Recently, Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne was holding forth on split brains, arguing that “perhaps the notion of consciousness and of will are things that merely report to us after the fact the deterministic actions of our brain, and are not in any way part of a causal chain.”
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, who knows some details about the brain, responds:
Split surgery, called commissurotomy by neurosurgeons, is an operation that treats certain kinds of seizures. I’ve performed that operation myself and have taken care of the patients before and after the surgery. Beforehand, they are often incapacitated—they may have 20 or 30 seizures per day. In the surgery, we cut a portion (occasionally all) of the corpus callosum, which is a bundle of fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. This procedure prevents seizures from moving across hemispheres and usually greatly reduces their severity.
What is most remarkable about these patients—what spurred Roger Sperry to do his landmark Nobel Prize-winning research—is that after the surgery they are unaffected in everyday life, except for the diminished seizures. They are one person after the surgery, as they were before. They are basically the same, even after their brain has been functionally cut in half. They feel the same, act the same, and think the same, for all intents and purposes.
Michael Egnor, “Split brains are weird, but not the way you think” at Mind Matters News
So, Jerry? Jerry … ? Aw, never mind. He’ll be onto something else soon enough.
Meanwhile, if you enjoyed this piece, you may want to look at some of Dr. Egnor’s other recent articles on the immateriality of the mind:
How can mind interact with matter? Nature itself provides examples of how the immaterial interacts with the material.
Four researchers whose work sheds light on the reality of the mind The brain can be cut in half, but the intellect and will cannot, says Michael Egnor. The intellect and will are metaphysically simple
An Oxford neuroscientist explains Mind vs. Brain. Sharon Dirckx explains the fallacies of materialism and the logical and scientific strengths of dualism
and
What is abstract thought? A reply to Dr. Ali. Abstract thoughts cannot arise from material things because a cause cannot give what it does not have.
As to this comment from Dr. Egnor in his article,
Hemispherectomies add further weight to this conclusion:
If a person were merely the brain, as reductive materialists hold, then if half of a brain were removed then a ‘person’ should only be ‘half the person’, or at least somewhat less of a ‘person’, as they were before. But that is not the case, the ‘whole person’ stays intact even though the brain suffers severe impairment:
As should be needless to say, the preceding evidence from hemispherectomies is completely inexplicable for reductive materialists, whereas for Christian Theists who believe in an immaterial mind and in an immaterial soul, these findings, while surprising, are none-the-less, to be expected since we believe that the immaterial soul and immaterial mind live past the death of our material bodies.
The fact that ‘the whole’ can never be reduced to ‘the parts’, as is assumed within the reductive materialism of Darwinian evolution, plays out with Gödel’s incompleteness theorem as well it plays out with quantum mechanics:
Gödel’s incompleteness theorem can be stated succinctly as such: “Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle—something you have to assume but cannot prove.”
In fact Gödel stated, “For something to be a whole, it has to have an additional object, say, a soul or a mind.”
Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is not just some abstract mathematical proof but has now been extended to physics.
In the following article entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
And indeed this ‘insurmountable difficulty’ plays out in biology. We find that Darwinian mechanisms are simply at a complete loss to explain how the basic ‘form’ of any particular organism may take is achieved.
For instance, contrary to what Darwinists presupposed, DNA is not a ‘blueprint’ for an organism,
Indeed, DNA does not even control its own shape, much less does it control the final shape of a organism,
As Dr. Jonathan Wells states, “I now know as an embryologist,,,Tissues and cells, as they differentiate, modify their DNA to suit their needs. It’s the organism controlling the DNA, not the DNA controlling the organism.”
Nor is the basic form of any organism reducible to any of the other material particulars in biology that Darwinists may wish to invoke,
As the following article states “Thom concluded in his book Structural Stability and Morphogenesis that the process of development should be thought of as being controlled by an “algebraic structure outside space-time itself” (p. 119). Likewise, Robert Rosen argued that life can only be understood as a mathematical abstraction consisting of functional relationships, irreducible to mechanistic processes.”
Thus we are stuck with the question of, ‘Since the ultimate and final biological form that any organism may take is not reducible to any of the material particulars of that organism, just how does an organism achieve its final shape during embryological development?”
Fortunately, due to advances in science, specifically due to advances in quantum biology and in quantum information theory, we are not in the dark as to answering this question. We now know that an immense amount of ‘positional information’ and/or ‘quantum information’ is coming into the developing embryo ‘from the outside’ by some ‘non-material’ method.
At about the 41:00 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Wells, using a branch of mathematics called category theory, demonstrates that, during embryological development, information must somehow be added to the developing embryo, ‘from the outside’, by some ‘non-material’ method.
As mentioned previously, the amount of ‘positional information’ that is somehow coming into a developing embryo from the outside by some non-material method is immense. Vastly outstripping, by many orders of magnitude, the amount of sequential information that is contained within DNA itself. As Doug Axe states in the following video, “there are a quadrillion neural connections in the human brain, that’s vastly more neural connections in the human brain than there are bits (of information) in the human genome. So,,, there’s got to be something else going on that makes us what we are.”
And as the following article states, the information to build a human infant, atom by atom, would take up the equivalent of enough thumb drives to fill the Titanic, multiplied by 2,000.
As to how thermodynamics itself relates to this immense amount of positional information that is somehow coming into the developing embryo from the outside by some non-material method, work done on bacteria can give us a small glimpse into just how far out of thermodynamic equilibrium multicellular organisms actually are.
The information content that is found to be in a simple one cell bacterium, when working from the thermodynamic perspective, is found to be around 10 to the 12 bits,,,
,,, Which is the equivalent of about 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. ‘In comparison,,, the largest libraries in the world,, have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.”
Thus since Bacterial cells are about 10 times smaller than most plant and animal cells.
And since there are conservatively estimated to be around 30 trillion cells within the average human body,
Then that gives us a rough ballpark estimate of around 300 trillion times 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. Or about 300 trillion times the information content contained within the books of all the largest libraries in the world. Needless to say, that is a massive amount of positional information that is somehow coming into a developing embryo from the outside by some non-material method.
On top of all that, as far as quantum information theory itself is concerned, this immense amount of positional information that is somehow coming into the developing embryo from the outside, by some non-material method, in order to bring the developing embryo to be so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium, and in order to achieve its final ‘form’, is found to be quote-unquote, “a property of an observer who describes a system.”
In other words, some ‘outside observer’ who, (due to the quantum non-locality of the quantum coherence and/or entanglement of biological molecules), must necessarily exist outside the space-time of the universe, is now required in order for us to give an adequate causal account so that we may coherently explain how it is even possible for this immense amount of positional information to somehow be coming into the developing embryo ‘from the outside’, by some ‘non-material’ method.
As should be needless to say, Darwinian materialists have no clue who this ‘outside observer’, who must necessarily be outside space-time itself, could possible be. Whereas, on the other hand, Christians have predicted such a ‘beyond space and time’ observer to be intimately involved in embryological development for thousands of years,
Supplemental notes:
Well, according to j. coyne, he is an ‘illusion’.
An ‘illusion’ that according to rosenberg, changes ‘every morning’ (very lawful illusions indeed).
365 days/year=365 ‘different’ j. coynes/year…?
And positing a soul is weird.
Materialism has killed itself. It is an oppresive, ridiculous and self-defeating philosophy.
Seversky, those effects were not something that Dr. Egnor neglected to mention. His main point was that, in spite of those effects, “Split-brain surgery doesn’t split the mind. People after split brain surgery remain one person, with one consciousness, one intellect, and one will.”
That is what remains completely inexplicable for Darwinian materialists such as yourself.
I doubt that there are many simple enough to expect the personality of a split-brain patient to be split down the middle as well – whatever that might mean. But Egnor is misleading – either deliberately or through ignorance – if he is suggesting that there are no consequences. You yourself quoted the following:
I don’t think of loss of vision on one side or loss of hand use as inconsequential. Nor are they the only effects:
And anyone who doubts the physical basis of personality has only to look at the tragic cases of Alzheimer’s Disease in which the family and friends of a victim have to watch their personality gradually unravel before their eyes to the point where they are no longer recognized. Alzheimer’s, as I’m sure we all know, is associated with pphysical changes in the brain
Nor are the effects purely physical
There is a wealth of evidence which shows that personality – however that might defined – is correlated with the physical brain. Egnor is promoting his anti-evolution agenda here, not science.
Seversky, you, as usual, are missing the forest for the trees.
But anyways, research has now shown the unified attention of a person despite split hemispheres. As well, it is now found that visual and motion information is shared between the two hemispheres despite the hemispheres being split
So again, as Dr. Egnor stated, “Split-brain surgery doesn’t split the mind. People after split brain surgery remain one person, with one consciousness, one intellect, and one will.”
As to your claim that “anyone who doubts the physical basis of personality has only to look at the tragic cases of Alzheimer’s Disease”.
No one argues that detrimental changes to the brain will not negatively effect one’s personality. Just like no one argues drinking too much alcohol will not negatively effect one’s personality. It is a ‘DUH” fact for crying out loud. What is being hotly contested is the evidence free claim from materialists that consciousness, (and therefore ‘personhood’), is a product of the material brain. i.e. the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness.
Darwinian materialists simply have no clue how anything material could ever possibly generate consciousness (and therefore no clue how anything material could ever generate ‘personhood’):
Thus for you to pretend that there is a “wealth of evidence” that consciousness, and therefore ‘personhood’, is merely a product of the material brain is for you to completely overlook the elephant in the living room. Namely, you have no real clue how consciousness from a material brain is even possible in the first place!
Moreover, there is also another particularly large fly in your ointment for your claim that Alzheimer’s patients prove that personality is entirely dependent on the material brain.
You claimed Dr. Egnor was”promoting his anti-evolution agenda here, not science.”
FYI, Darwinism is NOT a science but is a religion!
No one, not Egnor, not anyone here is arguing that there are effects to brain damage, Alzheimer’s, and split brain. Nor is Egnor being misleadingly. He is arguing to the fact that coyne is wrong, and split brained people don’t become two in one when you do the surgery
I can cut all the cords to a violin or piano and it will affect whether or not it makes music but you still need a person a mind to use it
You might not appreciate that analogy but it also satisfies cause and effect as well
Egnor’s position is that we are one mind and body fused, a single being
It is the same mind and the same personality only now it’s affected by brain damage of some sort
He actually argues against Cartesian dualism
Bornagain77 @ 1
This is similar to the sophomoric challenge of “what good is half an eye?” It depends on a simplistic concept both of personality and brain. Suppose we think of the brain’s hemispheres as more-or-less complete brains in themselves, cross-linked through the three bundles of nerve fibers through which they exchange information. What we call personality can be envisaged as the sum of all the neurological activity which is spread throughout both hemispheres. Isolating both hemispheres or even removing one completely can result in temporary or even permanent deficits but it is clearly a gross oversimplification to imagine one half of the personality stored in one hemisphere and the other half being stored on the other side. As has been pointed out, one hemisphere appears to be capable of acting as a fully-functional brain.
None of this supports Cartesian dualism, though.
As I suggested above, the evidence from hemispherectomies is not completely inexplicable from a materialist perspective, whereas the concept of an immaterial mind or soul presents a challenge to Christian theism, namely that, if those two entities can survive and function completely independent of a physical body, why bother with that body at all, let alone one that has to sustain a hugely complex and metabolically expensive brain?
Bornagain77 @ 2
Evolution assumes that living things are contingent, influenced by the environment beyond themselves, so there is no conflict with Gödel’s theorem.
Is it? The amount of information needed to describe an acorn is far smaller than that needed to describe an oak tree, just as the information needed to describe, say, a blastocyst is far smaller than that needed to describe an adult human being. Where does all that information come from? What is “information” in that context?
Seversky, contrary to what you want to believe, it is completely inexplicable to atheistic materialism. Shoot consciousness itself is completely inexplicable to atheistic materialism. But alas, empirical evidence never troubled your blind faith in atheistic materialism before so I see no reason why you should let it trouble your blind faith in atheistic materialism now.
Bornagain77 @ 3
Yes, it probably would. But biology does not assume a human infant suddenly materializes fully-formed as if it had just emerged from a Star Trek transporter. It is a stage along a decades-long developmental process that began with a fertilized egg cell. If you provide the right environment, including the necessary physical resources, that cell will grow into an adult human being. If you want to describe, say, the water and nutrients that are required for that development as “information”, you can but it is not what I think of as information.
Bornagain77 @ 8
No, we don’t have a coherent, detailed explanation of how conscious experience emerges from the physical activities of the brain. But neither do you. Nobody does, yet.
But what materialist science has done is begin to reveal in increasing detail at least some of what the physical brain does. This points towards a materialist basis for consciousness> Christian theism has nothing to offer as an alternative in that respect.
I think anyone who has read a fair amount of what Egnor has written would come to the same conclusion as I have and I’m not sure Egnor would deny it.
Whatever Seversky. Tell you what Seversky, come up with a rigid falsification criteria for Darwinian evolution and then I will believe that it qualifies as a science rather than as a unfalsifiable religion:
Here are a few falsifications of Darwinian evolution that Darwinists simply refuse to ever accept as falsifications of their theory:
Verse: