Is Your Mind Immortal? {Interview}

A Neurosurgeon’s Case Against Materialism

What if your mind doesn't die with your brain? In this fascinating interview, renowned neurosurgeon and professor Dr. Michael Egnor challenges the materialist view of consciousness and presents a powerful case for the soul’s survival beyond death. Drawing from his new book The Immortal Mind, Dr. Egnor explores near-death experiences, split-brain studies, and the mystery of self-awareness — all through the lens of science, philosophy, and spirituality.

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Transcript

Adam Jacobs: I have just completed your book, The Immortal Mind, and I mean this stuff is really right up my alley. I've read a lot of literature along these lines, but I will say that the way you have organized it and the argumentation that you've made, this structure is very compelling. And although I'll play the part of the skeptic a little bit in our conversation, I'm certainly very open and very moved by the way you've presented this information. So, thank you for that to start off with.

Michael Egnor: Thank you. Thank you.

Adam Jacobs: And what I figured is I have a series of questions, and I'd also like to go through what I would describe as what you present as clues to the human being being more than just the brain, more than just our electrochemical activity, and arguing for the existence of what was once called the soul. People have different names for it, and then see where we are at the end. So you're a neurosurgeon and you have done, from what I understand from the book, 7,000 plus surgeries on people's brains.

Michael Egnor: Yes.

Adam Jacobs: Through that process, you came to the conclusion that people are more than their brains. And I guess the thing I started wondering about off the bat, and so this is more of a general question, then we'll hone down. Why do most neurosurgeons not come to that conclusion? Is there something in the process that would reveal the same information to anyone who was doing it?

Michael Egnor: I think so. I think it's probably because most neurosurgeons, as most of us do in their everyday life, do things kind of what the cognitive psychologists would call pre reflectively, meaning that just go about your work. It's like walking. You don't think about walking when you're actually walking. You don't necessarily think about the mind and the brain when you're doing neurosurgery. You're thinking about getting the patient through the operation and all the stuff that you have to do.

And I think that if neurosurgeons think deeply about this, and I'm not the only neurosurgeon who believes in the existence of a spiritual soul, I think probably most neurosurgeons actually do. I think there are a lot of very religious neurosurgeons out there who really believe this. But the key to it, I think, is to think reflectively about what happens in neurosurgery and what we observe. And most of us in our everyday life don't really think reflectively all that much. We just do what we do.

Adam Jacobs: Okay. Of those religious neurosurgeons, presumably they came into it with that underlying belief. Do you know people who have changed their minds as a result of their work, like you have?

Michael Egnor: Well, I haven't discussed it with many of them. There is one neurosurgeon who changed his mind who had an enormous influence on me, and that's Wilder Penfield. Wilder Penfield was a pioneer in neurosurgery. He worked in the early and mid 20th century and really pioneered many aspects of neurosurgery, but particularly epilepsy, neurosurgery. And he was an undergraduate philosophy major.

So he was fairly philosophically informed, and he started out with a materialist view of the brain, the idea that the mind comes completely from the brain. In fact, he phrased it using a phrase that I think is the single most important question in cognitive neuroscience. And it's not only important in the sense that we need an answer to it, but you can't get an answer to anything else in cognitive neuroscience until, to some degree, you answer this question. And that is does the brain explain the mind completely?

And his initial view was yes, that is, that when you understand the brain completely, you understand the mind completely. There's nothing about the mind that doesn't have its explanatory foundation in the brain itself. So he addressed that question for his entire career for 40 to 45 years. He worked on that question, and he came to the conclusion, towards the end of his life, that the brain does not explain the mind completely.

And his insights, we write about quite a bit in the book. And his insights really opened my eyes because they awakened me from my materialist slumber, as I had said about Hume in a different context. And it made me realize that I think Pennfield's right, that the brain does not explain the mind completely. It explains a lot about the mind, but there's more to the mind than just the brain.

Adam Jacobs: And along with Penfield, you bring a lot of evidence for that. And some of it I think is easy for a lay person to understand and some is a little bit more difficult. But there is one experiment on a split-brain patient that I'd like to ask you about. And I'll just quote what you said in the book, to make it exact, you say, “in 1983, Sergeant,” I assume, is the surgeon who reported on her research on a split-brain patient who “was presented with conflicting messages in each of the two isolated visual fields. The patient was able to respond to the conflicting information with perfect accuracy with either hand, even though each hand was controlled by a cerebral hemisphere that saw only one of the messages. She concluded that the patient could integrate and resolve the conflicting information, even though neither separated part of the brain actually saw at all.” And then the conclusion “the patient's mind was more than the brain.”

Michael Egnor: Yes.

Adam Jacobs: Can you please give me a couple of sentences explaining what was going on there and why this conclusion was reached?

Michael Egnor: Sure. Justine Sergeant was a neurophysiologist who studied this as a number of other people have studied it as well. The best example I can think of this and the way it's been done, I think in the most sophisticated way, was with Alice Cronin at MIT, who looked at split-brain patients. And what she did is she would present to one hemisphere using the visual fields, you can isolate the hemisphere by putting pictures in specific parts of the visual field to one hemisphere. She would put one picture, and in the other hemisphere, she would put three pictures, and one of the three pictures would conceptually match the picture in the other hemisphere. The other two would be unrelated. One example of what she did is that she put a picture of a violin in one hemisphere and a picture of a violin in the other hemisphere. She put a picture of an artist's palette, a toilet plunger, and a light bulb.

And she said, “Tell me what concept links one of the pictures of the three to the other picture in the other hemisphere.” And split-brain patients would always get it right. For example, in that instance, they would say, well, art is what links the violin and the artist's palate, the toilet plunger and the light bulb have nothing to do with the violin, really. And she did it with hundreds of different trials of hundreds of different mixtures of pictures. And people with split-brain surgery were virtually always able to easily identify the concept and pick out the related images, even though no part of their brain saw both images.

Adam Jacobs: And that's because, just to clarify, for the folks watching, the corpus callosum was severed in this case. So, there literally is no communication taking place between the two Halves.

Michael Egnor: Yes. And the corpus callosum is a large bundle of fibers that connects the brain hemispheres or about 200 million axons in the corpus callosum. And when you cut the corpus callosum, you virtually completely separate the two hemispheres physically. So they're not in physical contact. There are roundabout ways that the hemispheres can talk to one another, at least theoretically, but they're very small. And that has been the focus of an enormous debate in neuroscience because many neuroscientists have studied split-brain patients. The last I looked, there are like 1500 different papers in the medical literature on this.

And the way that Cronin's and Sergeant’s, and there's another neuroscientist named Yair Pinto, the things that they found, the effort to explain that away has been that there are what are called subcortical pathways, that is kind of workarounds that the brain hemispheres use. The problem with that theory was summed up by Yair Pinto, one of the main researchers in this area, a couple of years ago when he pointed out that when people count the axons in the workaround pathways, there are only about 1500 axons total in the brain in those pathways as compared to the 200 million in the corpus callosum. So the degree of cutting is 99.999% there. And people have calculated how much information can be passed in those axons, the rate of information transfer. And Pento said that it's estimated it's about one bit per second, which is very slow, very, very slow.

And people conceptually will answer almost instantly. You'll show them these pictures and say, Oh, art, it's the violin. So I don't think the workaround theory works, and Pinto had a lot of questions about it. Also, Pinto summed it up as saying that in split-brain, patients perception is split, but consciousness is unified. And because there's no part of the brain that is conscious of these two regions, it would imply that the answer to Penfield's question, does the brain explain the mind completely, is no, that there's a part of the mind that is aware of both, even though no part of the brain is aware of both.

Adam Jacobs: So, just quickly, and I know each case that we'll talk about, we'll build the case for the point that we're trying to make, but right here in this particular case, assuming that those 1500 axons are not doing the communicating. So that's where one has to get into the concept of what a soul is and what the mind is and what the brain is, et cetera.

The concept of soul that I think makes the most sense is the Aristotelian concept of the soul. And by soul, I don't mean an Aristotle, didn't mean St. Thomas, didn't mean a kind of ghostly thing. Like in the movie Ghost, where Patrick Swayze's ghost looks like him, but is translucent. That's not what I mean. The soul is simply everything that makes us alive. That is, if you take me the moment before I drop dead and me the moment after I drop dead, everything that was true of me the moment before I drop dead, that's not true of me after I drop dead, is my soul. So my talking to you is my soul, my perceiving you as my soul.

My thinking is my soul, my heartbeat is my soul. All that is soul. What St. Thomas argued is that human beings have what he called a rational soul, and that is that our soul has the power of reason and the power of free will as well as the power of movement, of vision, of perception, of memory, of emotion, all these things and what we call the mind is just some of those activities. The mystic soul includes the heartbeat, for example, which we wouldn't normally call a part of the mind, but it isn't something that makes us alive.

So what we mean by mind is the ability to move, the ability to perceive, the ability to remember, the ability to have emotions, the ability to form mental images, the ability to reason, the ability to use free will. What St Thomas argued is that all of the abilities of the soul are material in our body except for two. There are two abilities of the soul that don't come from the body, and those are the capacity for reason and the capacity for free will, intellect, and will. So what is seeing or what is forming these concepts in these split-brain patients is the capacity for reason, for intellect that can make the concepts that are not in the brain.

Now, the normal activity of the brain is ordinarily necessary for the exercise of those of reason. That is, if I get hit on the head with a bat or I drink too much alcohol, my reasoning will not be quite as sharp as it was. But there's a difference between necessity and sufficiency. That is, the brain is not sufficient for reason and free will. It is necessary ordinarily, but there are workarounds.

Adam Jacobs: Okay, so that's important and is an interesting piece of the puzzle. But let's take it a little further. You talk about other remarkable instances of brain deficiency in the book. So we've got the split-brain patients, we've got people with large portions of their brain removed. In fact, portions that you have removed yourself, you've got people who have just a brainstem, remarkably, who managed to have consciousness, which is totally beyond. I had no idea that that was even possible. So I presume you would say all of these cases are just instances of the same pattern, which is that the brain is unlike what most people assume. I think it's really just assumed nowadays by the population at large that the brain is producing consciousness, and if you have no brain activity, you have no consciousness.

Michael Egnor: Right.

Adam Jacobs: Okay. So are all these cases in the same category? Are these just instances of further underscoring the fact that the mind is something beyond the brain?

Michael Egnor: And it's a great question, and it is in a sense you kind of go down the rabbit hole when you get into these questions, because in a very simple way, how do we define consciousness? That is the very thing that we talk about that is really elusive. It's difficult to kind of get to the bottom of this. When we think of consciousness, we tend to think of several different things. We think about alertness, that we focus on things. We think about arousal, that we're sort of not just dormant, we're doing things. We think about attention, that we focus on things, but none of those is really consciousness. For example, I'm not alert and I'm not aroused when I'm dreaming, but I'm conscious of my dreams. I experience my dreams, but I'm not the least bit alert. I'm in fact sleeping, and I'm not aroused. When I am driving a car and I'm listening to the radio and I'm listening to something very interesting on the radio, I'm really not paying attention to driving.

That is, we've all had the experience. We're driving down the road, we have a discussion with somebody in the passenger seat, and then we realize a mile later that we were driving just fine. We just weren't paying attention to it. But it still worked out. So you can be conscious of things you're not paying attention to. So the question then is, what is consciousness? And of course, I've actually seen some of your excellent programs where you've talked with people about what consciousness is, and those are great questions. And I think that the answer to that is very important.

In fact, if you think about it, it's kind of a scandal that we can't answer it. That is that we can land spaceships on comets. We know what happens inside the atom. We have a pretty good idea of what happened at the origin of the universe and the Big Bang. But the very thing that is with us every moment of our life, the very foundation of our existence, is a complete mystery. Not only don't we know where it comes from, but we can't even define it. And there's a reason for that. And I think the reason for that is it goes back to what Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas said about perception. It was a big question in those days, and it still is in some ways, what do we perceive when we see a tree in our front yard? What are you perceiving? And many philosophers, Locke, Descartes, and Hume, would say you're perceiving the image of the tree in your mind.

But what Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas would say is no, you're perceiving the tree. You're not perceiving an image. You're perceiving the tree itself. And the way St. Thomas defines perception is not that which we perceive. Perception is the means by which we perceive it's a means. It's not an object. And so I think that can be expanded to what we think about consciousness. Consciousness is the means by which we have experience, but it's not something that can be experienced itself.

Adam Jacobs: Interesting.

Michael Egnor: It's what allows us to do much the same thing, and I think the parallel is quite close and makes the point, well, you never see your eyes. You can see images of them. You can look in a mirror or you can see a photograph, but never see your eyes. The reason is that your eyes are that by which you see they're the means. So you can't see the means. You see what the means allows you to see. So consciousness, in my view, is the means by which we have experience, but it's not the experience itself. So we can only talk about it in a mirror. We can only talk about it secondhand. So that's why I think it's so elusive.

Adam Jacobs: Do you think of it as some do as a field that we are consciousness, there's a general consciousness and perhaps an ultimate consciousness that we are all partaking in, and therefore it is a field, it's a power amongst others in the world that we are interfacing with, whatever equipment that we were born with. Does that resonate at all?

Michael Egnor: Well, I certainly understand that, and I know there are people who look at it that way. The problem is in our language, meaning that a field is a map of space where things take certain values at certain locations in that map of space, which has nothing whatsoever to do with consciousness, meaning it's an analogy, but we have to be careful not to mistake our metaphors for metaphysics. It's kind of a metaphor. It's an interesting metaphor, but we can't take it too seriously because again, a field is a very specific thing, and consciousness has nothing to do with that.

Adam Jacobs: Getting back to some more of these examples, the question of does the mind have a specific place in the brain, which I think we've already begun to answer, but I wanted just quote once again, you say, “when I write a mathematical equation on a piece of paper, the area of my brain that generates the movement of my right hand can be localized to a millimeter accuracy on the precentral gyrus of my left frontal lobe. But my understanding of the equation cannot be localized at all.” And then a little bit later, you say, “there is no evidence that consciousness resides in any specific area of the brain.” Because consciousness is not something that it has location, it doesn't make any sense to talk about it as having location.

Adam Jacobs: So I think for a lot of people, parsing the difference. Exactly as you said, writing an equation on a piece of paper does do something in the brain, highly measurable, but the concept of what's being written is not. I think that is revelatory for people. Could you just explain how that is?

Michael Egnor: Yes. The consciousness, again, as the means by which we have experience, is not in itself a part of the material world. So it's not something that can be located in the material world. For example, my consciousness right here is not different than my consciousness right here. I've moved my head in the screen, but there's no difference in my consciousness in those two locations.

It's not that consciousness occupies that whole field; it's that consciousness is not the kind of thing that can have a location. One can speak of consciousness as metaphorically having a location where it's exercised. That is that if I am sitting at my desk and I have a thought, you might say, my thought is sort of where I am, but that's just a metaphor. Consciousness is not the kind of thing that can have locations, but something I write on a piece of paper can have a location, and my brain has a location, but my consciousness is not the same thing.

Adam Jacobs: Then, going back again, I've had a lot of different kinds of conversations, thankfully over the last few years, with a lot of very accomplished thinkers. Many of them take it as an absolutely axiomatic and obvious point that, whether or not we fully understand it, consciousness must be produced by the brain. That brain states always correlate to feelings and thoughts and whatnot, and I find this kind of information to be laughable. And when you bring it up, it's difficult because you can cite examples like this, and they seem to find it almost comical, as if the very fact that you're bringing it up means you don't understand what you're talking about. I presume you've experienced this yourself, or at least have observed it.

Michael Egnor: Yeah, yeah. I mean that goes on, but that's just because they have a materialist bias. I mean, if you have an ideological ax to grind on this, the way you'll look at it, but if you look at the evidence, if you look at logic and evidence, I think it all forms a pretty clear picture that Denise and I talk about in our book.

Adam Jacobs: Okay. And what do they say? I mean, do you have debates with people? Do you discuss this with skeptics?

Michael Egnor: I've certainly, in my professional life, I tend not to because most of my interactions don't really involve this. And a very good example of this was I was at a lecture given by Patricia Churchland, who's a philosopher, and she believes in a philosophical perspective on the mind called eliminative materialism, that the mind doesn't really exist, that we just use terms that refer to brain processes. And she gave a lecture at Stony Brook a number of years ago, and I went there with a neuroscientist who's a friend of mine, and we were in the audience listening to it, and then we walked out of the lecture hall, and we were both kind of chuckling.

It's kind of funny to say that I believe that there are no beliefs. And so I asked my friend, “so where do beliefs come from?” If they really exist, which any sane person agrees that there are such things as beliefs, then what are they? Where do they come from? So my friend said, well, they're processes in the cerebral cortex. And I said, well, how does that work? And he goes, “Ah, that's a silly question. Silly question.” And just went on there, walked down the hallway, and waved goodbye to me. So when you ask them how it works, they get a little vague.

There are a whole bunch of theories. There are probably roughly 10 theories as to how consciousness arises from the brain, materialist theories. There are order theories, there are integrated information theories, there are global workspace theories, there are all these theories about how perceptions come into the brain and they get mixed, and then they come into consciousness when they reach this part of the cortex, whatever.

All of those theories are completely disproven, conclusively by the existence of in the world, or at least several thousand handicapped children who have a condition called Hydrocephaly is a tragic birth defect where children are born without brain hemispheres usually because of an intrauterine stroke that affects their arteries to their brain. So they only have brain stems and a little bit of what's called a diencephalon, which is the top part of the brainstem. And these children have a lot of handicaps. It's really severe cerebral palsy, but they're totally conscious. I have 'em as patients. I mean, they're like kids with very severe cerebral palsy, but they're fully conscious. They laugh, they cry, they're happy to see you. They don't like having blood drawn.

I mean, all the kinds of normal conscious things people do and all of the theories nearly all, there's one or two that don't, but all of virtually all this is, and certainly all the widely accepted theories of consciousness in the brain, presuppose processing in the cerebral cortex, these kids don't have a cerebral cortex and they're fully conscious. So all those theories go in the garbage. And when I've confronted neuroscientists with this, you're a believer in integrated information theory that consciousness is the processing of information in the cerebral cortex. How can a person who doesn't have a cerebral cortex be conscious? They have changed the subject, roll their eyes. So these theories are all just nonsense.

Adam Jacobs: Why don't they just say the brainstem is enough to produce consciousness?

Michael Egnor: Well, some of them do. Mark Solms actually makes that argument, who's a very good neuroscientist from South Africa, whom I've talked with about this. And Mark believes that consciousness comes from the brainstem, and he uses Hydrocephaly as an example of why he believes that. And I think Mark is mistaken again, because consciousness, which is the means by which we have experience is not the kind of thing that is inherently protoplasm. It is a different kind of entity, but what comes from the brainstem, and there's no question that brainstem activity plays a significant role in mental states, but what comes from the brainstem is arousal, alertness, attention. If you have a severe brainstem injury, you're in a deep coma, so you don't have alertness, you don't have arousal, you can't pay attention. But that's not the same thing as consciousness. That's not the same thing as the capacity to have experiences.

Adam Jacobs: So you just mentioned vegetative states, and you talk about this in the book also, that in a persistent vegetative state, and we're talking now about more extreme cases than the brain compromises that we already spoke about. There's conditions by which the brain appears to be completely offline, such as, and you talk about people being in the deepest level of coma who are able, remarkably, really remarkably to communicate by being instructed to think certain things when they're being asked questions. I think you mentioned playing tennis. I forgot what the other one was. And that can answer yes and no questions from the vegetative state, which is wild. But then you take it even further, and I think that near death experiences is the ultimate question along these lines, which is, and you bring a case that Pam Reynolds, I think her name is, which I wasn't familiar with, which all the blood is drained out of her brain and there's no brain activity. She's basically dead.

Michael Egnor: You can't get any deder and come back to life again.

Adam Jacobs: And nonetheless, we know that there are thousands and thousands of documented cases to look at where people are reporting not only consciousness but hyper consciousness. So those seem to me to be the most incredible demonstrations of this phenomenon.

Michael Egnor: Yes.

Adam Jacobs: But you put them all together, the lack of location of a consciousness in any particular place, the inability to locate memory in the brain in any particular…

Michael Egnor: Well, memories as individual things cannot be located easily, although there's some question about that. But the areas of the brain that are responsible for forming memories do actually have very specific locations…

Adam Jacobs: For forming, but the memories themselves.

Michael Egnor: Memories themselves, although there are things that people call concept neurons that have been identified in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that they're not well characterized. Some people think that they can instantiate memory, although I think the evidence on that is pretty weak.

Adam Jacobs: So the through line for all of these conditions and challenges and events that happen to people that compromise their brain capacity and the brain itself, as you say several times in the book, like abstract reasoning, free will is not to be found in the physical structure of the brain. You talk about conjoined twins, which, and by the way, I've never, I took a look online last night at the two young girls who have literally sharing a brain, but who have different personalities and different lives.

Michael Egnor: They're totally different people.

Adam Jacobs: Yeah. I mean it's extreme, but an unbelievably interesting phenomenon.

Michael Egnor: Yes.

Adam Jacobs: So, their motor function is partially shared. One has this arm, one has this arm, but their consciousness and the abstract nature of their thinking are distinct.

Michael Egnor: Precisely.

Adam Jacobs: Okay. So, would you say that the distinguishing characteristic of all of these cases is that the brain performs certain functions? Yes, it controls the body. Yes, it's responsible for X, Y, and Z things, but as soon as you move it to a higher-level order having to do with abstractions, it no longer functions in the way that we think?

Michael Egnor: That's true. That's true. Related to Pennfield's question, Penfield asked the question, Does the brain explain the mind completely? And the answer is no. I think that's unequivocal from any objective look at the neuroscience. There are also a ton of logical reasons why the brain could not explain the mind completely. And if you want, we can get into that. You don't need any neuroscience to know that. The brain can't explain the mind completely. But the question that follows from that, which is a very interesting question, is, so what does the brain do? It doesn't explain the mind completely. Then exactly what does it do? And it's actually relatively simple, not that the brain is simple, but answering the question, what it does is fairly simple.

The brain is an organ, and as such, it does organ things. The eye, for example, is the organ of vision. The heart is the organ of pumping blood, the kidneys are the organs that make urine. The brain is the organ of five things. It's the organ of physiological homeostasis that maintains your blood pressure. It keeps the heart going, stuff like that. It's the organ of movement. The brain allows me to move. If I have a stroke, I will get paralyzed. I can't move. That's from my brain. It's the organ of perception. It allows me to see, to hear, to feel things like that. It's the organ of memory.

There's no question that although memories aren't stored in the brain as far as we know, the brain is necessary for the ordinary formation of memories. That is, you have a brain injury that leaves you unable to form new memories, which tragically does happen, and the brain is the organ of emotion. As anyone who takes a drink knows, your emotions change when you get some alcohol on board, but that's it. The brain is not the organ of the intellect. It's not the organ of the will because the intellect and will don't have organs. They're powers of our soul, but our soul is not synonymous with our body. So the brain is an organ just like the eye, the ear, the brain, the heart, and it does things, and what it does is easily definable, but it does not do anything more than that.

Adam Jacobs: Okay. I think we're on the same page, and this deepens my understanding of it quite a lot, but let me ask you a couple of philosophical questions based on all this. I spoke with Philip Goff a while back, and also a really great thinker and musician named James Tartaglia from the UK. They have their own, it seems to me, largely accepted this kind of information, but have nonetheless drawn very different conclusions.

Michael Egnor: Right.

Adam Jacobs: Okay. So yes, yes, there is an immaterial aspect to reality. They might say one would say, but because of something called panpsychism, consciousness is really a fundamental part of the universe. It's sort of along the lines of the field thing we were talking about before. It's everywhere. So it's not so surprising to find it in a human being because you find it in a stone, and you find it in a cup, and you find it everywhere. And therefore, so okay, yes, there is such a thing, but I don't see how it matters. That's one. And two, the other approach, Tarraglia would say, yeah, I even believe in the existence of a non-material universe, non-material world, but it's just as meaningless as this one. It's just as unimportant. It lacks morality. It lacks purpose and direction. I believe it exists, but again, it doesn't prove anything to me. It doesn't prove a higher order, a purpose, a god, anything like that. How would you respond to those sentiments?

Michael Egnor: I would say that he's trying awfully hard to avoid God. And I mean, when you realize that there's a mind that permeates everything that exists, which I think is certainly true, and you don't come to the conclusion that there's a God, then you're just fleeing the idea of God. I mean, goodness gracious, what more do you want? I mean, idea, of course there's a God, I have a lot of respect for panists in a lot of ways because I think materialism isn't even in my view, even a philosophical respect, it's just a mistake. It's just a sort of stupid way of looking at things. I mean, panpsychism takes seriously the notion that there is a mind behind reality. That particular question has been asked: is the ultimate reality more like a thing or more like a mind, and clearly it's more like a mind. In fact, at the quantum level, it's only a mind. That is the whole idea of matter kind of disappears at the quantum level.

When you look at the, for example, if you look up the mass of the electron, it's not a statistical statement. If you ask what, what's the weight of a human being? You'll say, well, the average weight is 170 and the standard deviation is 20 pounds. And there's a whole spectrum. There's no spectrum of electron masses. It's not like they're a bunch of little balls and each one is a little different. Maybe this one has a dent in it or something. It's a concept. It's a mathematical concept. So at the most fundamental level, reality is mental. It's not physical. And so I respect Panists for kind of recognizing that that mind is everywhere. Panpsychism itself I think is ultimately incoherent. For example, you have this terrible boundary problem. If every bit of matter has a mind, then every atom in my body has a mind, maybe a little tiny mind, but a mind.

And then every cell is a bunch of a billion little minds, and then my body is maybe a trillion little minds. But how do little minds become a big mind? The whole thing gets to be a mess. The other thing is how do you have experience without sense organs, and Adam might have a mind, but what does it experience? Because it doesn't have eyes or ears or anything. How does it experience things like what's the story there, and how could you ever prove it? How could you ever show it? So I think what's happening to panpsychism, is that they are getting this intuition that the most fundamental aspect of reality is mental, but for some reason, they are fleeing desperately from the idea that there is a God.

So my view, which is St. Augustine's view, all the classical philosophers, at least Christian philosophers, perhaps my mom, Andes, I'm not sure, I think he may have looked at this the same way Islamic philosophers, that reality including us are thoughts in the mind of God that the way in which reality is mental is that everything that exists is a thought of God. And that incorporates a kind of Panpsychism. And do have a mind in the sense that they are thoughts. They don't have thoughts; they are thoughts, and we are thoughts. I am one of God's thoughts, and that makes beautiful sense to me.

Adam Jacobs: So this has been really very edifying and very enjoyable. I have almost come to the end of my allotted time, but I do have time for one more question, and I am trying to decide which one it should be, because truthfully, as I was going through the book, I was thinking every page has something that has a good question on. But let's go with this. You ask four good questions on the concept of us not having free will. You mentioned that a lot of thinkers, neuroscientists included, take it for granted that there's no such thing. That free will is an illusion. The notion of the self is an illusion. We do not have the capacity to engage in moral choice, so on and so forth. There are obviously gigantic implications for that, which you mentioned some of in the book, but can you just outline one or two of those key questions?

Michael Egnor: Sure. There are four reasons why free will is real. The first reason is that everybody believes in free will. Everyone, there has never been and ever will be a human being who doesn't believe in free will. Even inside mental institutions, even they believe in free will. Everybody does. Because what you in, it's not just what you say, it's what you do. And if you ask Bernie Madoff, “Do you believe in being honest?” he may have said yes, but he didn't believe in being honest because that's not how he lived his life.

Everybody lives their life according to their beliefs. So a person who denies free will, who doesn't treat himself or other people as a meat robot, and nobody believes in free will. A very good example is Jerry Coin, who's a materialist who doesn't believe in free will. And I've had internet debates with him. He put a picture of the fender of his car that was dented by somebody in a parking lot who drove off, and he was complaining about how unpleasant it was, how wrong it was for this guy to dent his car and just drive away. But I pointed out that if no one has free will, then he has no more point in criticizing the guy than he does in criticizing the car.

Adam Jacobs: Well, it's all meaningless.

Michael Egnor: Yeah, it's all meaningless. I mean, no one can control anything. So the reality is that everybody believes in free will. So people who say, I don't believe in free will aren't telling the truth. They do believe in free will because they live like it's true. The second thing is that the denial of free will is self-refuting because to use reason and to construct an argument presumes that you can choose truth. And if you don't have free will, you can't choose truth. You're just a chemistry set. No one pays attention to the opinions of a chemistry set.

The third reason is that people base their denial of free will on a belief in determinism in physics. But determinism is not true in physics. The Nobel Prize in physics a couple of years ago was given to Alain Aspect and a few other physicists who have very clearly shown that local determinism in physics is not true. That is the exact state of a physical system, which does not determine the exact state. A moment later, there's room for free will in physics. And the fourth reason is that there's plenty of neuroscience that points to the reality of free will. The work of Benjamin Libet, the work of Wilder Penfield, there's a ton of neuroscience that points to the reality of free will. So the denial of free will is crazy. It's just nonsense.

Adam Jacobs: Thank you very much. I recommend that anyone watching go out and get the Immortal Mind. It is really interesting and very easy to read and really enjoyable, and I hope that a lot of people get to hear this information from you and that you continue to show people a different way of thinking about some of these matters, and certainly in ways that are going to impact their lives, I think in very profound ways. So, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.

Michael Egnor: Thank you, rabbi. It's been a privilege to be here. Thank you.

Adam Jacobs: Okay, have a great day.

Michael Egnor: Thank you. And same to you.