When somebody dies (their brain is dead) their mind is dead too; there is no detectable entity or energy which leaves the body at that moment. When one dissects the brain there is no soul there.

We do not detect with our five physical senses or with our present technology that anything leaves the body at the moment of death; therefore it is logically coherent to infer that there is no human soul, life force etc, and consequently the mind has to be the brain and nothing more. But it is important to realise that this evidence is not conclusive proof of the mind-brain identity. We can propose another logically consistent possibility: the mind consists of very subtle matter (or a complex energy field), popularly called the soul, which can be neither perceived by our five physical senses nor, as yet, be detected by our technology.

This new possibility is usually rejected on two main grounds: first, the existence of the soul does not fit into our known laws of physics; and second, the soul is not needed in order to explain how the mind and body work. It is a superfluous entity, and if we follow the scientific rule called Occam’s Razor (do not invent more new entities than are necessary), we should not seriously consider it.

Let me deal with the ‘does not fit into the laws of physics’ objection first. It is known from the history of science that many scientific phenomena were detected that did not fit into the theories of that time, yet were later confirmed and accepted as objective. For example, the constancy of the speed of light did not fit into Newtonian physics, but later was explained by a new theory: the Theory of Relativity. Some features of black body radiation could not be explained by either Newtonian or Relativistic physics, but could be by quantum physics. So the fact that something does not fit into our currently known laws of physics is no proof that it does not and cannot exist. Besides, the laws of physics are human formulations and we cannot be absolutely certain that they are entirely correct and cover all that there is.

The point of applying Occam’s Razor in this case, sceptics would argue, is that there is no reason even to speculate as to the soul’s existence; it is not as if, by proposing the existence of the soul, we can explain any anomalies in science. Yet, fortunately for the ‘believers’ and unfortunately for the sceptics or ‘rationalists’, there are some ‘anomalies’ which can indeed be better explained by proposing the existence of the soul:

Near Death Experience – some people have been able, visually and aurally, to perceive events in their physical environment, and travel to other dimensions, while they were clinically dead. Sceptics suggest that this phenomenon arises when the brain is in the process of shutting down or restoring its functions, but there is at least one case in which the brain was closely monitored and the person concerned perceived what was happening in the room at the time when her brain was entirely inactive. [1]

Remote Viewing & Out of Body Experience – so-called remote viewers, when in trance, move through the planetary ‘ether’ and collect information from anywhere in the world. This technique was used by at least two US intelligence gathering agencies. Today it is officially claimed that it is not in use any more and that it did not work well. But the point is that if the initial research had not shown some positive results, remote viewing would never have been used by the US army.[2]

Recollection of Past Lives – some little children remember their previous lives and their stories have been verified by the ‘previous’ families. The foremost research in this field has been done by Ian Stevenson, who accumulated evidence of over three thousands cases of children recalling their past life experiences.[3]

Since these phenomena significantly challenge the mechanistic paradigm of mainstream science, they are denied or conveniently ignored. But more research has been done in this direction and it is getting harder to ignore.

Different areas of the brain are related to different bodily and subjective aspects of man. If a part of the brain is artificially stimulated it can produce various subjective states; therefore the brain is the mind.

It has been discovered that different parts of the brain ‘light up’ when certain physical or physiological activities are performed. When the brain as a whole or its parts are artificially stimulated various subjective states can arise, including religious and mystical ones. For mainstream science, this is another proof of mind-brain identity.

Without denying the findings we can question the interpretation of these facts by considering the parallel of a child with a videophone:

A little child by the name of Scientificus Ignoramusus is visiting for the first time, with his mother, the house of the Browns who are new family friends. While his mother is chatting with Mrs Brown, Ignoramusus wanders through the house carrying an empty bottle of Coke. He walks to another floor and in one room on a desk spots something which looks like a little TV and a telephone at the same time. Ignoramusus climbs on a chair and starts playing with this thing he has never seen before. He accidentally presses quick auto-dial which connects him to Mr Brown who is in his office. Mrs Brown’s husband, Mr Brown, appears on the screen and realises that a child is in his study playing with his videophone, so he starts a friendly conversation with Ignoramusus, who finds all this very amusing. At one point Ignoramusus starts hitting the videophone with the empty bottle of Coke. The phone produces all kinds of audio and visual distortions with very amusing colour effects. Mr Brown gets furious, shouting “Don’t, don’t hit my phone, …get out!”, but the child starts laughing, hitting it even more, and then the videophone goes dead. Ignoramusus leaves the room in a hurry, thinking that he killed the little man inside that funny thing, while in another room Mrs Brown receives a call…

As we can see from the above story, Mr Brown was present in his house remotely through the vehicle of his videophone, utilising two senses - audio and visual - which were limited by the technological specifications of the communication device. The videophone consists of various parts responsible for various functions: audio, video, transmission, logic and memory - if we affect the videophone by physical or electromagnetic means, the person on the other side, so long as the connection is maintained, might detect this and react back accordingly.

So the other logically consistent interpretation of mind-brain interdependence is that the human brain is a vehicle for the mind, similar to the videophone as an instrument for a remote human presence. The difference is that the mind might be more ‘stuck’ or integrated with the body; i.e. the mind and the body are two different entities in a symbiotic but hierarchical relationship in which the body with its nervous system is usually the servant, while the mind is the master.

Darwinism and neuroscience explain quite well how the brain has evolved and how it works. Furthermore, physics, chemistry and biology explain almost every aspect of the world, and that which is not explained will sooner or later be explained rationally. Therefore all so-called parapsychological phenomena are misinterpreted natural phenomena.

This is an ontological statement of the scientific mainstream which is based on mechanistic materialism, i.e. a philosophy which asserts that matter or energy is fundamentally inanimate and its behaviour describable mathematically through mechanical causal relationships. Science maintains that everything can be defined in these terms, and if something is not scientifically explained today, that can be only because it is very, very complicated - not because it is ‘supernatural’.

But despite the pride in scientific achievement there are important questions which present scientific models cannot answer, such as: how the Universe works, how an organic system can arise from inanimate matter, and how a mechanical or organic system can produce consciousness. These questions elicit only vague scientific explanations which usually involve the word “somehow”. Furthermore, a widely accepted theory such as Darwinism does not actually explain biological evolution. The same with neuroscience - it cannot explain the existence of either feelings or consciousness. I will first demonstrate that Darwinism does not explain evolution - not because I am arguing for Creationism, but for the purpose of showing how incomplete and logically false presently held theories can be.

Darwinism, as well as Neo-Darwinism, is based on three principles that are supposed to explain biological evolution: struggle for survival, variation through mutation, and natural selection. Darwinism states that beings which possess characteristics better suited for living in their particular environment are more likely to survive; hence it is ‘natural selection’ that drives evolution. Here, among many others, are some problems with Darwinism:

Struggle for survival – struggle for survival is incompatible with the laws of physics. Matter and energy are indestructible; there is nothing in matter and energy that can make any complex system will its own preservation, for, according to physics, the whole is only the sum of its parts. Since no part, including DNA, wants to survive, how could the whole have a need to survive, when, as a complex entity, it does not have its own specific nature, but only the nature of its constituent parts?

Variations and mutations – there are far more disorderly than orderly states. Hence, any complex system such as a biological organism will far more easily fall into disorder than into more complex intelligent order. The time for random trials is not infinite: this universe and this planet have not existed for ever. Even if some order emerges, the succeeding mutations will bring disorder again, for disorder is more probable than order - which is why our machines tend to break down rather than improve themselves.

Natural selection – natural selection does not choose a more complex system over a simpler one; the system which better survives continues to exist whether it is more or less complex. What evolutionary advantage has a multicellular organism over a unicellular one? What evolutionary advantage have mammals over flying insects if survival of genes is all that matters?

Simply: evolution does not follow logically from Darwinian principles. So what could possibly drive biological evolution? It has been proposed by ancient wisdom that evolution is the process of self-expression and self-realisation. Beings do not live just to survive but also to express their potential and realise their nature. Apart from the struggle for survival there is a struggle for self-actualisation, and that is why the higher biological forms emerge: to allow the expression of more subtle potentials which nature carries within itself. Evolution, therefore, is the process of unfoldment.

It is believed by present neuroscience that consciousness is a product of the human brain - that functional complexity “somehow” produces an illusion of consciousness. The problem is that consciousness cannot be derived from the laws of physics as they are now formulated. Nor can consciousness be described by mathematics. The reason for this is that the fundamental conceptual entities of the present scientific paradigm are incompatible with the notions of self-awareness, pleasure and pain. It is precisely for this reason that some scientific scholars have taken the position of ‘Eliminative Materialism’, i.e. a theoretical outlook which asserts that the Self or ‘I’ is an illusion of language, that there is not any Self within - just neurological processes - and that consciousness only ‘seems’ to have a continuity, but, in reality, is no more than the sum of different brain functions.[4]

The problem with bringing the concept of illusion into this argument is that ‘illusion’ implies that something or somebody has fallen into it: i.e. every illusion requires an observer. Eliminative materialists have swept the problem of consciousness under the carpet called ‘illusion’, for the word ‘illusion’ sounds less mysterious and more under control than ‘consciousness’. Yet ‘illusion’ again is incompatible with the laws of present physics, for no material or energetic entity can be deceived; hence it cannot fall into illusion, nor can one function of the brain be deceived by another. The notion of illusion cannot logically be derived from mechanistic materialism.

Furthermore, haven’t we defined consciousness, at least in the human case, as the awareness of one’s own existence? If consciousness is an illusion, am I really not aware of my own existence? Do I doubt my existence? Am I saying that I actually do not exist? If I am saying that I do not, then who is saying this, and am I actually aware of my own non-existence? Well, forgive me for being frank, but this illusion business is an utter nonsense. It shows only that humanity does not have just insane politics, insane economy, and insane religion, but also insane science. But then maybe things are not that bad - at least we have some consistency in our insanity!

Conclusion

What is important to remember is that since present scientific models are vastly incomplete, sceptics or ‘rationalists’ cannot argue that the Soul is a superfluous entity, especially because there are phenomena, which I mentioned earlier, that imply the existence of the Soul. We have seen that the present theory of biological evolution cannot really explain evolution, and that current theory of the mind cannot actually explain consciousness. We also know that physics cannot entirely explain how the Universe works and why it is expanding in such a delicately balanced way as to allow the stars and planets to form and bear life. [5] Hence it becomes a scientific imperative to speculate and invent new models which better correlate with reality. For to get entrenched with theoretical models which are incompatible even with obviously real phenomena, such as self-awareness, pleasure and pain, is not science but blind dogmatism – yet another cult of power and control.

It is not surprising that, today, people who dare to criticise the dogmatic stance of mainstream science are often accused of being anti-science, just as in the Middle Ages people who criticised the Church were charged with heresy and acting against God. Modern science is not just an institution of knowledge, it is also an institution of power. This, of course, is the result of the strong and inevitable link between ideology and power structures: that link which humanity needs to understand better if it is to achieve true world peace.

So what could constitute a more coherent approach to the nature of reality? Most people seem acquainted with only two theoretical models that purport to know how everything works: scientific mechanistic materialism and monotheistic religion. But many other solutions are possible, and the theory which is being proposed ever more frequently at the present day by various academics is Pantheism – an outlook which asserts that matter and mind are different aspects of each other, and that everything contains everything. In Pantheism, Man, the Soul, and the Universe are instances on different dimensional levels of the One Unifying Reality which in its being carries an infinite creative potential. Man is an active agent in the expression of this potential.

[1] A convincing case of near-death experience was presented in the BBC TV programme The Day I Died on February 5th 2003. Pam Reynolds underwent brain surgery at Barrow Neurological Institute, Phoenix, Arizona. Dr Robert Spetzler, a neurosurgeon, performed an operation where he stopped Pam’s heart and breathing, and drained the blood from her brain, thus entirely stopping its metabolic activity. The brain waves were flattened and constantly extensively monitored. Yet despite this, Pam accurately overheard and saw what was happening in the room from a vantage point above her body. After this experience Pam declared: “I think death is an illusion. I think death is a really nasty, bad lie. I do not see any truth in the word death at all.”

[2] Much information about remote viewing can be gathered from the autobiographical book The Psychic Warrior by David Morehouse. Some former US government remote viewers have started their own private companies offering remote viewing services and courses. Their businesses can be found on the Internet.

[3] More information about children recollecting their past lives can be found on this website: www.childpastlives.com

[4] Eliminative Materialism or eliminativism, has been strongly advocated by the philosopher Paul Churchland, and scientific writer and TV presenter Susan Blackmore. It proposes that since common-sense or ‘folk psychology’(FP), which consists of notions such as desire, hope, the Self etc, is only a theory, it might be based on wrong ontological premises. In the future, according to eliminativism, FP will be replaced by neurological interpretations.

[5] Present cosmology cannot explain why the laws and the physical constants of this universe seem to be precisely adjusted to produce carbon based life forms. These ‘coincidences’ are now called the Anthropic Principle.