I see that you are a little bit more open to the view that it is not the brain, and only the brain, that controls and directs mental activity in the person. There is something within you that goes beyond the activity of the brain. We have touched on here on a common error in this mind/brain discussion and it is a fairly widespread error, that if somehow you were exceptional and there is something extraordinary about you, then biology should enable us to unlock this information about you.

The realization of the existence of the mind is crucial in understanding human beings and in also, seeing, what possible fate awaits them on their death. And it is not biology that will tell us about the existence of the mind – it will be something else.

If you were to compare the DNA of a human with the DNA of a monkey, you would be struck by the similarity, somewhere over 90 percent. And yet, one could not deny the vast difference between a human being and the monkey, and this difference could not be accounted for by the biological molecule DNA.

We have been bombarded with the misinformation that the difference between humans and animals is one that is not all that significant. The existence of mind would challenge the prevailing view that there is no such thing as a uniqueness to mankind. It would alter, for example, how we see people who are brain damaged and without any seeming hope of recovery.

Within the last ten years, a British researcher found interesting data about patients with severe brain damage who were considered to be in a persistent vegetative state. By using fRMI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), he found that these patients, when questions were posed to them, were in fact thinking and imagining. They were not in any ‘vegetative’ state.

And here we come across another weakness in the view that science and only science pronounces truths. For science the word green, for example, is meaningless. There is a certain wavelength of light that can be used to designate this color but for science there are no colors. It is just this immediately perceived quality of color, as one example, that is left out of objective science.

Objective science is very good for describing the world outside of us, but it is woefully inadequate for the interior world of humans. Science can tell us how many cells there are in our bodies, or the mechanism of how an antibiotic operates and many other ‘outside’ things about us. But it has great difficulties in dealing with our inner selves and therefore simply cuts out of consideration much that enriches our lives and our being.

For science, humans are on same relative scale with insects, beasts and other creatures, the difference being simply in the level of development. But this should not surprise us. If modern science cannot accommodate any radical difference between us and beasts that is because science has a very limited scope for its investigations.

We, who straddle the material and non-material have a whole world of experience and richness in our lives which we can call our interior life. By denying even the existence of this world – a very strange position since we all experience it – materialism cannot accept that there is in fact such a thing as a mind. They often aver that we are deluded in thinking there is more to us, but the immediate question arises – who is it that is deluded if we do not really exist?

Materialism, the belief that there is only matter in the universe, cannot explain cases involving our inner world. It is often described as totally subjective and therefore of no intrinsic value.

I know what their answer will be to all this. We have not gone far enough in our research and we will come up with answers in the future. Just wait a little bit and the explanation will come. But this is based on wishful thinking and being closed to the evidence already there and sticking to one’s own presuppositions in wishful hopefulness. A classic illustration of this faulty reasoning involves the concept of entropy in the Second Law of Thermodynamics which says that in any process, some energy is wasted and lost. There have been many schemes to show that this was wrong but the law has withstood all challenges.

A far better explanation for these observations of our experiences is to say we have evidence which indicates the existence of mind – that humans straddle the material and non-material spheres of creation and it is the mind that connects us to the non-material aspect of reality. And there is a way of making sense of this possibility as we will see shortly.

There are various aspects to our interaction with and relationship to the world and to the functioning of our bodies. You don’t, for example, have to tell your heart to beat – it does this function autonomously and automatically. And there are many other functions carried out by your body without your conscious involvement. There are also our interactions with the world and this comes through our senses such as sight and hearing and touch. This is another activity of our brains. And these classes of actions are fair ground for study by science and have proved fertile for expanding our knowledge as to how our bodies operate.

But it is undeniable that we have faculties that go beyond what we have described above. These faculties we can call intellect and will. We can think abstractly, we can think in terms of universal properties and these are not material-based actions but go beyond them. And we saw that Penfield, in spite of his extensive research into the mind could not locate the part of the brain responsible for will.

An example of the abstract thinking that man is capable of is the mathematician Bernhard Riemann who developed a mathematics that was to be used by Einstein in developing his Theory of Relativity. At the time of Riemann’s development of certain aspects of mathematics, no one knew how this mathematics would be used. Now we know that without this available mathematics, Einstein would not have been able to develop his equations. Riemann developed his contributions to mathematics simply because of his love of mathematics. It is interesting that on Riemann’s tombstone in Biganzolo, Italy, it is written: “For those who love God, all things must work together for the best”.

Let me illustrate the significance of abstract thinking for our concept of the existence of mind. Suppose I tell you to draw a perfect circle on a piece of paper. You proceed to do this easily and you show that you can do this on any kind of surface whether, paper, blackboard, screen – whatever. Now, notice, that in each of these cases what you have done is drawn a specific circle, with specific dimensions on a material body. But there is literally an infinite number of circles you could draw and still not exhaust the concept of a circle. In other words, you cannot represent, in a material medium, the universal concept of a circle. And yet, you can talk about this universal concept and discuss it and imagine it, and this shows that there is something within you that is not limited by materiality – the ability to form a universal concept of a circle. Let me state this in a concise fashion.

Anything having dimensions (anything connected to and impacted by matter) must individualize what it receives. (To draw on paper, or any other medium, we can only draw a specific circle).

The human intellect does not individualize what it receives. (Through our intellect, we can imagine and talk about the universal definition of what a circle is.)

Therefore the human intellect is not a thing that has dimensions. (The human intellect is not bounded or confined by the matter in the world.)

And we also see here a refutation of the so-called concept of artificial intelligence. This phenomenon is totally defined and controlled by things that have dimensions – the nuts and bolts and casings, etc. Therefore it is not a mind and therefore it lacks intellect and will.

Why is all this important? What it shows is that a material description of a human being cannot exhaust its capabilities. There is something in people that defies a completely material description of what it means to be a human being. This shows that the hope that a human being can survive the catastrophe of death is not an idle wish but is something that has a rational, explainable basis. I am not saying that we have proved the existence of a human soul but what we have done is shown that proposing the existence of such an entity is not irrational. We can only go so far before it is necessary for faith to step in and propel us further.

We’ll continue in the next letter with maybe something a little less daunting.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas