Yeah -- you!
Who are you?
More to the point, _WHAT_ are you?
Relatively modern (18th-19th Century) Utilitarianism defines a human being as a bag of skin full of bones and soon-to-be decayed meat, whose value is what it can generate in the way of cash or notoriety during its short life. We, in general, tend to visualize ourselves as the little person sitting an inch or so behind our eyeballs, looking out at the world through them, and pulling strings to make our muscles move.
Neither of these is a particularly useful or comfortable model of what goes on in the few pounds of grey goo between our ears, much less of what the meaning and value of human life may be. Utilitarianism denies them, and the little person is just baffled.
Studies of injuries to the brain itself and nerves have given us the idea that certain areas of the brain process certain kinds of data (sight, sound, memory, etc.). but we have not (yet) the foggiest idea of _HOW_ that gets done, much less an overview of how a personality fits into the synapses and wrinkles of the brain.
We are beginning to get hints that there are timing cycles (one part of the brain sends a signal which prompts other parts to do things, then pass the signal along) -- by analogy to the way we have designed and built computerss to do what they do. Our sharpest observational tool, however -- MRI -- as of early 2010 has a resolution of "a few millimeters", according to a recent issue of Science News.
In that roughly 125 mm^3 (5 mm x 5mm x 5mm) voxel (cube), the article estimates there are roughly 55 _MILLION_ neurons and their associated synapses. A very rough and clumsy tool, indeed.
At the present level of development in Neurology and Cybernetics, we cannot even begin to say, with any level of scientific confidence, just what the human mind is and is capable or incapable of, much less what it means. First-class scientific minds will shrug, and say: "We're workin' on it."
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Modern science is not the only means of gaining knowledge and insight. There is an enormous amount of speculation and philosophy in the corpus of human literature that stretches back over 5,000 years. Not all of it is equally useful -- Sturgeon's Law says: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." -- this applies to science, too. ;-)
Almost all human societies postulate that a person is more than a bag of bones with a job and a credit report -- and there is legitimate question about the humanity of those who do believe that. Living in community requires that we perceive and acknowledge persons, situations, and rules beyond our own skins, and it also breeds an expectation that others will do the same.
Different societies conceive of that expectation differently, and cloak it in different images. As Catholic Christians (my target audience), we are formed around the images produced by Israel and the Church, and many of those images are recorded in the Bible.
My question at the top of this essay is also asked in Psalm 144:3 (Geneva Bible):
"LORD, what is man that thou regardest him, or the son of man, that thou thinkest on him?"
The answer is in Genesis 1:26 (KJV):
"God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness'."
Now, no one but the stupidest and most concrete-headed literalist imagines that God is a gigantic physical human on steroids, sitting on a physical throne plastered with jasper and smaragdine and dilithium crystals, so what is this "image" and "likeness" we are formed in?
We see Jewish ideas of what a person consists of developing over time, from the very concrete "nefesh" (breath) to the very abstract idea of a rational, immortal soul by Jesus' time (Pharisees and some others). The Church has always taught that a person consists of a body and soul -- and this soul is the part of us that is in the "image of God".
To Be Continued . . .
