"Last Wednesday, COSM 2025 featured a most interesting panel discussion between neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and historian of scinece Michael Shermer.
The question was, “Does neuroscience show that we are mere biological machines?”
Shermer, executive director of the Skeptics Society, takes the view:
"Humans are biological machines that evolved from previous
biological machines going back billions of years. Mind, sentience, consciousness, intelligence, and free will evolved gradually, elements of which can be found in our ancestors and related contemporaries such as non-human great apes and cetaceans. There is no reason to believe that at some point in the evolutionary process an Intelligent Designer or Deity intervened to direct natural selection in a particular direction. Humans no more have souls than do chimps, gorillas, whales, or my Chocolate lab Hitch."
A key element of his critique is that the soul is not really a good explanation for our human reality.
"How does an immaterial soul register light and sound or move the muscles of the vocal tract, respond to psychoactive drugs. If a soul can animate the body without a brain, what do you need the brain for in the first place? If we can reason and have free will without a brain, then why bother with the brain and body? Why not just be a soul?"
Here’s one general comment Egnor made in response, stressing the non-locality of the soul:
"There’s no from [for the soul], it’s not a location. They are abilities that we have that are not material. “From” implies a location which implies matter. You need to get out of the materialist paradigm. The problem is, if the way you think about the world is a materialist, you try to cram the evidence into this artificial box."
Denyse O’Leary
