As I recently posted, there are only three basic views of the human mind. Atheists, materialists and most relevant scientists assume that the mind is what the physical brain does, full stop; there is no immaterial realm, no spirits of supernatural. Idealism takes the other extreme: there is no material reality at all and everything is just mental activity. That may be pan-psychic or supernatural, with God playing a big role in maintaining reality in mental space. The third option, and my own belief, is dualism: that a human is a integrated combination of material body and brain (physical substance), and a non-physical spirit or soul (immaterial substance), working together as an embodied mind. I won't repeat the evidence against materialism, nor argue against idealism here, although I have done both. Moreover, there is much evidence in favour of dualism and the existence of the human spirit which I also will not present in any detail. Rather, in this post I will mostly investigate some supposed problems plaguing the dualist view of human consciousness.
Rene Descartes was the first to describe dualism in detail as a model for human beings. He wrote that we are made of two very different substances: a material body and an immaterial spirit, working together. There are various flavours of dualism, but his substance dualism is the most basic. It has been both attacked and expanded on by others through the centuries. Most Christians are implicit dualists, believing in our material bodies, yet with non-physical spirits, which survive our physical death in some form. It seems that most people and even young children intuitively default to a dualist belief about human beings. Indeed, materialists complain that children need to be carefully instructed and raised to talk them out of their inherent dualism, while idealism requires even more explanation and convincing, even for adults. Thus dualism seems natural to most, notwithstanding the various arguments against it (more on that below).
While we are all familiar with physical substances, including our own bodies, it is often tricky to specify what the spiritual substance of our minds or souls actually is, often derided as "the ghost in the machine". Most of us however, instinctively know that there is some aspect of ourselves that is not material. Without that spiritual part, a human would be just an advanced animal, capable of doing a lot but without higher mental functions such as abstract reasoning, intentionality, true language, analysis and introspection. While some of the higher animals seem to have subjective inner mental experiences, there remains a large gap between them and us, which points to our spiritual selves.
Dualism nicely accounts for various aspects of being human, including our subconscious minds. Our conscious minds, spirit-based, look after high-level thinking: purpose, planning, our will, assessment, introspection and other high-level mental activity. The subconscious can be understood as the immaterial mind directing, working with and training the physical brain to accomplish its purposes. In return the brain provides perceptions (sensations), memories, words, connections and associations to the mind for consideration in its thinking. Learning to walk or ride a bicycle, dream sequences, putting together and speaking sentences, searching for memories or words, and most other human activities all involve both the physical and immaterial aspects of the mind, and in my opinion, make most sense in the dualist model.
The dividing line in functionality between the two substances making up a human person remains vague. Some aspects like muscle control and sensations are clearly physical, while higher mental functions cannot be located in the brain and so may be deemed largely spiritual. In between are things like emotions, memories, habits, etc. which may involve both substances working together. As in any discussion about human consciousness, there is more uncertainty and assumption than well-understood explanation and established knowledge. As a result, there is lots of room for speculation, hypothesis, story telling and disagreement, as we see in the literature. 😊
The major argument against dualism is the "interaction problem"; how does a spiritual, supernatural "substance" interact with physical reality, including the brain? How does sensory data coming in through eyes, ears, touch, etc. via nerves to the brain get perceived by a non-material spirit? And in the other direction, how do decisions and intentions made by said spirit cause neurons in the brain to activate nerves in the body, causing muscles to contract to lift arms, walk, speak, and do any other physical action? If the dual substances are so different, what could they have in common to work so seamlessly together? Such is the complaint.
This has seemed to be a major problem and has been used by materialists (and idealists) to pooh-pooh the idea of dualism. None or the four fundamental forces known to physics appear to be involved with or directly affected by mind alone or spiritual influences. And there is very little scientific evidence in support of a mind directly affecting matter, as via various parapsychological phenomena such as psycho-kinesis, for instance, notwithstanding a long history of anecdotal evidence in its favour.
Nevertheless, there are several hypotheses floating around suggesting how an immaterial mind (spirit) could influence matter via the brain as an interface, as well as some evidence for immaterial spiritual observation of physical reality without material intervention. I offer the following ideas and facts:
1. The brain acts as an "antenna" for the mind-body connection, something like the way a radio receives and transmits electromagnetic waves. Somehow the brain is able to do that; a physical brain tuned to a specific immaterial mind for life. Notwithstanding scientific disclaimers, evidence for psi-activity is widespread, albeit difficult to prove: telepathy, prescience, remote viewing, ESP, etc. Some people claim there are information fields all around us that the brain can sometimes tune into.
2. Roger Penrose has proposed Orchestrated Objective Reduction, a theory about microtubules in brain's neurons as the source for mind within the brain interface, based on supposed quantum effects at the molecular level. Although primarily intended as a materialist explanation for mental ability, it could in principle provide a spiritual interface to the brain.
3. There are other quantum speculations involving probabilistic uncertainty, superposition or entanglement at the subatomic level inside neurons. This would allow subtle tweaking of the collapse of wave functions in synaptic quantum states one way or other in response to spiritual (mind) control, thereby providing the mind-brain interface. Somehow -- subconsciously presumably -- this mysterious connection provides bi-directional transfer of information at some level. Robert Spitzer's quantum hylomorphism in Science at the Doorstep to God is one such example. Much about these speculations sounds like grasping at poorly-understood straws to bolster favoured ideas, but maybe there may be something in it.
4. In near death experiences (NDE's) people, clinically dead as in life-saving operations or resuscitations, report moving about outside the body and observing things they could not see from their body's position. This is not physical action, but non-physical perception and activity without material cause or involvement, yet physically remembered and reported once life has returned. There is strong and wide-spread evidence of these events, which on the surface appear to support the existence of immaterial consciousness, and hence, dualism (or idealism).
5. Or maybe there is simply some fifth force unknown to physics, involving mind interaction with matter. That would not be part of any normal physics experiments, although there was a time when scientists tried to test such things: spiritism, Ouija boards, levitation, psychokinesis, etc.; lots of weird stuff a century ago, never proven scientifically. Perhaps such a force is strictly limited to closely-connected, intimate spirit-brain associations at the intracellular level in neurons, which would make it difficult to test in the lab.
In short, \ there are many possibilities, some evidence and doubtless other ways to look at a dualistic mind-body interface. Any one of these could help explain the material-immaterial interaction implicit in dualism. Saying we don't know doesn't mean it is impossible. Anyway, who says that immaterial things cannot interact with material objects? Where is that proved? Other unknowns in science are taken as rational concepts: dark matter, gravity waves, imaginary numbers, infinities, event horizons, etc. Moreover, immaterial objects like Maxwell's equations clearly affect material objects via minds applying them to construct apparatus utilizing electromagnetic fields (back to the radio idea).
Note that the "problem" is only a problem if materialism is assumed; that only materialist forces, causes and effects are allowed on matter. But that is largely a philosophical assumption rather than a solid scientific understanding. If that unwarranted assumption is removed, the problem may disappear altogether. Just because matter and spirit are different substances does not automatically mean they cannot interact somehow. More fundamentally, we all know that our minds and bodies do interact together, so there must be some such mechanism.
As a second complaint about dualism: just what is this spiritual substance, what is the soul that supposedly survives death of the physical body? What is "spirit" anyway? Descartes called it a separate "substance", perhaps the same substance as God in Christian belief. It is not matter or physical energy, so cannot be detected or studied by normal physics experiments. But there is lots of evidence that it is "real", and like dark matter, some attributes or properties of it can be deduced from its apparent behaviour, our own introspection, and any spiritual experiences we may have: NDE's or other out-of-body experiences, visions and spiritual encounters, and perhaps miracles.
In particular, NDE's seem to demonstrate an immaterial (spiritual) ability apart from the physical body: thought, perception, movement, memory, interactions, etc. The human spirit is a self, a person, in continuity with its body, in lose association via an individual's brain. The spirit has no apparent mass, shape or size, and seemingly cannot be measured with physical instruments -- at least so far.
Your spirit is attached to or associated with your brain/body for life. Before birth, the spirit is likely a minimal person/self: just basic interaction abilities, with nascent learning and thinking skills. Your spirit develops along with your body through sensations, interactions, experiences, memory, discernment, thinking, language, logic/reasoning, mental skills, personality, and so on, becoming a full human mind in adulthood, while still developing. Then the spirit carries on after physical death somehow, or so most people believe. That has been hard to discern, but NDE's provide some evidence.
Wrapping up, most of this talk about minds and spirit is hypothetical or speculative, there being few scientific results that are widely accepted. Clearly something about us seems to be more than material, but beyond the labels, theories and minimal evidence, there is little definitive, widely-accepted knowledge. Some research areas apart from collecting NDE's and other experiences have been suggested, often with a focus on supposed quantum effects. But unless scientists will look beyond their self-imposed materialist assumptions and limits, we are unlikely to discover much more about the human mind and consciousness.
