I continue my blogs with excerpts from the book by richard swinburne, the evolution of the soul, REVISED EDITION. Swinburne makes a number of excellent comments regarding the immateriality of the human soul, though he accepTs the premise of darwin that “men evolved from apes, and apes from more primitive animals evolved from a soup of inanimate atoms. . . .” the issue that is our concern is how the mind and soul relate to the material body, and it is this issue that will be my focus IN THE FOLLOWING BLOGS.

in the prolegomenon to his book swinburne states that “humans (and the higher animals) consist of two separate parts - soul and body - while physical events are goings-on in the body. soul and body interact.” (how this interaction occurs has been a major focus of my writing in my books and blog posts.) swinburne describes in detail “what the human soul is like . . . these include freedom of will - to choose between alternatives without our choices being predetermined by prior states of affairs. [his] central theme . . . was the theme of substance dualism - that humanS consist of two separate substANCES, BODY AND SOUL.”

my research into the mechanism of interaction between the immaterial mind, including the mind of god, and the synaptic networks of the human braIN WILL CONTINUE. IN THE NEAR FUTURE I SHALL BE MAKING A COURSE MODIFICATION, THE DETAILS OF WHICH WILL BE MADE CLEAR WHEN THE COURSE DIRECTION IS FINALIZED. MY ACTIVITY WILL BE MORE FOCUSED ON GROWING THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON A GLOBAL SCALE, SHARING INFORMATION DERIVED NOT ONLY FROM MY PERSONAL RESEARCH BUT ALSO FROM RESOURCES OF THE REASONS TO BELIEVE MINISTRY AND FROM THAT OF WITNESSING CHRISTIANS ALSO COMMITTED TO THIS GOAL.

i conclude my citations from the book by foster with his comments about freedom of will:

“traditionally . . . cartesian dualists have taken human subjects to enjoy a freedom of the will. . . . thus they have held that, at least in normal circumstances, the non-physical subject has a genuine power of choice, whose operation is not constrained by prior physical or psychological conditions, and which enables him to exercise an ultimate control over the movements of his body. and they have seen this power of choice, in combination with his knowledge of right and wrong, as the basis of the subject’s moral accountability. all this, moreover, is thought of as contributing to man’s distinctive glory.”

when god created homo sapiens sapiens (Man/Adam/human beings) he gave man freedom of will, so that our love of god is not by force or in our intrinsic nature. god created man with the desire for a personal bidirectional communion with him. by the sin sacrifice of jesus christ, communion is restored by the indwelling by his holy spirit of the human spirit and repentant soul. it is a dualist interaction made possible by the grace and love of our creator, and it is eternal.

Foster states the following:

“although the basic subjects involved in human mentality are wholly non-physical, each subject is, at least for a certain phase of its history, intimately linked with a particular biological organism. it is this link which makes it appropriate to speak of the subject as having a body, or as embodied. . . . but what, then, is the nature of this link? what is the connection between the non-physical subject and the biological organism which embodies it? . . . anything approaching an adequate answer to this question . . . would become the business of the neuroscientist. . . . to begin with, it is clear that the connection between the non-physical subject and the biological organism is, fundamentally, a functional one: it is a matter of there being a psychophysical arrangement whereby each partner is equipped to have the right sorts of direct causal influence on the other. this arrangement will be secured by the respective natures of the two entities concerned, together with some framework of physical and psychophysical laws.”

my research has dealt with Foster’s last two sentences in this excerpt. the immaterial mind and the material synaptic networks of the human brain possess specific “natures” and functions which I endeavor to identify and explain, including waveforms, quantum tunneling, action potentials, neural codes and the like!

I cite foster who stated, “whether we are dualists or materialists. . . we presumably have to accept the existence of psychophysical causation.” he asks, “why should the fact that mind and body are so different in nature make it difficult to understand how there could be causal relations between them? . . . typically, when one physical event causes another, the two events are either spatially contiguous (or coincident) or are connected by a spatiotemporally continuous series of events through which the causal process passes. this feature of physical causation may make it seem that causation has to operate by means of spatial contact - that spatial contact is the essential mechanism for causal contact. and, of course, once this is accepted, causation between physical and non-physical events is automatically excluded, simply because the non-physical events have no spatial location. . . . but if there is no conceptual difficulty in envisaging causation-at-a-distance in the physicAL REALM, THEN DUALISTIC CAUSATION SHOULD NOT BE EXCLUDED, OR REGARDED AS CONCEPTUALLY PROBLEMATIC, PURELY ON THE GROUNDS THAT THERE IS NO SPATIAL CONTACT BETWEEN THE NON-PHYSICAL MIND AND THE BODY. . . . ON THE DUALIST VIEW, WE CANNOT UNDERSTAND HOW PSYCHOPHYSICAL CAUSATION OPERATES; WE SIMPLY HAVE TO ACCEPT IT AS A BRUTE FACT, WITH NO FURTHER EXPLANATION, THAT CERTAIN TYPES OF NEURAL EVENT DIRECTLY CAUSE CERTAIN TYPES OF MENTAL EVENT, AND VICE VERSA.”

AND IT IS THIS VERY “BRUTE FACT” THAT HAS BEEN AND IS THE OBJECT OF MY RESEARCH, USING THE NEURAL SYNAPSE AS THE MODEL FOR INVESTIGATION OF DUALIST INTERACTION BETWEEN THE IMMATERIAL MIND AND THE MATERIAL SYNAPTIC NETWORKS OF THE human BRain. and ”mind” includes the mind of god!

Foster identifies the five claims of dualism:

there is a mental realm

the mental realm is fundamental

there is a physical realm

the physical realm is fundamental

the two realms are ontologically separate

foster states that “human beings of sufficient maturity have minds. . . . and some will accept the existence of non-embodied minds, such as those of God, angels, and departed spirits. . . . mentality is not reducible to something else. . . . the mental and the physical realms are ontologically separate. roughly, what this means is that the entities which feature in the one realm are entirely different from those which feature in the other - that the class of mental-realm entities and the class of physical-realm entities do not overlap.”

in the book’s preface foster states the following: “my aim in this book is only to examine and defend the dualist account of the mind, and, in particular, to argue for its cartesian . . . version, which assigns the immaterial contents of the mind to an immaterial mental subject.”

in the next several blogs I will be posting excerpts from the book written by john foster entitled the immaterial self: a defence of the cartesian dualist conception of the mind. foster is a fellow in philosophy at brasenose college, oxford.

the back cover includes the following: “dualism holds that the mind is wholly non-physical and that mental phenomena are not reducible to anything else. the immaterial self examines and defends this thesis, and in particular argues for its cartesian version, which assigns the non-physical ingredients of the mind to a non-physical subject. the book exposes the inadequacies of the materialist and reductionist accounts of the mind which have become so fashionable in recent years.”

foster’s writing is that of a philosopher, and the reading can be challenging. I recommend this resource to those who seek a “systematic and uncompromising” defense of the immateriality of the mind.

i have posted blogs that address traveling waves. i came across an article that is quite current, appearing in 2021 and entitled “low frequency traveling waves in the human cortex coordinate neural activity across spatial scales.” Vishnu sreekumar and coauthors are associated with the NIh.

the authors stated that there was no direct link established between traveling waves and neuronal spiking in humans. their studies “found that macro-scale waves co-occurred with micro-scale waves, which in turn were temporally locked to single unit spiking. this temporal coordination between traveling waves at different spatial scales and between waves and neuronal spiking in the human brain suggests a role for traveling waves in neural communication. . . . traveling waves may also play an active role in information processing by influencing the probability of neuronal firing. . . . traveling waves propagating across brain regions could provide a mechanistic account for how such communication and coordination of neuronal activity could arise.” the authors “examined traveling waves while participants were attentive and repeatedly engaged in the same behavior in order to explore the potential role of traveling waves in human cognition.”

i reference this article since it shows how neuroscientists are coming closer to understanding if (and how) cognition itself generates waveforms that transmit specified information through synchronous, coherent synaptic networks to bring about selected actions. this information would open the door to accepting how the holy spirit communes with us in our time.

Thilo womelsdorf et al published an article in science, 2007 jun 15; 316(5831):1609-12 entitled “MOdulation of neuronal interactions through neuronal synchronization.” In the abstract it is stated, “brain processing depends on the interactions between neuronal groups. those interactions are governed by the pattern of anatomical connections. . . . [the authors] found that the mutual influence among neuronal groups depends on the phase relation between rhythmic activities within the groups. phase relations supporting interactions between the groups preceded those interactions by a few milliseconds, consistent with a mechanistic role. these effects were specific in time, frequency, and space, and [it was proposed] that the pattern of synchronization flexibly determines the pattern of neuronal interactions.”