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Guzeldere brings an insightful ordering to a chaotic field not only by distinguishing and cataloguing these controversies, but also by uncovering deeper intuitions among the participants that contribute to disagreement. For example, some theorists approach consciousness in terms of what it does—the causal role consciousness plays in the general economy of our mental lives. Others focus on consciousness as consciousness seems—the phenomenal qualities of consciousness mentioned above. These two approaches are usually assumed to be mutually exclusive, but Guzeldere believes that the way ahead is to recognize that "how consciousness seems cannot be conceptualized in the absence of what consciousness does."
The book throughout assumes a physicalist or materialist account of human consciousness; no essays by mind-body or body-soul dualists have been included even for historical interest. The assumption of all the authors is well expressed by Patricia Smith Churchland:
In assuming that neuroscience can reveal the physical mechanisms subserving psychological functions, I am assuming that it is indeed the brain that performs those functions—that capacities of the human mind are in fact capacities of the human brain. This assumption and its concomitant rejection of Cartesian souls or spirits or "spooky stuff" existing separately from the brain is no whimsy. On the contrary, it is a highly probable hypothesis, based on evidence currently available from physics, chemistry, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.
Tie this physicalist assumption to the fact that Christians have not only attributed consciousness to the soul but, in addition, have taken it to be the seat of our spiritual nature and it is clear that the very existence of such a book raises important questions for Christians.
It is no accident that this review follows an earlier one in BOOKS & CULTURE by Allen C. Guelzo, titled "Soulless: Is Consciousness an Illusion?" (Jan./Feb. 1998). Guelzo reviewed several books on consciousness studies by many of the same authors included in Block's anthology, and he raised an impassioned warning to Christians. I shall devote the rest of this essay to an attempt to explain why consciousness studies should raise the interest of Christians but should cause no alarm. Along the way I shall mention some of the more engaging of the book's 49 essays.
The central point of Guelzo's article is that consciousness studies are thoroughly antidualist and that an assault on substance dualism is an assault on Christianity. I take issue with Guelzo's assumption that Christianity needs dualism. True, body-soul dualism of one sort or another has been the majority view at least from Augustine to the beginning of the twentieth century, and remains common among lay Christians today. Nonetheless, I make the following claims:
- In the Hebrew Bible, human life is regularly understood monistically rather than dualistically, and this unified being is a physical being.
- New Testament writers recognize a variety of conceptions of the composition or makeup of the human being but do not teach body-soul dualism.
- Original Christian hope for life after death is based on bodily resurrection, patterned after that of Jesus, not on immortality of the soul.
- Christian salvation in the end is not "soul-ectomy" (in Ted Peters's colorful term) but rather participation of the entire person as new creation in the kingdom of God.
- The moral value of humans is not due to their possession of an immortal substance, but rather to the fact that God has created us and has chosen to be in relationship with us.
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