A Neurosurgeon Argues That Mind Functions Are Immaterial. Badly.

Michael Egnor is a pediatric neurosurgeon who is also affiliated with the Discovery Institute, an organization which promotes the form of creationism that goes under the name of “Intelligent Design” (ID). I suspect most of the people reading this are already at least partially familiar with the history and origins of the ID movement. But for those who are not, a useful summary can be found on the website of the National Center for Science Education.

One of Egnor’s roles with the DI is to serve as a Senior Fellow for what is called the Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence. That sounds very impressive, until one discovers that the function of this Center seems to be largely limited to writing blog posts promoting religion.

Egnor recently posted a video in which he cites a number of pieces of neuroscientific research from which he concludes that the mind cannot be explained as having arisen purely thru physical processes occurring in the brain, but rather can only explained thru invoking “immaterial” causes. (Don’t feel obliged to watch the video; I will summarize the points that are relevant for this discussion.)

Now, to be clear, I do not claim to know how the mind is produced and whether or not immaterial processes are involved. These are questions that continue to be debated by scientists and philosophers alike, with no firm resolution in sight. However, this does not mean that bad arguments for either side are not made.

And, boy, does Egnor ever make some bad arguments.

I explained why I found his arguments unconvincing on the website Peaceful Science, (which, incidentally, is run by S. Joshua Swamidass, a devout Christian who accepts the theory of evolution but is decidedly not a “materialist.”) The discussion there ran its course, and that was that. Or so I figured.

A few weeks later, I received an email from someone whose name I recognized as belonging to a prominent member of the Discovery Institute, asking me to confirm that I was indeed the Dr. Faizal Ali who is on faculty at the University of Toronto. Through this I learned, to my surprise, that Egnor had written no fewer than three articles on the blog “Mind Matters” responding to my criticisms of his video. As is usually the case with creationist websites, this blog has no comments section, making a direct response to his claims impossible. So I will be providing that here, instead. Here is a link to the first of his articles:

Atheist Psychiatrist Misunderstands Evidence for an Immaterial Mind

OK, a relatively trivial matter first: Egnor begins his article by writing, “Dr. Faizal Ali, who describes himself as a ‘Militant atheist’ and an ‘Anti-Creationist Psychiatrist’….” Egnor would not necessarily know this, but those are not names I use to describe myself. They are chosen by the staff of Peaceful Science. I do not consider myself to be a “militant atheist”, and while “anti-creationist psychiatrist” is accurate enough, it’s not typically how I introduce myself when meeting someone for the first time.

On to more substantive issues: Egnor’s argument is based on some fascinating research by Adrian Owen of the University of Western Ontario. It’s probably best to read the description from Owen’s lab itself, which is very clearly written. But to summarize briefly: Owen’s work concerns people in a vegetative state i.e. they are awake, but appear unaware of their environment. They show reflex responses to some stimuli, but do not follow commands and are unable to communicate. The question arises: Are

such individuals actually unaware of what is going on around them? Or do they have some awareness but have suffered damage to parts of their brain such that they are not able to communicate their awareness?

Owen’s research attempts to answer this question by demonstrating specific patterns of brain activity on EEG or fMRI that can only be produced by a subject voluntarily following a command to imagine performing an activity, such as playing tennis or walking around their home. In some patients in a vegetative state, their brains show the same pattern of activation when asked to perform these mental tasks, indicating that they are aware of what is being said to them and able to follow the commands. This was further confirmed by asking them a series of biographical questions to which they could answer “Yes” or “No” by imagining either playing tennis or walking around their home.

Interesting stuff, right? Now, how does Michael Egnor interpret these findings?

I am not arguing that fMRI imaging of patients in PVS (persistent vegetative state) measures abstract thought. I am saying that the presence of fMRI activity that correlates with complex thought is a serious problem with the materialist theory of the mind.

After all, these PVS patients have massive permanent brain damage and have been medically diagnosed as having no mind at all. Yet many of them do have minds and are capable of thinking quite complex thoughts (understanding language, imagining complex activities such as walking across a room or playing tennis).

Here is one way of seeing it” If someone took a sledgehammer to your computer and pulverized it, yet it still worked fairly well, you would conclude that there was something rather strange about your computer that you had not previously considered.

The fMRI research shows that the materialist understanding of the mind-brain relationship—that the mind is simply the product of brain activity—is inadequate to explain why patients with massive diffuse brain damage who are in deep permanent coma can still have a rich mental life.

Which is just very poor reasoning. First of all, Egnor is playing a bit fast and loose with his definitions. The patients in Owen’s studies are not in a “deep permanent coma.”. A coma is usually defined as a state in which the person’s eyes are closed and he shows no response to the environment. A person in a vegetative state, on the other hand, will go thru sleep and wake cycles and have periods where their eyes are open. Also, Owen’s patients are not presumed to be in a permanent state. In fact, one of the goals of his research is to identify factors that can predict recovery from the vegetative state.

More to the point, however, is that Egnor’s argument is based on seriously flawed logic. Strictly speaking, Owen has not shown that his subjects have “a rich mental life”. What he has shown is the presence in some subjects of particular forms of brain activity, from which it is inferred that subjects have a degree of awareness of and responsiveness to spoken language. This is a reasonable conclusion, and I see no reason to disagree with it. That is not the point. The point, rather, is that we can only make this conclusion if we assume that this form of mental activity is directly correlated with brain activity.

Now, to be sure, this is not the equivalent of assuming that the mental activity is caused by brain activity. However, the claim that this mental activity can exist in the absence of brain activity is not supported in the least by these findings. If you can see where Egnor provides a sound argument for drawing that conclusion, please let me know, because I cannot find it.

Egnor’s analogy to a destroyed computer misses the mark. The brains of these patients have not been completely “pulverized”. Rather, they have suffered widespread damage such that they are not able to respond physically or verbally, in a deliberate way, to their environment. However, parts of their brains involved in the processing of verbal commands have been relatively spared and are still functioning. That is all that this study tells us. It is as if the connection from your computer’s CPU to its monitor is damaged such that its display is blank. It would appear to you as if the computer is completely non-functioning because it is not outputting any information nor responding to what you input. However, if you are able to measure the activity of the CPU, you will be able to determine that the information processing is still going on, it is just not being communicated to the outside world through the monitor. (This is probably a hopelessly simplistic and naive version of how computers actually work, but hopefully you get the point.)

There is another problem with Egnor’s argument: Most of the patients that Owen has studied do not show any response to verbal commands. Their brains have, in all likelihood, been too badly damaged to allow the patients to remain aware of their surroundings. Their minds, or a big portion thereof, are gone. If the mind exists independently of the brain, then how does Egnor explain this? Why doesn’t every patient in a vegetative state continue to show what Egnor considers to be evidence that the mind can survive in the absence of a brain to produce it?

That’s a question for which I have no great expectation he will provide a convincing answer.

(Part 2 of this article can be found here.)