Speaking at North Texas Skeptics: There is No Soul

Saturday 12 April 2008

2 p.m.
Center for Nonprofit Management
2900 Live Oak Street in Dallas

Rodrigo Neely will discuss mind-body medicine for the April program.
Neely is a neuroscience major at UTD


The above is the info. from the North Texas Skeptics site at http://www.ntskeptics.org

I will be speaking on the mind-body problem, what that means is that whether or not the mind is part of the body is a hotly debated topic.

In fact when I read the works of pro-evolution religious people, they are usually placing God in the gaps of their own lack of understanding about neuroscience, rather than in evolution.

Kenneth Miller argues in his book,"Finding Darwin’s God" that certain aspects of human experience suggest the existence of God.

I would have to say that God will have to find another gap.

Experience is not kind to God.

Experience definitely affects the brain.

In a wonderful machine called the fMRI, which shows when regions of the human body are being oxygenated, by aligning the proton spins.

In essence fMRI shows us what parts of the body are doing something. The brain is no exception.

Lets make this clear, the brain IS part of the body.

If the brain is the mind, then there can be no mind independent of the body.

This has serious implications.

It means that there is no soul in the traditional sense. The brilliant philosopher, Daniel Dennett, says that, "we do have a soul, it just happens to be made of millions of little robots."

There are competing ideas.

For one, the brilliant thinker, Rene Descartes, who said immortally, "Cogito ergu sum" which translated means, "I think, therefore I am."

There are many sophisticated philosophers of mind who argue eloquently that the mind is not part of the body.

Perhaps most famous is: David Chalmers, who argues that you could make a simulation of the brain with a computer or a robot, and said simulation would not really be conscious.

It would be missing something, yet to be identified, that makes consciousness. He calls these beings "zombies."

I recommend the study of Chalmers, he is certainly brilliant.

I argue, however, that a computer simulation of the brain or a robot with a brain simulation is conscious.

It has a mind.

And therefore would deserve rights, at least as much as any human.

Why do I think this?

First let us examine some details about the study of mind and brain scientifically.

I mentioned fMRI before, because it makes my point so easily.

When a participant is instructed to imagine a visual image in the fMRI, the region of the brain known for sight (the Occipital lobe) will become active.

Nobel Laureates, Hubel and Weisel, showed when showing images to cats with electrodes in their brains, that in the brains of cats certain neurons light up for lines at certain angles and not others.

People with temporal lobe epilepsy feel that they have had terrifying and wonderful mystical experiences, and inspire others with their neurologically caused mysticism.

Neuroscientist Michael Persinger has found a way to cause these mystical experiences in about 80-90% of participants who do not have temporal lobe epilepsy with a wonderful device that stimulates the brain electrically through a helmet, (known affectionately as "The God Helmet&quot. This procedure is called "trans-cranial electromagnetic stimulation."

Persinger’s work is controversial, but when people like Michael Shermer (leader of the Skeptic Association) are your participants and can verify their own experience, your work cannot be dismissed easily as fraud.

Shermer has dedicated his life to destroying fraud.

In a region of the brain known as the Amygdala, which is a collection of brain cells which are known to be essential for processing fear and anger, are calcified and rendered inactive, patients can no longer recognize fraud at all, because we need the amygdala to signal concern when someone is trying to rip us off. This was reported by neurologist Antonio Damasio.

Damasio goes further to report that patients with calcified amygdale (plural for amygdala) cannot recognize angry or sad facial expressions.

It gets even stranger, scientific research on liars, people who habitually lie (I got this one from the radiolab podcast) have more myelination. Myelination is the presence of cells around neurons which improve the conduction speed of neurons. Neurons communicate with electricity (among other things) and myelinition speeds this up. Liars have more myelination than the rest of us.

People with damage to their fusiform gyrus suffer from a strange disorder which causes us to no longer recognize faces, this disorder is called prosopagnosia.

Famous case studies demonstrate, like in the nightmarish movie Memento, that people can lose the ability to make new memories with damage to their hippocampus.

Damage to the prefrontal cortex makes people rude and quick-tempered, this brain region was called the "seat of good manners" by the character Hannibal Lecter, in the film Hannibal.

The list really does go on and on.

And I own a stack of books in addition to my neuroscience textbooks which are full of similar phenomena that add to the above list.

It does seem that when the mind is doing something, certain brain regions predictably come into use.

It does seem that when those regions are damaged, the use of the mind in those tasks is impaired.

This leaves only two possibilities which I can reason.

The brain is like an antenna which receives consciousness from some kind of field of consciousness in the universe : like many quantum mystics, including Depak Chopra, suggest.

Or the brain is the mind.

I think the latter possibility carries more evidence, and the former has provided no evidence as of yet.

So my current stance is that the mind is the brain, and there is no soul.

Unless of course you like Dennet’s "millions of little robots" analogy. Which I do.