The senior pastor of our church will be presenting his new book on the baptism of the Holy Spirit at a revival beginning this Sunday evening. I will be reading it and sharing his comments as they relate to the focus of my books and blogs.
In the meantime, I will post comments on an article by Friedermann Pulvermuller, “How Neurons Make Meaning: Brain Mechanisms for Embodied and Abstract-Symbolic Semantics,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, September 2013, Vol. 17, No. 9.
This is a relatively recent work addressing neuronal semantics, a topic I also have addressed in my books and blogs. The point I have stressed is that neuronal synaptic networks transmit information within spike trains of action potentials that are linguistically encoded within the frequencies of the transmissions. I have offered that the human being learns to interpret the semantics, or meaning, of codes over a lifetime, and the codes are archived in memory. This interpretive function is by the immaterial mind in a dualist interactive relationship with the material brain. We shall see in this important article by Pulvermuller that no mention is made of the cognitive mind as I have described it, presenting instead an interpretation consistent with materialist reductionism, that cognition rests solely within the neuronal networks of the brain. As before, I invite the interested reader to obtain this article and derive your own conclusions.