It's obvious that unless your five senses are totally defunct, you have awareness of your body. That's self-evident. But quite apart from that awareness of your physical body, as I stated, you have an awareness of yourself that apparently has nothing to do with your physical body. "I think therefore I am" is one variation on the theme.

 

I used to be as 100% certain that everything was materialism. But I've reflected on that and now I'm not so sure.

 

Many people argue that even if your brain is pulled apart electron by neutron by proton there will be something intangible left over. Theologians call it your soul or your spirit; philosophers and/or brain scientists of that opinion call it consciousness, self-identity, essence, whatever.

 

I clearly have likes and dislike, but are these encoded in molecules? Do I have a molecule that encodes "I like pizza". If so, then I could clearly find it wandering through my own brain. However, many would argue that there is no such encoding in any physical thing that's part and parcel of me.

 

It seems obvious that if you destroy your brain you will destroy all that makes you, you. However, there are lots of people reading this who would disagree not to mention hundreds of millions of others around the world from all walks of life who absolutely believe that they have a material side and an immaterial side.

 

Just as a quick thought experiment, I've come up with two scenarios that are suggestive that the mind isn't all physical.

 

Scenario Number One: So here you are the world's most knowledgeable and most famous neurosurgeon - Ben Casey could take lessons from you. You know more about neurosurgery than everyone else put together. Unfortunately you haven't committed that knowledge into print (or other media) yet - via a textbook say. Double unfortunately, you suffer a massive fatal heart attack at work. Within minutes your neurosurgeon colleagues extract your brain and put it on the slab in the lab in search of all of your knowledge about neurosurgery. It's got to be inside that mass of brain tissue somewhere. Alas, no matter where and no matter how far down into brain structure; down to molecular levels your colleagues probe, no trace of your storehouse of neurosurgery knowledge, experience and wisdom can be found. So one question is where was that knowledge?

 

Another question was how was it stored? And most important, there's the question of where did it go since it can't be found? Why could you, and only you, when alive, access your storehouse of knowledge, experience and wisdom? Why isn't that knowledge, experience and wisdom available to others when they physically examine your brain? It, by all that is reasonable, has to be in those little grey cells somewhere.

 

I mean if that knowledge, experience and wisdom had been transmitted to print or some other physical media, then that knowledge, experience and wisdom would survive your death and be available to others. Even if you were to tattoo your knowledge, experience and wisdom onto your skin that would survive your death, even indefinitely if treated and preserved. Apparently the exception to that physical or materialistic rule is not if the physical substance is called your brain. Why? Paper is physical; the brain is physical, so something is screwy somewhere.

 

So when you die and the medical students dissect your brain, no matter what level they descend to, they will never uncover anything about what made you, you. There was no "energy equals mass times the speed of light squared" to be found in Einstein's brain. Your brain is just another brain, indistinguishable from billions of other brains. Isn't that a bit of a downer! So what makes you, you, is of a totally immaterial nature. A rather poor analogy is that one kind of bottle (or brain) can hold a near infinite variety of wines (or immaterial / non-physical human essences).

 

Scenario Number Two: Between the time you go to sleep and the time you wake up, you are pretty much a closed system with no inputs and no outputs apart from the routine standards of breathing along with maybe some internal digestion, routine biochemical maintenance and eight hours worth of ageing. In other words, your blood type, your DNA, your physical features are pretty much the same between going to sleep and waking up.

 

One thing you do while asleep is dream. Where dreams come from and where dreams go to is quite the question in itself. Clearly you don't have a movie projector and stack of films inside your skull waiting to be displayed in the theatre of your mind. Dreaming is a thing though since dreaming requires energy. But the content of the dream, the 'what' of your dreams, is irrelevant to that and what you dream would appear to be of a nebulous and immaterial nature. Anyway, you have this very vivid dream which actually wakes you up. The nature or contents of this dream directly causes you to, literally overnight, undergo a profound change in your worldview, personal philosophy and personality, etc. Now are those new you traits of personality, philosophy or worldview things or non-things; physical / material things or non-physical / non-material things? If the former, then presumably your brain chemistry has undergone a radical change in an extremely short period of time. Presumably your brain structures, the rewiring of your neurons, synapses, and your brain tissues hasn't altered, at least not in such a short time-frame as in overnight. There's not sufficient time to allow that sort of biological change.

 

Of course the alternative is that the immaterial contents of your vivid dream caused the equally immaterial changes in your personality, philosophy and worldview since these traits are part of your overall immaterial essence.

 

Since I'm having lots of fun with this topic, here are a couple more scenarios that might be suggestive that there is something more to the human essence than that which consists purely of quarks and electrons; physical fields and forces.

 

Scenario Number Three: Take the brains of the next one million people to die in the US of A and place them side-by-side in a sort of police line-up. Now your mission, if you decide to accept it, is to identify which brain belonged to a professional opera singer, who always votes Republican, raised in the Islamic faith but is now a born-again Christian, who's favourite colour is blue, who has a violent temper but a correspondingly very long fuse, who is a vegetarian with a special fondness for peanut butter and who is fluent in Japanese. Of course while it is obvious that someone's mind could hold all those attributes, there is nothing that any examination of that person's brain could show that could or would reveal those attributes. So brains are not unique but minds are unique yet the mind disappears after death while the brain remains behind. Something physical, assuming the mind ultimately consists of quarks and electrons, fields and forces, cannot vanish!

 

Scenario Number Four: Over the course of a lifetime, you generate a massive amount of mental stuff. You dream hundreds of thousands of dreams. You think billions of thoughts. You potentially acquire multi-megabytes of knowledge via the learning process. Potentially every sensory input ever experienced can be committed to and stored as memory. You make dozens of decisions every day. The question is, where is all this mental stuff stored? Another question is how is all of the mental stuff that is no longer required dealt with?

 

Unlike other bodily wastes or stuff no longer wanted or needed you can't bleed out mental states no longer required or surplus to needs. You can't slough them off like dead skin cells. You can't breathe or exhale them out (like carbon dioxide) or urinate or defecate or sweat them out. So how do you unclog your brain unless of course it was never clogged to begin with if mental stuff is immaterial stuff? Chemical waste products produced by brain activities may ultimately be eliminated in urine, but I doubt if any biochemist who has studied the (very complex) chemistry of urine has ever found anyone's mental no longer required memories, etc. contained within. So, if mental states consist of physical stuff, then day-by-day your brain should be ever increasingly laden with that mental but physical stuff. Clearly that doesn't happen. Conclusion, mental stuff isn't physical stuff but immaterial or non-physical stuff.

 

Further to my comments about Scenario Number Four with respect to the deletion of mind stuff or mental stuff, quite apart from the question of how does the brain actually delete the stuff of the mind comes the question of how does the brain even decide what is important (do not delete) and what is not important (delete). How does the brain make an intelligent decision about what to keep tucked away inside of itself and what to throw away? How can the brain make a judgment about the relevant qualities of the multi-thousands of bits of mind stuff it has to deal with and process every day? Why is what you had for breakfast 1000 days ago of lesser importance than that well remembered job interview from 1000 days ago when 1000 days later neither has any bearing on what tomorrow will bring and how you need to prepare for it? I can remember events from forty years ago that have absolutely no relevance to my here and now. Why doesn't my brain delete this unnecessary mental garbage?

 

The same brain-that-makes-decisions-phenomena must apply to animals, at least the higher animals like mammals and birds. My cats have the right sort of mental stuff that knows where their food bowl is, but they probably don't recall the exact contents within that bowl from 1000 days prior to today. My cats can remember where the sunny spots are inside the house even as the seasons change and locations shift, but they probably have lost track whether or not it was sunny just a couple of days ago.

 

One thing is clear, these decisions made by the brain about what mental stuff to retain and what mental stuff can be tossed out into the waste paper basket are not conscious decisions if in fact there are really decisions being made at all. This apparent decision making is all on autopilot. But the key question remains, how can brain chemistry, brain cells, brain neurons or synapses, brain structures make informed decisions about the relative importance of those bits and pieces you'd call your essence; you mental stuff, and how can the brain actually hit the delete button?

 

Parallels have often been made between the brain and computers. It is clear that various data storage devices like hard disk drives, magnetic tapes, CDs and DVDs, USB sticks, film stock and photographic paper, computer punch-cards, even the printed page, all have a maximum carrying capacity. So too must the brain have a maximum carrying capacity, assuming mental stuff is material or physical stuff. So in with the new and out with some of the old according to some undefined criteria (the brain putting a value on that degree of importance). But where is the brain's eraser (rubber), delete key, shredder, gizmos that demagnetize, or related?

 

The nasty bit is that your brain is deciding things on your behalf without your permission or authority and you have relatively little say in the matter. Say you work in a book store and on the same day a customer says "thank you for your help" and your boss gives you a pat on the back for doing a good job. A year later your mind might more readily recall the pat on the back while the customer's "thank you" has long since been forgotten even though at the time the "thank you" was the more meaningful experience. But there is only one boss and customers come and go by the thousands. Still, how many things do you suppose you've forgotten – had your mind wiped clean of  - which had you a solid say in the matter you'd rather be able to recall, even something quite trivial, maybe say something from childhood. You probably can't answer that since you've already forgotten what you'd now like to remember. 

 

It's almost as if all memories are equal (they are all the same stuff) but some are more equal than others. Your brain has a kind of Nazi philosophy when it comes to memory by exterminating the inferior (non-important) memories and ensuring the survival of the chosen elite few.   

 

Maybe you could try to force your brain to remember, but that doesn't usually work out too well over the long term. Once your brain decides to forget, that's it – it's lost. Maybe that's why people keep diaries and blogs and take photos and related.

 

How the brain decides, and how it carries out deletion of mental stuff are irrelevant questions if mental stuff, all of that which makes you, you, is in fact non-physical or non-material. If the brain can absorb all that you see and hear, think and dream, learn and memorize, even if shoved down into levels of the subconscious, then there is no issue with how the brain decides or how the brain deletes.

 

You'll note that I've deliberately left God out of this discussion since the concept of an immaterial, non-physical part of what makes you, you does not translate of necessity into anything that has to do with God or even an afterlife. Your mind or mental stuff might be of a non-material nature, but that doesn't mean it has to survive your physical death. Perhaps it just disperses, scattered by the four winds. Even if it does and provides you with an afterlife, that afterlife might have bugger-all to do with the traditional pictures of heaven and hell.

 

I suspect that you and I both wish that our essence was non-material so that we would survive our pending and inevitable demise. I suspect that nearly all of us wish that regardless of the reality of a supernatural deity or deities.

 

One can take all of the deductive and inductive reasoning on this issue and inscribe them on stone tablets for all the value they have. I like the following instead: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".

 

P.S. A Solution to the Mind-Body Problem?

 

Might the mind-body duality problem actually be more evidence for the simulation hypothesis which is that we actually 'exist' as virtual beings in a simulated landscape, all part of computer/software programming by entities unknown?

 

It is clear that there is a physical part of you that is really not all that unique. You'd call this your body which includes your brain. It is also clear that there is a mental part of you which is unique. The latter mental component is your essence, what makes you really you. It's your mental states, events and processes. It's your memories, free will, personality, worldviews, philosophy, morals, ethics, values, likes and dislikes, personal goals, knowledge, awareness, creativity, consciousness, self-identity and so on.

 

Now the problem is that your essence has to be both apparently material (a body or brain to house it in) and apparently immaterial. Its material also in the sense that material things (like drugs) can influence the nature of your essence. It takes a something to influence a something. Your essence is however immaterial in that you cannot pinpoint it anywhere in your brain; you cannot find at some set of neurological coordinates by any means known to science or neurology. You cannot bottle your essence, physically dissect it or put it under a microscope of any magnification. Your essence doesn't seem to be made of anything material like atoms, molecules, cells, tissues or other biological structures. So your essence is both a thing and a not-thing at the same time and in the same place. That's a paradox that takes its place among other paradoxical dualities like superposition-of-state or wave-particle duality.

 

But what if material things are just virtual reality, rendered in bits and bytes as well as those nebulous concepts surrounding immaterial mental states, events and processes, also rendered as the bits and bytes of a computer/software simulation. Then there is this commonality between the two components of mind-body dualism that explains how the one can affect the other (material stuff influencing the immaterial) and vice versa (akin to the concept of mind over matter).

 

Thus the mind-body problem is solved by postulating that we 'live' in a Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe.