Altruism and the Good Samaritan
How do we define altruism? The word itself was coined by the French philosopher Auguste Comte in the mid 1800s, and is based on the Italian adjective altrui. He coined the word “altruism” to refer to what he believed to be our moral obligation to serve others and place their interests above one’s own. Through his philosophy of positivism it was introduced into English and was popularised by the advocates of his philosophy.
The word may be less than 200 years old, but altruism is older than humankind itself. We can see altruistic behaviour in evolutionary biology. An organism is said to behave altruistically when its behaviour benefits other organisms, but at a cost to itself. This behaviour may reduce the number of offspring produced, but at the same time increase the chances of more offspring being produced to another like-organism. There are many such examples: the insect world with intricate social arrangements; vampire bats which regularly regurgitate blood for other members of the colony who have failed to feed; animals warning the group at a risk to their own safety.
In human understanding the action of helping another person is a conscious action. In the biological sense there is no such requirement. Natural selection may have favoured humans who genuinely care about helping others. Consider child raising, it is easy to predict an evolutionary advantage associated with taking good care of one’s children. As a result, caring, altruistic parents will have a higher inclusive fitness, and spread more of their genes, than parents who do not care. Humans behave more altruistically towards their close kin than towards non-relatives, as within the animal kingdom; and we tend to help those who have helped us in the past – not dissimilar to the reciprocal altruism displayed in the animal kingdom – you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours!
“The Golden Rule” is a moral principle which is a corner stone in most major religions and cultures. Basically it means “treat others as you would like to be treated.“
Confucius talks about shu, which is translated as altruism, saying to his disciples: “Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you”; similar words are used in other religious scriptures. Altruism is an extension of this reciprocity. Examples of how it crosses religions or cultures include:
- Aristotle: lists benevolence as one of the virtues.
The Qur-an: If you give alms openly, it is well; but if you do it secretly and give to the poor, that is better. - (Qur-an 2:271a)
In Islam, zakat, or the giving of alms, is the third of the five pillars of Islam. Various rules are attached to the practice, and a set amount is stipulated. The recipients include the destitute and the working poor, those with excessive debt, strangers and others who need assistance. The general principle is that the rich should give to the poor.
Buddhism recognizes three kinds of charity: giving material offerings, sanctuary and protection to animals and giving doctrinal lectures. In Buddhism, alms or almsgiving is the respect shown by the giver to the Buddhist monk, and is offered in return for prayers.
In Judaism, the term for charity is tzedakah, which derives from tzedek, meaning “justice.” I like this concept – it gives respect to the person receiving the charity. An example of Judaic altruistic behaviour is Ruth when she places the needs of her mother-in-law before herself; or the commands in Deuteronomy to leave a portion of crops for the poor to glean.
Altruism is central to the teachings of Christianity. Think of the Sermon on the Mount, and the parable of the widow’s mite.
Although altruism means helping another person without expecting a reward, there is often an “internal” benefit for the subject, a good feeling, a sense of satisfaction, a fulfilment of duty. If one does something for another person, simply with the view of gaining something for oneself then it is not really altruistic.
With this in mind let us think about the above examples, each of them has an accompanying reward for doing good. Aristotle recommends adopting the virtue of beneficence to advance one’s standing in the community. A person adopting such a virtue will not only benefit others, but will generate a response that will likely bring benefits in return. Within the other doctrines there is a concomitant reward, Ruth married the rich landowner, the golden rule is all about reciprocity, the Christian and Islamic doctrines focus on a better after-life – laying up treasures in heaven, other religions suggest good karma such as rain to grow crops. Even old adages – such as what goes around comes around, suggest that if you do the right thing by someone else, you will get your reward.
According to the theory of psychological egoism, while one can be outwardly altruistic in the practical sense, there is no such thing as pure altruistic motivations. That is, while one might very well spend one’s life helping others, one’s motive for doing so is always the furthering of one’s own interests. One claiming to be an altruist might get a great deal of pleasure from helping others. That pleasure, according to this theory, is both the motive and the resulting benefit one gets from the act.
We do need to recognize that there are powerful external motivators for altruistic acts. But does this mean that there is no such thing as true disinterested altruism? I don’t believe so, people acting altruistically are not consciously calculating the benefit that they are gaining for themselves each time they reach out to help another person. Research with young children, demonstrates how a toddler will help somebody struggling with a task, suggesting that we are indeed hard-wired to be altruistic. Neurological research has found that a particular area of the brain – the posterior superior temporal cortex – is activated by altruistic behaviour.
800 years ago, Maimonides, the mediaeval Jewish philosopher drew up a golden ladder of Charity.
- Giving grudgingly
- Giving to the poor less than one should, but in a friendly manner
- Giving to the poor after being asked
- Giving to the poor without being asked
- Giving when the recipient knows the donor but the donor does not know the recipient
- Giving when the donor knows the recipient, but the recipient does not know the donor
- Giving when neither the recipient nor the donor know each other
- The highest degree of all is one who supports another reduced to poverty by providing a loan, or entering into a partnership, or finding work for him, so that the poor person can become self-sufficient.
Today 3 percent of the Australian population climb to the second highest rung on the ladder when they give blood, knowing not the donor, nor the donor knowing who gave the gift of blood.
There are multitudinous examples of altruism: the kindness of strangers; the Salvation Army making prison visits; our spontaneous response to the Tsunami victims; the philanthropic gifts of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet; Geoff Dixon’s $70 million donation to Parkinson’s research. Then there are the truly heroic altruists; the soldier who gives his life for his mates, the person who jumps into a swollen river to rescue a drowning child; Oscar Schindler; Raoul Wallenberg.
The term the Good Samaritan has entered into the vernacular. It is one of the most well known stories exemplifying selfless giving. The parable was told by Jesus in response to the question “And who is my neighbour?”
In brief, a man was set upon by thieves and left for dead on the side of the road. A priest came past saw him, and crossed to the other side of the road. Next a Levite, an important religious official, came past and he too crossed the road. Then along came the Samaritan. Now Samaritans were despised religious outcasts, but the Samaritan when he saw the victim, helped him, fixed up his wounds, took him to an inn and took responsibility for his on-going care.
Two Princeton researchers (Darley & Batson) wanted to test the psychological motivators behind the behaviour of the Good Samaritan, and by extension our own supposedly altruistic behaviour. They took a cohort of students at Princeton Theological Seminary with different religious and moral orientations. As each subject arrived, he (I think they were all men) was informed that he was to give a talk in another building and was sent on his way. On the way there, there was a “victim” slumped strategically in a doorway and clearly needing help. The question was under what conditions would a subject stop to help the victim?
Half of the subjects were assigned to talk on the Good Samaritan Parable; the others were assigned a different topic. Some of the subjects were told they were late and should hurry; some were told they had just enough time to get to their destination, and some were told they had lots of time. The results showed that only one of these variables that made any difference was how much of a hurry the subjects were in. Subjects in a hurry were far less likely to stop and provide assistance than the other subjects.
What does this indicate? These were all Princeton divinity undergraduates, students who you would expect would be switched on to helping those in need. But they were easily manipulated by an instruction to hurry. Even making the parable of the Good Samaritan a part of the actual experiment had no real effect on the subjects.
The standard interpretation of the Parable focuses on the moral character of the people, the goodness of the Samarian as opposed to the religiosity of the priest and Levite. But this interpretation is wrong because it overlooks situational factors. In this case the important situational factor is how much of a hurry the various agents might be in. I will come return to this later.
In light of the above we can re-evaluate our reactions to certain situations. For example, why did Australians give so readily to the Tsunami victims, but have overlooked the famine sufferers in Daifur? I contend that situational factors are behind our altruistic response or lack thereof. The dramatic nature of the Tsunami, the proximity to our own shores, the sense that they, the Tsunami victims, are not responsible for their fate, the acute presentation over the chronic problems of Africa.
I have a second Samaritan story for you to consider – the story of Kitty Genovese which demonstrates a phenomenon which came to be known as the Bad Samaritan Complex and I would also remind you that there have been similar occurrences recently in Australia.
In 1964, Kitty Genovese was murdered in New York while thirty-eight people watched without intervening from their Queens apartment block. This was in middle class New York, but where, one might ask, were the heroic altruists on that day? The circumstances of her murder and the apparent lack of reaction by the neighbours who watched it was reported by a newspaper article published two weeks later. The incident prompted investigation into the psychological phenomenon that became known as the bystander effect the “Bad Samaritan Complex” or “Genovese syndrome”.
Darley and Latané conducted a series of experiments to tease out this problem. In one such experiment, a subject was put in a waiting room to fill out application forms. The subject was either alone, or there were two other people in the room filling out applications. Then smoke began pouring out of a hole in the wall. The researchers were interested in ascertaining who would report the presence of smoke. The results? Three quarters of the people who were alone in the waiting room reported the smoke before the experimental period came to an end (6 minutes). When there were three people in the room only one person out of 24 reported within the first 4 minutes, and only 38% reported it within the 6 minutes. Basically people were twice as likely to report the smoke if they were alone than if they were in groups. Darley and Latané’s other experiments produced similar results.
The researchers offered several possible explanations for these results. One hypothesis is diffused responsibility: passing the buck assuming or hoping, that others will intervene; the fewer people present the greater the sense of responsibility. Another explanation is that subjects interpret the situation as other people around them do, rather than making their own judgement. Suppose a person is staggering in the street, we may not know whether he is drunk or suffering a heart attack. If we look around and see others paying no attention, we are more likely to ignore the situation, and assume the person is drunk and can therefore be ignored.
Maybe people are concerned about how they appear to others around them, and don’t want to make fools of themselves; when alone, people do not worry about their image and are therefore more likely to act. There have been other experiments which show that people are influenced enormously by the perceptions and behaviour of those around them. If we don’t help because no-one else is getting involved, we might help more when we are given the lead by other people helping.
As an aside – To counter the bystander effect when you are the victim, the recommendation is to pick a specific person in the crowd to appeal to for help rather than appealing to the larger group generally. This places all responsibility on that specific person instead of allowing it to diffuse.
All too easily we attribute character traits to people in order to explain their behaviour, the priest was bad, the people in the apartment block were morally suspect, Oskar Schindler was a saint (he wasn’t); remember that until recently Bill Gates was not universally admired. But we can so easily be wrong as people behave differently in different situations. In trying to explain why someone has acted in a certain way, we concentrate on the person, their supposed character, and ignore the situation. What I believe is that in another situation, another time, another place, if he too was in a hurry, the Samaritan could have passed by on the other side of the road.
Why is this important? Understanding the complexity of altruistic behaviour can help us understand our motivations, the triggers that make us commit to a cause, why we don’t all give, why we are not always generous or why we don’t behave to others, as we should.
I would now like to move on, to take you away from the standard view of altruism and its underlying psychology, and introduce the philosophy of Peter Singer.
In 1972 at the age of 26 Peter Singer published a seminal essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” This essay challenged, and still challenges, contemporary philosophers and ordinary citizens alike. It was confronting, it asked a lot of hard questions about the moral obligations the west in light of world poverty and the unequal distribution of global resources – an issue still going on in the environment debate. Singer is an unabashed utilitarian, and he uses utilitarianism to argue that we are obligated to do something about it. We need to ” give aid until giving any more would hurt ourselves more than it would help recipients”, and ”whatever money you’re spending on luxuries, not necessities, should be given away.”
Today Singer admits that he himself falls short of the standards that he set in this seminal essay but he is still writing and enjoining the affluent west to face up to their responsibilities. Recently he wrote a long article which was published in the SMH setting out clearly how targets to alleviate world poverty could be reasonably met.
The pressing philosophical questions now are: what in the way of humanitarian assistance do people who have more than enough owe to those who do not have enough? What are our obligations? Is the alleviation of harm of higher moral good than prevention of harm? And once we recognise our obligations and act accordingly, then are our actions no longer altruistic, but a requirement or duty?
In his final chapter in the book A Darwinian Left – Politics, Evolution and Co-operation, Peter Singer takes an ambitious leap past the view of altruism that I have presented today, he enjoins us to move beyond ourselves when he says, and I quote.
We do not know to what extent our capacity to reason can, in the long run, take us beyond the conventional Darwinian constraints on the degree of altruism that a society may be able to foster. We are reasoning beings…… Reason provides us with the capacity to recognize that each of us is simply one being among others, all of whom have wants and needs that matter to them as our needs and wants matter to us. Can that insight ever overcome the pull of other elements in our evolved nature that act against the idea of an impartial concern for all of our fellow humans, or better still for all sentient beings?
Mind Over Matter
By Derek Maitland
Tuesday February 20th 2007
I want to open this talk by recalling what I rank as the most elegantly apocalyptic dilemma ever posed about the existence and future of mankind. It comes from the prolific works of the celebrated and controversial British philosopher of the 1940s, Cyril Joad, and when I first read it I knew I had to begin studying philosophy myself.
Joad wrote: “Is the human mind a fundamental feature of the universe, a key to the interpretation of the rest, or is it a mere accident, an eddy in the primeval slime, doomed one day to finish its pointless journey with as little significance as it once began it?”
Isn’t that just wonderful? Doesn’t it make you feel glad to be young and alive?
Now, there are various ways in which that statement can be interpreted, but I’ve always looked at it this way: Are we intelligent beings with a free will – capable of a creativity and resourcefulness that will survive everything to come, or are we simply organic robots, physical bodies with built-in computers that simply react to the demands and challenges of our environment?
Or let’s put it this way: Are we completely governed as human beings by an incredibly complex neurological wiring, or circuitry, that is part and parcel of our organism, or is there truly another force, what we call the mind, or the soul – certainly something metaphysical – which drives and guides the body through a higher level of desires, aspirations and needs which are far loftier than our physical senses?
It’s a question that lies at the heart of philosophy, and indeed has been debated furiously for centuries. I say it’s a purely fundamental question because of the bigger issues that bloom in great blossoms of thought from it – the whole of metaphysics, for example – whether in fact there are two distinct realities to our existence, one the physical reality of matter; the other a dream-like reality of ideals, thoughts, beliefs and concepts.
This fierce debate is raging still – fuelled nowadays by the steady advances in neurological research. And by that, I mean that they’re finding more and more little nooks and crannies and patterns or networks of circuitry in the brain which not only deal with emotions, desires, even projected aims and goals that many thinkers have claimed for the idealistic side of things, but suggest that what we would regard as the separate, free-thinking mind is simply a neurological function: a product of the human machine.
In our day and age, with the level of intellectual and spiritual debate that many of us are attaining, the very last thing we’d like to hear about ourselves is that we are perambulating organic computers.
Yet it may well be – and I, for one, sincerely hope it isn’t – that the concept of mind or soul as a separate, more elevated force within our consciousness will ultimately turn out to be an invention of religion – an emotional flux, born of faith, in which we’ve been able to correspond with another of our inventions – the gods.
If we take the Darwinian theory of existence and evolution, we can certainly say that our brains have grown and become more and more complex – fantastically so – in response to increasingly complex demands and challenges of our environment.
So have our minds – if indeed we have what we regard as separate minds – required to deal these days with an enormous, ever-growing, whirling storm of moral, ethical, intellectual, occupational, imperatives and dilemmas with each step on the rung of human development.
In that respect, we have another immediate question that we have to deal with: Is the human brain, as with the circuitry of any man-made computer, completely a-moral, dispassionate, absolutely objective, concerned only with the health, safety and welfare of the body itself – while it’s the mind or soul that’s responsible for the abstract issues and functions like truth, good, beauty, morality and the like?
Remember, we can build a computer now that’s more powerful in terms of calculation and multitasking than the human brain itself, yet the next step – artificial intelligence – making it possible to think for itself – deal with the abstract demands of the intellect – is so technologically daunting that it really is as if we have to develop a mind to go with it.
OK, I’m not saying that there’s definitely a separation between body and soul, brain and mind, but we can go back – as in most other things philosophical – to Socrates and Plato to prove the many centuries in which that distinction has existed.
Socrates referred obliquely to a separate mode of command and thinking when he spoke of permanent natures of justice, courage, and right and wrong, that were not of the bodily senses. Like Plato’s so-called “eternal natures” – which, of course anticipate the ages-old debate on immutable values – Socrates saw these as not perceptible to the senses and apprehended by understanding only.
Plato himself came up with that other definition of mind – the soul – which he saw as a link between the material world, the world of matter, including the human body, and the eternal, unchanging, values-based world of ideas.
It then becomes apparent that Plato shared with Aristotle the theory of the soul being a cause, separated from and working independently of the body – causing bodily movement by “exciting desires,” as in creating those desires.
In that respect, we begin to feel the first stirrings of that rather formless, nameless, almost undefinable impulse, or life-force, within us that Schopenhaur later called the “will.”
Plato wrote that the body can only move when pushed by others or when, as in living things, it is set going by a soul or principle of life within it. But then the question begs: what moves the soul? And Plato’s answer to that was a force that he called the “unmoved mover” of the universe – God.
And when you read that, you begin to appreciate how much of Plato’s theories and those of his fellow-thinkers made their way into the Christian religion. Not that Plato saw God in quite the same way as the Christians have since regarded Him.
Plato’s God was not the maker of the world, which he said was in itself eternal. Nor was God the soul. Rather, he was the perfect being – perfect and in need of nothing beyond knowledge. In fact, Plato saw the human soul itself as separated from the physical body, to be sure, but part of God’s eternal soul.
Anaxagorous, who is said to have taught Socrates the principle of the mind, regarded it as the force that animates all matter, has power over all things that have life, is infinite and self-ruled. In fact, Anaxagrous spoke of mind or intelligence providing order to the diversity and chaos of the world, and in doing so he again reached out to the theory of eternal natures, immutable values – the mind in quest of the intelligible will – the common good – the divine plan.
Beyond that, I think we can say that the mind, as the separate, non-physical, idealistic master of the body, prevailed in philosophical thinking – supported by religion — right up until the empiricists of the 17th century, when the first real surge of scientific discovery and culture, with its accompanying strict limits on the supernatural, began to point toward the sharper debate on mind over matter that reigns today.
Is the mind, as we regard it, purely a function of the brain – and therefore an electro-organic product of matter – or is it a separate, idealistic, driving force that connects us all with an eternal common consciousness of true, immutable values and laws?
Why do we say on the one hand to others: “Use your bloody brain,” and on the other: “Surely your intelligence would tell you …”
Kant didn’t have much truck with the mind as a pre-eminent mover and shaker of all things. You’ll recall he’s most famous for asserting that, if there’s a mind at all, or more likely an intelligence in his way of thinking, it’s incapable of taking we mere mortals across the great philosophical divide to that fabled realm of idealism, wherein all things abstract reign.
Kant said the mind can obtain knowledge only from what it perceives of the material world through our senses.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, on the other hand, was among those thinkers who began attributing the mind, or soul, with a kind of supreme purpose, and harnessing the physical world, and us, to achieve it. Fichte reckoned the soul itself saw nature, or the material world about it, as a kind of obstacle course with which to exercise itself and, and. ultimately, to successfully overcome – or even as a means through which to communicate with other souls.
Then we have Hegel, who took Fichte’s obstacle course and went a huge metaphysical step further. Yes, the mind or spirit needed an external world in which its striving to know and use might develop its own capacities. In other words, sharpen and develop its knowledge and reason.
But, says Hegel, the external world only serves this purpose because it sets before the mind, as an object for its study and appropriation, a nature which is in truth the mind’s own. And, having opened up the question of reality actually being what we ourselves perceive it to be, Hegel went on to define reality itself in terms of mind over matter – body and soul.
I think it’s so compelling and powerful, the way he puts this thesis – if for no other reason than you can actually understand what he means.
Hegal contended that the thought of an ultimate reality which is rational or intelligible – for that is practically what is here meant by “God” – is the thought of something which is certainly not perceptible by the senses. To appeal to the senses for verification would be unreasonable.
The only verification of which we could reasonably talk, he continues, is that supplied by the actual progress of knowledge, as, under the pressure of the questions which the mind puts to it, the world yields up one secret after another.
But the whole business of putting the questions, distinguishing the answers, and seeing what new questions these answers suggest, is all carried on by the mind in the strength of conviction – that in thinking logically, that is in following the laws of its own nature, it is tracing out the actual structure of reality.”
Can we prove the existence of mind over matter – a higher, independent intellect, if you will, that says we must walk before we can run, that a stitch in time saves nine, that pride goeth before a fall, and all the other little nagging safety and ethical messages we mentally download when we have time to stop and think?
Well, we can’t see the mind, or soul, or do a digital trace of it. All we have to go on at this point in time, I think, is to think of the analogy of man and computer.
And at this moment, I’m moving into the realm of existence as Derek Maitland sees it, with answers that are purely intuitive and must not be taken in the same light as those wide-eyed, slightly manic men we see with cow-licked strands of hair, whipcord neck muscles and spittle flying from the lips, bawling the word Truth at us from soap boxes in the Domain.
So, it’s my intuitive theory that as human beings, we are the mainframes in which our brains are the computers.
These computers can operate the body, interpret its perception of the material environment about it, store and build memory, master an inestimable range of tasks and supply commands, energy and chemical at required times to stimulate an emotional response to what it senses.
Of course, there are celebrated philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle, who wrote “Concept of the Mind” in 1949, who insist that this is where it all stops — in what he calls the super-mechanical capacities of the body and brain. Ryle claims that the idea of mind as an independent entity, inhabiting and governing the body, should be rejected as a redundant piece of literalism carried over from the era before the biological sciences became established.
But I’m not sure of that – intuitively, that is. To me, it is the mind that drives and masters the body through the brain. It is we ourselves, by analogy, sitting at the keyboard telling the computer what to do – making it respond to desires, aspirations, aims, goals, codes and yearnings that the computer, concerned only with “tasks” – and that’s the keyword – tasks – cannot understand.
And from that thesis, we go back to my philosopher mentor, Cyril Joad, and three steps in his own analysis of mind over matter.
Step 1: Joad asks: “If the purely mechanist view of evolution is to be accepted, how does man fit in – so poorly equipped for his environment, compared with other species striving for higher forms of life?”
Step 2: Joad continues: “I shall assume, that is to say, that both life and matter are real – in the sense that neither can be derived from the other and must find accommodation for each other in the universe.”
Step 3: Joad’s clincher – “The notion of a non-material form of life acting upon and using material bodies is therefore no longer so difficult to sustain, as it was when the older physics held sway.
“The body is a machine, and, if appropriately stimulated, will work as a machine works. Life may be conceived to be intimately associated with it, but independent of it – an activity, rather than a thing, which uses and moulds the body for its purposes, playing upon it as the fingers of a skilled pianist play upon his/her
instrument.”
That’s another most beautiful analogy, and to it we can add the athlete, whose sense of challenge, ambitions and pure will to win drive the body hard for victory. And the body delights in this mastery and drive – frisking and leaping, like a horse when the reins are let, in anticipation of each new challenge.
If I can round off this talk with another example of my own intuitive thinking, I would ask this: Why does the human body, the human self, put itself through such horrible trials, risk such injury and death and deprivation, unless there’s a power of mind over matter, some commanding force which can override its own natural instinct for safety and survival?
And I’ll leave you with this example of this overriding power from my own experience.
It’s one, you can laugh at — my decision, three years ago, to take the world’s second highest bunjee jump in Helsinki, Finland.
My mind had an aim, a goal, you see – insane as it was — and my body, ever-trustful that my mind would do the right thing, allowed itself to be winched up 400 feet on a huge crane over the Helsinki waterfront – standing on the edge of a small metal cage, legs roped together with the bunjee cord and two jump-crew hunched behind me.
My mind had absolutely no doubt about whatit was going to do. And it wasn’t until I reached the top, and the two Finnish guys behind me swung me around to gaze out over what I swear was the worst thing I’ve ever seen — an absolutely awesome, awful, terrifying empty expanse of Helsinki rooftops and traffic — that my body finally rebelled.
“What in the name of Christ are you doing?” it screamed. “This is suicide. This is how one kills oneself. This is against all the laws of human existence and self-preservation, for fuck’s sake! Stop this insanity. Get back. Go back down. I will not allow you to do this to me, us!”
Behind me, I could hear the two Finnish crew gently preparing me for the jump. “It’s gonna be beautiful, Derek. You’re just gonna love this. Now, on the count of three … One …. Two …”
And in those tiny moments, that’s where I encountered the pure and absolute separation of mind over matter, mind over body. My body was absolutely terrified. It was like a dog being dragged on a chain to a cold bath, ears back, neck straining, all paws frantically dug into the floor for traction.
But in those apocalyptic split seconds of decision, my mind – believe it or not — could not bear the abject humility of turning back, stopping the jump, being lowered back down to the beach with everyone for miles around hooting with derision. And me at 60, I think it was – silly old fool, get him down before he does himself an injury. Who let him up there in the first place?
And the secret of bunjee jumping became plain to me too – it’s the mind, the will, overriding the body’s natural terror, that makes it as horribly thrilling and ultimately triumphant as it is.
Yes, I think we have a mind, or soul, that’s separate to and independent of our organic, computerized frames. It’s what makes us do such awesome, terrifying and wonderful things. It’s what, in the final analysis, makes us human.
