Episode Transcript
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ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
Welcome to ID the Future, everyone. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today my guest is renowned neurosurgeon, Dr. Michael Egnor. To begin talking with me about his new book, the Immortal A Neurosurgeon's Case for the Existence of the soul, Dr. Egnor is a professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook.
Named one of New York's best doctors by New York Magazine in 2005, Egnor is an award winning brain surgeon who has performed over 7,000 brain operations.
Dr. Egnor, thank you for taking the time with us today.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: Thank you, Andrew. It's a pleasure to be here.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Well, you've written a book, an extraordinary book, an intriguing book, making a case that the human soul exists and that the mind is immortal. And over a couple of episodes of the Idea the Future podcast, I'd like to unpack some of the arguments and evidence that you've marshaled for these provocative ideas.
Now today, I'd like to tease out some of the key insights of your book. And in a separate episode, we can get into a little more detail and examples.
Now, let's start with some helpful definitions. I always like to start by, you know, verifying terms and making sure we're all on the same page. How do you, as a neurosurgeon define brain, mind and soul?
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Well, the brain is an organ. It's an organ like the heart is an organ or the kidney or the liver. And it has certain jobs that it does certain functions.
And it's not the same thing as the mind, and it's not the same thing as the soul.
The mind is several aspects of the soul.
And I'll get to that in a moment.
The soul is what makes the difference between a living body and a dead body. And that's Aristotle's definition, and I think he got it right.
A soul is everything you do that characterizes you as being a living person. That is, a soul involves your heart beating and your life, lungs breathing. It involves your vision and your hearing and your capacity for reason and free will. All of that together collectively is your soul.
One way of thinking of it is that your soul is everything that's true about you the moment before you die, subtracted from that the moment after you die. So your soul is your principle of life.
And the mind is kind of a modern idea. The ancients didn't really think think of things in terms of the mind. They thought of things only in terms of the soul.
The mind is the powers of the soul that we associate with perception, with memory, with emotion, with abstract thought, and with free will.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: Okay, yeah, that's helpful. Now, neuroscientists have different opinions of the mind and whether it exists independently of the brain or not. Can you explain the difference between the materialist view and the dualist view?
[00:04:13] Speaker B: The materialist view is that in one way or another, everything that goes on in the mind is generated by the brain. That there is no remainder, there's no aspect of the mind that is not dependent completely on brain activity. And there are three kinds, general kinds of materialist perspectives on that. One is a reductionist perspective. Perspective, a reductionist believes that everything in the mind is completely reducible to what's in the brain.
And the most common reductionist viewpoint is identity theory, which says that what's in our mind is really the same thing as what goes on in our brain. Just understood from a different perspective.
There's a non reductionist kind of materialism that believes that everything that happens in the mind is completely dependent on what happens in the, in the brain. But the mind, it can't be simply reduced to the brain, but everything in the mind is generated by the brain. And the third is the eliminative materialist viewpoint that the mind doesn't exist. That it's. That the concept of the mind is what they call folk psychology, meaning it's just kind of a common mistake. And we don't really have minds, we just have brain processes that we mistakenly interpret as being a mind.
The, the dualist Viewpoint is that there certainly is quite a bit that goes on in, in the mind that indeed is generated but by the brain. Dualists very much believe in the mind, brain interaction. But dualists argue that there are aspects of the mind that while brain function may be necessary for the normal exercise of that aspect of the mind, brain function is not sufficient. There's. There's something extra that goes into what makes us human that does not come from. From the brain.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: Okay, and you hold the dualist view. Is that correct?
[00:06:10] Speaker B: That's correct.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: Okay. And we'll. We'll unpack that more as we go.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: Now, one of the things I've learned from scientists working on the evidence for intelligent design is that it's helpful to draw up a set of observations that you'd expect if a given hypothesis were to be true.
In your book, you relay five propositions from Yale University neurologist Stephen Novella in support of the materialist view. For example, no mental phenomena without brain function. As brain function is altered, the mind will be altered. If the brain is damaged, then mental function will be damaged, and so on. And then you turn around and you offer up five alternative propositions. One would expect, given a dualist view. For example, there will be some mental phenomena without brain function. As brain function is altered, the mind will not necessarily be altered. If the brain is damaged, mental function will not necessarily be damaged, and so on.
So why is looking at what you'd expect to see if a given hypothesis is correct a helpful way to evaluate a view of the mind?
[00:07:13] Speaker B: It's helpful because science works particularly well when people who have a theory have to give predictions as to what the logical consequences of their theories are.
And Einstein found. Found this when he developed the theory of relativity. It made very specific predictions for, for example, about the bending of light as it goes around the sun. And that could be tested, and it was tested. So there are ways of testing materialist views of the mind, and there are ways of testing dualist views of the mind.
And those propositions that you mentioned earlier are a very useful way to test these theories.
[00:07:56] Speaker A: Yeah. And those are in your book, so readers can consult those as well as see how your propositions shake out throughout the course of your arguments. I think it's very helpful that you included that. Now, your book provides evidence that the mind is distinct from the brain and that the human mind can adapt to a variety of brain absences. You tell the story as an example of one of your patients, Sam, who suffered from debilitating epileptic seizures. You performed a split Brain procedure literally splitting in two. The corpus callosum, the massive bundle of millions of nerve fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. What was the result of this surgery then? And how does it support your argument about the unity of the mind?
[00:08:42] Speaker B: Split brain surgery is a remarkable kind of operation that surprises people that we can actually do it, but in fact, it's safe. It's done with some frequency even today, and I've done it in the past.
The most remarkable thing about split brain surgery is, number one, it can be a fairly effective way to treat certain kinds of seizures.
The second most remarkable thing is that people don't change much, except they have fewer seizures. That is that they still feel like they're one person.
They actually feel completely normal. After split brain surgery, there's a neuroscientist named Roger Sperry who studied split brain patients many years ago, and he won the Nobel Prize for his studies. And he found that there were subtle perceptual problems in people with split brain surgery, problems they generally don't even notice in everyday life.
But it helped Sperry to understand the function of the individual brain hemispheres.
So it was really good science.
Other researchers, justine surgeon at McGill and Jair Pinto in the Netherlands, have studied these patients in more detail over the past number of decades. And what they found is a remarkable thing. With split brain surgery, the hemispheres of the brain are functionally disconnected, and you can present an image to the individual hemispheres that the other hemisphere doesn't see. So you can present, like, an arrow to one hemisphere and another arrow to the other hemisphere. And you can ask the patient, do these arrows point in the same direction or different directions? And people with split brain surgery almost always get the right answer. But if you think about it, no part of their brain has seen both arrows. One part saw one arrow, the other part saw the other arrow. Nothing in their brain saw both arrows, but they're able to compare the arrows, which implies that there's a part of their mind that's not in their brain.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: Huh, that's fascinating. And how did Sam's procedure turn out?
How did he do?
[00:10:47] Speaker B: Went very well. Went very well. It's a very successful operation. And seizures are markedly reduced in patients who have the surgery. Most patients with seizures don't need the surgery, but for certain kinds of seizure, it's really necessary to do this.
[00:11:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Now, you also discuss what we can learn about the mind and brain from cases of conjoined twins. How does this condition affect twins? Individuality, their minds and their souls?
[00:11:18] Speaker B: Yes. There's a small number of twins who are born conjoined at the head and they actually share parts of their brain.
And there are a couple twins in Canada who have this condition and they've grown up together and it's Tatiana and Christa Hogan is their name. And they share important parts of the deep part of their brain and they can do remarkable things that, for example, they can see partially out of each other's eyes.
And if you touch one twin's leg, the other person knows you're touching that twin's leg.
They often share emotions, although not, not entirely. But curiously, they don't seem to share higher intellectual function, that is that there's no evidence that, for example, one twin can study math and the other can study history and they both end up knowing the subjects, I.e. that there, there, there's a definite distinction between their intellects, their capacity for abstract thought, and they certainly don't share free, free will, meaning that they have different personalities. Well, one twin likes certain things and doesn't like and doesn't like other things. So what the, the twins who share parts of their brain show us is that there are parts of the brain and there are parts of the mind that can be physically shared that, that are physically part of the brain that can be shared with other people if the connections are just right.
But there are other parts of the human soul that are not part of the brain and really can't be shared. And these two girls are definitely different people. They're completely different people in many ways, even though they share some perceptual abilities.
[00:13:06] Speaker A: And again, a very rare condition. But when it does come along, it gives scientists, neuroscientists the ability to get a glimpse at the differences and connections between the mind and the brain.
Well, your book makes an argument for the immortality of the mind and the soul. You discuss NDEs, near death experiences. They're a fascinating phenomenon in recent decades, but you also report that they've been recorded by many cultures across, you know, thousands of years. Can you give us a few examples of those cultures and what their experiences looked like in the past?
[00:13:41] Speaker B: Sure.
Near death experiences are surprisingly common. There's no question there's, there's been probably tens of millions of people over, over human history have had things like this and they, they, there tends to be patterns to them that, that, that, that occur across cultures.
People often feel that they're leaving their body. They often see that, see their body, and they will hover in the vicinity of where they have died.
And they often describe a Kind of a tunnel experience where they go down a passageway and they come into a different world. And the world they come into is often very beautiful. Although there are some negative experiences there. There are people, new death experiences. They're probably the most common ones, are the pleasant ones. And people go to the other side of the tunnel and they see a beautiful world. They often will have some interaction with the divine figure, and they generally will meet dead friends and relatives.
A fascinating aspect of near death experiences is that to my knowledge, there's never been a report of someone having a near death experience where they met anyone on the other side who wasn't dead.
That is, the only people they meet are dead people.
And there have been a number of recorded instances where people with near death experiences have met a dead person on the other side of the tunnel who they didn't know was dead before they died. That is, the death was not known to them. One example was a little girl who was in a car accident and she had a near death experience in the hospital. And her sibling had died in the car accident, but she didn't know that she saw her sibling on the other side of the tunnel. Her parents had not died, and she didn't see her parents on the other side of the tunnel.
And there's a very famous near death experience.
A woman named Pam Reynolds was a patient who had an aneurysm at the base of her brain, a blood vessel that was about to burst. And she needed a very radical kind of surgery to fix the aneurysm. It was done in Phoenix at the Barrow Institute by a neurosurgeon named Robert Spetzler. And what she had to have done was she had to have her body cooled down to about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, put on a heart lung machine, and then her heartbeat was stopped and Dr. Spetzler went into her brain, drained the blood out of her brain, fixed the. Fixed the aneurysm in 30 minutes, and then restarted her heart, reperfused her brain, she came back to life.
And this was done in the early 1990s, and she made an excellent recovery. And she reports that when this happened, she felt as soon as her heart stopped, it felt as though her.
Her where she. She popped out of her body, went up to the ceiling of the operating room, watched the whole operation. She said she wasn't frightened. She said it was beautiful and fascinating. She heard the conversations the doctors had, which could be checked. She heard the music that was playing in the operating room. She saw the instruments. She then went down A tunnel. She saw her grandmother and her uncle who said she had to come back. She came back, went back into her body, and she said it felt like diving into a pool of ice water. It's kind of interesting because her body temperature was 50 degrees, so it really was a pool of ice water.
And so this is probably the best documented case of near death experiences in that she was documented by all kinds of machines in the operating room as being completely dead while she had these experiences.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: Wow. Yeah. So you can use those measurements as a way to verify what she was experiencing in her story. Yes, which does make it stand out.
Now you've also got a chapter in the Immortal Mind that addresses the Darwinian view that the human mind evolved gradually through natural selection and random mutation. What aspects of human life do you argue are immaterial and could not be products of a Darwinian process?
[00:17:33] Speaker B: The capacity for abstract thought, which includes reason and judgment, those are not material things and they can't possibly have evolved by a Darwinian mechanism because Darwinian mechanisms only work if they work at all. I'm not a big supporter of Darwinism as good science, but even if one believes that some aspects of human biology arose through some kind of process of natural selection, there's no way that the human mind could arise that way because our capacity for abstract thought and our capacity for free will are not material things and are not subject to Darwinian mechanisms. The human soul was created directly by God at the time of our conception.
[00:18:28] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. And of course, along the Darwinian framework, the intelligent design research community is challenging that on so many fronts these days.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:18:37] Speaker A: I mean, we have, you know, a systems biology approach to systems engineering, I should say, approach to biology, where you look at biology top down instead of bottom up, and it seems to make a whole lot more sense.
And then there's the whole immaterial genome that Richard Sternberg has been working on.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: And which is a very, very exciting idea. And the ID science on this is really first rate. It's really excellent science.
[00:19:05] Speaker A: And his work certainly dovetails with yours in that. I mean, your book could have been called the Immaterial Mind because it's working along the same lines.
[00:19:15] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: Now, speaking of free will, you explain that free will denial is very popular among neuroscientists and scientists today.
Why do you think this belief is so common and why do you believe it to be wrong?
[00:19:28] Speaker B: Well, it's a very, very interesting topic. It's interesting for scientific reasons, it's interesting for philosophical reasons, and it's interesting for psychosocial reasons.
I hold the viewpoint that everyone believes in free will, that there really is no one who doesn't believe in free will. I don't think there's ever been a human being who's ever lived who doesn't believe in free will. The reason is that belief is not merely what you say you think, but belief is what you do.
It's how you behave. For example, if you ask an embezzler, do you believe in financial honesty? And he says, sure, yeah, I definitely believe in that. Well, you know, he doesn't believe in that because he's an embezzler, because he steals money.
So if a person who really did not believe in free will would have to stop living as if free will were true. And everybody lives like free will is true. Everybody feels that you can morally choose good or evil or the other people morally choose good or evil. Everybody believes that they have some degree of genuine freedom in choosing.
You couldn't live your life. You couldn't live your life as a meat robot.
And a good example if you have someone who doesn't believe in free will is to. If you see them working on their laptop, just take your cup of coffee and hold it over the laptop and ask them, well, should I pour this coffee on your laptop? Of course they'd say, no, don't do that. You say, hey, I've got no free will. I've got no choice. You can't blame me if I do. I'm no more responsible for pouring a laptop, for pouring the coffee than the coffee cup is.
So the reality is that everybody believes in free will. It's just there's some people who say they don't believe in free will. And what I. I think of it as. As materialist signaling, actually is the term I use. And it means that they believe in the ideology of materialism so radically that they try to convince other people of how pure they are in their materialist ideology, you know? Well, I don't even believe in free will. But of course they believe in free will because they behave that way. So I'll. I will believe that they don't believe in free will when they stop acting like free will is real.
[00:21:43] Speaker A: Right, right.
Yeah. And that sort of gets back to the expectations I was talking about earlier. You know, what are the expectations? What would you expect, what behavior would you expect from someone who says there's no free will, you know? And does that match up to the reality of their actions?
[00:21:58] Speaker B: Sure, sure. I mean, most people who don't believe in free will are Perfectly ethical people who be, who behave, they behave as if free will is real. In fact, some of them are a real moral scold. I mean, you read some of the, some of the blogs of Jerry Coyne, who is a biologist who doesn't believe in free will, and I'd say probably 80, 80% of his blog is taken up with various moral exhortations to, you know, to do this, to do that. But if you didn't believe in free will, then what's the sense of making moral arguments there? Because there is no morality. It's, it's, it's, it's all just chemistry.
[00:22:36] Speaker A: And it's an easy way out to determinism because then you're not on the hook, you know, for much of anything.
[00:22:42] Speaker B: Right, right. And I, I suspect that that plays a deep role. It's kind of a way of saying all the, all the bad parts of my life aren't really my fault anyway, so you can't blame me.
And it's, it's kind of a cop out.
[00:22:56] Speaker A: Yeah. And then, then it begs the question, what about the good parts of your life? Were those accidents, you know, or did.
[00:23:01] Speaker B: You, they, they still take credit for that? I, I, you know, that's, you know, if they, and they, their paychecks, I mean, it's, you know, if, if they didn't freely show up to work and so on, and if they didn't freely have good ideas and why, why would they expect to get paid, you know?
[00:23:17] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
Well, you've written that nature is not a closed system and that it's possible that ordinary scientific causes in nature can come from outside nature. You also hold that science alone cannot interpret what science has revealed about the human mind.
Science cannot tell the whole story, in other words. And so you've drawn from philosophy and theology in your book to make a whole complete argument. What have you learned personally from your study of ancient philosophers and theologians? I know you did a lot of additional research, you know, for this book and also after you became a believer, your journey from atheism to belief in God, did you come across very old arguments that were consistent with your experience as a neurosurgeon?
[00:24:02] Speaker B: Sure.
The ancient philosophers got a lot of things right, and Aristotle and Plato and Thomas Aquinas.
And basically even the way we think as modern people in the west is structured in a lot of ways from the work of Plato and Aristotle and their followers.
And science can't explain everything, of course, and it can't even explain itself. That is, science is not a self validating thing. If you define science as the systematic study of causes in the, in the physical world, you can't validate the truth of science by science. You, you have to take a philosophical approach to say whether science can or cannot explain things. So science isn't even self validating, let alone a complete description of everything in the, in the world.
To me, the most compelling reason to believe that there is agency outside of the natural world that causes the natural world to exist and causes it to change and to have the kind of natural laws we have.
Well, there are two reasons. One is that modern science, particularly modern cosmology, points us to the Big Bang. And the, the Big Bang is a cause that came from outside of the universe because the Big Bang itself was not in the universe, because the Big Bang existed before the universe as the universe began. So the Big Bang didn't come from the universe because the universe didn't exist before the Big Bang.
So even basic cosmology points to causes that are outside of nature.
The singularities that are inside black holes are completely undefined according to natural science. Meaning there is no way that natural science, currently understood, can understand what's inside that singularity. So science can handle things that are outside of the natural world. It does it all the time.
The second reason to believe that there's something outside of the natural world goes back to Aristotle's argument for a prime mover. And what Aristotle argued. I'll say it can be expressed in a simple sentence that you can't go to infinite regress in a series of instrumental causes.
And what that means is that if you have one thing causing another thing and the causation is instrumental, meaning the thing that causes the effect has to continue acting as the effect is caused.
You can't go to infinite regress. You can't just keep going back further and further and further. There has to be something at the beginning of the series of causes that is outside of that causal chain. And what Aristotle would say, what St. Thomas Aquinas said is that is what all men call God.
So God is not only very acceptable in scientific reasoning. I think God is necessary in scientific reasoning. And I think God's existence is, is actually in a sense a scientific theory in that you can compile evidence for his existence. I think it's the strongest theory in science. It's the most thoroughly proven theory in science.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: Yeah, and I appreciate what you say about science there, but there was a time in your life, and we will explore that in a further episode where you felt that science could explain everything that, that it did have the answers. In fact, at one point in your, your life, you saw it as an escape, you know, as a, as a place to jump for truth and wisdom when life, you know, didn't make sense or wasn't as great as you, you hoped it would be. So we'll explore that and just your journey from atheism to belief in God as part of our next episode. Well, I hope that this gives listeners, viewers a little taste of what your book holds. We'll leave it there for now, but as I said, in a separate episode, we'll continue unpacking the insights you present in your new book. Dr. Aganor, I want to thank you for your time and being able to chat with us today.
[00:28:17] Speaker B: Thank you, Andrew. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
[00:28:20] Speaker A: Well, you can learn more about the book and order your copy @the Immortal Mind.org that's the website the Immortal Mind.org for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
