in my last blog, reference was made to the “hard problem of consciousness.” i came across an article written by dr. steven r. cook that was presented on linkedin dated january 14, 2025. the author asks what consciousness is, including a focus on how the bible describes it. i am including several quotations from his thought-provoking article. neuroscience is working to define consciousness, based so often on a materialist perspective, reducing it to the workings of the material brain. i shall offer some thoughts after the quotations from cook’s article in my next blog post.
“from a biblical perspective, consciousness can be understood as the awareness [Italics added] of self, others, and the environment, along with the ability to think, reason, and make moral choices. it encompasses not only intellectual and sensory awareness but also the spiritual awareness that connects humans to god.
“being made in god’s image includes the capacity for rational thought, moral understanding, spiritual perception, and relational interaction.
“consciousness is also tied to the soul and spirit of humans. . . . the ‘breath of life’ (heb. neshama) is often understood to represent the spiritual component imparted by god, making humans distinct from other living creatures. the ‘living being’ (heb. nephesh) signifies a soul with self-awareness, emotions and intellect.
“the origin of consciousness lies in god’s creative act. it was directly imparted to humans when god breathed life into adam. . . . humans possess a spiritual dimension that allows for higher reasoning, creativity, moral decision-making, and communion with god.
“. . . through regeneration, believers are given a renewed spiritual consciousness, enabling them to understand and receive spiritual truths (1 Cor 2:14-16) and have fellowship with god (john 14:26).
“conclusion
“consciousness . . . encompasses intellectual, moral, relational, and spiritual awareness, distinguishing humans from all other creatures. its origin is found in god’s creative act, where he imparted life and a soul to humanity. though marred by sin, consciousness can be restored and elevated through a relationship with god and a renewed mind.”
in my next blog i shall offer a critique of cook’s comments, my thoughts stemming from my research and writings over more than 25 years. in the meantime, i suggest the reader give prayerful thought to cook’s comments and the cited scriptures. he has certainly stimulated my thoughts and enabled me to add to the perspectives i have reached over this lengthy time of study.
i conclude my blogs addressing excerpts from cregg’s book with this lengthy one. It is my hope AND PRAYER THAT THESE BLOGS HAVE ENCOURAGED YOU IN UNDERSTANDING BOTH THE BENEFITS AND DEFICIENCIES OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AS APPLIED TO COMPUTERS. IT IS A REMARKABLE ADVANCEMENT OF TECHNOLOGY, BUT THESE BLOGS POINT OUT HOW THE IMMATERIAL HUMAN MIND SIMPLY CANNOT BE PROGRAMMED INTO A COMPUTER, NOT EVEN A QUANTUM COMPUTER ON A MORE THAN LIKELY BASIS. aRTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CANNOT EQUATE WITH THE CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE OF THE HUMAN MIND, CREATED IN THE IMAGE OF THE MIND OF gOD! THIS BLOG POST IS TAKEN FROM PAGES 296-297 IN CREGG’S OUTSTANDING, THOUGHT PROVOKING BOOK.
“REMEMBER HOW I SHOWED yOU LAST NIGHT THAT RODIN ULTIMATELY THINKS THE WAY IT’S BEEN PROGRAMMED TO?
“YEAH.
“THIS DEMONSTRATION GETS TO THE HEART OF WHY WE CAN NEVER PROGRam a machine to be autonomously creative. it’s because true autonomy is an attribute of an agent who possesses genuine free will. and as far as we know, that kind of agent is only known to exist in a metaphysical sense - it cannot be empirically detected or, for that matter, doesn’t even seem logically coherent. but we all know from our own subjective experiences that human beings are such agents.
“there is no biological equivalent of a prewritten software program that is stored in, and runs on, the wetware of our brains. no neuroscientist alive can tell you what comprises, or is responsible for, the existence of our conscious selves.
“every computer programmer knows you can’t reproduce what you cannot define,” sam continued. “oh sure, we’ve done an amazing job of simulating aspects of intelligence. as you know, we’ve gotten to the point of fooling the vast majority of people who converse with our machines into believing they’re talking to another person. but in the end, our software doesn’t intuitively understand what a word is or how to use it like our brains do because we don’t have a clue how it’s done.
“this is part of the hard problem of consciousness; the subjective reality we all experience. it’s hard because no one has any idea how our minds grasp the meanings of things or how experiences invoke emotions that inspire us to write poetry or paint masterpieces. those emotions are essential to give depth and perspective to our experience.
. . . “we take all of that for granted in our daily lives. but to software developers who think that they can duplicate it in a computer, it’s what i’ve known all along - it’s impossible to achieve because we simply have no way to digitally reproduce an immaterial entity like consciousness.
“whatever we call AI, we will never be able to artificially recreate human consciousness unless we can do two things. first, we must write a practical, non-circular definition of it. and second, we must understand how our physical brains interact with it [the focus of my over 25 years of apologetics research presented in my books and blog posts]. until then, the best we’ll ever be able to come up with are just chinese rooms that is, elaborate pattern recognition algorithms.”
. . . “then sam broke the silence. ‘i’m pretty sure that right before he died, carl would have anticipated the results of our little experiment here. his test the day he crashed rodin along with something he wrote to me tells me he had dramatically changed his entire outlook on not just that, but on life in general.”
again, i thank jeff cregg for giving me permission to present parts of his thought provoking book in these several blogs. if they have stimulated critical thoughts, do obtain and read it. it is applicable in our time, identifying the reality of dualist interactionism between the immaterial mind of man, and of god, and the material components of the synaptic networks of the human brain. this creation by god enables us to commune bidirectionally with the holy spirit in our time.
on page 43 of cregg’s book the programmer of rodin “widely expected [it] to be capable of independent thought and reasoning. . . . he had every confidence that his software engineers could instill in it a philosophical approach to its deliberations. he even went so far as to predict that it would develop genuine emotions. but most of all, Carl redmond sincerely believed rodin would develop autonomous creativity. . . . would he have understood that such an achievement had fundamentally and irrevocably changed the meaning of humanity?”
expressed in this excerpt is a belief seen among people today that such a computer with artificial intelligence could be “the ultimate man-made creation. it would, according to carl, usher in the inevitable next step in human evolution. all it lacked was a robotic body.”
both secular materialism and darwinian macroevolution are represented by these comments (concepts that are endorsed today by many working in the neurosciences). in my next blog post addressing the original perspectives of the creators of rodin as identified above, we shall see how the surviving creator, sam weissman, and roland caymus came to understand that the wetware of the human brain relates to the human mind, a realization guided by what the computer’s programmed software was unable to do. my writings have addressed the “how” of this relationship extensively - dualist interactionism.
sam weissman is another major character in this book who early in the story expressed skepticism about the concept of making a conscious machine. He felt it absurd to do so since “it’s a machine, albeit a really complex one; but in the end, it’s just a machine that executes code written by humans. . . . was it really necessary to define consciousness in order to recreate it? . . . . the consensus of the best and brightest minds in the field . . . was that consciousness is, like in the human brain, a derived attribute of the machine and its software. it’s an emergent property of its processing. in other words, if its designers were successful in mimicking enough of the neural activity of the human brain in their hardware and software, then that would be sufficient for consciousness to arise spontaneously.”
so we see how materialist reductionism had to be confronted by the building and encoding of rodin! we will address the role of autonomy in the next blog post.
carl redmond is a main character in this novel, the inventor of rodin, the computer equipped with artificial intelligence. “his vision of the future where the intellect of machines would at first eclipse, and then easily surpass, that of humans was one of unimaginable possibilities. it was a world where hunger, disease, poverty, and even death would be virtually eradicated. carl truly believed there would be no problem his system could not solve, and no dream, human or otherwise, that couldn’t be realized. . . . carl envisioned that within his lifetime, our biological bodies would be completely replaced with cybernetic parts that could last almost forever. . . . his adherence to the strict precepts of materialism convinced him consciousness was something that could be artificially reproduced inside a computer. he considered it to be either purely an illusion our brains labor under or an immaterial manifestation of the electro-neural activities.”
cregg describes the precepts of materialism very well, precepts that are yet prevalent within neuroscience and neuropsychology. as we proceed we shall learn the deficiency of rodin, the machine, described by the author.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who has experience with AI computers. it is a book which, in the final analysis, its author identifies what a computer cannot do employing artificial intelligence.
on p. 30 one of the main characters, Laura, states, “and all this - this, artificial intelligence nonsense. i don’t know how he let steve convince him he could somehow copy his soul into a computer!”
in my books and blogs i have defined with documentation the soul as having attributes of mind, will and emotion, and also conscience. Materialists maintain that the human mind is an emergent property that reduces to the material brain, and nothing else. the book’s characters designed a computer named rodin, programming it so it would think like a human - be creative, autonomous, introspective and have self-awareness. in excerpts to come i shall elaborate on how the author addresses this point, acknowledging the role of intelligent design in the formulation of the human soul.
over the next several days i shall be posting blogs that address what the author of a stimulating book shares about what artificial intelligence cannot do. one of my last blogs considered what the brain cannot do, and the theme of this book aligns with that blog.
the book, an emergent truth, Texas sisters press, 2022 is authored by jeffery c. cregg. though a fictional story it is written by a retired software developer and follower of the intelligent design movement, as am i. cregg’s theme is consistent with the concept of dualist interaction that i have studied for almost 25 years, discussed in my two books and blog posts. can an artificial intelligence computer express will, creativity and self consciousness, attributes of the mind of man created in the image of the mind of god? stand by and see how cregg addresses this issue in his work. i thank him for permission to cite excerpts from his book.
In my two books and many blog posts i have shared what i trust is compelling evidence acquired over a span of more than 20 years of my research for dualist interaction between the immaterial mind of man (and of god) and the material components of the human brain, the neural synaptic networks. i am sharing an article composed by Dr. Michael Egnor that was featured in “mind matters.” i have chosen to post the entire article which provides strong confirmation of dualist interaction by Dr. Egnor, a neurosurgeon, who cites the pioneering findings of another neurosurgeon, Dr. Wilder Penfield. the article provides support for my findings:
“What, Exactly, Does Your Brain Do? What Can’t It Do?”
A surprising result of pioneering neurosurgery was the discovery that some mental processes could be stimulated in the brain but others could not be
Mind Matters December 16, 2024
Your organs have jobs to do. Your heart pumps blood. Your lungs exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide. Your kidneys make urine. Your skin keeps you inside and your environment outside.
So what does your brain do? We naturally answer: “It makes me think, use my mind, stuff like that.” But that’s not exactly true. The brain does have a job, of course, but it’s a more limited job than producing all that is in our mind. Neuroscience tells a very different story about what the brain does. And it’s a fascinating one.
Brain surgery while the patient is awake
Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield (1891‒1976), who pioneered epilepsy surgery at the Montreal Neurological Institute in the mid-20th century, asked this very question: What does the brain do? He explored the question during eleven hundred “awake” brain operations over four decades. He needed patients to be awake so that he could communicate with them, to be sure that he was not damaging vital tissue while removing the tissue that was prone to epileptic seizures.
Penfield could do brain surgery while a patient is awake because the brain has no pain sensors. A local anesthetic (similar to the novocaine used in dentists’ offices) ensures that there is no pain in the scalp either during the surgery. Neurosurgeons still do this type of surgery today.
While epilepsy patients were awake and their responses to brain stimulation could be observed, he mapped their brains using electrical probes to find and remove seizure foci but also to determine which parts of the patients’ brains did what. He could answer questions like “What part of the brain makes us move our muscles?”, “What part of the brain enables us to see?” and “What part of the brain enables us to have memories and emotions?”
What fascinated Penfield is not so much what he found—i.e., which parts of the brain caused movement, perception, memory and emotions—but what he didn’t find.
What Penfield could not find in the brain
Penfield could find no part of the brain that, when stimulated, caused patients to think abstractly—to reason, think logically, do mathematics or philosophy or exercise free will.
He noticed the same thing about epileptic seizures as about stimulation during surgery. Patients who were having seizures did all sorts of things—they jerked their muscles, they saw flashes of light or had unusual sensations on their skin. They even occasionally had specific memories and emotions. Then they fell unconscious.
But patients never had intellectual seizures. That is, they never had seizures that caused them to reason, think logically, or do mathematics or philosophy. There are no “calculus seizures” that cause them to uncontrollably take first derivatives. There are no philosophical seizures that cause them to uncontrollably contemplate Plato’s Republic.
Penfield asked the obvious question: why did brain stimulation only cause certain mental operations, like movement, perception, memory and emotion to happen, but not other ones, like abstract thought and free will? As Denyse O’Leary and I discuss in The Immortal Mind (Worthy June 3, 2025), he eventually came to the obvious conclusion: he couldn’t evoke abstract thought or free will by stimulating the brain because abstract thought and free will don’t come from the brain.
Penfield started out as a materialist, like most scientists do, but, as he learned more about the mind and the brain he became a dualist. He concluded in his book Mystery of the Mind (1975) that the mind is something separate from the brain, and that there are aspects of the mind that don’t come from the brain but are spiritual in nature. As he put it, “The mind must be viewed as a basic element in itself . . . That is to say, it has a continuing existence.” (p. xxi.)
Many other neuroscientists have followed in Penfield’s footsteps and their research points to the very same conclusion. That said, within the neuroscience community materialism reigns so it is unfashionable (and dangerous to a scientists’ career) to admit the truth about dualism. Neuroscience shows us that the brain is an organ, like the heart or the liver, that has specific jobs to do. The brain orchestrates our bodily processes (sometimes called vegetative functions)—our heart rate, our blood pressure, our hormone levels and so on. The brain is the source of our ability to move, to perceive, to remember and to have emotions.
But the brain is not the source of our intellect or our free will
Neuroscience shows that intellect and free will are spiritual powers of the human soul. Our spiritual powers depend on the brain and body for our normal functioning—e.g., we can’t reason well after being hit on the head with a baseball bat and we don’t always exercise our free will wisely when we’ve had too much alcohol. The brain, that is, is necessary and sufficient for our embodied powers—vegetative, locomotor, perceptual, mnemonic, and emotional—and the brain is necessary but not sufficient for the normal exercise of our intellect and our free will.
The human soul is an embodied spirit, a composite of bodily and spiritual powers. We are created by God with some abilities that are physical and some abilities that are not strictly physical—i.e., that are spiritual, created in His Image. This insight is actually quite ancient. It was an insight of many great classical philosophers and theologians, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and countless others. What is remarkable in our day is that this profound and true understanding of the human soul—our spiritual soul—is now being confirmed by modern neuroscience.