Why does the soul need the brain seems like a logical question especially in the context of the belief held by the leading ID proponent of the Discovery Institute Michael Egnor. He has written extensively on the theme of the immaterial soul that, in his view, is an independent entity, separate of the human body. What Dr. Egnor consistently fails to acknowledge is the obvious connection or interdependence between a functioning brain and self-awareness or consciousness. I wrote about it here.
If certain parts of human brain are damaged or disabled, just like in case of general anesthesia, the human brain loses the sense of consciousness or self-awareness either permanently or temporarily. The immaterial soul fails to make up for the damaged or disabled brain…
Dr. Egnor’s personal experiences (and he has many) as a neurosurgeon convinced him that many people, including many of his patients, with the great majority of their brains missing have developed and function normally. Egnor is convinced that an immaterial soul makes up for the loss of brain mass that is responsible for normal brain function in people with normal brain size or no damage to any of the brain parts.
It appears Dr. Egnor believes that unlike a computer software that can’t function without the computer hardware, human brain has an ability to make up for the loss of the hardware with the computer software – the immaterial soul.
Is Dr. Egnor’s view consistent with the readily available facts?
I personally see Dr. Egnor building and supporting a strawman by his selective choice of facts…Hey! That’s my opinion and that’s why we have this blog full of experts to disagree with me or Dr. Egnor…(I kinda like the guy though).
Let’s see…First off, not all cases of patients with missing parts of their brains experience the supposed miraculous saving powers of the immaterial soul. It appears that the amount of the missing part of the brain mass doesn’t seem to matter… What seems to matter more is which part (s) of the brain is missing and not how much of the brain mass is actually missing. Some parts of the brain seem essential for consciousness and self-awareness and others do not.
However, the main point of this OP is:
<strong> Why does the soul need the brain? Or why would human body need a brain at all, if the immaterial soul has an ability to compensate for the brain losses?
If the software (the soul) can operate without the hardware (the brain) why do we even need the brain in the first place?</strong>
It seems like a faulty or at least a wasteful design to me…
No, it does not seem at all like a logical question.
Perhaps you intended “reasonable question”. Some people seem to equate logic with the use of reason. But other folk have a far stricter meaning for “logical”, and your title question does not fit that strict meaning.
Personally, I see the title question as nonsensical.
Thanks Neil! You always seem to stray away from the theme … which is good…
J-Mac,
I don’t mind the theme, except that it is based on a wrong way of looking at everything.
The idea of the soul as software and the brain as hardware is very misleading, though it may well have many proponents.
I’ll point you to a book review Why I Left, Why I Stayed by Tony Campolo & Bart Campolo (Book Review).
Please yourself on whether you read the book or the review. In brief, Bart Campolo left Christianity for a number of reasons. But the trigger was a bike accident that result in damage to his brain. And that caused him to question his former ideas about the soul.
When I was in high school, one of my classmates was involved in a motor cycle accident (with brain injuries). He was absent from school for around 6 months. When he returned, his personality had completely changed.
The idea of brain and soul being separable does not stand up to this kind of evidence.
A better question would be,”why does the brain need the soul?”
Good thread. Hits the Nerve.
Dr Egnor is a very welcome intellectual voice for accuracy in these matters.
Yes he has seen, I have read his stuff, folks having loss so much “btain’ that yet they are fine in thinking. He is right is stressing the immaterial soul is proven, or a excellent option.
Our soul needs a brain/mind because the immaterial must be connected to the material. We must touch the material world with a immaterial soul. SO the mind/brain is simply the go between.
SIMPLY! how else could it be? how could we have a immaterial soul in opur body NOT affecting our body?
the connection must be the mind.
I say the mind is just a memory machine. the bible hints at this .
jesus had a immaterial soul. yet when placed in a human body IMMEDIATELY he was imprisoned by a human mind/memory. thats why as a babe and child and youth he was THISE beings. he was not a baby who knew everything. The bible says he GREW in wisdom! How could a God grow in wisdom ? what could he pick up here he didn’t already know?
nOthing! therefore the issue was memory . Jesus could not remember anything from his previous trinity/God status.
The brain is a myth. there is just a soul meshed to a memory(mind).
all problems with human thinking, like posters showed examples, is interference with the memory.
In fact retardation is famous for having people RETARDED but with great memories for this or that. Savants they call them.
Yet they just reveal the equation. They don’t have better memories nor retardation of the brain. they simply have triggering failure with the memory.
So under/over problem. likewise accidents or drinking temporarily etc affect the triggering mechanism.
No brain. just Soul plus mind/memory.
It will work in all cases. I think healing would progress if this equation was embraced.
Good thread.
Byers:
keiths:
Byers:
So this person is holding a myth?
Egnor doesn’t think the soul is involved in all cognitive functions. He admits that nonhuman animals can perceive, learn, and remember, yet he doesn’t think they have immaterial souls. He thinks that the immaterial soul allows humans to do one thing that nonhuman animals cannot do: apprehend (=be aware of) real universals. He thinks that universals are just as real as particulars, but that one is aware of real universals through the immaterial soul just as we (and other animals) are aware of real particulars through our senses.
KN:
Vincent Torley makes a similar argument. I’m not surprised to hear it from Egnor, but I’m a bit disappointed in Vincent.
Moved a post to guano.
It’s not surprising since they are both Thomists. It’s a fairly standard argument among them. Feser makes it most explicitly in his work.
Is this the same Egnor that said the following?
“Virtually all of the gun violence in America is committed by Democrats in municipalities governed by Democrats. “
Neil:
Pointlessly.
KN:
Ah. I didn’t know Egnor was a Thomist.
KN applies the label “Thomist” very liberally.
It should matter what sort of interdependence this is. Is it the sort of interdependence as between on/off button and computer, for example? Switch it on and it’s on. Switch it off and it’s off. Is this how you think?
Maybe it’s more like a wind and a leaf. A moving leaf shows that the wind is there, but when there is no leaf, it does not follow that there is no wind.
Which way is it and how would you argue for it?
And the very fact of damaged or disabled (parts of) brain makes the brain unable to account for what it means to be alive. The brain can be abled or disabled, alive or dead. What is it that makes the difference between one and the other?
It’s true that sometimes minor brain damages result in major losses of the individual capacity. However, sometimes even major brain damages are recoverable – not in terms of regenerating or replacing the brain, but just the capacities that should be lost because parts of brain are lost. If the brain is one-to-one linked to the individual capacities in your sense of “interdependent”, why does it not work accordingly?
True. But some do. And that should be enough to suspect that the relation is not mechanical.
Do we need the brain? We need the brain for a particular purpose. When this purpose is not important to us, when we don’t care whether we are dead or alive or in what way we are alive, then we don’t need the brain.
The software cannot physically operate without the hardware, but when there is no hardware or the hardware is bricked, it does not follow there is no software. For example, there may be a graphics card driver among the software, but the computer does not have a graphics card. When you add the graphics card, the software may or may not make the graphics card operative. When there is no graphics card, the software does not have the thing that would be made operative, but it has the thing to make it operative with. But when the graphics card is there, and the driver is not, the graphics card will still not operate. Understand?
On the software-computer analogy, it’s fundamentally the other way around: In order to operate, the brain needs the soul.
Tune in next week: “Why do fairies need wands?”
leading ID proponent of the Discovery Institute Michael Egnor …
I think that sort of says it all.
Well, that and J-mac and Byers contributing.
I thought you might be interested in this series of 3 videos, J-Mac.
Experiential Reality – Part 1 – The Mind Is Not in the Brain
Experiential Reality – Part 2 – The Brain is Superfluous
Experiential Reality – Part 3 – There Is Nothing but Mind and Experience
Speak for yourself William, speak for yourself…
WJM: Those videos come from the ‘Afterlife Institute’. Really ?
Membership in this institute is eternal. 🙂
No source is too low quality for William. He’ll defend Uri Geller…
Thanks for the heads up! I was about to waste some time watching them… 🙂
Good thing we don’t have to read your contributions…
Can you imagine what would happen then? 😉
I see this a lot. Is it factually wrong? I mean the part about shootings concentrated in cities.
graham2:
OMagain:
If you locked William in a room with CharlieM, a singularity would form, creating a black hole of gullibility.
graham2:
Acartia:
They must use auto-renewal. But what happens when my credit card expires?
Here are some articles about Dr. Egnor’s views of the soul:
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/06/a-map-of-the-soul
What Egnor has a hard time accepting is that consciousness/awareness could be quantum and that is way he keeps on insisting that the loss of the major parts of the brain without loss of function must reach beyond materialism…
If consciousness is quantum, as it appears to be, according to the law of quantum information conservation quantum information can’t be destroyed… So, as long as the microtubules in the brain neurons are able to process it, the consciousness remains… Hameroff and Penrose propose quantum entanglement as the mechanism of quantum consciousness….
Does the idea of quantum consciousness reach beyond materialism?
In multiple articles, essays, and blog-posts Egnor defends Thomistic hylomorphism specifically and Thomistic metaphysics in general.
He has… he puts his own spin on it though….
So what? I put my own spin on pragmatism. That doesn’t mean that it would be incorrect for someone else to classify me as a pragmatist.
Anyway, my real point was that Egnor’s arguments for the existence of the immaterial soul depend on the assumption that there are real universals. On that picture, we “perceive” real universals with our intellect just as we perceive real particulars with our senses. Particulars are contingent and variable (so the story goes) while universals are necessary and invariable.
There would still be Justice even if all institutions were unjust, there would still be Doghood even if all dogs became extinct, etc. And so we need to posit an immaterial intellect to perceive these immaterial but real universals.
The underlying argument seems to be this: all real particulars are composed of matter, but no real universals are also real particulars, so no real universal is composed of matter. Real universals are perceived by the intellect. But something that is not composed of matter cannot be perceived by something that is made of matter, and so the intellect cannot be material. Hence if there are real universals then there must be an immaterial intellect.
Calling something “quantum” is a sure way to avoid meaningful answers.
Are you able to propose a better idea other than speculations?
At least Hameroff/Penrose’s quantum consciousness predictions have been confirmed by experiments…
https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/why-a-genius-scientist-thinks-our-consciousness-originates-at-the-quantum-level
What about you?
Kantian Naturalist,
I remember reading Egnor’s article about universals…
Thanks for clarifying it…
You probably read his “A Map of the Soul” article…
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/06/a-map-of-the-soul
To complete the trifecta, Penrose’s version includes Godel incompleteness and his own personal solution to the measurement problem.
They guy is brilliant but he gets essentially no support from the relevant scientific communities for any of these three eccentricities.
But he is an atheist materialist AFAIK.
J-Mac is wicked quantum.
You quote-mine with the best of them! Sadly, you like to pretend that you don’t.
I know! I know!
I take it as a compliment?
Quanta are the absolute BEST!
I’ve really been looking forward to that OP too!!
Said the guy who got caught blatantly quote mining. Does your projector need a new bulb? Seems to me it should, by now.
Richardthughes:
OK, Mr. Smarty-pants, but if there are no fairies, then who waves the wands? They don’t wave themselves, you know.
P.S. Mung says he needs a hug. I’m reluctant, since I just took a shower, but I thought you — Richard T. Hugs — might be willing.
Mung:
OMagain:
Mung is neck-and-neck with colewd, J-Mac, and fifth in the self-unawareness sweepstakes.
ETA: Added J-Mac. How could I forget J-Mac?
lol
And keiths does not deny that he quote-mined Robert.
It’s almost like they can’t remember the past!
If someone else did a bad thing it does not stop you being a shit. Learn that lesson son.
Mung:
Sure I do.
How can the brain be a myth? As is so often the case, what Byers wrote makes no sense.