Michael Egnor: The Evidence against Materialism - Science Uprising Expert Interviews

Summary

Highlights

• Democritus's ancient materialistic views laid early foundations for the discussion about the mind and materialism. 🎓
• The 20th-century behaviorists dismissed the importance of the mind, focusing on observable behavior instead. 🧠
• Identity theory's claim that the mind is the same as the brain fell out of favor as evidence mounted against it. ❌
• Functionalism and eliminative materialism tried (and struggle) to explain the mind without invoking anything beyond the physical brain. 🎛️
• Scientific studies, like Sperry's and Penfield's, provide evidence against purely materialistic views of the mind. 👨‍🔬
• Functional MRI studies reveal surprising cognitive activity in patients thought to be in vegetative states. 😮
• Benjamin Libet’s experiments support the idea of 'free won't,' countering deterministic views of free will. ⏱️
• Franz Brentano’s intentionality highlights how thoughts can uniquely be about something, unlike physical matter. 🧠

Key Takeaways

• Materialism is an ancient philosophy suggesting everything is reducible to atoms, including the mind. 🤔
• Behaviorists and materialists have proposed various theories relating the mind to the brain, but these ideas face scientific challenges. 📚
• Roger Sperry's split-brain studies indicate the mind isn’t purely generated by the brain. 🧠
• Wilder Penfield's neurosurgery experiences showcased aspects of the mind untouched by brain operations. 🔬
• Studies in persistent vegetative states and Benjamin Libet's free-will experiments challenge materialism further. 📊
• Dualism offers a robust alternative to understanding the relationship between mind and matter. 💭
• Intentionality and teleology provide deeper insights into nature's purposeful design, suggesting a grand mind or designer. 🌌

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:00: Materialism and Its Evolution Materialism is a philosophy that traces its origins back to ancient Greece. Democritus, a Greek philosopher, posited that everything, including the human mind, is reducible to atoms and the void. This foundational view has influenced materialist ideas into the 20th century and beyond.
• 02:00 - 05:00: Cerebral Localization and Higher Thought Functions During the early 20th century, behaviorists posited that the mind was either irrelevant or non-existent, focusing solely on observable behavior. However, this perspective eventually proved untenable. Consequently, the perspective evolved, leading to the understanding that the mind is essentially identical to the brain.
• 05:00 - 08:00: Split-Brain Experiments and Implications The chapter discusses the evolution of theories regarding the relationship between the mind and the brain, highlighting the transition from the identity theory prominent in the 1960s and 70s to modern perspectives. It emphasizes that the mind is distinct from the brain, contrasting the dated identity theory with functionalism. Functionalism likens the mind-brain relationship to the software and hardware of a computer, suggesting a more dynamic interaction than previous models allowed. This shift in understanding reflects the broader development of cognitive science and philosophical thought about consciousness and identity.
• 08:00 - 13:00: Wilder Penfield's Observations The chapter titled 'Wilder Penfield's Observations' challenges the concept of the mind being synonymous with computation. It argues that while the brain may function in a computational manner, the mind itself is not computational. The chapter also introduces the theory of eliminative materialism, a viewpoint favored by some materialists, which posits that the mind does not exist and only matter is real. According to this perspective, our belief in the existence of the mind is merely an illusion.
• 13:00 - 17:00: Persistent Vegetative State Studies The chapter titled 'Persistent Vegetative State Studies' explores various philosophical materialist viewpoints and their lack of support in the scientific community. It highlights that despite the popularity of the idea that humans have minds, such perspectives are not backed by scientific evidence, which suggests these viewpoints may be incorrect. The chapter also references several classic studies that challenge these materialist viewpoints.
• 17:00 - 20:00: Benjamin Libet's Experiments on Free Will The chapter discusses Benjamin Libet's experiments that challenge the concept of free will from a neuroscientific perspective. It highlights that while certain brain functions are linked to specific cerebral localizations, others are not, indicating a complexity in understanding the material basis of the mind. This suggests that some elements of the mind may not be entirely material, opposing strict materialism. The chapter sets the stage for exploring how neuroscience can both support and contest materialistic views of the mind.
• 20:00 - 27:00: Critique of Materialism in Neuroscience The chapter titled 'Critique of Materialism in Neuroscience' discusses the localization of various brain functions. It mentions that basic motor and sensory functions can be traced to specific, discrete areas in the brain. For example, moving a hand is controlled by a specific part of the opposite cerebral hemisphere, and vision is managed by an area in the occipital lobes. However, the chapter argues that higher intellectual functions, like abstract thought, mathematics, ethical contemplation, and aspects of personality, cannot be localized to specific brain regions. This implies a critique of the materialist view that all brain activities can be directly mapped to physical locations.
• 27:00 - 33:00: Intentionality and Teleology The chapter explores the concept of whether complex intellectual functions, such as calculus and abstract thoughts like justice and mercy, have specific localizable centers within the brain. It argues that while the brain is crucial for these activities, the processes are not localized in the same way that sensory and motor functions are. Historically, there was a belief in the localizability of such higher abstract thoughts, but this chapter suggests otherwise.
• 33:00 - 42:00: Rejection of Materialism and Philosophical Insights The chapter delves into the philosophical rejection of materialism in the 19th century, using the example of phrenology. Phrenology was the theory that specific mental functions had designated areas in the brain responsible for them. However, this theory has since been discredited as inaccurate. The chapter highlights that while certain mental functions are indeed mediated by specific brain regions, other aspects of the mind do not correspond to specific locations in the brain, challenging the materialist perspective.

Michael Egnor: The Evidence against Materialism - Science Uprising Expert Interviews Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 materialism is an ancient philosophy it dates back to the ancient Greeks and the viewpoint of Democritus was a Greek philosopher is that the only thing that exists is atoms in the void and that everything including a human mind is reducible to atoms in the void and in the 20th century the materialist ideas
• 00:30 - 01:00 have been extended a bit the behaviorists in the early 20th century believed that the mind was at best irrelevant and possibly didn't even really exist at all the only thing that actually mattered was the behavior of a human being or the behavior of an organism that philosophical viewpoint turned out to be untenable so the viewpoint that the mind was identical to the brain became widely
• 01:00 - 01:30 accepted among materialists in the 1960s and 70s it was called identity theory and that viewpoint has come to be untenable pretty obviously the mind is not the same thing as the brain and other theories such as functionalism which views the mind brain relationship somewhat akin to the relationship between the software the hardware of a computer has become quite popular but
• 01:30 - 02:00 the mind is not computation in fact the mind is the opposite of computation although the brain itself could be described as a computer the mind is no form of computation and a theory that is currently very popular among materialists is called eliminative materialism and eliminative materialism is the viewpoint that there is no such thing as the mind it's not that the mind is explainable by matter it's just that the mind doesn't exist at all and the only thing that exists is matter and that we are deluded into
• 02:00 - 02:30 thinking we have minds that's a rather radical strange way to look at things but it actually is rather popular nowadays amongst materialists none of these philosophical materialist viewpoints have any particular support in science the scientific evidence strongly suggests that these viewpoints are wrong there are variety of classic studies in
• 02:30 - 03:00 neuroscience that support the viewpoint that some aspects of the mind are not material and that refute materialism the first set of experiments are experiments that show cerebral localization with certain kinds of neurological functions but not with others it's been known since the 19th century that for motor and sensory function there are very
• 03:00 - 03:30 specific locations in the brain that seem to mediate those functions what if I move my hand that is controlled by a specific part of my opposite cerebral Hemisphere and the area is quite discrete vision is controlled by a very discrete area in the occipital lobes however higher intellectual functions abstract thought such as mathematics such as contemplating ethics things involved in personality are not
• 03:30 - 04:00 localized like that that is that there is no calculus center of my brain there's no addition center in my brain the brain seems to be necessary ordinarily for doing in calculus and doing addition and thinking about concepts like justice and mercy and so on but it's not localizable in any way near the same way that movement and sensing cessation is localizable the belief that higher abstract thought was going to be localizable was held by
• 04:00 - 04:30 materialists in the 19th century and they developed the theory of phrenology from that day as the idea that all of these individual higher intellectual functions have a spot in the brain that controlled them and phrenology of course has been discredited it's been shown to be wrong and it was wrong because only certain things in the brain seemed to be mediated by the brain other aspects of the mind don't have a spot in the brain that seems to give rise to them the
• 04:30 - 05:00 implication there is that they're not really material that they're an immaterial power of being able to reason and we use logic and frankly that's a very old duelist idea it was an idea proposed by Aristotle an idea as part of two mystic philosophy so for thousands of years duelists have predicted that and modern neuroscience confirms that back in the 1960s Roger Sperry who is a
• 05:00 - 05:30 prominent neuroscientist did a series of studies on patients who had had split brain operations and these were patients who had severe epilepsy in which an epileptic focus would begin in one hemisphere of the brain and traveled through the corpus callosum which is a bundle of fibers connecting the two hemispheres and caused a generalized seizure it was recognized by surgeons in the mid 20th century that if you cut a fiber bundle that connected the two
• 05:30 - 06:00 hemispheres of the brain that you could prevent the seizures from becoming generalized and you could greatly improve the quality of the patient's life so a number of patients had this operation to call it called corpus callosotomy an operation that I've performed and that many neurosurgeons it performed and surprisingly after the operation the patient's their seizures would get better of course but they really weren't much different that is that their brains were essentially cut in half but they still seemed to be a unitary person they still seemed to be fairly normal Sperry was a
• 06:00 - 06:30 neuroscientist who studied these people in detail and he did find that there were some subtle abnormalities as a result of cutting the brain in half but the animality were very subtle they were so so that the experiments he did won him the Nobel Prize but they weren't obvious they weren't obvious changes and what that implies is that the human mind is not purely generated by the matter of
• 06:30 - 07:00 the brain otherwise cutting the brain in half would have profound effects on the human mind it might make two people certainly it would it would create a rather profound difference in a person's state of consciousness and it doesn't you can cut the brain in half and the person can't tell the difference except that he has fewer seizures there are some subtle differences but the differences can only be detected with literally Nobel prize-winning research that shows little differences in perception
• 07:00 - 07:30 there are the experiments of Wilder Penfield who was the pioneer in epilepsy neurosurgery from the 1930s to the 1960s dr. Penfield who worked in Montreal in Canada was the first neurosurgeon to systematically operate on the human brain when people were awake the brain doesn't feel pain the scalp can feel
• 07:30 - 08:00 pain the skull can but he would give local anaesthesia so the patients didn't have pain and he would work on the brain while they were awake in an effort to identify the focus of their seizures and to remove the focus from the brain so their seizures would stop and he operated on upwards of a thousand patients like this and very carefully recorded his results he was a meticulous scientist as well as a neurosurgeon and he began his career as materialist he believed that all the mind originated
• 08:00 - 08:30 from activity of the brain but by the end of his career he was a passionate duelist and was a harsh critic of materialism and he was a duelist for several reasons first is that he repeatedly observed that there were aspects of the patient's mind that no matter what he did to the brain he couldn't affect you know he could he could elicit memories by stimulating a
• 08:30 - 09:00 part of the brain he could make a muscle move or make a patient have a sensation but he couldn't change their consciousness he couldn't change their intellect he couldn't change their sense of self there was a fundamental core the person's soul that no matter what he did to the brain remain the same so he said there was something he couldn't reach using material things the other observation that which i think is absolutely fascinating
• 09:00 - 09:30 is that he asked the question why are there no intellectual seizures and when people have epilepsy the epilepsy can follow various patterns commonly a person will have jerking of a muscle sometimes so many muscles jerk that they actually go unconscious sometimes they have a tingling on their skin or sometimes they'll have a funny smell or sometimes they can even have a little behavioral tic but they never start
• 09:30 - 10:00 doing calculus they never contemplate justice or mercy they never think about Shakespeare so Penfield says why aren't their intellectual seizures if the mind comes from the brain entirely the mind is material in some sense well then you ought to have seizures that make you do addition when you can't stop you ought to have seizures that make you think about politics and you can't stop but you don't says there are no intellectual seizures it says what that implies is that the intellect is not the brain
• 10:00 - 10:30 because that otherwise you would have it you would have intellectual seizures so Penfield was a very profound thinker on this matter he was the pioneer in the study of the brain and he conclusively showed in my view that there is an immaterial aspect of the mind particularly the intellect the ability to reason to use logic and he started out as a materialist and he finished his career as a passionate duelist
• 10:30 - 11:00 in 2006 a neuroscientist named Owen published a landmark study in the Journal of science looking at brain function in people who were in persistent vegetative state persistent vegetative state is a condition where a person has such severe brain damage that they show no sign of consciousness at
• 11:00 - 11:30 all it's basically a persistent deep coma and it can go on for years and many times people who are diagnosed as being in persistent vegetative state for example a car accident or from lack of oxygen to the brain something I've done many times they're family and sometimes they're their caretakers will say but I get the sense that the person is there that they understand things but there's no clinical evidence for it you examine them there's no sign of any reaction at all and on scan their brains are
• 11:30 - 12:00 shrunken and obviously severely damaged so Owen did a fascinating experiment he used the technique called functional MRI imaging which is an MRI machine that images changes in blood flow in the brain that seems to correlate with brain function so if you're moving your arm the part of your brain that involves moving your arm lights up on the functional MRI if you're thinking about stuff your frontal lobes light up things like that so what Owen did is that he took a woman who had been diagnosed for
• 12:00 - 12:30 several years and persistent vegetative state from a car accident who showed no sign at all of any awareness deep coma put her in the MRI machine and asked her questions through a little microphone and head and head said he said pretend that you're playing tennis or imagine that you're walking across the room he asked her to imagine all these things and her brain kind of lit up in places but you could say that well the brain lighting up doesn't mean she was understanding anything it just meant
• 12:30 - 13:00 maybe the sound coming into her ears was causing a reflex or something so what he did was he took 15 normal people and he did the same thing when that stuck me the Machine put hit and ask the same questions and then he asked neuroradiologists to look at the functional MRI images of this woman and the 15 normal people and see if you could tell a difference between the two and they couldn't her pattern of reaction was identical to the normal
• 13:00 - 13:30 people that seemed to imply that she could understand what he was asking even though medically she was diagnosed as having no no mind at all and he just and he did something that was very clever that absolutely fascinates me and he said maybe the lighting up of areas in in her brain and the lighting up of the areas in normal people's brains was not because of understanding was it was just because of the reception of the sound and that it didn't really mean she understood so what he then did is he
• 13:30 - 14:00 took the same words that he had asked her before and he asked them again but he mixed them but he mixed the sequence of the word so they to make any sense walking understand pretend rule Macross so he took away the semantics and just left some syntax and her brain stopped stopped reacting as did the normal controls her brain only reacted when what he said to her made sense they didn't react from just sound so Owens work was a landmark study and it made
• 14:00 - 14:30 people begin to question these folks who were in persistent vegetative state are they really unaware and so his study has been repeated by a number of different investigators and they're probably last I looked there were 40 or 50 patients who had been studied by other investigators and at least half of them showed the same thing that he found that even when your brain is so massively destroyed that there's no clinical evidence for any mental activity at all functional MRI can find that these
• 14:30 - 15:00 patients are capable of thinking in quite quite clear ways and there are some patients who can do mathematics that is that what what some researchers have done is they will ask a person in persistent vegetative state to do simple math what's 8 plus 6 and then and then give them different answers and when you when you when you when you hit the right answer of the brain lines up so very clearly there are aspects of the mind
• 15:00 - 15:30 that cannot be destroyed by severe brain damage that's what Owens work is showing us it's showing us our aspects of the mind that aren't connected tightly to the brain that are immaterial some of the most fascinating work in neuroscience has been the work of Benjamin Libet who was a neuroscientist in California
• 15:30 - 16:00 back in the mid 20th century Lyman was fascinated by the correlation in time between thought and brain activity and he did a whole series of experiments in which he would place electrodes on the scalp of patients or people and he would ask them to make decisions or think about things and he would attempt to time the moment when they made a
• 16:00 - 16:30 decision when they thought about something and correlate the moment they thought about something with a the moment that there was a change in brainwave activity and he did a number of different experiments one experiment has become very famous and ironically has been used by materialist to support materialism although an understanding of what lab had actually found is quite the opposite it refutes materialism the experiment that lie beneath his
• 16:30 - 17:00 sweep hand and the person would just sit there and whenever they would decide I think I'll press the button and push the button he asked them when they made the decision to press the button not when I pushed it but when they decided to push it just know the the the fraction of a second that was on the clock at the same time he was recording brainwaves and he wanted to find out the moment you decide
• 17:00 - 17:30 what happens in your brain and what he found was quite consistently was that about perhaps half a second before you decide to do something there's a spike in your brain spike in your brainwave then he called the readiness potential and it was before you were aware of the decision to do anything there's almost like an unconscious motive and then you would decide a half second later and do it so he found this quite consistently
• 17:30 - 18:00 that there would be the spike in brain activity then the conscious awareness of a decision and then you go ahead and do what you decided materialists have used this to suggest that we are misled by thinking that we have freewill that what actually happens is that our material brain just sort of makes the decision and then we kind of think that we decided but we didn't it was our nerd two neurotransmitters and neural chemicals but whybut didn't agree with it lie between Tadao t' that he asked
• 18:00 - 18:30 these subjects to do something more he said when you decide to do something then decide not to so you decide I'm gonna push the button up no I'm not gonna push the button when they did that he found that there was a readiness potential for deciding to push the button but there wasn't a readiness potential to decide not to push it and he said he didn't prove the existence of free will but he proved the existence of
• 18:30 - 19:00 free won't that's what he called it free won't he said what he see is going on in the brain with his experiments is that we are bombarded with what are probably pre conscious or unconscious motives and that we are freely capable of deciding whether to comply with them or not and the decision to comply with them is not Material there's no sign of any brain activity when you decide not to comply
• 19:00 - 19:30 and he pointed out kind of interestingly that free won't is a parallel concept to traditional religious ideas of original sin that in a sense we have motives that are beyond our control we can't stop the motives but we can stop ourselves from doing it and the free will or the free won't is scientifically demonstrable and he demonstrated and his experiments were brilliant and he was a duelist he was a property duelist and he rejected the
• 19:30 - 20:00 idea that his experiment to prove materialism he felt just the opposite that approved that freewill was real what this remarkable research suggests is that the materialistic bias that has been present in neuroscience specifically and in science in general leads us to misunderstand the
• 20:00 - 20:30 results of our science one could say in a sense almost that we have an ocean of data an ocean of answers but we've forgotten what the questions are we've forgotten the questions that we're supposed to be answering and when you look at these studies and cognitive neuroscience carefully they are giving us a very clear answer to a fundamental question in neuroscience and that is is
• 20:30 - 21:00 the mind entirely a product of the material brain and the answer they're giving us is that it's not and this particular viewpoint that neuroscience had been misled by materialistic ideology has been addressed in some depth by by two people working in the field who I think had done fascinating
• 21:00 - 21:30 work there is a neuroscientist named Bennett from Australia and a philosopher named Hackett from Oxford who've published several books over the past couple decades the most prominent of which is it was the philosophical basis of neuroscience in which they critique the materialist viewpoint in which they point out that the the traditional classic way that
• 21:30 - 22:00 materialist science scientists do neuroscience seriously misrepresents what the science is telling us and that we can't understand our experiments if we begin with a materialistic bias that isn't justified by the evidence so I strongly recommend that a Benetton hacker's Blanc it provides a wonderful philosophical foundation for getting a deeper insight into neuroscience the
• 22:00 - 22:30 object that neuroscience studies the human mind and the brain is best understood by dualism and I believe that neuroscientists need to become more acquainted with with dualism and need to understand the limitations of materialism which are profound and which are holding their science back the natural world can be much better understood if you assume that it has purposes if you assume that it has designed it helps you to understand how
• 22:30 - 23:00 things work and I believe that the human mind properly understood it will give us a much deeper understanding of nature and not just of the mind in the 19th century a German philosopher named Franz Brentano asked a very important question and I think answered it very well he asked the question what is it that is
• 23:00 - 23:30 unique about the mind that makes it different from matter we tend to think of mind and matter as different things but what is though is there's one thing that makes something mental as opposed to physical he said actually there is and he said it's intentionality and intentionality is a is a is an ancient term it was a term that dates back to Aristotle and was used by scholastic philosophers and what intentionality means is that it is the ability for something to be about something else for
• 23:30 - 24:00 example if I'm thinking now about Washington DC my thought is intentional in a sense that I am thinking about something that's not me I'm thinking about a city or I'm thinking about a doorway or thinking about my wife so the ability for a thought to be about something is unique to the mind because no physical object is is about anything
• 24:00 - 24:30 in the absence of a mind all right there's a rock sitting on a beach isn't about anything a tree isn't about anything only a thought can be about something so brentano said that if we are to understand the mind we have to understand intentionality we have to understand how a thought can be about something and of course you can't explain intentionality using materialistic beliefs and precepts because matter is never about anything intrinsically and materialist have tried
• 24:30 - 25:00 in the twentieth century they've taken a brentano's challenge they've been many different efforts so for example by daniel dennett who was a materialist philosopher to explain intentionality as some kind of material thing but it can't be explained that way what's remarkable about intentionality and what the scholastic philosophers understood is that intentionality is in some sense a reflection of a grander aboutness in nature and that grander about mrs.
• 25:00 - 25:30 called teleology and teleology is the tendency for processes in nature to go somewhere to become something for example the classic example is an acorn growing into an oak tree geologically it seems to be what the Acorn is designed to do to become an oak tree the Acorn doesn't become a ocean or a Corvette or or a flower it becomes an oak tree it
• 25:30 - 26:00 has a very specific direction and a goal and it's a kind of aboutness in things that they're all directed and the scholastic flobsters realize that intentionality in the human mind is kind of a reflection of this aboutness in all of nature and essentially it's a reflection of purpose in nature and that you can't understand the mind or you can't understand nature unless you understand purpose and in fact biologists have tried because they are allergic if they're Darwinist biologists
• 26:00 - 26:30 they're allergic to teleology they're allergic to the notion of they've tried to explain biology without explaining but without invoking purpose and I can't do it you can't explain a living thing without explaining what the purpose of the parts of that living thing are you can't explain the heart unless you explain that the purpose is to pump blood you can't explain the eye unless you understand the purpose is to see what are those purposes come from
• 26:30 - 27:00 well those purposes are kind of like intentionality they're kind of like a mind and the implication is that behind the universe there's a there's a mind a grand mind a mind that is reflected in the way the universe works and as st. Thomas would say that is what all men call God so what really helped me in my personal understanding and in my faith is that I
• 27:00 - 27:30 see that everything in nature that shows purpose that shows goal-directed --mess that shows teleology and intentionality is a reflection of a much higher mind it's a reflection of God materialism in my viewpoint is not even really a philosophical perspective it's just a mistake it's just it's like saying it's like claiming that 2+2 is 5 as mathematics
• 27:30 - 28:00 it's not really mathematics it's just an error and materialism isn't even sufficiently coherent in my view to qualify as a philosophical perspective the best philosophy on this originated with the ancient Greeks particularly with Aristotle and what Aristotle proposed and what really became mainstream metaphysics for such philosophers as st. Thomas Aquinas the scholastic philosophers is that things
• 28:00 - 28:30 that exist in the world are composites of form and matter and that form is the intelligible aspect of things and that matter is what makes something an individual thing and not just sort of a theoretical thing but that the the actuality the intelligibility of something is in the form that's not in the matter form is what makes things real and what I believe materialism does in modern science is it denies that the
• 28:30 - 29:00 form of things is the most important aspect of them that we need to for example in biology we need to to focus on the purposes of biological structures not just on the details of the structure itself we need to know why they're doing what they're doing and once you start looking for purposes you start looking at a material aspects
• 29:00 - 29:30 of nature at form and that leaves you out of materialism the reality is that if you are a consistent materialists you can't even do good science let's face it if you think the only thing that exists is matter extended in space and why would you pay any attention to physical laws as Newton's law matter extended in space as Einstein's theory the Einstein's equations of gravitation are they matter extended in space now the
• 29:30 - 30:00 best science is science that looks for deep conceptual principles that underlie the natural world and that's inherently not a materialistic perspective