Michael Egnor and Denyse O'Leary: The Immortal Mind

Knight & Rose Show — Wintery Knight and Desert Rose

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Michael Egnor and Denyse O'Leary: The Immortal Mind

May 31, 2025

Knight & Rose ShowWintery Knight and Desert Rose

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose interview Dr. Michael Egnor and Denyse O'Leary about their new book "The Immortal Mind". They discuss how scientific evidence such as split-brain surgeries, veridical near-death experiences, and terminal lucidity challenges materialist views of the mind. Egnor and O'Leary argue that an immaterial, immortal soul is the best explanation for human consciousness, free will, and abstract thought.

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Show notes and transcript: https://winteryknight.com/2025/05/31/knight-and-rose-show-64-egnor-and-oleary-the-immortal-mind

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Transcript

Welcome to the Knight and Rose Show, where we discuss practical ways of living out an authentic Christian worldview. I'm Wintery Knight. And I'm Desert Rose.

Welcome, Rose. So today we're delighted to welcome two guests onto the show, Dr. Michael Egnor and Denyse O'Leary. Let me tell you a little bit about them.

Michael Egnor, M.D., is a professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. He has served as the director of pediatric neurosurgery and is an award-winning brain surgeon. He was named one of New York's best doctors by the New York Magazine in 2005.

He received his medical education at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and completed his residency at Jackson Memorial Hospital. His research on hydrocephalus has been published in journals, including the Journal of Neurosurgery, Pediatrics, and Cerebrospinal Fluid Research. So welcome to the show, Michael.

Thank you, Wintery. It's a pleasure to be here. Excellent.

Our other guest is a co-author of a new book I'll tell you about in a minute. Her name is Denyse O'Leary. She's a freelance journalist based in Victoria, Canada.

That's in British Columbia, right? And she specializes in faith and science issues and is co-author with neuroscientist Mario Borreguard of The Spiritual Brain, a neuroscientist case for the existence of the soul. Her newest book, co-authored with Dr. Egnor, is the forthcoming The Immortal Mind, a neurosurgeon's case for the existence of the soul. And that's coming out in a couple of weeks.

So we thought we would have you both on to discuss that. And one more thing about Denyse, she received her degree in Honors English Language and Literature. So welcome to The Night in Rose Show, Denyse.

Glad to be here, Wintery. Excellent. Today, we just want to ask you some questions about your fascinating new book, The Immortal Mind.

And I want to start with just asking you, Dr. Egnor, tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us a little bit about how people understand the mind and mental operations and what are the different views. Thank you, Wintery. The fundamental question we ask in our book is, does the brain explain the mind completely? And that's a question that has fascinated me for really all of my professional life.

I started out as a child and a young man as a materialist and an atheist. I love science. I majored in biochemistry in college.

I went to medical school. I was fascinated by neuroscience because I thought that learning about the brain would tell me everything there was to know about the mind. I decided to become a neurosurgeon.

I did my residency training in neurosurgery at the University of Miami, and I joined a faculty at Stony Brook here in New York in 1991. And I began to see, as I practiced neurosurgery, things that I couldn't explain. People who had minds that seemed to be better than their brains.

I had a little girl born missing probably half to two-thirds of her brain who grew up completely normally. She's a perfectly normal person. She's a bright young lady.

I've had other children with similar issues. I even had a little boy born with no brain hemispheres at all, just a brain stem. And he was severely handicapped, but he was fully conscious, fully alert, had normal emotional interactions.

And that didn't fit with the textbooks that I had read about how the brain causes the mind. And at one point, I was doing an operation on a patient, a woman who had a brain tumor, and she was awake during the surgery. We did that on purpose so we could map her brain.

We used local anesthesia, so she didn't feel any pain. And as I was removing a major part of the left frontal lobe of her brain to get the tumor out, she was talking to me. We had a perfectly normal conversation.

So it seemed to me that the brain doesn't explain the mind completely. I underwent a religious conversion. I studied a lot of cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind, and I've come to believe that the mind is more than the brain.

There are several common ways of understanding the mind. The materialist way is that everything in the mind is either identical to or completely generated by the brain tissue itself. Substance dualism is the view that the mind is a separate substance than the body and is connected to the body.

Tumistic dualism is the view in some sense that the mind is what the brain does, at least that's one way of saying it, but that the mind can have a separate existence. And idealism is the viewpoint that everything is the mind. I'm a tumistic dualist in that I believe that the mind and the brain or the mind of the body are very closely integrated, but that the mind has some aspects that have a separate existence and that the mind is the soul, and the soul is immortal, and I think there's scientific evidence for that.

Very interesting. I think that the research that you cited kind of suggests that definitely more investigation is needed to decide if there's something beyond the standard materialist interpretation. In the book, you talked about the research done on epileptic seizures by a neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield.

Could you tell us a little bit about his research and how it impacts the question of how we see mind? Sure. Wilder Penfield was a neurosurgeon in Montreal back in the mid 20th century, and he really is probably the greatest scientist in the neurosurgical profession. And he was devoted to studying epilepsy and to finding out ways to treat it.

And he did an extensive review of everything that was known about epilepsy by the mid 20th century. And he noticed something that he thought was just remarkable, and that was that when people have seizures, seizures can activate certain parts of the brain, but there were only four things that could be activated by seizures. Seizures could cause movement of the muscles.

They could cause perceptions like flashes of light or tingling on the skin. They could cause memories. People occasionally would have these distant memories, and they could cause emotions.

People could have strong emotions. But seizures never caused any kind of abstract thought. That is, there were there were no mathematics seizures, or there are no seizures where you suddenly would start doing logic, or you would start talking about the moral law or things like that.

And he thought that was very odd, given that a major part of our mental content is abstract thought, but that seizures never gave rise to it. So he developed an operation called awake brain surgery on patients with epilepsy. And what he would do is he would give them local anesthesia like Novocaine, so they didn't feel pain.

And he would do the surgery with them fully awake. And then he would do mapping of their brain by stimulating the brain in all different locations, to try to find out where the seizure focus was coming from, so he could remove it and stop the seizures, but also so we could understand the anatomy of the person's brain, so we could prevent any damage to their brain while he was doing this. And he did it on 1100 patients over about 40 years.

I estimate that he probably did more than 1 million simulations of people's brains over that period of time. And never once was he able to stimulate the brain to do any kind of abstract thinking. He could stimulate movements, he could stimulate emotions, he could stimulate perceptions, he could stimulate memories, but he can never stimulate calculus or mathematics or logic or anything like that.

So he came to the conclusion at the end of his career that the brain was not the source of abstract thought, that the brain didn't completely explain the mind, and that there was a separate aspect of the mind that was not material and didn't come from the brain. Yeah, it sounds like they're able to stimulate like what we would call in tech like device driver level software or hardware level software. You know, pulling up memories or sensory bear stuff, but not really the higher level stuff like, you know, making inferences or something like that.

One of the explanations, and this has been discussed quite a bit, and materialists obviously have a big problem with this viewpoint. And one of their explanations for it has always been that it's because abstract thought is so complex that you can't get it just by stimulating the brain. However, many of the memories that Penfield stimulated were very complex.

So he was able to stimulate complex thought, but he was never able to stimulate abstract thought, even if it's simple, even if you think one plus one is two, or it's nice to be good to people, things like that, that are very simple concepts. He could never stimulate those. So he said that those ideas don't come from the brain.

It's part of the soul, but not part of the brain. Yeah, fascinating. So Penfield also made some observations related to free will and determinism during his surgeries.

Tell us about that research and which view of mind it supports. Sure. The his free will research was also fascinating while he was doing the awake brain surgery, he would ask the patients undergoing the surgery to occasionally just raise their arm whenever they felt like it.

And he would stimulate their brain to make their arm raise without telling them. And whenever their arm would raise, he would ask them, did you will to do that? Or did I make you do it? And every patient every time got it right. That is patients always knew when they willed to raise their arm or when Penfield stimulated their brain to make their arm raise.

So Penfield concluded from that that free will was not from the brain, he could never find a part of the brain where when he stimulated it, people would think it was their own free will. So he believed that he showed that free will was also an immaterial sort of spiritual part of the mind, not from the brain itself. Yeah, interesting.

So tell us about the research from Roger Sperry, Justine Sargent and Yair Pinto on split brain surgery as a remedy for epilepsy patients. There was another kind of operation developed in the mid 20th century to treat a particular kind of epilepsy. There's a kind of epilepsy that starts out as a little focal electrical discharge in one brain hemisphere that is fairly minor, but then it spreads across a structure called the corpus callosum, which is this huge bundle of fibers that holds the hemispheres together to the other hemisphere.

When that happens, you have a major seizure. So what surgeons began to do was to split was to cut that fiber bundle, so that the hemispheres were no longer directly connected. And the seizures got much better.

What was remarkable about this was two things. One was that after the operation, the patients were pretty normal. In fact, they were quite normal to everyday life.

I've done the surgery and I've examined these patients. And they're really fine after you basically split their brain in half. They're not two people.

And what was also found, and this research was done by a researcher named Roger Sperry, is that you could, using very subtle experiments, determine what each individual hemisphere was doing in these patients because they were disconnected, although the patients never noticed this in everyday life. And Sperry won the Nobel Prize for it. So it was remarkable research.

Wow. There were two researchers in subsequent decades. Sperry did most of his research in the 1950s and 60s.

In the 1980s, extending up to the present, Justine Surgeon at McGill and Yerapento in the Netherlands have done more research on these patients. And what they found is that when you split the cerebral hemispheres, the perceptual split is real. That is that the hemispheres are not able to share perceptions back and forth.

If you present, for example, a picture of an apple to one hemisphere, the other hemisphere doesn't know what the other hemisphere is seeing because that fiber bundle that connects them is cut. However, the mind is not split, meaning that perceptions are split, but people can still integrate the information. And they can, for example, compare things in the two different the two different hemispheres accurately, even though the no one hemisphere has perceptual access to both images.

So it's as if there is a mind that is overseeing both hemispheres that is not split at the time the brain is split. Yeah. And one thing I was learning about this phenomena of showing people illustrations where it appears to one hemisphere, not the other.

And I feel like it's helpful to add that basically you can put it in a certain part of the visual field. So that only one hemisphere sees it. Is that correct? That's correct.

That's how they're able to isolate the hemispheres. So there's no communication between the spheres, but we're still able to make inferences on both sides. So and there's there are subtle questions that have been asked whether there could be workarounds inside the brain.

They're called sub subcortical pathways that might permit communication. But if that happens, there are two things. One, it should be all kinds of communication.

And there is a definite perceptual split. There's no question about that. The other thing is that that kind of communication should be unconscious.

And what Yerpinto has found is that it appears that the integration of the information between the two hemispheres is a conscious act, not an unconscious act. So at least my interpretation of that research is that there is a conscious agent that is monitoring both hemispheres that's part of the person's mind, but is not isolated in the brain itself. That seems reasonable.

Is there anything more from your personal experience with splitting the corpus below some? When I first read Dr. Sperry's work on split brain, he won the Nobel Prize for showing the abnormalities of people who have split brain surgery. But what struck me was how completely normal they are. That is, if you meet them, you can't tell the difference.

They're perfectly normal people. And they tell you, I'm one person, I'm not two people. They basically don't notice anything different in their lives.

And that is it would be as if you took your computer and just took a chainsaw and cut it right down the middle. And then you found it still worked just fine. You said there's something odd about this computer.

So I think that the existence of an immaterial soul is the best way to explain the remarkable outcomes of split brain surgery. So basically, we're finding out through the progress of science that there are a lot of things that we can demonstrate about mental activity, things like consciousness and free will and abstract thought that are not like lining up perfectly with the brain. So we can take away parts of the brain and, you know, cut the brain in half and we're still preserving this mental function.

And so let me ask you a question about free will. So we already had the evidence about the arm raising, but there's additional stuff in the book about the work of Benjamin Libet and its implications for free will. So can you tell us about that? Sure.

Benjamin Libet was a neurophysiologist in the mid 20th century, and he was fascinated by what he called mind time. And what he took to be mind time meant what exactly is happening inside your brain at the very moment that that you have a thought on and he wanted to correlate the time and the thought. And so what he did, he took a bunch of normal volunteers.

He's not split brain patients, normal people. And he put electrodes on their scalp so we could record their brain waves. And he asked them to push a button that was put on a table in front of them whenever they decided to do it.

Just decide to push the button and push the button. He had a special clock in front of them so they could time the moment that they decided to push the button down to the level of maybe 10 or 20 milliseconds on the clock. And he recorded brainwave activity to see how it lined up with their decision to push the button and then when they push the button.

And what he found was that about half a second before they decided to push the button consciously, there was a spike in brainwave activity. It seemed to imply that the brain was driving the decision unconsciously. And it initially looked as though we didn't have free will.

That is that the brain processes sort of told us what to do. And then a half second later we thought we had thought of that, but it really was from an unconscious motive. But he did a very clever adjustment to the experiment.

He asked the people that when you make a decision to push the button, once in a while veto the decision. So you don't actually push the button. So you decide and then you immediately veto.

And what he found was that the veto wasn't associated with any new brainwave activity. That is all the brainwave activity was unconscious before. But when you vetoed, it was silent as far as brainwave activity.

And he said that it seemed as though free will was real. It wasn't from the brain. And it was immaterial.

And he actually called that free won't. That is that he said that he said that we have constant bombardment of our motives by unconscious processes in the brain. But we have the free ability to accept or reject those motives.

And he said actually, he said what he discovered was quite analogous to what the major religions like Christianity and Judaism and Islam have found about the notion of free will and responsibility. Yeah, that seems to line up quite well with what we read about thin and temptation and human responsibility, right? Yes, yes. I thought it was also really fascinating that that brainwave activity that came like a split second before an action to do something kind of mindless like push a button.

It was not present in more complex decisions and decisions of greater consequence, right? Like moral decisions and things. Yes. And Leibert's research has been subject to enormous scrutiny because, first of all, pushing buttons is a very minimalist way of understanding free will.

And there's a great deal more to it. I think the most interesting thing is that I think he showed that the simplistic notion that your brain drives everything you do doesn't really hold up under scrutiny. So one of the really fascinating chapters for me was the chapter on conjoined twins.

I've actually probably told more people specifics from this chapter than any other. So tell us, how is the phenomenon of conjoined twins related to the mind problem? Well, it's a fascinating thing. It's absolutely fascinating.

There are it's very rare, but it does happen that children can be born joined at the head who share parts of their brains. So there are two people who share single parts of their brains or their brains are connected. And probably the most famous pair of twins is Krista and Tatiana Hogan, who are Canadian young, young ladies now, and they were born with joint at the head and they share what's called a thalamic bridge, which is a connection between the deepest parts of their brain.

So they share things like one child sees through one of the eyes of the of the other child. In addition to her own eyes, they share some sensation on their skin. The girls can close their eyes and their mother can touch the leg of one girl and the other girl also feels it.

They also share some control of limbs where one girl can make another girl's limbs move. And but what's remarkable about this is that they don't share personalities at all. That is, they're two completely different people.

They have different opinions, different likes, different dislikes. They have fights. They have disagreements.

All of the of the higher kinds of thinking they abstract thought personality, sense of right and wrong. They're completely separate people, unique people. So what has been found with them is very much like what I think Penfield found and Sperry found and all the people who have done research like this have found is that there are certain things in the brain that do seem to be definitely related to brain function.

But there are other aspects of our souls, of our minds that are not mechanical, they're not material and they're not shared, even if the brains are connected. Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. And there are several more stories that you guys share in the book that I think would really interest people.

Another topic that people are really fascinated by these days, understandably, is near death experiences, right? Angel Studios recently had a huge hit documentary on this topic. And several friends have been asking me for resources to learn more about this. But what are veridical near death experiences and what might be the best example related to our topic today? The term veridical and near death experiences means near death experiences that can be corroborated.

That is, that people have experiences while their brain is not functioning that in some sense proves that they were able to see or perceive or know things that they couldn't know through ordinary mechanisms. The most remarkable case, I think, of a near death experience. Well, first of all, just to back up quickly, near death experiences happen generally in very uncontrolled circumstances.

They happen, you know, people, their heart stops, there's a panic, the medical team is trying desperately to save their lives. So it's very difficult to do really good science on near death experiences, because obviously you can't do it in a laboratory. However, there was a woman named Pam Reynolds, who had a brain aneurysm and had brain surgery back in 1991 in Phoenix, Arizona.

And she had a special kind of operation, a very rare kind of operation, because her aneurysm was very difficult to fix. What they had to do was actually to stop her brain from working and basically stop her heart, drain the blood out of out of her brain to repair the artery that the aneurysm was in, and then to start her heart again and bring her back to life. And this was done by cooling her body down to about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, putting her on a heart lung machine, stopping her heart, draining the blood out of her brain and fixing the aneurysm.

And the operation went beautifully, it went very well. They monitored her brain during the operation very carefully to make sure that her brain was stopped. They had earphones on and there were very loud clicks every second, I think it was 100 decibel clicks that would register in her brain stem if her brain were still alive.

And they also looked for brainwaves, so they confirmed her brain was completely dead for about 30 about 30 minutes. During that time, when she woke up in the recovery room, she made a good recovery. The aneurysm was fixed.

She told the surgeon that she saw the operation. She saw the whole thing. She said that during the surgery, as soon as her brain went dead, she felt that she popped out of her body.

She floated up to the ceiling. She watched the surgery. She heard the conversations the doctors had.

She knew the songs on the radio that were being played during her surgery. She recognized the instruments that they were using. She said she went down a tunnel and at the other end of the tunnel, she met, I think her grandmother who had passed and her uncle.

And it was a beautiful world and she wanted to stay there, but they told her she had to go back. It wasn't her time yet. And she went back into her body and it felt really cold, which of course it was 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

So it's an incredibly well-documented near-death experience with clear proof that her brain was not functioning when this happened and with excellent corroboration. That is, that she knew everything that was going on inside the operating room. So I've kind of made a list of four things that I think any explanation for near-death experiences must explain.

The first is that people who have these experiences have remarkably clear thinking. It's highly organized. They often have a life review and they have an explicit decision to return to their body.

The second thing is that they have about 20% of the patients who have this have clear corroboration, meaning they see things that can be checked. They know what happened in the room when their brain wasn't working. The third thing is, and this is remarkable, is that as far as I know, there's never been a report of near-death experiences where people met living people on the other side of the tunnel.

When they go down the tunnel, they always meet people on the other end who are dead, even if they didn't know they were dead. Yeah. That one story about the boy whose sister had died, whose sister passed away, nobody in the family knew it.

And he reported seeing her on the other side like that. Wow. Yes.

And there are several well-documented instances of people meeting dead people on the other side where it could be shown that they did not know that person had died. And as far as I know, they've never had a situation where somebody's met a live person. And you would think if this was all just wishful thinking, you're going through this terrible trauma, you might meet your husband or wife, you might meet your mother or a close friend if they're still living, but you never do.

Only dead people. And the fourth characteristic of these phenomena is that they're life-changing. People's lives change very often dramatically.

From what they see, and I've reviewed all of the materialistic explanations. There are, you know, there's probably 20 of them and none of them can account for all four of these characteristics. So I believe that at least a significant subset of near-death experiences are genuine experiences of survival of the soul after death.

Yeah, fascinating. Yeah, that's really fascinating. Let me ask you a different question.

This one for Denise, I think you worked on the chapter about whether computers would ever develop consciousness and free will. So I'm a software engineer by day, and it just seems crazy to me that people would think that by typing in additional lines of code, the machine would become conscious of what it's doing. When I'm playing a game on my computer, I know that it's just executing code like anything else.

It has no idea what's being run. So why do people have this idea that you can make a computer complex enough so that it has consciousness and especially free will? Well, let's start with the fact that people hear that in the media all the time, like that soon, computers are going to think like people. Sam Altman says it.

Elon Musk says it. All kinds of people say it. And I often read items in the news by software engineers like yourself saying, no, that's nonsense.

But who do you think gets most of the publicity? Now, let's look at a couple of realities. First, we don't even know what consciousness is. One of my topics on which I write a great deal is theories of consciousness, which are wildly contested.

Nobody has a good theory of consciousness, of human consciousness anyway. But there are a number of theories out there. Let me tell you.

The thing is, if you don't even know what consciousness is, how are you going to determine whether a computer has consciousness anyhow? Like there's no benchmark. We all know we have consciousness. But that's it.

That's not a benchmark. Okay. Now, the other thing is free will free will requires reason and computers don't reason.

I mean, essentially a computer can't think anything except in ones and zeros, right? So if you can't make it ones and zeros, it's not something a computer can do. No, I don't think that the human mind quite works that way. Or anyway, I've never heard a really good explanation for how the human mind works.

But the computational theory is not more widely accepted than others. So let's just say that I think you have to be a human person to actually have free will as we understand it. You can't just be a string of ones and zeros.

But when people say that computers are developing free will, I think what you'll find is that there's a certain amount of slate of hand going on. Like you'll find that the philosopher has managed to define it in such a way that it could be software. But wait a minute, then it's not what humans experience.

So I do see a lot of that. Now, a quick anecdote, and I promise it's short. In 2010, South African neuroscientist Henry Markham, he was the head of the blue brain project, was pretty confident that conscious computers were not far off.

A model of the human brain like the one he was working on would be 10 years away. So that was 2010. Didn't happen in 2020.

And it hasn't happened in 2025. Here's something that happened in 2024 that may relate to the problem. New scientists reported strange new types of cells keep coming to light in the human brain.

By the latest count, there are more than 3,300. And we don't even know what most of them do. So if somebody says that he's going to build a model of the human brain on a computer, I would suggest he start tackling a handful of the 3,300 first.

Yes. I mean, that's about as much as I have to say on it. That'll keep him busy.

Yes, definitely. So another topic that you write about at Evolution News and Mind Matters is Darwinism. And that's, you know, people kind of ascribe all sorts of increases in complexity and higher functionality to Darwinian mechanisms.

But a lot of times when we look at it, we don't see how it's actually possible to do it. So let me ask you about consciousness and free will. Just my awareness of myself and my first person perspective to my own thoughts and my ability to act freely like Dr. Agnew was talking about.

Can these things be developed by Darwinian mechanisms? Well, first let's start with a fact that people sometimes overlook. There is no equivalent anywhere else in nature to the human mind. So if it developed by Darwinian means, we have no idea how.

There isn't a precursor to the human mind. The way I usually put it is the human mind has no history. Now there are several ways of approaching that question.

Some researchers have tried to show that various types of apes actually can do what humans do. It's just that they do it in a more primitive way. For example, some people have attempted with some success to teach apes sign language and a few apes have learned a couple of hundred signs.

This sounds very impressive, except there's a border collie who mastered a thousand signs. All that you want is something to master signs seen as signals. A lot of apes are fairly good at that, but that's not a language.

Human language does not consist of a long string of signs. And in fact, while there is such a thing as American Sign Language, of course, it actually stands in for a grammatical language that humans use. It's just a way of doing it with your fingers, basically.

So most people believe that because they want to find a Darwinian mechanism, not because there's any clear path whatever. The human mind is like, okay, the evolution of the human mind is like a ladder with no lower runts. Right.

Yeah. Darwinism only works by slight increases of capability at each iteration. So, you know, it doesn't like big bangs.

We had Gunter Beckley on to talk about the fossil record. And he told us about about 12 billion biological big bangs. And these are all terrible for Darwinism.

You don't want sudden, massive increases in complexity if your theory can only do gradual changes. Mm hmm. But we do have some information from the very distant past.

For example, a child's grave from 78,000 years ago, um, done up the way people would do up a grave of a child that they were grieving. Um, another group of graves from 90,000 years ago, including the grave of a child who appears to have been seriously handicapped, who was about 13. And apparently they didn't kill the child.

They looked after the child. And perhaps the child died of natural causes at that time. You can go back 1.5 million years ago and find people carefully carving stones into balls, limestone, which is comparatively soft and easy to carve.

They made hundreds and hundreds of these balls. Why? This has got to be some abstract idea about the perfect sphere. Because there's no apparent use for these things.

They just made large piles of them. And I mean, some belief system connected with it. But you see, I would look at that and say, maybe the human body has a history.

People are free to make that case. But I don't think the human mind does. What has a history is technology.

Um, today we can do much more accurate spheres than those people could. But that's because we have technology they didn't have. They had the basic idea that we do.

It's just there was a limit to what they could do about it. So Dr. Rigner, could you tell us about terminal lucidity and how it's relevant to the question of mind? It's a very interesting phenomenon. And I have a colleague here at Stony Brook named Stephen Post, who's a medical ethicist, who's actually written extensively on this.

And I've talked to him a lot about it. And I've seen some of it myself. There are situations where people who have very compromised brains, people who have the advanced stages of Alzheimer's, for example, will have a period of time, generally relatively brief, sometimes 30 or 45 minutes, where they are quite lucid.

They essentially wake up and are normal or nearly normal, and then slip back into their compromised state. And that's sometimes it's called paradoxical lucidity. It seems to happen with some frequency just near the time of death.

So people call it then terminal lucidity, although it's not always terminal. That is, that sometimes it just happens out of the blue. And it's very difficult to account using ordinary materialist ways of looking at the brain as to how a person in the latest stages of Alzheimer's, who's really completely incapable of interacting with the world in any meaningful way, could suddenly wake up and be okay for 30 minutes and then slip back down again.

So I think that the viewpoint that people have immaterial souls, and that at certain points in a person's life, even if they are suffering terribly from a brain disease, where the real content of a person's soul can come out for a brief period of time. Usually terminal lucidity and paradoxical lucidity happens in the presence of a loved one, somebody who they're close to. And it's sometimes it's almost as if they're tying up loose ends just before they pass away.

Wow. Yeah. But how is that possible with someone who has on the materialist view? I mean, how is it possible for someone who has all this extensive brain damage who just five minutes ago had all of these difficulties with mental processing to suddenly the brain hasn't changed, right? So yeah, as far as we know.

Yeah, right. So then how do they help themselves to all these good functioning mental operations? Precisely. And it's another example in this very long list that we go through in in the book of aspects of the mind that are not completely explained by the functioning of the brain.

This is not to say that the mind isn't linked to the brain. It certainly is. And one way of looking at this is that for normal functioning of the mind, the brain is ordinarily necessary, but not necessarily sufficient.

That is, that there's a part of the mind that goes beyond the brain and can manifest itself at certain times like in near death experiences or paradoxical lucidity. When I was probably about halfway through the book, I texted wintery night and I said, this is something along the lines of, okay, so they're making a great case for the existence of a mind or a soul. Certainly something immaterial beyond the brain, but the book is called the immortal mind.

And I have, you know, how do, how do we know that this soul or this, this, you know, this mind isn't just existent until maybe a short time after death. What makes them think it's immortal? And then I turned the page and, you know, and, and you asked the exact same question and then go on to address that, which was really fun. But, uh, so can you talk about what reasons there are to think that the mind is immortal? It's, it's a great question and a very important question, one that we've thought about a lot.

And of course, many people have thought about it a lot over, over the, over the centuries near death experiences, I think clearly show that it is possible for the soul to, uh, exist after the brain has stopped working. The issue is then it does, does the soul continue to exist and what happens after death? It's useful to look at this from a perspective of a scholastic philosopher named Thomas Aquinas, who addressed these general issues. He noted that there were certain powers of the soul, particularly intellect and will that we've been talking about today actually, that are not material things.

That is that they are, they are spiritual things. They're not material things. He asked, well, what does it mean to die? When we say that, that, that an animal or a plant dies, when we talk about death, we really mean disintegration.

That is that if your dog dies, um, his body doesn't cease to exist in the sense of the atoms in the dog's body don't disappear. It just that the organization of the body breaks down and the body decays. So it's death is really the, the loss of form or the loss of organization of a material thing.

Um, and if you have a, a soul that is completely material, that is, that is integrated completely with a matter of the body, one could see that when the body breaks down, the soul disappears because there's no longer any matter for it to, to organize. However, if you have a soul that has an immaterial spiritual component, that spiritual part can't break down. It can't disintegrate because it's not made of parts.

It can't decay. So, um, a good analog to, to that way of seeing, of seeing it is to think of the, the number eight, um, and think of the number eight in two different instantiations. One would be the number eight as just a number written on a piece of paper with ink.

And you could make that number eight die. In a sense, you could tear it up into little pieces and throw it away, or you could put it in a fireplace and reduce it to ash. And that iteration of number eight is gone.

That would be a soul that could die. However, the number eight itself as a concept can't die. The immaterial number eight, that is that you're not going to hear a mathematics department someday announce, we're sorry to announce that last night, number eight passed away.

So now we have to count from seven to nine. So the, the, the immaterial might say spiritual number eight can't die the same way of physical one can. And what Aquinas argued and what we think neuroscience has shown us is that there is a spiritual aspect of the human soul, which means it's not the kind of thing that can die.

The body can die and, and disintegrate, but the soul can get a new body, but the soul doesn't die because it can't die. It's not the kind of thing that can break up into pieces. Yeah.

As I was reading your example about math in the book, you know, if a student maybe hates math and they're, they're doing their homework and they get all mad and they tear it up and they throw it in the fireplace. Like you just said, they're like, I'll take care of math. It's still there.

It's still there. You didn't take care of calculus. That's right.

That's right. I'm going to ask you where we can find your work online and anything that either of you might want to share with our listeners. But first, I do want to take a moment just to say that I have absolutely loved this book.

My mom was visiting me recently and she was a bit bored because I was busy. So I said, here, read this. And I handed her your book.

And within the day, she, she was halfway through it and she had to leave town the next day. And she's like, okay, I'm going to order this book right now. I have to read the rest of it.

First, she asked me if she could take it with her. And I said, no, I need that interviewing the author soon. And she's like, okay, well, I'm going to buy it.

I'm going to go. Where can I buy it? It's on Amazon. Right.

And I said, well, it's available for pre-order. She's like, no, I need it now. I need to finish it now.

And so, you know, she, she's not exactly an avid reader. She's a, she's in finance and very intelligent, but I'm not a huge reader and she just could not put this book down. Same, several people.

There's like a list, a very long list of people who have told me they either want to borrow it or order it. Anyway, I, my point is the, the work itself is absolutely fascinating. Dr. Eggner, I'm, I just love what you have done with your life and your work and all of this incredible thinking.

And Denise, my goodness, to make such complex and complicated ideas into such an accessible, fun, easy read is really a remarkable feat. So thank you both so much for your work on this. I'm absolutely certain this is going to be a huge seller.

We are honored to have been able to be a part of getting an early look at it and we'll continue to promote it. So in addition to our listeners going out and getting the immortal mind, ordering it right away, I think it's available June 3rd. I believe it'll, you can pre-order it now though.

Where else can we find your work? What would you like our listeners to know about? I'm the editor of Mind Matters News, where Mike is one of our favorite writers. Mind Matters News is mindmatters.ai and we cover these topics regularly along with a whole bunch of other topics about, oh, computers, AI, prehistoric human beings, theories in philosophy that relate to the human mind. It's quite a grab bag.

You'll find something of interest to everybody. And that's all free. You just have to keep checking back.

Oh, animal mind. We do a lot on animal mind as well. All right, Dr. Eichner, did you have anything additional to that or? Yeah, I just wanted to say, first of all, thank you so much for having us and for your kind words.

What I think motivated Denise and I to write this book is our conviction that materialism has been taken for granted in neuroscience and that it is largely wrong. It's largely bad science. In fact, it's some of its junk science and that the spiritual nature of the human soul is true.

And it's true from a philosophical perspective, from a theological perspective, from a biblical perspective and from a scientific perspective. And we really think that the science on this matter has largely been misrepresented. And the purpose of our book is to just tell the truth.

And we hope that this will help people to understand that what they've learned in their spiritual life about their soul is actually the scientific truth. That's a good place for us to stop for today. So once again, we urge everyone to take a look at the book.

And if you pre-order it, you get a free digital copy of an earlier collection of essays on philosophy of mind as well. So it's a really great deal. There are plenty of topics that are covered in it that we didn't talk about here and many more details for the ones that we did talk about.

So listeners, we just want to remind you, if you enjoyed this episode, please consider helping us out by sharing this podcast with your friends, writing us a five star review on Apple or Spotify, subscribing and commenting on YouTube and hitting the like button wherever you listen to the podcast. We appreciate you taking the time to listen and we'll see you again in the next one.