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So my more specific title of this lecture is, can you take a picture of the soul?

Okay.

And I'll explain why that's the title as we go on here. Okay.

So the title of this lecture is prima facie absurd. Of course, you can't take a picture of the soul.

When we typically talk about souls, we have in mind spiritual, ghostly persons that do not fit

at all neatly into our ordinary world of physical objects.

That is, we take souls, if there are such things, to be immaterial substances

that cannot be possibly captured by our senses, let alone imaged by cameras.

Tonight, however, my plan is to complicate the picture, as it were, a great deal.

In fact, at one point I will argue that, once we understand the notion of a soul as it is conceived by the Aristotelian tradition of philosophizing,

there is a perfectly good sense in which you can take a picture of the soul.

Moreover, with the ever-advancing technologies of functional neuroimaging,

there is even a perfectly good sense in which we can video record the soul and its movements

across the dimension of time. According to this Aristotelian tradition, a soul is a constituent

of a living body, an organism. The soul, however, is not just any part of the organism,

but one that plays a definitive role in determining the organism as being what it is.

That is, the soul is an essential constituent of the organism.

Thus, in observing the development of the essential structures of a certain type of organism,

we are simultaneously observing, maybe even video recording, the soul of that organism.

I will argue, however, that taking a picture of a mind is indeed just as absurd as it sounds.

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