My research and writing have emphasized the reality in our time of the indwelling by the Holy Spirit in people who are in repentance and desire to live Christ-like by the Counsel of the Holy Spirit. It is a reality that was made possible by the sin sacrifice of Jesus Christ by God’s grace and boundless love for Man with whom He wants a dualist interactive relationship restored, lost at the Fall of Adam. It has been my goal to identify a compelling explanation for the “how” of this relationship drawing upon current neuroscience in concordance with Scripture.

I recommend the ministry of Joyce Meyer who bases her teaching points on Scripture and a personal experience with the indwelling Holy Spirit. Though she does not explain the “how” of the interaction, she speaks clearly how Counsel by the Holy Spirit is manifested in a person’s life.

I have referred to my blog, “Waves in Our Brains,” Part Two, several times since it was posted on October 3, 2020. I invite your review of it to refresh your understanding of dualist interactionism between the immaterial mind and the material synaptic networks of the human brain. In that blog I referenced an important and exciting study that provides compelling confirmation of this interaction. I am copying the work of the authors of that study here that I summarized in that blog. It will serve as the basis for my subsequent blogs that will expand on their findings. My research continues investigating how the mind exerts an energy expressed as wave forms that transmit information through synaptic networks of the brain within linguistic neural codes.

THE NEURAL CODES OF OVERT AND COVERT SPEECH

THROUGH PART TWO OF THIS BLOG REFERENCES HAVE BEEN MADE TO COGNITION, ATTENTION AND INTENT, AND WE HAVE SEEN THAT WAVES ARE TRANSMITTED INTRINSICALLY THROUGH NEURAL NETWORKS TO BRING ABOUT SPECIFIC FUNCTIONS SUCH AS TO MOVE AN EXTREMITY.  WHAT IS LEFT IS TO ADDRESS THE QUESTION RAISED ABOVE, HOW DOES THE IMMATERIAL MIND RELATE TO THESE PROCESSES IN A DUALIST INTERACTION?  DOES THE HUMAN MIND GENERATE WAVES EXTRINSIC TO THE BRAIN ITSELF THAT CAN ACT CAUSALLY ON IT?  STEPHANIE MARTIN AND EIGHT COWORKERS PUBLISHED AN ARTICLE IN FRONTIERS IN NEUROENGINEERING THAT ADDRESSES THIS QUESTION WITH EXCITING FINDINGS. (17)  I CONCLUDE THIS BLOG WITH A DISCUSSION OF THEIR FINDINGS.

THE MODEL USED WAS ECOG IN SEVEN EPILEPTIC PATIENTS WHO PERFORMED AN OUT LOUD AND SILENT READING TASK.  SUBJECTS READ SHORT STORIES THAT WERE PRESENTED TO THEM BOTH ALOUD AND SILENTLY.  A HIGH GAMMA (70-150 HZ) NEURAL DECODING MODEL WAS BUILT “TO RECONSTRUCT SPECTROTEMPORAL AUDITORY FEATURES OF SELF-GENERATED OVERT SPEECH.”  THE DECODING MODEL TRAINED FROM OVERT, SPOKEN SPEECH WAS USED TO DECODE THE NEURAL ACTIVITY OF COVERT, SILENTLY READ SPEECH (WHICH DID NOT INVOLVE AUDITORY SENSORY INPUT, ONLY INPUT FROM MENTATION!). SPECTROGRAMS WERE GENERATED IN CONTROLS AND IN SUBJECTS WHO USED OVERT AND COVERT SPEECH TO RECONSTRUCT NEURAL RESPONSES WITH A HIGH STATISTICAL ACCURACY.  EVIDENCE WAS PROVIDED THAT SHOWED THAT REPRESENTATIONS OF OVERT AND COVERT SPEECH COULD BE RECONSTRUCTED SHARING A NEURAL SUBSTRATE.  IN OTHER WORDS, OUT LOUD SPEECH AND READ TEXT COULD BE RECONSTRUCTED IN NEURAL NETWORKS MONITORED VIA ECOG.  NO WIRES CONNECTED THE TEST SUBJECTS TO THE CORTICAL MONITORS, INDICATING THAT THE CEREBRAL NETWORK RESPONDED TO WAVES GENERATED BY THE MIND OF THE TEST SUBJECTS.  THE HIGH GAMMA BAND RELIABLY TRACKED NEURONAL ACTIVITY AND CORRELATED WITH THE SPIKE RATE OF THE UNDERLYING NEURAL POPULATION.  THE KEY TEST OF RECONSTRUCTIVE ACCURACY, ACCORDING TO THE AUTHORS, WAS THE ABILITY TO USE THE RECONSTRUCTION TO IDENTIFY SPECIFIC SPEECH UTTERANCES.  THIS WAS POSSIBLE ESPECIALLY FOR OVERT SPEECH.

My cataract procedures have gone extremely well. It is wonderful to have such clear visual acuity back! Please stand by. I have resumed my reading research and already have about ten articles to discuss on my blog as my studies of dualist interactionism resume. Thank you.

For the month of February I have had to markedly reduce posts on my blog site since I am having cataract surgery. I will be able to resume my posts in the early part of March. Thanks to all who are following my posts. I invite you to stand by for when I again share what I learn going forward in my research into dualist interactionism between the Mind of God and the mind of Man by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Complex specified information refers to patterns embodied in physical structures. But if the designer is not a physical structure, the designer, though capable of bringing about complex specified information, would not in turn exhibit complex specified information. . . . The designer responsible for the complex specified information in nature is, as best we can tell, not an event, object, or structure. . . . Who is the designer? . . . Design inferred from complex specified information in nature is compatible with Christian belief but does not entail it. This is as it should be. Nature is silent about the revelation of Christ in Scripture. At the same time, nothing prevents nature from independently testifying to the God revealed in the Scripture. . . . An information-theoretic design argument therefore removes us from the paths of atheistic materialism that lead away from God and takes us a modest distance toward an intelligence behind nature who, from the vantage of Christian theology, can be no other than God. In this way, information theory (ap)proves the existence of God. (W. A. Dembski)

. . . when natural systems exhibit intelligence by producing complex specified information, they have in fact not created it from scratch but merely shuffled around existing information. Nature is a matrix for expressing already existing information [e.g. acorn to an oak tree]. . . . the ultimate source of that information resides in an intelligence not reducible to nature. (W. A. Dembski)

The principal characteristic of intelligent agency is choice. “Intelligent” derives from two Latin words, the preposition inter, meaning between, and the verb lego, meaning to choose or select. Thus, according to its etymology, intelligence consists in choosing between. For an intelligent agent to act is therefore to choose from a range of competing possibilities. . . . Actualizing one among several competing possibilities, ruling out the rest, and specifying the one that was actualized encapsulates how we recognize intelligent agency, or equivalently, how we detect design, (W. A. Dembski)

Complex specified information . . . requires a dual ruling-out of possibilities, one by an intelligent agent who identifies a pattern [such as a linguistic neural code with structure, meaning and purpose] and one by physical processes that induce an event [such as spike trains of action potentials that transmit neural codes through neural synaptic networks to bring about specific actions]. Provided these coincide, the probability is small, and the pattern can be identified independently of the event, we say the event exhibits complex specified information. Complex specified information reliably detects design. (W. A.Dembski)

Ordinarily when we think of information, we think of meaningful statements that we communicate to each other. The vehicle of communication here is language, and the information is the meaning communicated by some utterance or linguistic expression. . . . For information to be generated . . . means identifying one possibility and ruling out the rest. The more possibilities get ruled out and, correspondingly, the more improbable the possibility that actually obtains, the greater the information generated. . . . To generate information is therefore to rule out possibilities. (w. A. Dembski)

Dr. Dembski points out in his article that the relation between matter and information can become controversial when they are mixed with design and nature. “. . . designing intelligences are not the only causal powers capable of structuring matter and thereby conferring information. Nature, too, is capable of structuring matter and conferring information. . . . Nature and design therefore represent two different ways of producing information. Nature produces information, as it were, internally. . . . design [consists] in capacities external to an object for bringing about its form with outside help. . . . nature [consists] in capacities internal to an object for transforming itself without outside help. . . . information is conferred on an object from outside the object and that the material constituting the object, apart from that outside information, does not have the power to assume the form it does. . . . Nature produces information not by imposing it from outside but by growing or developing informationally rich structures from within. . . . an information-theoretic design argument contends that the art of building certain information-rich structures in nature (like biological organisms) is not in the physical stuff that constitutes these structures but requires a designer.” (W. A. Dembski)