More Than Matter

A Review of Minding the Brain

I’m an editor for Discovery Institute Press, and one day last year a friend at church asked what I’d been doing at work lately. “We’re putting the final touches on a book where twenty-five experts in different fields weigh in on the relationship between the mind and the brain,” I told her.

She looked perplexed. “But the mind and the brain are the same thing,” she said. “Aren’t they?”

That’s the question addressed in the first big section of Minding the Brain: Models of the Mind, Information, and Empirical Science (2023, 490 pages plus three online-only chapters).

The Mind-Body Problem

First, a clarification: The term brain refers to the physical organ residing inside the skull. The term mind, as used in this book, refers to thoughts, consciousness, will, emotion, soul—any immaterial part of the self.

Does the mind exist in its own right or is it purely a byproduct of the physical brain, much like smoke is a byproduct of fire? If the mind does exist apart from the brain, what is the precise relationship between the two? Does one give life to the other? Does the brain dying make the mind depart, or does the mind departing make the brain die? Does one control the other—a one-way street—or is it a two-way street, with each influencing the other?

These are a few of the questions addressed in Minding the Brain by experts from a wide range of fields, including neuroscience, computer science, theology, psychology, social psychology, quantum theory, and mathematics.

Because the authors are trying to have fruitful conversations across disciplines, they mostly avoid field-specific jargon, making the book generally accessible to readers with no background in any of their fields. Some sections are more challenging than others (I had to look up supervenience and haecceity, and any discussion of quantum theory will mostly sail over my head), but I was always able to at least get the gist of any given argument, and there are plenty of more readily understandable parts. All told, it’s a fascinating and informative book.

The contributors don’t agree with each other about the relationship between mind and brain. They argue (politely); they refer to each other’s articles and to comments made by pre-publication expert reviewers. Sometimes they persuade each other into a slight change of position. Sometimes they heave an exasperated sigh.

Physicalism’s Fatal Flaws

There’s one point, however, upon which they all agree: we aren’t just meat machines. That is, physicalism (or materialism, or naturalism—all referring to the view that matter is the sole fundamental type of substance in existence) cannot provide a credible explanation for certain immaterial phenomena of which we are all aware, including emotions, thoughts, each person’s sense of himself as a unique individual, and the experiences of sensations like pain that require a coherent “I” (that is, a conscious subject who retains a stable identity over time).

The first part of the book is dedicated to explaining the fatal flaws in various types of physicalism. Later chapters circle back and put more nails in physicalism’s coffin. Here are just a very few:

Causal logic: How can purely physical parts such as nerve cells (neurons) produce non-physical cognitive capacities such as the ability to produce complex language? And even if we grant causality in that direction, how can it run the other way? That is, if every event has a purely physical cause, then how can our thoughts cause anything? How can our mental states affect our physical body and behavior, as they clearly do?

Brain experiments: Physical stimulation of the brain by a neurosurgeon can produce movements, sensations, perceptions such as smells, and can even cause the recall of certain memories; but it can’t produce “mind actions” such as abstract reasoning, mathematical calculations, or volition. Why not? And when a neurosurgeon stimulates the brain and causes a patient’s hand to move, why is the patient always aware that it was the neurosurgeon—not the patient—who caused the movement to happen? Also, why do brain waves register before a positive decision, but not before a negative one (a veto)?

Craniopagus twins: Why do conjoined twins who share large portions of the brain and who can control each other’s arms and legs nevertheless have separate selves and personalities?

Commissurotomies: Why do people whose brain hemispheres are severed (split brain) still have unity of mind?

Near-death experiences: If we’re purely physical beings, how can people who die on the operating table or elsewhere and who are then resuscitated present verifiable evidence that they were conscious throughout the experience—and conscious in places far from their dead or dying bodies, witnessing events on other floors of the hospital, or even across town in other buildings?

The authors highlight these and many other evidential challenges to the materialist view of the mind/brain. Additionally, they reflect on artificial intelligence and how it compares to human creativity and human emotion; quantum physics; the non-physicality of mathematics; and the implication of our ability to engage over a period of time in consistent reflection on these ideas (unity of consciousness over time). All told, the anthology makes a powerful case that physicalism cannot—and never will—explain aspects of human existence that you experience every day. The mind (soul, will, immaterial self) really does exist as its own non-physical thing. On this the authors agree.

Three Models

Beyond that, it’s something of a (very polite and brainy) free-for-all, as the authors hold a variety of positions on how to conceptualize the relationship between the physical and nonphysical. Their views can be loosely grouped into three broad categories (some authors manage to blur the lines).

Substance dualists argue that there are two types of foundational substances, the mental and the physical (unlike physicalists, who say that matter is the only foundational substance of reality).

Idealists say there’s only one foundational substance, but it’s not matter—it’s mind. All reality consists of minds and their ideas, and physical things are aspects of God’s thoughts.

But what if, as William (Bill) Dembski and C. Eric Jones argue, the most fundamental aspect of reality isn’t matter or mind, but the unseen web of relationships, information, and communication tying everything (physical and immaterial) together? In a relational ontology model, things exist not in themselves but insofar as they relate to other things. Pushing back against the idealists, Dembski argues that we aren’t just thoughts of God; God, so the Genesis account says, spoke creation into existence. Words, alas, can’t be taken back. They are separate from us in a way that thoughts are not. So God’s spoken creation gives us free will in a way that a thought-based creation could not.

More Than the Materialists Say

“I get it,” said my friend, when I ran through a tiny fraction of all this, which is itself only the very tiniest fraction of Minding the Brain. “The mind and the brain are different, even though we tend to use those terms interchangeably. And we shouldn’t, because we’re inadvertently misstating who we are.”

Exactly. Whether you end up aligning with some version of dualism, or idealism, or relational ontology, one thing is clear: We are more than the materialists say. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in physicalist philosophies. And there are more people—intelligent, educated people—pondering and discussing these things than you might imagine.

Minding the Brain opens the door onto some of those “more thans.”