A number of them were Nobel Laureates and their views were informed by their work
In a podcast discussion with Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor talks about how many famous neuroscientist became dualists—that is, they concluded that there is something about human beings that goes beyond matter—based on observations they made during their work. For example:
[Charles Scott] Sherrington (right), who was really the original pioneer of neuroscience, worked back near the beginning of the twentieth century was a dualist, as was Dr. Penfield, whom I will talk about momentarily.
Note: Charles Scott Sherrington (1857–1952) won the Nobel Prize, along with Edgar Adrian, for Physiology or Medicine in 1932. “His investigations of nearly every aspect of mammalian nervous function directly influenced the development of brain surgery and the treatment of such nervous disorders as paralysis and atrophy. Sherrington coined the term synapse to denote the point at which the nervous impulse is transmitted from one nerve cell to another.” – Britannica
If it is mind that we are searching the brain, then we are supposing the brain to be much more than a telephone-exchange. We are supposing it to be a telephone-exchange along with subscribers as well.”
CHARLES SCOTT SHERRINGTON, “MAN ON HIS NATURE” AT (P. 178), 1942.
Here are some of Michael Egnor’s thoughts on theories of consciousness:
Tam Hunt offers some ideas at Scientific American but his dismissal of objectivity is cause for concern. There is a better way. Hunt is right that the scientific study of consciousness using merely third-person objective data is flawed—it is the idiotic flaw of behaviorism—but the notion that “objective” data needs scare quotes opens the door to a deconstruction of our knowledge of the natural world that is every bit as idiotic and dangerous as the crude materialist objectification of consciousness.
Why eliminative materialism cannot be a good theory of the mind. Thinking that the mind is simply the brain, no more and no less, involves a hopeless contradiction. How can you have a proposition that the mind doesn’t exist? That means propositions don’t exist and that means, in turn, that you don’t have a proposition.
Why the mind cannot just emerge from the brain. The mind cannot emerge from the brain if the two have no qualities in common. In his continuing discussion with Robert J. Marks, Michael Egnor argues that emergence of the mind from the brain is not possible because no properties of the mind have any overlap with the properties of brain. Thought and matter are not similar in any way. Matter has extension in space and mass; thoughts have no extension in space and no mass.
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The mind’s reality is consistent with neuroscience. A neglected “dualist” theory offers some insights. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor thinks that the explanation of the relationship of the mind to the brain that best fits today’s neuroscience is that certain powers, particularly the intellect and will, are not generated by matter but are immaterial. However, other properties of the mind, like perception, memory and imagination are physical, generated by brain matter.