1. Introduction: What is the mind? How does it generate consciousness (thoughts, beliefs, feelings, sensations, desires, acts of will, sense of self)? How does consciousness emerge from 3 pounds of gelatinous pudding (chemicals, neurons, atoms, particles)?
Materialists (and the accepted mainstream view) says the that brain produces consciousness, but this has never actually been proved or even explained. John Eccles “nowhere in the laws of physics or in the laws of the derivative sciences, chemistry and biology, is there any reference to consciousness or mind.” Colin McGinn “The problem with materialism is that it tries to construct the mind out of properties that refuse to add up to mentality.” Whereas substance dualists would say consciousness is accounted for with a body and soul.
Not only is there no evidence to think the purely physical can create consciousness and experience, but there are positive reasons and accumulating evidence to show there must be an immaterial aspect to humans.
The soul has been a universal belief about humans for all of history. It is intuitive. In theory it contains consciousness, animates the body and grounds and unifies experiences, indivisibility, personhood, identity through change, free will. This is not a scientific question. It doesn’t have access by definition-immaterial. You wouldn’t use a metal detector to figure out who the killer was. It would be a category fallacy because science studies matter not philosophical questions about metaphysics.
2. Consciousness without brain: How can consciousness emerge from the brain if there are conditions where people are essentially born without brains and even though they are severely retarded they still show signs of consciousness like stress, joy, laughter, react to stimuli. In 1984, Andrew Vandal born without brain and had a skull full of fluid, against doctor’s predictions he was able to live several years, was able to laugh, smile and described by his adoptive mother as maturing mentally and having “an outgoing, bubbly personality that really draws people to him.” He couldn’t speak, see or walk. He still displayed clear signs of consciousness. Enjoyed kid shows, move across the floor in response to doors opening-in other words-move and sense through touch and hearing.
3. You cannot stimulate the will: When Wilder Penfield was poking around a subject’s brain, he could make them involuntarily raise their arms, vocalize and recall memorize but one thing he couldn’t do was force people to act/stimulate the will, now many studies show this. “There is no place where an electrical stimulation will cause a patient to believe or to decide.” Pg 77 of The Mystery of the Mind. He concluded there was a causal force missing which could not be explained from brain chemistry alone. He argued the mind was not in the brain chemistry and could not be explained by it. Many studies have been done on the brain, you cannot stimulate someone to believe or decide. The mind has a causal power independent of the brain.
4. Near-Death-Studies: In 1965, psychologist John Beloff wrote in The Humanist that the evidence of near-death experiences already indicates “a dualistic world where mind or spirit has an existence separate from the world of material things.’ See article on Near-Death-Experiences.
5. Visual Binding Problem: Another problem that plagues neuroscientists is how unified perceptions emerge. A different part of the brain will store the color of an object while another part will store the shape. There is no place where the information is combined. It’s called the visual binding problem. It can’t have simply ‘not been found yet’, when the entire brain has been mapped out, no place could be responsible for this. “there is now overwhelming biological and behavioral evidence that the brain contains no stable, high-resolution, full field representation of a visual scene, even though that is what we subjectively experience (Martinez-Conde et al., 3008). “The subjective experience is thus inconsistent with the neural circuitry.” (Kaas and Collins, 2003) The Neural Binding Problem(s). We can clearly see that brain chemistry cannot give rise to unified subjective experience and how our experiences emerge. We are either aggregates or souls. Aggregates cannot have unified visual field.
Some argue that because brain scans can map a super rough image from the primary visual cortex, it must mean our visual experience only comes from the brain. This research has been seriously overblown, all it is doing is conjuring up images based on blood flow in the brain, while the person looks at a prescribed image. It’s not recreating an image someone has in their head from imagination.
6. God-like Mind? Its a problem for evolution, how do you get consciousness from nonconscious matter. If you’re going to say mind evolved and came to be from matter, they are supporting the possibility of a giant mind like God coming into existence. It makes perfect sense especially when considering the parallels of conscious thought and webs of galaxies and other phenomena. Or at the very least they are implying that a computer that is complex enough can develop consciousness.
7. More expert agreement: Jeffrey Schwartz is one of many leading neuroscientists that are beginning to head in the same direction towards a soul.
Penfield’s opinions took a 180. Renowned father of modern neurosurgery. “I, like other scientists, have struggled to prove that the brain accounts for the mind”. “To expect the highest brain mechanism or any set of reflexes however complicated to carry out what the mind does and thus perform all the functions of the mind is quite absurd.”
Sir Charles Sherrington, a genius who laid the foundations of our knowledge of the functioning of the brain and spinal cord, said “for me now, the only reality is the human soul”.
His student-John Eccles “I am constrained, to believe that there is what we might call a supernatural origin of my unique self-conscious mind or unique selfhood or soul”.
Darwinist philosopher Michael ruse “no one seems to have an answer” to the consciousness issue.
Leading expert Stanley Kline “it’s ridiculous to think memories are in the brain they have to be in the soul.”
Robert Augros, George Stanciu concluded physics, neuroscience, and humanistic psychology all converge on the same principle: mind is not reducible to matter.
Anthropologist Marilyn Schlitz “I am driven by data not theory. And the data I see tell me that there are ways in which people’s experience refutes the physicalist position that the mind is the brain and nothing more. There are solid, concrete data that suggest that our consciousness, our mind, may surpass the boundaries of the brain.”
50 year long leading intellectual atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is almost certainly wrong. Argues you can’t get mind from matter.
Atheist philosopher Colin McGinn “any naturalist explanation for this borders on sheer magic.” “how did evolution convert the water of biological tissue into the wine of consciousness?”
8. Damaged brain: Once skeptical Sam Parnia said scientific findings so far “would support the view that mind, consciousness or the soul is a separate entity from the brain.” And speculated the brain is a physical manifestation of the mind like a tv is to a show. If the brain is damaged, all it means is the apparatus was damaged. When a tv pixelates a show, you don’t say the actors can feel it.
9. Consciousness is not equal to the brain: Conscious states are correlated with brain states. Doesn’t mean they’re the same. Smoke isn’t the same thing as fire. This is why we see consciousness without brains and brains without fully functioning minds (brain damage). But philosophically, there are things that are true of conscious state that aren’t of brain states. You can’t see the weight of thoughts and you can’t see whether beliefs are true or not from the brain. Consciousness is not reducible. A watch is a mereological aggregate-a collection of separable parts that explain its functionality.
10. Intentionality: Conscious states have intentionality. Beliefs are about things. This is not a property of anything physical. If a single quark cannot form beliefs, then simply having more and rearranging them will also not give you beliefs.
11. Indivisibility of personhood: Physical objects can be divided and come in percentages or degrees. This can’t happen with persons. They are all or nothing. If someone is born with 10% of a brain, are they 10% person?
12. Identity through change: If something is a physical object composed of parts, it does not survive over time as the same object if it comes to have different parts. Bodies and brains are constantly changing and gaining new parts. If one is to survive over time then they must be more than brain and body. Change presupposes sameness. When a sweet apple becomes sour. Change requires some type of underlying sameness otherwise the nature of things are just popping in and out of existence. These 2 facts-I am the owner of my experiences and I am an enduring self who exists as the same possessor of all my experiences through time-show that I am not identical to my experiences. I am the thing that has them. Only a single, enduring self can relate and unify experiences, a fact that physicalists cannot adequately account for.
13. Freewill: I am a soul or physical object. If I am purely physical then I don’t have freewill. But I do have freewill, therefore I am not purely physical. See article on freewill.
14. Rationality and Objective truth: If we don’t have freewill, then rationality is impossible as well. In order to have it, you need the freedom to deliberate and choose. But if it’s all determined then it wasn’t you choosing it was the domino effect of matter and neurons.
15. Conclusion: Steven Weinberg said scientists might have to “bypass the problem of human consciousness” because “it may just be too hard for us”. In other words, its evidence against their worldview and they don’t plan on changing it anytime soon.
While religion is accused of being dogmatic, scientists were the ones resisting the big bang because it conceded what religion said about a beginning. And at least with religion, we can accept natural or supernatural. Whereas the naturalist wants to just “bypass the problem.” Physicalist scientists admit they don’t have an answer. Its unshakable blind faith that keeps them from acknowledging a soul. The bible and science are in agreement and it opposes naturalism.
It’s called a “problem” but it’s only a problem when your worldview and the things that you are willing to believe become restricted by biases and prejudice. And they have to say things are “unexplainable” when they’re not really, they’re just unexplainable on their worldview.
This is all evidence for substance dualism (soul and body interconnected). Substance dualism has more explanatory power. Damaged brains affecting people only explains interdependence. If there is a soul, we would expect to see it have causal power over the brain and body like it does (neuroplasticity, cognitive behavioral therapy). You can change brain chemistry by the way you think-your attitude-kind of why Jesus’ teachings always targeted the human heart.
Ideas and information are immaterial, they are fundamental, they are everything. So religion, philosophy and the worldview discussion are the most important things imaginable. You can’t learn about a person by looking at them-apart from their interest in exercise and hygiene. You have to ask questions and learn about their beliefs, feelings, passions ideas to know a person. This is how and why we can know God. We ARE souls that HAVE bodies.
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