The Brain as Mediator

Positive science and internal experience have produced conflicting philosophies. Materialism is based on the first, transcendental metaphysics rests on subjective experience. Both have a plausible rationale. Materialism is supported by the undeniable observation that brain function is necessarily involved in mental activity; hence brain injuries can interfere with any one or all of the modalities I’ve talked about before. A transcendent view is supported by experience and logic. The logic is simple. It’s impossible to imagine mental phenomena arising from mechanical underpinnings, be these chemical or electromagnetic. We lack even a single instance of genuine mentation arising from machines that we have made. To think that chemistry, complexly arranged, gives rise to thought requires a leap of faith. We have to believe that chemical reactions, like oxidation, hydrogenation, etc., can produce self-consciousness, will, intelligence, memory, and all the rest. That is negative evidence for the positive reality of soul. The experiential evidence, beyond ordinary human life, comes from near death experience reports which suggest that mentation is possible and takes place in the absence of brain function too.

Materialists are prohibited by their very starting premises—all is matter/energy—from granting the possibility of an immaterial soul. The traditionalist—if I’m a reasonable representative—is more flexible. I find it easy to accept the positive evidence that brains are involved in mentation. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that brain activity is mentation. My explanation is that spirits are in some way limited in this realm of reality by the very nature of matter. In this range of the cosmos, therefore, we need tooling and instruments. The brain then becomes a mechanism by means of which we can experience this domain—see it, feel it, interact with it. Without the tooling we may be able to touch it at the subatomic level only. Hence my working model of reality is that life itself is a chemical civilization gradually built up by a spiritual community somehow entangled in this realm, voluntarily or otherwise. The why and the wherefore of that is the Big question, and this entire blog is part of an examination of that question. Here, however, my aim is much narrower. It is to suggest that, culturally, we often confuse the means with the end, effect with the cause. Thus brains are the consequence of mentation, not the cause of it. They are tools chemical civilization has built as instruments by means of which to see; they are not structures chance has produced to aid survival—the reason for that survival never explained by positive science. In my rough working model survival is not an issue because our stay here is not permanent. In the positive model it is incoherent because only individuals experience but no individual survives. And matter, to survive, doesn’t need such fancy instruments as kidneys and livers.

It is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis to suggest that if we are spirits and if we are caught up in this realm against our will—or came here to see what it is all about—and if we are relatively weak in an environment of colossal forces, over against our own, we would actively exert ourselves to bring what force we have to bear to make the situation better—much as we do the same thing routinely in ordinary life. If we can only move matter by interacting at the subatomic level, we would build instruments to obey our will. And the brain is such an instrument. We need but to decide something, and action follows—at the personal as at the collective level. I decide to lift my arm. The brain does the rest. Muscles lift my arm. The vast biological machinery necessary to do that would take volumes to describe. The brain also serves me by giving me the information that I need. And when it is injured, I’m deprived of instruments. I’ve elsewhere on this blog reported the frustrating incapacity of souls, deprived of brain function, in trying to communicate with others who are still “encased” in bodies. This suggests that so long as we’re inside of bodies, we cannot act as discarnate souls, and in a bodiless state, we cannot move these vast hulking masses of matter without the instrumental aid of brains and muscles. We need bodies to act in the world. But this doesn't mean that we have no other and, for us, more appropriate environments in which we could get along quite well without our circulation systems, food intake, oxygen, livers, hormones, and the rest. Given my hypothesis, which at least provides a meaning for existence—which living, breeding, aging, dying, by themselves, do not—my interest in cosmologies is almost self-evident. I’m looking for the bigger picture that will accommodate the vast evidence available for a process either of entanglement, exploration, or development—of souls.