Last Wednesday, COSM 2025 featured a most interesting panel discussion between neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and historian of scinece historian of science Michael Shermer.
The question was, “Does neuroscience show that we are mere biological machines?”
On Monday, we looked at Egnor’s view that the evidence that the mind is not merely the brain is quite strong. Shermer, executive director of the Skeptics Society, takes the opposite view.
Yes, we are machines
He summarized his views in an opening statement which he also posted at X:
Humans are biological machines that evolved from previous biological machines going back billions of years. Mind, sentience, consciousness, intelligence, and free will evolved gradually, elements of which can be found in our ancestors and related contemporaries such as non-human great apes and cetaceans. There is no reason to believe that at some point in the evolutionary process an Intelligent Designer or Deity intervened to direct natural selection in a particular direction. Humans no more have souls than do chimps, gorillas, whales, or my Chocolate lab Hitch.
Shermer’s defense of his position did not seem to follow a clearly defined track, though he certainly provided interesting observations. For example, he credits the influence of genome mapper Francis Crick (1916–2004) with making the study of consciousness respectable in science.
Crick’s book on the subject, The Astonishing Hypothesis: (Scribner 1994), which treats consciousness as a physical function of the human brain, may have encouraged dozens of researchers.
Shermer, adopting a Bayesian approach — giving a proposition a probability of being true between 1 and 99 — offered a 1 for Egnor’s view, though he allowed that the right arguments might nudge him up to a 10.
A key element of his critique is that the soul is not really a good explanation for our human reality, in the sense that quantum physicist David Deutsch offers in The Beginning of Infinity (2012). Drawing on that, Shermer says,
Good explanations are testable, they’re make predictions. You can try to gather evidence in favor of them, you can debate them and so on. But more than that, good explanations are accounts of how things work…
So when we use words like mind and soul, these are just linguistic placeholders. We’re just using words to talk about something we have to communicate. But those aren’t very good explanations.
“I have some questions.”
He then asked a number of questions, mixed with observations, about what Egnor means by the soul:
I have some questions. Where does this soul float off to? I mean, okay, Michael, you said the soul is everything a person does when they’re alive. Yeah, that’s right. Alright, so what are we talking about here? You said it’s not a ghost. Well, yeah, actually that is what you’re proposing. It’s a copy of the pattern of information. That’s all my memories, my personality, my temperament, me, and somehow this just kind of floats off into the ether. Maybe it’s a quantum field or something. A lot of the quantum physicist people, the woo people think this is what happens…
But where do you go? My answer is you don’t go anywhere. Where were you before you were born?
Also, drawing on reports of near-death experiences,
How does an immaterial soul register light and sound or move the muscles of the vocal tract, respond to psychoactive drugs. If a soul can animate the body without a brain, what do you need the brain for in the first place? If we can reason and have free will without a brain, then why bother with the brain and body? Why not just be a soul?
But the soul is not local
This is a raft of good questions. Most of them could not be addressed in a meeting that was already battling the clock, with questioners forming a line. Here’s one general comment Egnor made in response, stressing the non-locality of the soul:
There’s no from [for the soul], 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 a materialist, you try to cram the evidence into this artificial box.
But a very good analogy to what’s happening in neuroscience is what happened in physics from the 19th to the 20th century. The original Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom was that it was a little solar system. The nucleus, the proton was the sun and the electrons were the planets going around it. And it wasn’t until Schrodinger and Heisenberg that we came to understand that these particles are not little marbles circling things. They’re wave functions, they’re concepts. Quantum mechanics is a much stranger thing than any of the neuroscience that I just talked about, much stranger. And if you reject the neuroscience I just talked about, then you have to reject quantum mechanics, which is a much stranger world and is the pinnacle of modern science.
I caught up with Egnor later and asked him how he would address the other questions. I’ve written to Shermer to ask a question too. Here’s what they said.
