On the weekend, I went for an hour walk, and listened to a 3-part series of discussions between Pat Flynn and neurosurgeon Michael Egnor. The first episode of the series was especially good, talking about the scientific evidence against materialist / physicalist views of our minds. I went hunting around on the Mind Matters web site, and was able to find a good article about two of those evidences.
Here’s the first article from Mind Matters, which talks about the ways that neuroscience is disconfirming materialist views of mind, with scientific evidence.
First evidence:
Dr. Egnor, Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at Stony Brook University in New York State, offers a number of specific examples, including the pioneering work of neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield (1891–1976) in treating epilepsy. Penfield, observed closely what happens in an epileptic seizure. But the most interesting element he found was what didn’t happen.
Seizure victims might collapse, feel tingles, see flashing lights, experience strange smells. They could have powerful emotions, a sense of doom, oir a sense that everything is hilarious. They can even remember things they thought were long forgotten, like an incident from school days:
But Penfield said that’s where it ends. That is that there’s no other mental content that ever appears in a seizure. He said, for example, you never have a mathematics seizure. You never have a seizure where you can’t stop doing calculus. You never have a logic seizure, you never have a philosophy seizure, you never have a music seizure, you never have a literature seizure. This whole range of abstract thought, things that kind of make us human are never a part of a seizure. And Penfield said, why not? If random electrical discharges in the brain will spark off a thought, why aren’t the thoughts ever abstract? Why aren’t they ever about math?
And Penfield did more experiments, which also raised problems for materialism:
Penfield had started out as a materialist but he ended up thinking, as Egnor puts it, that “maybe the mind isn’t entirely from the brain. Maybe there are aspects of the mind that are spiritual and not material.”
His conviction was strengthened by the more than 1100 “awake” brain operations he did. During surgery, he would stimulate an area of the brain of a patient with serious epilepsy in order to find out if that area did anything important. If not, he could simply remove it if it were damaged, lessening the chances of another serious seizure. Meanwhile, he mapped the areas of the brain he was working on.
And Penfield found exactly the same thing that he had found in his review of epilepsy. That is that when he stimulated the brain, he could stimulate people to move their limbs. He could stimulate people to have perceptions like flashes of light or feelings on the skin. He could stimulate emotions by stimulating certain parts of the brain and he could stimulate memories, but he could never stimulate abstract thought. He could never stimulate mathematics. No matter where he touched in the brain, you didn’t start saying one plus one is two.
That first podcast also contained a second evidence that falsifies materialist conceptions of mind – split-brain surgeries.
This second article from Mind Matters explains:
Split-brain surgery, which gives even Dr. Egnor, who has done it, “the chills,” is a radical effort to control epileptic seizures that jump through the corpus callosum — the huge bundle of nerve fibres that connects the two halves of the brain. By the 1940s, surgeons realized that if they just cut the bundle, severing the connection, the seizure was confined to one side. That cut down on life-destroying seizures. But was the patient then living with two brains that mirror each other but can’t communicate?
Neuroscience pioneer Roger Sperry (1913–1994) won a Nobel Prize for his clever experiments on split-brain subjects, showing what they could and couldn’t do. But, Egnor notes, the big story is the one that receives very little emphasis: “You could cut the brain in half and practically nothing happens.”
[…]McGill University neuroscience researcher Justine Sergent (1950–1994) picked up on this in the 1980s and decided to focus on it:
Egnor: … there are ways that you could present a picture, like an image to the right hemisphere and a picture, an image to the left hemisphere. And if you’re a split brain patient, these hemispheres can’t talk to one another. They don’t communicate.
So she would present, for example, an arrow pointing up to the right hemisphere, and an arrow pointing sideways to the left hemisphere. She would ask the person who had had the split brain surgery, are the arrows pointing in the same direction or different directions?
And the split brain patients almost always got it right. They almost always could tell, they could compare something that the right hemisphere sees with something that the left hemisphere sees.
The problem is that there was no part of their brains that saw both things. And so how did they know? How do you compare things when no part of your brain sees both things?
So, a couple of pieces of scientific evidence that contradict the materialist / physicalist view of mind. Do you think I should add this argument to my list of 6 scientific evidences for a Creator / Designer? It might be fun to have a discussion with Grok AI about this and see if it is good enough to add to my list of 6.
Anyway, here is the podcast. And there is also a transcript for it, if you prefer to listen. If you like that one, you can listen to all three in the series, but the first one was the best, and the second was good.
