualifier, too. It just means the body is no longer animate. But if it isn't, why not? Why can't we animate it again? We've never been able to, but why not? What is missing from the dead body that isn't missing from the sleeping one? Something material?
Yeah, that's a good joke.
We can, now, revive someone in a coma; especially if we induced it. But the coma patient is not dead. Life functions have not ceased. And what are "life functions," anyway? They are materially sustained; we know that because we can materially destroy what sustains them. But where are they? What are they? Matter, I was taught in school, is neither created nor destroyed. But life is. Living things reproduce new living things all the time. But nothing can revive once-living things. Nothing can restor their "life force." Why not? What's gone missing?
If there's not a ghost in the machine, what is there?
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