The Most Human Human by Brian Christian Read Free Book Online Page B

intelligence.”
    In fact,
most
cultures have placed the self in the thoracic region somewhere, in one of the organs of the chest. This historical notion of heart-based thought and feeling leaves its fossil record in the idioms and figurative language of English: “that shows a lot of heart,” wesay, or “it breaks my heart,” or “in my heart of hearts.” In a number of other languages—e.g., Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Zulu—this role is played by the liver: “that shows a lot of liver,” their idioms read. And the Akkadian terms
karšu
(heart),
kabattu
(liver), and
libbu
(stomach) all signified, in various different ancient texts, the center of a person’s (or a deity’s) thinking, deliberation, and consciousness.
    I imagine an ancient Egyptian woman, say, who catches a man looking tenderly into her eyes, up at the far extreme of her body near her useless, good-for-nothing brains, and chastises him, hand at her chest. Hey. I’m down
here
.
A Brief History of the Soul
    The meaning and usage of the word “soul” in ancient Greece (—written as “psyche” 4 ) changes dramatically from century to century, and from philosopher to philosopher. It’s fairly difficult to sort it all out. Of course people don’t speak in twenty-first-century America the way they did in nineteenth-century America, but scholars of the next millennium will have a hard time becoming as sensitive to those differences as we are. Even differences of
four
hundred years are sometimes tricky to keep in mind: when Shakespeare writes of his beloved that “black wires grow on her head,” it’s easy to forget that electricity was still several centuries away. He’s not likening his lover’s hair to the shelves of RadioShack. And smaller and more nuanced distinctions are gnarlier by far. “Hah, that’s so ’80s,” we sometimes said to our friends’ jokes, as early as the ’90s … Can you imagine looking at a text from 460 B.C . and realizing that the author is talking
ironically
like someone from 470 B.C. ?
    Back to “soul”: the full story runs long, but a number of fascinatingpoints are raised at various moments in history. In Plato’s
Phaedo
(360 B.C. ), Socrates, facing his impending execution, argues that the soul is (in scholar Hendrik Lorenz’s words) “less subject to dissolution and destruction than the body, rather than, as the popular view has it, more so.”
More
so! This fascinated me to read. Socrates was arguing that the soul somehow
transcended
matter, whereas his countrymen, it would seem, tended to believe that the soul was made of a supremely gossamer, delicate, fine form of matter 5 —this was Heraclitus’s view 6 —and was therefore
more
vulnerable than the meatier, hardier tissues of the body. Though at first the notion of a fragile, material soul seems ludicrously out of line with everything we traditionally imagine about the soul, it makes more sense of, if offers less consolation for, things like head injury and Alzheimer’s. Likewise, part of the debate over abortion involves the question of when, exactly, a person
becomes
a person. The human body, Greeks of the fourth century B.C . believed, can both pre- and postdate the soul.
    Along with questions of the composition and durability of the soul came questions of who and what had them. It’s not just the psychologists who have been invested in The Sentence: philosophers, too, seem oddly riveted on staking out just exactly what makes
Homo sapiens
different and unique. Though Homer only used the word “psyche” in the context of humans, many of the thinkers and writers that followed him began to apply it considerably more liberally. Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus referred to plants and animals with the same word; Empedocles believed he was a bush in a previous life; Thales of Miletus suspected that magnets, because they had the power to move other objects, might have souls.
    Oddly, the word appears to have been used both more broadly andmore