Excerpts from a chapter at this URL, Ch.2.pdf (nccu.edu.tw), will be posted identifying the human mind as an immaterial substance. There is ignorance, confusion and contrasting perception concerning the true nature of the human mind. Can it be reduced to materialism? Is it an emergent property of the material brain with no causal effects on it? Is it only supervenient to the physicochemical functions of the brain? Does it really exist? How does it relate to will? I found this chapter informative, and a better understanding of dualist interaction and Descartes’s dualism will be derived from its reading.

“What is it for something to ‘have a mind,’ or ‘have mentality?’ When the ancients reflected on the contrast between us and mindless creatures, they sometimes described the difference in terms of having a ‘soul.’

“. . . many of us seem to have internalized a kind of mind-body dualism according to which, although each of us has a body that is fully material, we also have a mental or spiritual dimension that no ‘mere’ material things can have.

“Your soul defines your identity as an individual person; as long as it exists - and only so long as it exists - you exist. And it is our souls in which our mentality inheres; thoughts, consciousness, rational will, and other mental acts, functions, and capacities belong to souls, not to material bodies. Ultimately, to have a mind, or to be a creature with mentality, is to have a soul.” (For further reading the soul will be defined as mind, will, emotion and conscience.)

In Hebrews 9 we read that only once a year the high priest entered the inner room, the Most Holy Place, of the tabernacle and never without a blood sacrifice. In verses 8-9 it reads, “The Holy Spirit was showing by this that the way into the Most Holy Place had not yet been disclosed as long as the first tabernacle was still standing. This is an illustration for the present time, indicating that the gifts and sacrifices being offered were not able to clear the conscience of the worshipper.”

In the next section, “The Blood of Christ,” verses 11-12; 14-15 read, “When Christ came as high priest of the good things that are already here, he went through the greater and more perfect tabernacle that is not man-made, that is to say, not a part of this creation. He did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves; but he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, having obtained eternal redemption. . . . How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that led to death, so that we may serve the living God! For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance - now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant.”

In Hebrews 14-16 it reads, “. . . because by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy. The Holy Spirit also testifies to us about this. First he says: ‘This is the covenant I will make with them after that time, says the Lord. I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds.’” [And we are beginning to understand how this act of the Lord likely occurs by dualist interaction between His Mind and the mind of repentant mankind.]

In my second book, Section 2.3, I wrote what applies to these verses: “As Jesus was dying on the cross he was heard in the ninth hour to cry out in Aramaic, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ - which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ In the sixth hour darkness had come over the whole land and lasted until the ninth hour. The sun had stopped shining, and the curtain in the temple was torn in two as Jesus called out with a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’ Jesus then breathed his last and died. The tearing of the temple curtain signified that people again had direct access to the Spirit of God [by the atoning blood of Christ] . . . .”

“But the eternal plan of God was to be fulfilled by the physical and spiritual death of Jesus the Man while carrying the sins of mankind. Jesus was a sinless propitiating sacrifice for the redemption of Man from sin. . . . Jesus was in full obedience to the necessity for his death to fulfill his Father’s purpose. It accounts for his final words on the cross, ‘It is finished.’ With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” Now repentant mankind has direct access to the Most Holy Place!

The greatest negative in the universe is the cross, for with it God wiped out everything that was not of himself: the greatest positive in the universe is the Resurrection, for through it God brought into being all he will have in the new sphere. (Watchman Nee)

In Hebrews 7-10 Jesus Christ is identified as the high priest of the New Covenant, a priest in the order of Melchizedek. The author explains how the New Covenant came to be and its significance for the eternal salvation of repentant believers. I recommend this Scripture to you to obtain a much fuller understanding of the New Covenant given to mankind by the love and grace of God the Father through the atoning sin sacrifice of His Son, Jesus Christ, raised to life by the Spirit as our eternal priest. I have made reference to these verses in my second book, The Boundless Love of God: A Holy Spirit Story.

My next blogs will address the New Covenant in Hebrews by which the indwelling of the Holy Spirit has been restored to repentant believers, making a personal communion between the Holy Spirit and the human spirit and soul the reality desired by our Creator God since His creation of Man.

I introduce this series of blogs with a quotation from the third chapter of my book, Section 3:3 Restoration of Communion by God’s Grace:

“We look to Athanasius to confirm the reality of salvation offered to fallen mankind through Jesus Christ. Athanasius is regarded as the Father of Christian Orthodoxy, and he championed the ‘view that the Spirit of God is a fully divine person like the Father and the Son.’ Athanasius ‘focused on how the identity of Christ in the incarnation made it possible for him to accomplish salvation. Being both God and man he could represent both parties and reconcile them through redemption . . . . the logic of New Testament doctrine on salvation assumed a divine-human Christ.’ His biblical argument was that only God can save people from their sin. Jesus Christ saves people from their sin. Therefore, Jesus Christ is God incarnate. No human creature can save another creature; thus it was vital to salvation that Jesus Christ was the God-Man. God’s only begotten Son is our Savior and our redeemer by the shedding of his blood.”

I cite Article 20, Belgic Confession: The Justice and Mercy of God in Christ:

We believe that God - who is perfectly merciful and also very just - sent the Son to assume the nature in which the disobedience had been committed, in order to bear it in the punishment of sin by his most bitter passion and death. So God made known his justice by his Son, who was charged with our sin, and he poured out his goodness and mercy on us, who are guilty and worthy of damnation, giving to us his Son to die, by a most perfect love, and raising him to life for our justification, in order that by him we might have immortality and eternal life.

“Oh, how boundless is our Father’s love for us!”

Greg Koukl composed an article in 2013 entitled “How to Know Immaterial Things Exist?” In my latest blog posts I have shown that there is reality in the immaterial. This point is vital to an understanding and acceptance of dualist interactionism. We have seen that information is a reality in and of itself, distinct from matter and energy. It is immaterial and consists of structure, purpose and meaning. It also has a statistical component, all of these aspects having been addressed in earlier blogs as well as in my books.

Koukl comments on the content of the mind:

“When you gaze, as it were, on the content of your mind so that you know what it is you are thinking, is the thing that you’re aware of neurons, brain tissue, and electrical impulses? No. The things you’re aware of are your own thoughts. Maybe there are electrical impulses that are happening when you’re thinking, and it may be that they’re always accompanied with the thoughts, but that isn’t how you know your own thoughts. You can just tell by reflecting, if you will, upon your thoughts themselves that you are not gazing upon something that has chemical properties. Thoughts have propositional qualities. They are not governed by the laws of physics, yet your brain chemistry is. They must be something different. . . . Can we employ some of those same ways of knowing that we know immaterial things to other issues, like the existence of God or souls or morality? I think the answer to that is yes. There is no good reason to believe that we cannot have confident knowledge about facts of the immaterial world. If we simply, by default, assert that we can’t know those things, then what Christians are doing is asserting a materialist worldview that is not only inconsistent with Christianity, but I think inconsistent with our basic perception of reality. . . . the rejection of the idea of certitude about spiritual things is not well grounded.”

I close this post paraphrasing Mortimer Adler who stated that we need our brains to think, but we do not think with our brains.

I continue citing Kyle Butt:

“Information is not material or physical. It is something that can be transferred via material media like pen, ink, voice, sand, air, etc. [It can also be transferred/transmitted via semaphore, the genetic code, telegraph, the neural code.] But its substance is something completely different from the medium used to convey the message. Millions of processes everyday deal strictly with information. From DNA to desktop computers, multiplied millions of processes focus primarily on information. This information can be transferred, translated, decoded, and encoded into a host of different physical media without ever altering the actual information.

“So what does this mean? If information is not material, and information does exist, then some things that are not material do exist. One of those immaterial beings is God. The Bible says that God is Spirit (John 4:24). He is the great Knower, the master Giver of information, Who sustains all things by ‘the word of His power’ (Hebrews 1:3).” [And I would add that God is the Ultimate Source of all information that has been instantiated in His creations.]

I begin this series of blogs quoting from an article by Kyle Butt, M.Div., entitled “Immaterial Information” (https://apologeticspress.org/immaterial-information-14571/)

Butt cites The American Heritage dictionary that defines materialism as, “The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena.” Evolutionist Paul Davies wrote, ‘The materialist believes that mental states and operation are nothing but physical states and operations.’ . . . In short, there is an idea prevalent among those who believe in evolution that matter is the only ‘real’ thing that exists. If it is not material or physical, then it is not a part of the Universe, and is either non-existent or unimportant.

“The fundamental flaw with this particular theory is the fact that it can be proven that some things do exist which are not material. Among the most obvious of those is information.”

Much of neuroscience literature is characterized by the commitment to material reductionism/materialism. Dualist interaction is a “non-starter” for scientific research conducted by investigators having this perspective.

In my next blogs I will focus on articles that address the immateriality of information and the mind, so important to an understanding and acceptance of dualist interaction between the immaterial mind of Man and of God and the material components of the human neural synaptic networks. It is by this process that God created Man with the capacity for a personal communion with Him.

Romans 2: 29 includes verses that pertain to points I share in my books and in many blog posts. I have discussed the indwelling of the Holy Spirit restored to those in repentance by the grace of God through the sin sacrifice of His Son, Jesus Christ. It is by the work of the Spirit that we are justified and sanctified, referred to as “circumcision of the heart:”

No, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a person’s praise is not from other people, but from God.

I have endeavored to provide a compelling case for a means (dualist interaction) by which the Holy Spirit communes with us in our time giving us in repentance “circumcision of the heart.”

Moro makes the following comments at the end of his article:

“The very fact that the majority of human communication takes place via waves may not be a casual fact; after all, waves constitute the purest system of communication since they transfer information from one entity to the other without changing the structure or the composition of the two entities. They travel through us and leave us intact, but they allow us to interpret the message [by the immaterial mind] borne by their momentary [linguistically encoded] vibrations. . . .”

The author shares a very interesting finding in his article:

“. . . we found that the shape of the electric waves recorded in a non-acoustic area of the brain when linguistic expressions are being read silently preserves the same structure as those of the mechanical sound waves of air that would have been produced if those words had actually been uttered. The two families of waves where language lives physically are then closely related - so closely in fact that the two overlap independently of the presence of sound. The acoustic information . . . is part of the [neural] code from the beginning. . . . “

Perhaps this researcher is finding how we hear our thoughts! Perhaps this also applies to our hearing from the indwelling Holy Spirit via linguistic neural codes transmitted through our synaptic networks.

Andrea Moro has an article in The MIT Press Reader dated 9/6/22 entitled “What Is the Sound of Thought.” He makes very interesting comments which I will share in the next few blog posts. He addresses the “reading [of] linguistic thought directly from the brain.” He asks, “Why do we include the sounds of words in our thoughts when we think without speaking?”

Moro asks what language is made of. “When it lives outside our brain, it consists of mechanical, acoustic waves of compressed and rarefied molecules of air (i.e., sound); when it exists inside our brain, it consists of [encoded] electric waves that are the channel of communication for neurons. Waves: In either case, this is the concrete stuff of which language is physically made.” . . . This complex system translates the acoustic signal’s mechanical vibrations into electric impulses in a very sophisticated way, decomposing the complex sound waves into the basic [encoded] frequencies that characterize them. The different frequencies are then mapped onto dedicated slots in the primary auditory cortex, at which point the sound waves are replaced by [encoded] electric waves [transmitted via the process of quantum tunneling that has been explained in previous blog posts and in my books and ultimately interpreted by the immaterial cognitive mind].”

My next blog post will continue to include excerpts from this interesting article.