Black Hole Radiation

Over the last decade I have slowly moved toward the belief that there is an immaterial mind which is separate from the brain.

When I was in high school I realized that I was an atheist, and I was a pretty doctrinaire one at that. Over the years, through philosophy courses, through entertaining myself with working out the logical consequences of materialism (especially for free will), and through pondering just what our sense perceptions and thoughts consist of anyway, I have come to the conclusion that I must be at least agnostic on the question of whether there is a mind or soul separate from the brain. By now I am moving away from agnosticism and towards belief, but it’s a slow process after years of comfortable materialism.

I say comfortable because one of the attractions of atheism/materialism (I grant that they are not quite the same thing) is a pleasant certainty that you understand the universe and how it works. Much easier to believe there is no God, no soul, no afterlife, and that death is the end than to wonder uncomfortably how you are doing on some invisible scoreboard rating your life and what might happen after. I know it is supposed to be the other way around: religion is supposed to be comforting and science the cold, hard truth. But there is a lot about materialism that is attractive. It promises that you don’t need anything but rationality and observation to understand the universe. It is a lot simpler and more certain than theology. The stakes are lower. There are things beyond our knowledge in science, but nobody worries about ending up in hell if they don’t find the answers.

It is human nature to want to know and understand reality. The simpler reality appears, the easier it is to feel that we comprehend it. If we accept that there is something beyond the material we are opening a Pandora’s box filled not just with gods and ghosts, but also with a lot of uncomfortable questions. Like whether morality is more than just a cultural construction. Whether we are living our lives the way we are meant to. What the mind might be like once the brain stops functioning.

Science is a useful way of understanding the world but it can be just as doctrinaire as religion. Its tenets are that only what we can sense and measure exists, and that these phenomena obey regular laws and can be described mathematically. The problem is that these sensations and measurements are based on our perceptions and thoughts, which cannot be measured themselves. That is, I can measure the wavelength of light reflected from a red object but I cannot measure how red that object appears to me. Nor, it seems to me, can I understand what that perception of redness actually is. I know my eyes take in light and transform it into nerve impulses, but then what? The discontinuity between the physical process and the way I experience it seems unbridgeable.

The biggest problem with materialism, in my mind, is the issue of free will. I’ve had a lot of fun over the years thinking up arguments against the existence of free will, and even more fun imagining how people would act if they really did not believe it existed. I have come to believe that materialism and freedom of choice are not compatible. I think a lot of scientifically minded people understand this on some level. Yet they act as if choice is possible because our basic emotional responses and cultural constructions are predicated on the belief that we are all responsible for our decisions. Even more importantly, we feel like we make decisions, just like we perceive colors as something more than pure information.

I find the belief that all of our experience can be explained by the workings of the physical brain fundamentally unscientific. It is a quintessential act of faith. We experience making countless choices every day yet many of us believe that these are actually the necessary results of calculations made by the organic computer in our skulls acting in accordance with immutable laws.

The materialistic view of mind-as-brain discounts this experience of choice as an illusion because it cannot be explained in material terms using physical laws. A fundamentally unscientific way to proceed, that, denying the evidence of our own senses.

Thus I have come to feel that I must accept an immaterial “mind” interfacing in some unknown way with the material brain. I must accept my perception of color, shape, and sound as things that cannot be explained in physical terms. Above all I must accept that my experience of constantly making choices, including my current choice of what words to type, is not just an illusion.

…as for the soul, I could use that word instead of mind, but it has more religious connotations. Still, if mind is possible, why not soul? Maybe the soul interfaces with the mind just like the mind interfaces with the brain….