The Resurrection

[Belacqua]

Yes; this concept of transformation has always fascinated me. During my last days of grad school, the idea of embodied cognition had taken a hold of the psychological world. In summary, the mind is dependent on and influenced by body. For example, we explored its implications for AI, a disembodied agent, and whether embodying it in robotics was necessary to advance it, etc.

Now, the Christian God is very concerned with sanctification—with actually, almost surgically, removing sin out of a person. For Christians that believe in souls, like Catholics, something like purgatory is where the soul is purified. However, for churches that do not, like mine, where the mind and body are not separable, this requires bodily transformation. It is as though repairing the body is a pre-condition to healing the mind. Take memories for example, if you've suffered from traumas those experiences are physically and visibly forged into your brain. The experience itself is threaded across neurons. And so, a God that wanted to psychologically heal you would need to physically transform you. And what embodied cognition suggests is not just transform your brain but the entire body.

This is interesting stuff. Certainly the concept of embodied cognition makes it clear that the computer guys are dreaming if they think they're going to upload themselves, and still be themselves. 

I don't know about rank-and-file Catholics, but I think that Dante would have no problem with modern science's view of mind/body. As I understand it, he believed in classical hylomorphism, so he's not a dualist. He doesn't think that soul is a separate substance, but simply the form of the body. And for him, "form" would include all of the bodily transformations -- memories encoded in neurons, etc. -- that form our minds. 

Where Dante requires a leap of faith (and where Aristotle would disagree with him) is when he says that the form of the body (the soul) can be transferred intact to a different bit of matter. But his Purgatory is a reformation of the form/matter combination. 

But I haven't heard about your church's approach to this, and I find it interesting that physical healing is involved. It opens up the possibility of different therapies, or even medicine, as soul-work. I see now why you're interested in bodily resurrection too.