During the Wednesday, November 19, plated dinner at COSM 2025, Dr. Michael Egnor and historian of science Michael Shermer participated in a panel moderated by Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Jay W. Richards. Egnor and Shermer take opposite views on whether an immortal soul exists and whether human beings are machines.
Dr. Egnor, a Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook, an award-winning brain surgeon, and first author of The Immortal Mind (2025) told the audience that he began his career as an atheist. He was informed by his textbooks that consciousness is a product of the brain; it arises from the brain. What he started to witness in his neurosurgery practice did not support that view. Consciousness, at some points, did not seem to arise from the brain. For instance, as he illustrated with a slide, “Cindy” was a girl born without most of her brain. But she remained fully conscious. If consciousness comes wholly from the brain, how is this possible?
Reason, free will, and neuroscience
Egnor spent the rest of his presentation on the ways that reason and free will in particular seem independent of brain activity. “Reason and free will come through the brain, but not from it,” he said.
For example, epileptic seizures evoke movement, sensations, memories, and emotions but not reason or free will. He observed that a seizure has never been reported to evoke a rational thought or moral reasoning in anyone. He also noted a rare case of conjoined twins who share parts of a brain. They share some feelings and motor control yet each must learn the alphabet and mathematics for herself. He referenced the fascinating findings of Alice Cronin at MIT, who researched the capabilities of split-brain patients, in which reason, free will, and abstract thought do not appear to be split.
Finally, Egnor addressed near-death experiences, which he called “the most radical examples” of an immortal soul separate from our finite brain. First, he points out that these experiences are “very clear, coherent, (and) organized.” Second, these experiences include out-of-body experiences in which they see things occurring that are verifiably true. Third, “nobody has ever seen in the medical literature a living person at the other end of the tunnel.” In fact, sometimes the person they encounter is someone who has died so recently that the person having the NDE doesn’t know the person they are seeing is dead.
“So are we machines? No, we’re not machines,” Egnor concluded. “Machines are artifacts cobbled together. We are natural living creatures. We have both material and immaterial abilities, powers of our soul. And this is the best interpretation of neuroscience.”
Shermer: Humans are machines and there is no soul
Michael Shermer, science writer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, and author of Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational (2022), took the stage next, answering the question, “Are human beings machines?” in the affirmative. He told the audience that we are evolved biological machines and thus have no soul. “Where does the heart go after it stops beating? It doesn’t go anywhere. It just stops beating. That’s it. It’s over. And so that’s the same with the brain. It just stops functioning. That’s it. Lights out. They don’t come back on.”
According to Shermer, the supernatural and paranormal do not exist. There’s just the natural and then phenomena we can’t explain yet. He referenced David Deutsch’s Beginning of Infinity (2012), in which the author documents the process of science “figuring out good explanations for things that are better than the previous explanations.” A century ago, for instance, it was commonly understood that the body worked due to the élan vital, or “vital force.” Lacking an explanation for how the heart pumps blood, or the way the brain fires synapses, or details about the intricate workings of cells, commentators explained it by attributing the processes to a mysterious force. We have no need of that today, Shermer argued.
“Mind” and “soul” are just words, in his view, and not good explanations. What’s lacking, he argued, is an answer to the question, How? “Michael thinks we have evidence. Okay, we can talk about that, but it’s not a good explanation because how does this happen? Where does this soul float off to?”
“You are your body,” he said. “You can’t leave your body. There’s nowhere to go.” But he didn’t make an unyielding case for materialism: “I’m not dogmatically closed-minded on this,” he said. “I would like, like anybody else, for my consciousness to continue beyond my four score and whatever, however long we have. I would, of course. But is it true? I can’t base my judgment of what’s true by what I want to be true. I want to believe what’s actually true.”
Richards then led Egnor and Shermer in a panel discussion, allowing the two to explore their ideas in more depth, which led to this fascinating exchange:
Egnor: There is a mountain, massive mountain of evidence that reason and free will do not come from the brain. And if one sticks to a materialist understanding of the mind, you have to try to cram all of that evidence into a materialist framework.
Shermer: Well, where did they come from then?
Egnor: There’s no from, 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 as a materialist, you try to cram the evidence into this artificial box.
Philosopher of technology George Gilder, who was asked to participate, weighed in:
I’m just amazed at the depth of the materialist superstition of this belief. I mean, we all live in a world of ideas and consciousness and a sense of a transcendent consciousness. It’s an overwhelming experience of human beings attested through the millennia. But there’s a certain sect, a scientific sect that upholds this determinist materialism and nothing can shake their conviction. And I think it’s a superstition and it’s a kind of a derangement that incapacitates scientific exploration because anything that’s not explicable in determinist materialist terms, which means all of quantum theory and all conscious experience has to be reduced to this formulaic set of sterile dogmas. It’s a superstition.
And the audience was left with plenty to think about.
