Lithium for the Soul

January 13, 2010 By 55 Comments

by VorJack

xrayI have a family member – let’s call him Kenneth – who suffers from manic depression, with a few more disorders thrown in. He was middle aged before these problems were diagnosed, and so he’s had most of his life to get used to them. For the past decade he’s suffered through different regimes of medication in the hopes of getting stabilized.

During one period where Kenneth was dealing with issues from his medications, we were both involved in a conversation about the afterlife. After a couple go-rounds about heaven, reincarnation and the soul, Kenneth said, “There is no soul. It’s all just chemistry.”

Kenneth acknowledges that his experience with medication led him to that conclusion: a sprinkle of lithium and he’s a different person. Our emotions, personalities and all the rest of the mental furniture that we think of when we try to define a person all change with different concentrations of chemicals.

All of this leads to sticky questions about what people mean when they use the word “soul.”

Body, Soul and Mind

Pullquote: “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”
2nd. Cor. 5:1

Like most Americans, I suspect my understanding of heaven comes from New Yorker cartoons more than systematic theology. Still, here it goes: heaven is the place where our souls go when we die. In other words, where we go when we die. We will all be standing around in the clouds, carrying the memories of our time on earth, and still be basically the same people we were while alive.

So it’s not surprising that we tend to equate soul and mind; that is, the soul contains all those mental facilities like memory and thought that make up who we are. This soul isn’t something like the Hindu concept of the atman, the part of us that continues on after our death but which contains none of ourselves.

The thought of something surviving our deaths that lacks our personalities and memories – something that is not us – is uninspiring. Why struggle so that something other than ourselves can live on in paradise? The soul must be us, yet immaterial and spiritual, so that it might continue after our physical bodies die.

But that leads to problems with Kenneth’s insight. Anyone who has ever dealt with mental illness knows that it is a material problem that can be traced to the structure or chemistry of the brain. It responds to chemical drugs better than spiritual practices. But if our minds are our physical brains, where does that leave the soul?

To gain the world but lose your mind …

Pullquote: “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality”.
Handel’s Messiah

Basically, our tendency to equate mind with soul leads to a problem once we witness the physical basis of our minds. How can our squishy mortal brains live on after our death? One solution actually comes from St. Paul, who was looking for a solution to another knotty problem.

In regards to the afterlife, Christianity primarily drew from two source: the Jews, who tended to believe that life after death meant a physical resurrection of the body, and Greek philosophers like the “middle Platonists,” who argued for an immortal spiritual soul and denigrated the material body. Obviously, these two ideas would come into conflict.

We can see this most clearly in 1st & 2nd Corinthians, where Paul seems to be arguing with people who do not believe in a physical resurrection. The Middle Platonists couldn’t accept a resurrection that left the soul “trapped” in the body, while more Jewish Christians like Paul couldn’t accept the complete loss of the body.

The compromise that Paul works out is that upon resurrection we would be given a new body. Yes, this temporary earthly body — this “tent” — is flawed and unpleasant, but our heavenly body — a real “building” — is wonderful and waiting for us after this life. The idea of the body and soul bound together was maintained, but the Platonists could be consoled in that we are to leave this earthly body behind.

Perhaps this sidesteps the problem. Maybe the soul is both software and hardware, but we have the option of upgrading. People have had a lot of fun imagining what those perfect heavenly bodies might be like. I’ve heard modern evangelical preachers go on about how these bodies will be beautiful, they’ll all be thin, and all our physical ailments will be healed. But what about our mental ailments?

It seems nonsensical to suggest that residents of heaven will still suffer from schizophrenia, manias and other problems. Perhaps the easiest answer would be to say that new bodies will include new minds without the old problems, but this is altogether too facile. Kenneth’s manic depression is part of him, and has been part of him for decades. Take it away, and he’s not the same person.

And for that matter, what about me? I’m twitchy, moody and introverted. None of these problems interfere with my ability to function (much), but the line between mental illness and personality problem can get fuzzy. Would my “new mind” fix these issues? But if so, what remains of me?

Sometimes it seems that many forms of Christianity are still trying come to terms with evolution. If so, they’re likely to be left behind as we now try to grapple with the mysteries of the human brain. Because if a religion cannot produce an answer to Kenneth’s experiences, then I don’t know that there’s any hope for it.

Filed Under: Christianity, Heaven 55 Comments
  • mikespeir

    But what if the brain is just the control panel the soul manipulates to make the body function? Maybe the control panel is what’s faulty, so that some functions are impaired or don’t work at all. Freed from the malfunctioning brain, perhaps the soul is also freed from the various psychological maladies.

    • trj

      That would still mean the experiences and personality you have in this body are disconnected from your soul. Can we separate personality from the soul? If so, then it’s a different version of your current self that lives on in the afterlife.

      • Neophyte

        schrodinger’s cat?

        • trj

          Not really.

    • Reginald Selkirk

      “But what if” fluorescent blue leprechauns came flying out of your ***? We can play “But what if” all day long.

      Ockham had a thing or two to say about this.

      • Custador

        Occam. Pluralitas non est positum sine necesitate. In fairness, though, Occam’s Razor has very limited application because it over-simplifies situations and rules out unlikely explanations which are nevertheless possible and which do sometimes occur.

      • mikespeir

        Yeah, Occam would be a problem, but it’s still a kind of thinking that’s hard to refute if the dualist can con us into shouldering the burden of proof.

  • Francesc

    “I’ve heard modern evangelical preachers go on about how these bodies will be beautiful, they’ll all be thin, and all our physical ailments will be healed”
    Wait. Thin? Beautiful according to 20th century ideal of beautiness, according to 15th century ideal or may I be a Platypus?

    • Sunny Day

      What if your “body” is only beautiful to the person observing it?

      Yay skewed perceptions!

    • cynic

      i’ve also heard about ‘resurrected’ bodies being able to walk through walls

      • Neophyte

        read ” surfing through hyperspace” by clifford pickover. very, very cool.

  • http://uponariver.blogspot.com/ Lisa

    I agree, and it’s dementia which really makes me wonder how people can believe in souls – I think we are our memories, and without them we are no longer the same person/soul.

    • Custador

      I’ve had a lot of patients who are EMI (elderly mentally ill), usually with Alzheimers or a similar condition. It’s been my experience that their personality stays intact until a very late stage. The changes in behaviour people notice are often because the patient is afraid and doesn’t understand what’s happening. It’s a cruel part of the degenerative nature of dementia, but imagine how you’d feel if the last thing you could remember was today and you suddenly wake up in a hospital bed, decades older than you are now. Some dementia sufferers go through that every minute of every day. You have to do things like covering up mirrors because seeing themselves can put them into shock. Personality seems to be the last thing to go, probably because Alzheimers tends to attack new memories first and work back, and personality is hard-wired at an early stage in our lives.

      • http://brgulker.wordpress.com brgulker

        My grandmother suffered from Alzheimers … such a humiliating, dehumanizing disease.

        Your assessment (working backward) reflects what happened to my grandma — she retained her personality but lost her recent memories initially … by the time she passed, she was literally a shell.

        I hope we find a cure.

        • Custador

          It is a horrible condition, you’re right.

  • http://www.jesus21.com Miss Poppy Dixon

    What about memory? What if all your memories are painful? How will you be able to hobnob with people who remember summering in the Hamptons and buying a string of polo ponies? I see a new kind of Heavenly class war.

    I should have taken the blue pill.

  • Francesco Orsenigo

    I was just reading this: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Phineas-Gage-Neurosciences-Most-Famous-Patient.html?c=y&page=1

    The fact that everything that would pertain a soul (memory, personality, inclinations) can be changed by external factors is probably the greatest proof against most Abrhamic Religions.

  • http://foreverinhell.blogspot.com Personal Failure

    This is also explains why, if you visit a fundamentalist message board, the response to “I have [whatever mental illness]” is “pray more”. They can’t accept that mental illness is physical illness because the mind is the brain and therefore physical, because that obviates their entire concept of the soul.

  • CJ :)

    It’s funny you published this today – I was thinking about this from reading a post on another blog (Hemant’s, maybe? Can’t remember) about “religious like” ideas that one doesn’t discuss with others.

    The “soul” is mine.

    I am also manic depressive and I have depended on lithium to stabilize me for over 20 years. With lithium I am a reliable employee, a responsible parent (if one with a little whacky ideas on how to raise a child, according to others) and a dedicated wife and daughter. Without lithium, I am a crazy, out of control, hypersexual, paranoid, violent, impulsive beyond-bitch.

    It has always amazed me how lithium reins my brain in enough for me to control myself – believe me, although there are some good parts of mania, there is also a lot of fear involved in it.

    To me, a “soul” is the compilation of who and what one is. It isn’t supernatural – it’s just one’s personality and experiences culminating in an individual person.

    • wintermute

      The “soul” is what the brain does.

  • wintermute

    Long, but well worth reading:

    http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/ghost.html

    • kholdom0790

      Fascinating article. Recommend it to anyone. I posted it to my Facebook but no one seemed to notice. Sad face.

  • Jer

    The thought of something surviving our deaths that lacks our personalities and memories – something that is not us – is uninspiring.

    What’s more it would be a heresy in almost all of the major Christian denominations to cast it that way because Christianity promises immortality after death. The idea that some invisible bit of “energy” that doesn’t have your personality or memories might persist forever is not the same as the idea of an immortal life after death for the faithful. One can argue about what Heaven is supposed to be like, but one of the fundamental principles of the afterlife is that somehow it’s “you” that lives forever – either in bliss in Heaven or in the eternal torment of Hell.

  • cypressgreen

    I would not even *recognize myself* without my Manic Depressive meds. And would my friends? Contrary to what average people think, a Bipolar person’s cocktail of meds (ah, yes, I take 4…for now) *does not* fix you back to normal. It should fix you back to *normalcy,* but that’s different.

    And one coctail of meds won’t work forever. I hate when I need to change meds, because you never know how you’ll react to something new.

    I don’t want a new perfected personality. Or a perfect body. Or all my old memories forever (I suppose in Heaven we’d have perfect recall of all the stuff we forgot on purpose.) I don’t want to run into those people who treated me like shit in High School and remember it! Or the guy I went on a date with thinking it was his twin brother. Take that eternal life and stuff it.

  • CybrgnX

    As state previous you can argue ‘what if…’ all day and settle nothing.
    Who cares about the soul anyway. As NO ONE can prove it is there or not there.
    When you die -you will find the answer.
    is there a heaven/hell – when you die you will find the answer. Again there is NO way anyone can prove they are ‘real’, all we have are a bunch of stone-age goat herders, terrified at the thought of their own death, making up fairy tales to make themselves feel better thru fabricated delusions.
    At this point I am HERE! living this existence and must follow the rules of how things work here.
    I’ll worry about ‘THERE’ when I get there.
    I personally ‘believe’ that what is beyond is weirder than anything a bunch of frighten stone-age goat herders could possibly think up.
    As far as the JXI (jews/Xtians/Islamic) idea of heaven/hell, I’m choosing HELL!!!
    The thought of spending eternity with their spoilt, 5yr old, psychopath of a g0d is too disgusting for words to express.

    • Yoav

      I’m with you on that. Every time I hear the fundie description of heaven I get the image of North Korea with harp music where you have to spend every moment praising that infantile, tantrum trowing, murderous bustard, or else (the viewing gallery where you can enjoy watching others burning in hell are the equivalent of public executions). At least if you live under such a regime you know that worst case you will be out when you die just think of living for ever in North Korea (suddenly immortality lose its appeal).

      • Justin

        Perhaps you AND the fundies are wrong…. fundamental Christianity that you guys talk about isn’t all that old – maybe a few hundred years. Reading what early Christians wrote would probably surprise both of you two.

    • Francesco Orsenigo

      On the contrary, modern neurology can prove that no soul exist for quite a large variety of definitions of the term “soul”.

      Every time we see that alteration of the physical brain alters part of our identities, the definition of “soul” must be reduced in scope.
      This has happened already for enough aspects (free-will, memory, personality, skill, tastes) to make any idea of an immortal “soul” largely meaningless.

  • Dutchgirl

    While I sometimes admit to being atheist in social settings, I almost never mention that I don’t believe in a soul. This seems to get people really riled up. They argue and argue how I’m wrong. But when pressed they get very defensive and vague about what a soul is. For me, I see no purpose in the concept since I don’t believe in god(s) or an afterlife.

  • Neophyte

    I think the soul is a metaphorical vehicle for the electricity of the nervous system. callin git the soul is an easy term for most to grasp. i personally do not contemplate an ethereal version of the physical body as a vessel for the soul, however, i do wonder about the electrical activity of the brain that allows me to exist and have awareness… that is to say, when considering the law of conservation of energy, what happens to the microvoltage in our brains when we die? according to conservation, it doesn’t disappear ( be created or destroyed, simply change form)- after all the ionic pumps which generate the current are elemental… they don’t decompose as tissue does. Just curious.

    • Francesc

      What happens with the energy wich is currently allowing your computer to work when you turn it off? What happens with a chemical battery when you let it in your TV command for a year?

      • Neophyte

        it is still there, running thru the wiring of my house, to the power generating plants after a circuitous course. likewise, the ions allowing current in my batteries are still there, I am just not accessing the circuit. where’s yours?

        • Francesc

          From a philosophic point of view, this same current that was allowing you to use your computer is now allowing you to read a book in your bed. It doesn’t have -in any sense- the same information as it had before.

          A chemical battery that is not used for a long time tends to slowly discharge itself.

          What I meant was: ok, the energy doesn’t dissapear, it changes. The atoms who form your cells also doesn’t disappear, other organisms feed from them changing them, as before you eat them they were part of other organisms. But those are not you. When you format your computer the bits are still there, but they aren’t anymore your documents.

          • Neophyte

            but isn’t that exactly conservation of energy? and so where does it eventually go? i mean beside the obvious ” back to the earth” if you are buried. maybe i am just looking for the basic squid ( engineer) answer, but i feel there is some vague thought/question i cannot properly vebalize. i am frustrated and hope that someone can objectively look at my queries and help– thx a million

      • Neophyte

        this is relating to science, physics, not philosophy, entiende?

    • Yoav

      The pumps are proteins that like all other protein will degrade when you die and their components will get back into the earth or into the bugs and maggots that will be feasting on your body. The charge is menteined by the inability of ion to freely cross the cell membrane. once your body decompose the ions flow and reach equilibrium. This is equivalent to the potential energy of a rock held high then dropped. The ion pumps use chemical energy to create a voltage difference between the two side of the membrane that can later be released by opening a channel that let the ion flow down the gradient using the energy to preform a task.

      • Neophyte

        but what then, happens to the potential energy of the ions? k+ na+ ca+ ?
        wish i were a bioelectrical engineer.

        • Yoav

          The same thing that happen to the potential energy of a rock once it hit the ground. The ions themself don’t have energy the energy is in the gradient and once the gradient is destroyed there is no potential. I’m sure a physicst can explain it better.

          • Neophyte

            thanks, for trying. though the energy of a rock that hits the ground is transferred from the rock to the ground… is there a physicist in the house?? lol

            • Yoav

              The energy is released as the ions flow back to equilibrium. I don’t have the physics to be able to do the exact math but just like the falling rock you will have some kinetic energy and probably some heat generated by the movement of ions.

            • D’n

              He’s explaining it right.

              In the analogy the positive ion is the rock, and the negative ion is the earth. When released the rock falls to the earth giving its energy to the earth. When the ions aren’t stuck in their artificial gradient the positive ions give energy to the negative ions and both reach equilibrium. Also there is the law of thermodynamics where a system not being maintained loses energy to heat and such. So the energy essentially goes to degrade the material, heat given off, and is trapped in the tissue to be consumed by another life form.

        • Francesco Orsenigo

          Physicists don’t care about what is real and what is not.
          We care only about how to describe something.
          “Does this particular set of mathematical concepts agree with the experiments?”
          If so, then that is a valid description of reality.

          Is a photon a particle or a wave?
          That we leave to philosophers, we just have a nice equation that describes what it is likely to do.

          Just like that, “potential energy” is more a mathematical description of reality than something you can touch.

          Getting even more abstracted, all your cell pumps will be replaced during the course of your lifetime, so they are not part of what you think as “myself”.
          You are a specific configuration of synapses that connect to neuron X rather than neuron Y.
          Without removing a single molecule, you could rearrange the synapses and obtain a different individual.
          Simulating that very specific configuration with a computer, we’ll definitely obtain you.

          (Hey, I’ve been hypersemplificating everything, but you get the spin…)

          • trj

            > “Physicists don’t care about what is real and what is not. We care only about how to describe something.”

            Not entirely true. A lot of proposed physics is disposed because it doesn’t describe reality.

            An oversimplified example is the the formula for a rectangle: you can solve it by using negative values for the rectangle’s sides. In the real world we know it doesn’t make sense to have a square with negative sides (you can’t have a football field that is -70 x -30 m, say). So a physicist will discard a calculation that yields such a solution, even though mathematically there’s nothing wrong with it.

    • trj

      > ” the ionic pumps which generate the current are elemental… they don’t decompose as tissue does”

      The pumps themselves decompose, as they’re part of biological cells. The electrical current (in the form of electrons) is fundamental, but these electrons will dissipate into the immediate surroundings via the usual chemical processes.

    • Septimus Octopus

      The conservation of energy idea used to make some sense to me until I thought it through a bit more. The source of energy for your consciousness is the food you eat. When you die, you cease eating and thereby adding energy for your body to function. Your body’s potential energy at the time of your death is dissipated (I assume) through heat and decomposition.
      Also, it has occurred to me that the idea of your soul transporting your “energy” to heaven/hell/whatever is actually a violation of the conservation of energy principle. Since the afterlife is typically defined as some place apart from the universe we currently inhabit, the transportation of your soul’s energy would in essence be the destruction of that energy from our universe.

      • Neophyte

        interesting ideas. i wasn’t meaning energy going heavenward, but rather whether there might be science beyond the decomposition/ back to the earth idea. thx

        • Neophyte

          and perhaps there isn’t, but that’s why i solicit opinions :D

      • Justin

        Yeah, but that assumes that we need physical, electrical, energy to operate a soul…

        • Francesc

          Well yes, we try to explain the world through naturalistic means. What else is besides matter and energy? You can imagine that there are “other things” but we don’t have any evidence of their existence. That of course doesn’t mean it’s impossible for them to exist, only that we don’t have any reason to imagine that they exist.

        • Francesco Orsenigo

          Justin, do animals have a soul?
          Do Monkeys? Dolphins? Other mammals? Fish? Octopi? Fruit flies? Nematods? Jelly fish? Copepods? Sponges? Plants?
          Where do you draw the line?
          Can we have different ‘amounts’ of soul?

  • http://brgulker.wordpress.com brgulker

    I had a professor in seminary whose area of study was historical theology, meaning that he studied the history of theology and its development over time. He, like everyone there, was accepting of science and had put a good bit of time into researching how the idea of “soul” has developed and changed over time.

    To put it briefly, he argued that the concept of a “soul” was used (historically) to describe human dignity, and in some ways the distinctiveness of human beings. Whatever else the soul is/was, my soul is what makes me a human, not a dog, a cat, or a cow. Further, my soul is what makes me, me, and you, you. In other words, my soul is my consciousness — my mind, my memories, and so on.

    The problems you raised, vorjack, are not easy ones for theology. The more we learn about the human brain (and accept it honestly), the more we are forced to rethink what we mean by the term and what those implications are for classical theology.

    • Neophyte

      your argument is what jaynes concludes in the breakdown of the bicameral mind ( the origins of consciousness: the breakdown…) by (julian) jaynes

      • JonJon

        The thing of import I’ve learned from my own profs is that the human soul could not and should not remain perfectly intact in heaven. In other words, Christian theology can remove this problem by saying that the divine plan for souls is to “perfect” them; since they are obviously imperfect on earth, no matter the state of their mental health, “fixing” them must be one of the necessary functions of heaven. This is all very arcane, of course, but it is a persistently occurring question.

  • nazani14

    Good for Kenneth, and I wish him health. I reached the same conclusion by watching elderly relatives, and by realizing that I am a far different person than I was as a teenager. All I share with my past self is some memories and preferences. Certainly there is no invisible, eternal “core” to my consciousness. I think atheists should spend a lot more time asking theists to prove that they have souls, instead of trying to disprove the existence of god. From the comments I’ve heard, I really don’t think most Christians actually make much effort toward conceptualizing the soul.

  • nikki tang tang

    “Our emotions, personalities and all the rest of the mental furniture that we think of when we try to define a person all change with different concentrations of chemicals.”

    i’m bipolar and I couldn’t have said it better myself