Michael Egnor is a professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at state university of new york. he is also senior fellow at the center for natural and artificial intelligence. he composed an article for the website mind matters entitled “sean carroll: ‘how could an immaterial mind affect the body?’” dr. carroll is a theoretical physicist at johns hopkins university who is an atheist and supporter of the materialist philosophy. he denies the reality of libertarian free will and “believes that the immaterial mind does not exist and, if it did exist, could not affect the physical body.” Dr. egnor critiques his perspective in this article referring to aristotle’s “understanding of causes in nature.” i am including excerpts from dr. egnor’s article and suggest you review it yourself to come to a full understanding of the doctor’s critique (https://mindmatters.ai/2023/03/sean-carroll-how-could-an-immaterial-mind-affect-the-body).
“aristotle noted that when we think carefully about natural causes we see that there are four distinct ways that causes can lead to effects in nature.” they are material cause (the matter of which something is made), efficient cause (the material agent/person that gives rise to an effect), formal cause (“the design principle that underlies the effect,” including “the idea in the mind” of the person who designs the effect), and the final cause, “the ultimate goal, purpose, or final state of the causal chain.”
“in the aristotelian paradigm, a complete understanding of cause must entail an understanding of all four causes in nature. . . . the ultimate final cause, according to aristotle, is god. . . . aristotle was right - material and efficient causes alone are inadequate to understand nature because there are patterns (with meaning and structure, e.g. neural codes, evidence of design by intelligence) and purposes (both incorporated within specified information that can only come from a mind, as i have shared in my books and several blog posts) built into nature that we can’t deny. . . . the scientific description of quantum processes is entirely mathematical, which is a description of formal causes. . . . matter and individuation disappear at the quantum level. . . . quantum mechanics shows that formal (immaterial) causes are fundamental in nature.
“thus a mental (formal) state can cause a physical state in a way that is currently understood in physics. formal causation is ubiquitous in biology and carroll’s argument that we cannot have libertarian free will because the immaterial (formal) mind cannot affect matter is philosophically vacuous. libertarian free will . . . is an example of the action of formal and final cause on brain matter - the intellect (formal cause) provides an understanding of the choices [within probabilities] and the will (final cause) provides a decision of how to act (action, a fifth component of information described by dr. werner gitt). . . . libertarian free will is real.”
dr. egnor’s comments serve as further strong support for dualist interaction between the immaterial mind of god and the mind of man through the material components of the synaptic networks of the human brain.