Part 2: Can You Love an Embryo?

Neuroscience and Perception

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

In IVF is Not the Way (Sophia Institute Press, May 2025), I address the question of what we, as a society, should do with the millions of abandoned human embryos. I think it begins by allowing ourselves to love them. St. Thomas Aquinas never wrote a treatise on how to love an embryo, but I have applied his teaching on exterior and interior senses to the question about loving a human person, a child, whom we cannot sense (see, touch, hear, smell). We have no experiential knowledge of the child’s existence. If we could love one child, then we can love them all if we apply this teaching to the question about loving the millions of embryos suspended alive in cryogenic storage tanks. I think this is a preamble to figuring out what to do. Donum vitae goes so far as to say that this “absurd fate” consists in having “no possibility of these embryonic children being offered safe means of survival which can be licitly pursued” (I.5).

I decided to break this into parts. Part 1 “Can You Love an Embryo?” set up the meaning of the question. Part 2 (this post) introduces neuroscience and perception and how it connects to Aquinas’s teaching on interior and exterior senses. Part 3 will present that teaching. Part 4 will put it all together.

Neuroscience and Perception

This idea started when I read the work on nonlinear dynamics by the late Walter J. Freeman III (1927–2016). He was the son of Walter J. Freeman II, an American physician and neurologist known for popularizing the (controversial) lobotomy procedure in the United States. The son (Freeman III) was also neuroscientist and biophysicist. He focused on nonlinear brain dynamics and how the brain processes sensory information to generate perceptions. I have his 2001 book, How Brains Make Up Their Minds, but I was particularly interested in the 2008 article this agnostic biophysicist wrote about St. Thomas Aquinas, “Nonlinear Brain Dynamics and Intention According to Aquinas” (Mind & Matter 6.2). He says:

“In my experience there is no extant philosophical system than that of Aquinas that better fits with the new findings in nonlinear brain dynamics.”

His book does mention Aquinas but explains his ideas about how brains accommodate new sensory perceptions somewhat like ocean waves accommodate new water molecules. The system takes up the newcomer and determines its trajectory, even as the system is made up of such once-newcomers. In his 2008 article, Freeman III attempted a detailed reading and transcription of basic Thomistic terms to compare “the significance of key words across 700 years from medieval metaphysics to 21st century brain dynamics.” I love his insights!

I will summarize them:

Our brain depends on sensory perceptions. Sensory receptors from all five senses interact directly with stimuli in the world. When photons of light enter our eyes (sense of sight), gas molecules enter our mouth or nose (senses of taste and smell), sound waves reach our ears (sense of hearing), or objects contact our skin (sense of touch), electrical signals are sent along nerve cells through the nervous system to our brain for processing. The brain is a complex organ with different regions. The continuous stream of electrical signals from our five senses are directed to different parts of the brain. The brain does not process information linearly, one bit of information at a time, as many modern neuroscientists have suggested, but nonlinearly and seemingly chaotically, i.e., per nonlinear dynamics.

Think of ocean waves. Each water molecule is like a single perception. When new signals reach the brain, they are accommodated into the system, so the brain is constantly processing new perceptions and fitting them into the already existing stores of knowledge. This is all bodily, and even non-rational animals have the same functions to different extents. Another word for it is “cognition.”

For example, when we are babies and see our first apple, we have a sense perception of the apple as an object. Then we learn the word that matches that perception as we see more and more apples. Over time, we see apples of different varieties; most are red, some are green, some are yellow. We also sense that they are different sizes, different tastes, or can turn rotten. We do not collect sense perceptions like someone putting a coin into a piggy bank, one at a time in linear fashion. (Notice, this is how children are taught, one fact at a time, but our brains do not work this way!) We collect sensory data into already existing waves of energy in our brains. Each new perception adds to what is already there, until one day, we think of apples not as we did in infancy but as a universal form that can have many different accidents. (Yes, I just switched to Aristotelian-Thomistic language there.) For embryos, we never collect these sensory inputs, so we have to “know” them so that we can “love” them using our intellect alone.

Freeman picks up on a lot of Aquinas’s teaching regarding the human person as a unity of body and rational soul as well as the way exterior and interior senses work together. He fails to appreciate that the soul is subsistent and immediately created by God, although he agrees the soul is immaterial. He sees the immaterial soul as something that emerges from the brain (like a lot of his contemporaries), but the origin of the soul is a question beyond his scientific consideration. So, there is a lot to glean from the way Freeman connects nonlinear brain dynamics to abstract thought. This is what I employ to talk about embryos. Call it a Thomistic assessment of how our brains make up inform our minds intellects.

Next: Interior and Exterior Senses

Sorry to leave you hanging, and thanks for following me through what must seem like a detour, but I LOVE it when these things integrate because we are all trying to express the truth. In IVF is Not the Way, “Loving Embryos” is one full chapter, but I am already going into much more detail here than I do in the book.

Most of the book is about the history of IVF in secular culture and the Catholic Church’s response to it, the terminology and procedures of IVF, the FULL argument from the Church against IVF starting with “God exists” (this is thoroughly addressed in the book), and the situation with millions of embryos stored in cryogenic tanks and what to do with them. Their situation—suspended alive in a frozen state—is absurd and totally against the human dignity those children deserve. The “Loving Embryos” chapter is in this part of the book, as groundwork for individual and societal decision-making.

Thanks for reading. I hope you buy the book! It is out in May. As a Catholic Answers speaker, I am also available to come speak to your parish or group about the Church’s teaching on IVF as this topic ramps up in the United States.

Part 3 will post on Tuesday. Have a beautiful Second Sunday of Lent and a happy St. Patrick’s Day. This is also my husband’s birthday, so we’ll be celebrating that too. Until then…