[Avodah] Neurological evidence for the existence of neshamos

[Micha Berger]

An article in Christianity Today, by Dr Michael Egnor Sep 14, 2018
<https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2018/september-web-only/more-than-material-minds-neuroscience-souls.html>
or <http://bit.ly/2MQOymU>
> Michael Egnor, MD, is a neurosurgeon and professor of neurological
> surgery and pediatrics at Stony Brook University.

I'll quote his opening stories before summarizing the philosophy:

    More Than Material Minds
    As a Christian and a neuroscientist, I keep learning that to be
    human is to have a soul.
    Michael Egnor| September 14, 2018
    More Than Material Minds

    I watched the CAT scan images appear on the screen, one by one. The
    baby's head was mostly empty. There were only thin slivers of brain--a
    bit of brain tissue at the base of the skull, and a thin rim around
    the edges. The rest was water.

    Her parents had feared this. We had seen it on the prenatal
    ultrasound; the CAT scan, hours after birth, was much more
    accurate. Katie looked like a normal newborn, but she had little
    chance at a normal life. She had a fraternal-twin sister in the
    incubator next to her. But Katie only had a third of the brain that
    her sister had. I explained all of this to her family, trying to
    keep alive a flicker of hope for their daughter.

    I cared for Katie as she grew up. At every stage of Katie's life so
    far, she has excelled. She sat and talked and walked earlier than her
    sister. She's made the honor roll. She will soon graduate high school.

    I've had other patients whose brains fell far short of their minds.
    Maria had only two-thirds of a brain. She needed a couple of
    operations to drain fluid, but she thrives. She just finished
    her master's degree in English literature, and is a published
    musician. Jesse was born with a head shaped like a football and
    half-full of water - doctors told his mother to let him die at
    birth. She disobeyed. He is a normal happy middle-schooler, loves
    sports, and wears his hair long.

    Some people with deficient brains are profoundly handicapped. But not
    all are. I've treated and cared for scores of kids who grow up with
    brains that are deficient but minds that thrive. How is this possible?
    Neuroscience, and Thomas Aquinas, point to the answer.

    As a medical student, I fell in love with the brain. It's a daunting
    organ: an ensemble of cells and axons and nuclei and lobes tucked
    and folded in exotic shapes. ...

    But I was wrong. Katie made me face my misunderstanding. She was a
    whole person. The child in my office was not mapped in any meaningful
    way to the scan of her brain or the diagram in my neuroanatomy
    textbook. The roadmap got it wrong.

And he closes:
    I see her in my office each year. She is thriving: headstrong and
    bright. Her mother is exasperated, and, after seventeen years,
    still surprised. So am I.

    There is much about the brain and the mind that I don't
    understand. But neuroscience tells a consistent story. There is
    a part of Katie's mind that is not her brain. She is more than
    that. She can reason and she can choose. There is a part of her
    that is immaterial--the part that Sperry couldn't split, that
    Penfield couldn't reach, and that Libet couldn't find with his
    electrodes. There is a part of Katie that didn't show up on those
    CAT scans when she was born.

    Katie, like you and me, has a soul.

Notice Dr Egnor isn't saying this is anything like statistically
normal. Just that it can /ever/ happen should cause one to question
monism.

But I just had to include the narrative in the original, as I think it
gives an emotional "argument" I couldn't reproduce.

Dr Egnor frames the debate between monism and dualism as one that dates
back to the start of science. (As opposed to Natural Philosophy, its
predecesor.) Rene Descartes believed in dualism, that the brain and the
mind are two different things, gashmi vs ruachani. The two were linked,
somehow, although no one can explain how, mind and brain are like "the
ghost in the machine".

Science was founded on Francis Bacon's tradition, during the
"Enlightenment, it became fashionable to limit inquiry about the world to
physical substances: to study the machine and ignore the ghost. Matter
was tractable, and we studied it to obsession. The ghost was ignored,
and then denied." That denial being "scientism" -- since science works
and gives certain answers, let us deny that any other topics are real.
A worldview that is quiote popular in many circles today.

Dr Egnor uses Aquinas only to make a point that we would draw from
mesorah as both are using terms you also find in Plato, Aristo and
Plotinus (Neoplatonism). Souls come in four forms -- domeim, tzomeiach,
chai and medaber. And his position is that neurologists never found the
kochos specific to a medaber when looking around the brain.

If minds were identical with brains, or something the brain does the
ways computers run software, there would be no freee will. A mechanistic
worldview has room for algorithms, where the inputs force the outputs,
and for randomness -- so that there is unpredictability, but like a coin
toss, not a choice.

And so, he boils down his claim to (1) the mind is metaphysically
simple (ie not divisible), (2) the intellect and will are not
material, and (3) free will is real.

The Mind is Metaphysically Simple:

He says neurology found this to be true when looking at patients who
had a type of epilepsy where a treatment would be to cut the
corpus callosum, the bundle of brain fibers by which the two sides
of the brain are in communication.

Roger Sperry studied scores of people who underwent this surgery.
Yes, there are test cases where there are odd symptoms. If
an object was only shown to the left eye, it only reached the right
side of the brain, and the patient couldn't name the object as
speech is on the left.

However, in daily life... Patients didn't notice a change. A person could
have two brains -- the sides aren't connected, after all, and still be
one person. No indecision between the two hemispheres reaching different
conclusions. A single identity and will.


The Intellect and Will are Not Material

Dr Wilder Penfield (who was one of the pioneers of the corpus callostomy)
was one of the first people to operate on people's brains when the
patient was awake. (None of the neurons in the brain feel pain, and the
scalp and skull only need a local anesthetic.)

Using electrodes to stimulate the brain, he could cause a patient to
jerk an arm, have a memory, see a flash of light, feel tingling,
whatever. But the patient never attributed that arm movement to his
own decision. Nor could he cause the patient to feel mercy, to feel
righteous indignation, or solve calculus problems.

"Penfield began his career as a materialist. He finished his career as
an emphatic dualist."


Free Will is Real

Benjamin Libet is /the/ name to look up when discussing bechirah
and the brain.

He set up a machine with a screen that had a lit dot on it. The dot would
complete a circle once per second. This was a way of measuring the time of
a decision with quite a bit of precision. (For human interactions. Not
for my "in how few microseconds can you get that stock order to the
market?" job.) We're talking to the nearest a hundredths of a second
or 2.

He gave each subject a button. They can choose when to push it. When they
did decide it, they would not where the dot is. Then he could measure
the time they decideded to pushe the button, how much later the brain
started firing up to push the button, and how much after that they
actually pushed it.

Turns out that the brain wave he named the "readiness potential" to put
the button is 1/2 second BEFORE the decision to push it. At this point
the argument circulating in journals was that free will was disproven.
What we think of as our conscious decisions are /after/ the wiring did
the real decision-making. Choice is just a story we tell ourselves after
the fact.

(Although some tried defending free will by saying that there is a time
lag between when a person makes a choice and the time they are aware of
having made the choice. Free will vs self-awareness of using it. If this
takes 1/2 second or longer, then the free will decision causes the
brain wave, then people realize they decided and note where the dot is,
and then finally the button is pushed.

(I personally, watching on the sidelines, had no problem since I bought
into the notion of nequdas habechirah. Libet's first experiment didn't
so much disprove free will as give some reason to say at least some
decisions aren't free will. When a subject pushes a button in an
experiment is kind of arbitrary. So what if it isn't in NhB territory?)

But then Libet did a second variant on the experiment. He asked the
subjects to second guess their decision immediately after making it.
So that the first decision to push the button isn't necessarily followed
by actually pusshing it. And they're to mark where the dot is (effectively,
the time) when they make that first decision.

As Libet put it, we may not have free will, but we do have free won't.

Turns out that the readiness potential brainwave is there when they
decide it is time to consider pushing the button whether or not they
end up actually pushing it. The command to your muscle is only being
prepped *in case* you need it.

Enger emphasizes what Libet couldn't find -- any activity in the
brain that actually correlated with the decision itself. They have
not found will in the brain, even as they did find where the
physical action was being readied.

Libet actually terms this in language much like that of mussarists.
The brain (vs? the nefesh) is a sea of taavos, middos and kishronos,
and the role of bechirah is which we bring to po'el.

In the language of soul (translating from Aquinas to our language)
-- Libet found the aspect which is chai, but not the medaber.

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             I always give much away,
micha at aishdas.org        and so gather happiness instead of pleasure.
http://www.aishdas.org           -  Rachel Levin Varnhagen
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