Neurobiology, Human Embodiment, and the Concept of Soul | Prof. William Hurlbut

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

Professor William Hurlbut explores the relationship between neurobiology and the concept of the soul, examining the reductive scientific approach to life, the challenges posed by technology like large language models, cerebral organoids, and synthetic embryos, and the need to integrate scientific understanding with the ancient insights of the soul.

This lecture was given on November 17th, 2024, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

William B. Hurlbut is a physician and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University Medical Center. After receiving his undergraduate and medical training at Stanford, he completed postdoctoral studies in theology and medical ethics, studying with Robert Hamerton-Kelly, the Dean of the Chapel at Stanford, and subsequently with the Rev. Louis Bouyer of the Institut Catholique de Paris.

His primary areas of interest involve the ethical issues associated with advancing biomedical technology, the biological basis of moral awareness, and studies in the integration of theology and philosophy of biology. He was instrumental in establishing the first course in biomedical ethics at Stanford Medical Center and subsequently taught bioethics to over six thousand Stanford undergraduate students in the Program in Human Biology.

Dr. Hurlbut is the author of numerous publications on science and ethics including the co-edited volume Altruism and Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Dialogue (2002, Oxford University Press), and “Science, Religion and the Human Spirit” in the Oxford Handbook of Science and Religion. He has organized and co-chaired three multi-year interdisciplinary faculty projects at Stanford University, “Becoming Human: The Evolutionary Origins of Spiritual, Religious and Moral Awareness,” “Brain Mind and Emergence,” and the ongoing “The Boundaries of Humanity: Human, Animals, and Machines in the Age of Biotechnology.” In addition, he was Co-leader, together with U.C. Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna of “The challenge and opportunity of gene editing: a project for reflection, deliberation and education.”

Keywords: Aristotle, Blaise Pascal, Cerebral Organoids, Hylomorphism, Large Language Models, Neurobiology, Reductionism, Soul, Synthetic Embryos, Vitalism

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.7	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.3	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:25.2	I was asked to talk about neurobiology and the soul,
0:29.0	and I thought that no sane person would try to do that.
0:33.6	So I changed my title a little bit.
0:36.5	Here's my title.
0:38.0	To be a little bit more biological.
0:41.4	But I'm going to take the risk of talking to you guys who know a lot more than I do about some information technology things,
0:48.5	simply because it provides a very useful heuristic in thinking about what human beings are.
0:56.0	And I don't know quite how to do this presentation because I don't exactly want to read it to you,
1:03.0	but I know I want to get the wording precise, so I'll just come in and out on that.
1:09.0	But if you want, you just interrupt me and we can turn it all into one big conversation.
1:15.7	It's a really, really difficult subject.
1:18.8	But an exciting one, I think a really crucial one.
1:22.4	So I'm going to start by introducing this whole subject through a sort of analysis of where we're at in our kind of a scientific approach, our assumptions to the notions that would have some relevance to the idea of soul.
1:45.7	So in 1799, the French Academy of Science has offered a prize of one kilo of gold
1:56.2	to anyone who could explain alcohol fermentation.
2:05.5	For 6,000 years, fermentation had been regarded as a mysterious power of transformation, a meeting of the material and the spiritual. It's a connection
2:12.6	still evident in the way we use our English word spirits for decurs or alcoholic drinks.
2:20.4	But by the 18th century, late 18th century in the age of science,
	...

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