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“When you look carefully at the neuroscience—the best neuroscience over the past century—it clearly points to the existence of the soul and to the existence of aspects of our mind that don’t come from the brain. And there’s overwhelming evidence in neuroscience for the existence of a soul.” -- Dr. Michael Egnor, 40 years and 7,000 brain surgeries pediatric neurosurgeon, professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at Stony Brook University, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.

The brain allows us to express our reason and express our free will by talking, by writing, by things like that. But reason and free will are not material powers, they’re powers of us, but they’re not powers of the brain. The brain does not explain the mind completely. It explains some parts of the mind, but not all parts of the mind, as neuroscientist Wilder Penfield stated. Years ago, Rene Descartes believed that living things were machines of sorts. And that in human beings, the soul was like a ghost that kind of adhered inside the machine. That became the basis for philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s comment that we’re sort of like a ghost in a machine. But the fact is, a machine can’t give rise to a mind, because a machine is defined as something that doesn’t have a mind. It’s just a mechanical arrangement of parts. Aristotle pointed out the profound difference between a machine and a natural thing, he called them the difference between an artifact and a substance. A substance is a naturally existing thing. A human being is 1 substance. A machine is an artifact. It’s cobbled together. What you do is you take pieces of natural things, you stick them together, and you get them to do something that they don’t naturally do. Nature is not a machine. You can make analogies but we're not machines. 
 
The brain is an organ. It does organ things, it makes action potentials, electrical impulses, nerve systems and neurotransmitters, chemicals that affect our mood and so on. There are 6 things that definitely come from the brain:
1). Homeostasis, all physiological regulation. 2). Arousal, if your brain is working right, you’re awake and alert and you pay attention. 3). Movement. 4) Perception. 5). Memory. 6). Emotion.

But reason and free will isn’t from the brain: 

A). reason, understanding what things really mean, which isn’t memory, it’s learning, it’s knowledge, which is a different thing.  B). free will, choosing voluntarily.

The soul is the aggregate, sort of you, kind of everything put together. The mind is 1 of several powers, part of the aggregate. Souls are an integration of our physical and spiritual abilities. They’re all integrated.
 
There are several ways of figuring out whether an organ does something. 1 way is to stimulate the organ and get it to do it, so you can prove it does it. The other way is to inhibit the organ from doing it and prove that when the organ’s inhibited, it doesn’t happen. While it is true that if you suppress the brain, we can’t use reason or free will very well, but there’s a way of stimulating the brain to test whether reason and free will come from it using electrical stimulation. And 1 measure looked at rather carefully to test this is the phenomenology of seizures (that leave you conscious and your body does things that you can’t control) which has, over the past couple years, been extensively reviewed in medical literature. There have been a quarter of a billion seizures in human beings over the past 200 years in the world. And there’s never been a recorded case of a seizure causing someone to express reason or free will or mathematical, or logical or moral thoughts or actions, but may move, tingle, emote, or recall a memory. That’s odd because a lot of our mental content, a lot of the stuff we do every day in our thinking involves reason and free will, but it never ever shows up when a seizure focus sparks brain activity. Wilder Penfield asked why are there no intellectual seizures? An answer: reason and free will don’t come from the brain(1).

Another method is to actually stimulate the brain directly in a controlled circumstance called awake brain mapping. About 400,000 done over the past century never elicit reason or free will. No matter where you stimulate the brain, you can’t make a person say, 1 plus 1 is 2, or if A, then B, modus ponens. Or say a moral viewpoint. 

There are about 20,000 people in the US walking around with implanted deep brain stimulators, people who have problems like Parkinson’s disease or where they have severe tremors. There’s not a single report of that kind of stimulator ever evoking reason or free will. There’s also been a lot of research done on patients with split brain surgery and some observational studies of people who were born as conjoined twins at the brain(2). And the same phenomenon is evident in those studies, that reason and free will are not material powers of the brain.

Then there are people missing major parts of their brains who were perfectly normal people, as if you have a laptop and it works perfectly, and you open it up and you find out that parts of your hard drive are missing. There are many, many people who have missing parts of the brain who are really highly functioning people. What replaces the brain tissue inside the skull is spinal fluid, which is basically water. There are cases of people just having a few millimeters of brain tissue and the rest is just water. And they’re very bright, highly functioning people. 

Then there's the condition called hydranencephaly is a condition where one is missing all of their brain hemispheres and all of the cortex of their brain. Those people are very handicapped But they’re still fully conscious, basically with severe cerebral palsy. Practically all the current theories of how consciousness works, integrated information theory, global workspace theory, higher order theories, all these theories all involve some kind of computational processing in the cortex, and that’s what makes us conscious. But these people don’t have a cortex. They don’t have brain hemispheres and they’re fully conscious.

If you’re missing a lot of your brain you may not be okay. But there are also lots of people who are very impaired whose brains look pretty good structurally. So the correlation is kind of loose. So neuroscience is just fundamentally wrong in certain ways because of the materialist bias in neuroscience. We don’t work like machines work. So it’s perfectly reasonable to infer that reason and free will don’t naturally come from the brain because you can’t make the brain do it. 

Then there's Maxwell Bennett's and P.M.S. Hacker's  mereological fallacy, attributing to a part something that can only be attributed to something that can only be attributed to a whole. An obvious example would be to say that my eyes see. Eyes don’t see. I see using my eyes. So we have to be very careful when we say the brain thinks. How can a brain think? A brain’s a lump of meat. The brain doesn’t think. People think using their brain. But people think, be very careful about metaphors because if the brain can think, then you start looking inside the brain for that little thinking area. And then your research project is just based on a fallacy. Wittgenstein spoke about this, that you have to be very careful of your language and very careful of the way you express things, or you lead yourself into all kinds of nonsensical conundrums(3). 

Benjamin Libet, a neuroscientist, was very interested in what’s happening inside the brain at the moment one has a thought. Brain waves kind of correlate them in very rough ways to thought. So he did some very ingenious experiments to look at that. Libet’s experiment found that the brainwave that corresponds to your thought happens before you’re aware of the thought, by about half a second. But Libet would ask his subjects to occasionally veto the thought. What he found was that the veto didn’t have a change in brain waves, the veto doesn’t seem to be the brain, that the brain presents us with a sea of temptations, constant like waves, just constantly coming up and they’re pre-conscious, we just feel that we have to do something, but we retain the free choice to accept it or deny it. And that’s where free will comes in. And like a "free won’t."  So human life, in some sense, is a continuous struggle between sensitive appetites and rational appetites. We want things that we shouldn’t have, or we don’t want things that we should want, that we should have, it’s a struggle.

Meanwhile, it’s been estimated that about 20 million Americans now living either have had a near-death experience or will have a near-death experience at some point in their lifetime, practically every culture has reports of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences going back thousands of years, but there are commonalities between them. And over the past several decades, there’s been quite a bit of scientific research done on near-death experiences in the West. Some near-death experiences are hallucinatory experiences or seizures or something. But there are 4 characteristics of near-death experiences that have to be explained:
1. They are very often very clear, very coherent, very detailed. People often have a detailed life review during it.
2. the outer body experience, at least hundreds, if not thousands, of people who observe things that they could not have observed in the body, who see things in distant cities, that can be confirmed.
3. there’s never been a report of somebody who’s gone down the proverbial tunnel and seen a living person at the other end. The people you encounter on the other side are always dead people. If these were hallucinations or wishful thinking, once in a while you'd run into the living. But they don’t see the people who live.
4. they are often transformative. People are different afterwards. They lose their fear of death.

But how do you see things without eyes? Your eyes are dead too when it happens. Then how do you see? Or how do you remember, memory does seem to be a brain function?  How do you remember what happened in your near-death experience if your brain is not working? Virtually all near-death experiencers say what I’m telling you is not really what happened. It’s ineffable, what would ever make us think that we could go to the other side, to an existence outside of our body, and make any sense of it? Thomas Aquinas said that we perceive after death by divine law, so perhaps what near-death experiences are seeing and remembering, is by virtue of powers that transcend ordinary mortal power.

Any materialist explanation would have to explain all of those things, and there’s no materialist explanation that can account for all. Materialism is a box and it’s a relatively small box, you have to try to cram all of reality into it but there’s a lot of things about reality that don’t fit. The material and the immaterial powers of the soul, of the mind, intertwine, and they work together. Immaterial means that the source of these powers is not a physical thing. It’s not a physical object. And immaterial is actually a fairly simple concept. For example, numbers are immaterial. There are many, many things that we think about, that are quite real but are not matter. And reason and free will are abilities we have whose source is our soul but not our brains. Nothing that will be implanted in the brain will cause reason and free will to be evoked. 

Science is not the enemy. If we look at science objectively and look at the real evidence, we have souls. And there are immaterial powers of our soul, of reason and free will, and that our souls are immortal.

1) The God of the gaps argument is a way that atheists/materialists have of deflecting the inadequacies of their theories. The God of the gaps argument is that there will be aspects of the natural world, human biology or physics, that can’t be explained using atheists/materialist ideas, so the explanation saying God did it the atheists/materialist say is a way of deflecting criticism of inadequate science. But there’s lots of gaps, most of it’s a gap. The amount that we really understand is very small compared to what’s out there, even though we do understand a lot. Hence, Atheists of the gaps create their own explanation, a promissory materialism, a tactic saying, we can’t explain that yet. Give us time. We’ll figure it out. And so atheists/materialists do a lot of promising, which is ultimately just a faith-based argument too. 
2) The studies of twins who are conjoined at the head and share brain activity hasn’t been as systematic, but there’s a lot that’s known about it. They have what’s called a thalamic bridge, brain tissue that connects the deepest parts of their brains. They can see at least partially through each other’s eyes. They can feel, to some extent, each other’s skin, share some motor control over each other’s limbs, share emotions and they seem to share memories to some extent. But as far as we know, they don’t share reason and free will, they have different personalities, get into fights, have different opinions on things, they both have to learn. They show that even if you have connected brains, your reason and free will is separate because they have separate souls, separate persons, and they have separate souls, and you don’t share reason and free will. 
3. For example, there’s a problem in neuroscience called the binding problem, where we experience things as a unified whole. Talking with someone is a kind of a unified thing. But in reality, it is a whole array of different things. It’s the sensation of being there, hearing, seeing, and thinking all bound together in the brain as a single experience? That's called binding. But ideas don’t have to bind. So we have to be very careful of our language.


Supplemental Info:

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/12/08/religion-holds-steady-in-america/


https://spectator.org/leslie-corblys-progressive-prejudice-is-a-book-every-christian-should-read/  


https://www.foxnews.com/media/scholar-warns-feminism-has-become-megachurch-rerelplacing-faith-family-christian-virtue


https://spectator.org/the-optics-of-accommodation-pope-leos-audience-with-pro-abortion-illinois-governor-j-b-pritzker/  

 

The Tradesman- My views on this;

 

I firmly believe that God exists, that he's given humans a soul that is immortal, That he's given humans free will to do good or evil, that there is an existance beyond our lives on Earth. I also believe we will be held to account for our actions during our lives here and this life is a training period.

This dissertation proves to me there is an afterlife. There is a God. There is a Soul. It also proves to me, we need to turn to God for help in reversing the immorality and tearing down of our moral principles the hard left liberals have forced on us over the last 60 years or so. I fear if we don't start asking him for help we won't be able to reverse the evil that has already been done to our society.

 

We are caught in a no win situation with the Democrats/Deep State waiting in the wings patiently until Trump is gone, and they take back the power. You know they will reverse everything he has done, just like they did the first time.That is the measure of their rampant greed. Even if things are codified in law, laws can be, and are, regularly reversed. We sit here and consistently refuse to take the power the Founders gave to us to keep the government subservient to the people. The real fear about our using that power comes from the ones who stand to lose everything they have amassed for themselves since 1789, the government politicians. 

 

If we got the 34 States to demand Congress convene an Article-V Amendment Proposal Convention, We could block further grabs by the politicians by proposing three simple amendments;

1. A balanced budget Amendment that forces Congress to present a balanced Budget within 6 months of being seated with penalties for non-compliance; personal fines attached to their salaries, censure, recall, and in extreme cases loss of right tom run for ANY office for 10 years.

2. Term Limits That allow only 12 years total in Congress, with the same provisions in the House as now are present with the Senate. Two 6 year terms and electing of only a third of the members every two years for rotation purposes. It would also forbid them from exempting themselves from any Laws Regulations or Rules they create, and would requoire them to have the same health care and retirement benefits the rest of us have. 

3. An Amendment that allows the people the right with a 3/4 vote to override the Congress on laws and the Supreme Court on rulings. Of necessity to it's seriousness, it would have to be set up like Article-V with the same protections contained within it.

 

Those are my ideas, what are your ideas?

The Tradesman.