Do You Mind?!

The mind exists apart from the brain – as does the soul.  Yet atheists and materialists deny it.  We are not meat machines.  Do androids dream of electric sheep?  Are we truly nothing but brain?  Is there life after death?  I’m a SOUL man not a MineCraft calculator.  Saved, Originated by God, United with Christ and Life after Death (in heaven).

John Searle (Philosophy Prof., UC Berkeley) proposed the Chinese Room Experiment.  I’m in a room and I don’t know Chinese, but I’m given a series of questions in Chinese.  I have the rules in English on how to write answers to these questions using Chinese characters.  Those who get my answers think I understand Chinese, but I don’t.  In like manner, a smart computer has no real understanding, consciousness or mind.

Norman Geisler confronts the materialists who think they can explain the mind:

Also unwarranted is the assumption that, because the mind and brain function together, they must be identical.  A corollary assumption is that I am nothing but my brain.  This is reductionist fallacy.  Things that go together are not necessarily the same, any more than ideas expressed by these words are the same as the words themselves.  Mind and brain could interact without being the same. [1]

Brain is Mind advocates fall from logic.  As Geisler reveals:

Materialist arguments are self-defeating.  “Nothing but” statements assume “more than” knowledge.  How could I know I am nothing more than my brain unless I was more than it?  I cannot analyze my brain in a test tube unless I am outside the test tube. [2]

If the nonmaterial mind does not exist, how is it that most cultures have a sense of the afterlife?  In The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul by Mario Beauregard (neuroscientist) and Denyse O'Leary (science journalist) provide empirical evidence for a nonmaterial mind.  Edward Feser teaches Philosophy at Pasadena City College and wrote The Philosophy of Mind.  He provides a number of helpful links here.

“The purposes of a person's heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out” (Pr. 20:5).

Notes:

1) Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics by Norman Geisler (Baker

Books, 1999), “Materialism,” p. 445.

2) Ibid.

**Graphic source:  adapted from Bizarro by Dan Piraro.