Dr. J.P. Moreland's Arguments for the Soul

Neuroscience Can Correlate Brain States but Not Explain Consciousness

I guess the next question that arises then out of that is, well, how did we get, how do you get to that? There is an immaterial cell. I'm even trying to anticipate rejoinders from skeptics or, or physical lists or something, but what would be an argument for substance dualism?

Well, there are a whole host of them. Um, uh, you know, a lot of, uh, really good ones. I mean, 10 or 15 at least, but, um, the basic, the basic thing that you have to first of all establish with people is that advances in empirical science, particularly neuroscience, literally have nothing whatsoever to say about this issue.

It's invited to speak to the National Institute of Health a few years ago. Uh, and my audience was about 130, uh, neurosciences, scientists and research biologists that worked there and the overwhelming majority were not Christians.

And I are, I argued that, uh, neuroscience is absolutely fantastic when it comes to studying, uh, correlations and dependencies between brain states and conscious states. So that if a certain state of the brain is activated, a certain conscious state will be activated.

And if a certain aspect of the brain is damaged, then I might not be able to have memories or, or whatever it might be. But when it comes to the ontological questions about what is consciousness and what is the possessor of consciousness, neuroscience is completely silent on those questions.

Mirror Neurons, Empathy, and Three Competing Explanations

And I'll tell, if I may, I'll tell you why, please. Yeah. There was a discovery that, that we have something called mirror neurons. Now, a neuron is a cell elongated cell in the brain and neurons wire together, uh, and form, uh, patterns of neurons.

And so, uh, mirror neurons are just a kind of neuron that is activated or fires or engages in electrical sparking. When we feel empathy for someone else. Now, if your mirror neurons are damaged, you cannot feel empathy for someone else.

Now, how do we explain that? Uh, ontologically, what implications does that have? Well, there are three explanations that are empirically equivalent. And that means all three of these are consistent with exactly the same set of observational data, which means that you can't appeal to any scientific observation whatsoever to adjudicate among these three solutions.

If you're going to do that, you're going to have to appeal to philosophical arguments, not scientific ones. And the first explanation is that a, a, a state of a mirror neuron firing is the same thing as a state of, uh, of feeling empathy.

So a feeling of empathy is just identical to, or it's just a physical state of the brain. Yeah. The second is called property dualism or mere property dualism. And that says, no, no, wait a minute, wait a minute.

A feeling of empathy is very different than a firing of a mirror neuron, but both of them occur in the brain. And the relationship is a dependency relationship or a cause effect. The firing of the mirror neuron causes the state of feeling empathy, which is a mental state.

And both of those are in the brain. Now there's a third view, substance dualism that says, hold it. Not only are the states different, but so are their possessors. The firing of a mirror neuron is a physical state in the brain.

And the feeling of empathy is a mental state in the self or soul. But there is a dependency relationship while you're in the body that the soul can function only if your organs are functioning properly.

And, uh, but if you get out of your body, that's different. So, uh, there, there can be all three of those equally explain the data. So if we're going to choose, we have to appeal to a certain argument.

Free Will as an Argument for an Immaterial Soul

Asked me about, let me give you one real quickly.

Sure.

I think most people commonsensically understand that we have what's called free will. Uh, by that, I mean that if I choose to do something, it was in my power at that very moment. I could have refrained from choosing it if I'd want, if I had chosen to do so.

So it's up to me what, what I do. And we also hold people, we blame people for the things they do. And we praise them for the thing. We praise a person for sacrificing in the inner city to serve the poor.

So we assume that that praise and blame makes sense because people actually are responsible for their actions. And that's true because they were free to choose or not choose those. And so we give them credit or blame, whatever the case may be.

So I think most people are aware that they have what philosophers call libertarian freedom. Now, the problem is this. If, if I am a material object, either my brain or body, then no matter how complicated I am, I'm still a complicated material object and all material objects behave in a law governed way.

That means that whatever they do is governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and causal inputs that happen to them. So you have a billiard ball and you have a causal input. It gets hit by another billiard ball of a certain mass and momentum and so on that will, according to the laws of motion, fix what that second billiard ball is going to do unless somebody intervenes and pulls it off the table.

But, but if you're a brain or an, or a body, then your behaviors are not up to you. They're, you're not in control of them. They're fixed by environmental factors that impinge upon you and the laws of chemistry, physics, and neurobiology.

And so free will is an illusion. And some people have tried to say, well, maybe it can emerge when matter reaches a certain level of complexity. But first of all, that's no longer strict physicalism. And it's also, it is just the name for the problem we're trying to solve.

It's not a real solution. The question is, how could there be such a thing as this, is this power to be free and saying it's emergent is the very thing we're trying to explain. One more thing, and I'll put on this.

But not only does there have to be that power, but there has to be an agent that exercises it. So I can have all the power in the world to, to raise my arm. But if I'm not an agent who chooses to exercise that power, it's not going to happen.

So you've got to have an agent. And the question is that that agent is not a physical object or else it wouldn't have that power. That's the argument.

Why Libertarian Freedom Points Beyond Materialism

Yeah. So I mean, in other words, to, to have freedom, which it appears that we do have the freedom to choose then you're saying the best explanation for that is that there must be some kind of immaterial substance apart from just our bodies.

Because to just simply say, it's all, it's all molecules all the way down then leads to a fatalism, fatalist determinism.

Yeah.