Mind, Brain and the Elusive Soul (Ashgate Science and Religion Series)

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Does science argue against the existence of the human soul? Many scientists and scholars believe the whole is more than the sum of the parts. This book uses information and systems theory to describe the "more" that does not reduce to the parts. One sees this in the synapses - or apparently empty gaps between the neurons in one's brain-where informative relationships give rise to human mind, culture, and spirituality. Drawing upon the disciplines of cognitive science, computer science, neuroscience, general systems theory, pragmatic philosophy, and Christian theology, Mark Graves reinterprets the traditional doctrine of the soul as form of the body to frame contemporary scientific study of the human soul.

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Mark Graves is Visiting Faculty at the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences, where he co-teaches a doctoral seminar on "Theology, the Person, and Neuroscience," and is organizing a cognitive science and religion program with faculty at GTU and University of California, Berkeley. He has 20 years experience in interdisciplinary research upon which this book draws. He studied cognitive science at Georgia Tech before earning a doctorate in computer science/artificial intelligence at University of Michigan, and spent ten years working in the fields of bioinformatics, genomics, and systems biology. He was one of the first computer scientists to work on the Human Genome Project (at Baylor College of Medicine and in industry), and published forty technical works in computer science and biology, including the book Designing XML Databases. He earned a M.A. in theology at Graduate Theological Union (GTU) and Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, writing his thesis on the human soul.