“Unless, as happened here, a duplicate body is made and by some affinity the wathan reattaches itself to the duplicate body. This duplicate body would be intelligent but would have no concept of /. The wathan attached to it would have the self-awareness. But it couldn’t have it until it interacted with the body.
“Without wathans, humans would have evolved from apes, would have had language, would have had technology and science, but no religion, yet would not have had any more knowledge of the self than an ant.”
Frigate said, “What kind of language would that be? I mean, try to imagine a language in which no pronouns for / and me exist. And probably no you or yours either. To tell the truth, I don’t think they’d develop language. Not as we know it, anyway. They’d just be highly intelligent animals. Living machines which would not depend upon instinct as much as animals do.”
“We can talk about that some other time.”
“Yeah, but what about the chimpanzees?”
“They must have had a rudimentary wathan which had a low-level consciousness of their /. However, it was never proved that apes did have language or self-awareness.
“The wathan itself can’t develop self-awareness unless it has a body. If the body has a stunted brain, then the wathan is stunted. Hence, it can attain only to a certain low ethical level.”
“No!” Frigate said. “You’re confusing intelligence with morality. You and I have known too many people with a high intelligence and low ethical development and vice versa to believe that a high I.Q. is a necessary accompaniment to a high moral quotient.”
“Yaas, but you forget about the will.”
They came to another bay. Burton looked along the shaft. “Nothing here.”
They walked on while Burton resumed the role of Socrates.
“The will. We have to assume that it’s not entirely free. It’s affected by events outside the body, its exterior environment, and by internal events, the inside environment. Injuries physical or mental, diseases, chemical changes, and so forth, can change a person’s will. A maniac may have been a good person before a disease or injury made him into a torturer and killer. Psychological or chemical factors may make multiple personalities or a psychic cripple or monster.
“I suggest that the wathan is so closely connected with the body that it reflects the body’s mental changes. And a wathan attached to an idiot or imbecile is itself idiotic or imbecilic.
“That is why the Ethicals have resurrected idiots and imbeciles elsewhere—if our speculations are correct—so that these may get special treatment. Through the medical science of the Ethicals, the retarded are enabled to have fully developed brains. Hence, they also have highly developed wathans with a full potentiality for a choice between good and evil.”
“And,” Nur said, “the opportunity to become super-wathans and so reunited with God. I’ve been listening carefully to you, Burton. I don’t agree with much of what you’ve said. One implication is that God doesn’t care about His souls. He wouldn’t allow them to float around as unconscious things. He has made provision for all of them.”
“Perhaps God—if there is one—doesn’t care,” Burton said. “There is no evidence whatsoever that He does.
“Anyway, I argue that the human being without a wathan has no free will. That is, the ability to make choices between or among moral alternatives. To surpass the demands of body and environment and personal inclination. To lift one’s self, as it were, by the self’s bootstraps. Only the wathan has the free will and the self-awareness. But I admit that it has to express these through the vehicle of the body. And I admit that the wathan closely interacts with and is affected by the body.
“Indeed, the wathan must get its personality traits, most of them, anyway, from the body.”
Frigate said, “Well, then. Aren’t we back where we started? We still can’t make a clear distinction between the wathan and the body. If the wathan furnishes the concept of the / and the free will, it’s still dependent upon the body for its character traits and everything else in the genetic and nervous systems. These are actually images which it absorbs. Or photocopies. So, in that sense, the wathan is only a copy, not the original.
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