in my next blog posts i will address again how it is becoming increasingly apparent that the immaterial human mind generates waves, or wave forms, that reflect the content of thoughts, interacting with neurally encoded specified information in spike trains of action potentials to accomplish desired actions. jeffrey winters is the author of an article entitled “communicating by brain waves,” last reviewed june 9, 2016. in posts that follow i will cite additional articles that consider this topic.

“neurologists call patients who are totally paralyzed ‘locked-in,’ and diagnoses of lou gehrig’s disease or a brain-stem stroke are among the most feared of all neurological disorders. . . . such a life is thought to be unbearable.

“but a german neuroscientist has found a way to give voice to 11 patients around the world with a device that converts mental activity into computer commands. . . . niels birbaumer, ph.d., of the university of tubingen calls his machine a thought translation device, or ttd. it is attuned to a low-frequency brain wave called the slow cortical potential, which people can produce at will. by controlling their thoughts, patients can answer yes-or-no questions, spell out sentences or even surf the internet.”

“no one . . . had communicated via brain waves in a real-world environment. . . . a slow cortical potential is a type of electrical activity in the cortex, the outer part of the brain. . . . SCp’s [slow cortical potentials] are produced when the brain is engaged in a spectrum of mental activities. . . . building a communications device for a person with a severe paralysis meant tapping directly into [cognitive] mental function.”

as this topic is addressed consider also how the immaterial mind of god through his indwelling holy spirit may well interact with the synaptic networks of our material brains in similar, or like, fashion. it is a dualist interaction by which the holy spirit communes with us in our time.

In my books and blogs and in many blog posts the term “image of god” is used, often concerning the cognitive capacities of the mind of human beings. in the book testable faith: a reasons to believe anthology, a chapter is entitled “The case for the image of god.” I am including an excerpt from that chapter that clarifies what this term means:

“. . . two new testament passages (colossians 3:10 and ephesians 4:24) shed light on [what the image of god means]. . . in these passages, paul encourages the christians at colossae and ephesus to allow the holy spirit to transform them into the image of their creator. these passages imply that god’s image includes our capacity for knowledge, understanding, love, holiness, and righteousness. in other words, according to paul, the image of god refers to attributes we possess as humans. . . . we would argue that to serve as god’s representatives on earth and to enter into a relationship with our master required that we possess attributes that resemble god’s, at least in some measure. another way to put it: because we resemble god - at least in part - we can be granted the responsibility to function as his vice regents on earth and we have the privilege to uniquely enter into a special type of relationship with god. . . . we identify four characteristics that give parameters to the concept of god’s image.

1. human beings possess a moral component. we inherently understand right and wrong and have a strong, innate sense of justice.

2. humans are spiritual beings who recognize a reality beyond this universe and physical life. we intuitively acknowledge the existence of god and have a propensity for worship and prayer. we desire to connect to the transcendent.

3. human beings relate to god, to ourselves, to other people, and to other creatures. there is a relational aspect to god’s image.

4. humanity’s mental capacity reflects God’s image. human beings possess the ability to reason and think logically. we engage in symbolic thought. we express ourselves with complex, abstract language. we are aware of the past, present, and future, and we display advanced creativity through art, music, literature, science, and technical inventions.

The description of the model proposed by the authors is EXTREMELY complex, involving bohmian quantum mechanics, PILOT WAVE THEORY, quantum field theory, the schrodinger wAVE FUNCTION EQUATION AND A NEW QUANTUM POTENTIAL ENERGY REFERRED TO AS “q” THAT GIVES DIRECTION TO A PARTICLE, SUCH AS AN ELECTRON, through the brain. fOR READERS INTERESTED IN THE SPECIFICS OF THIS MODEL, i MAKE REFERENCE TO THE ARTICLE.

iN BRIEF, THE AUTHORS PROPOSE THAT MIND HAS CAUSAL EFFECTS ON THE MATTER OF THE BRAIN “VIA THE CREATION OF CONSTRAINTS . . . USING QUANTUM MECHANICAL LAWS TO REACH ITS AIM.” A CAUSE IS NEEDED “TO ACTUALIZE ONE OF THE POSSIBILITIES [OF THE WAVE FUNCTION] . . . THIS CAUSE IS A MIND WHICH . . . AFFECTS THE APPEARANCE OF STATES. . . . MIND CAN BE EFFECTIVE ON THE PARTICLE/MATTER DYNAMICS THROUGH AN EFFECT ON THE FINAL [wave function] POSSIBILITY DISTRIBUTION. . . . AND LEADS TO THE CREATION OF THE QUANTUM FORCES THAT GUIDE THE BRAIN ACTIVITY TO WHAT THE MIND WANTS. . . . THE OCCURRENCE OF A CERTAIN STATE AMONG MULTIPLE POSSIBILITIES NEEDS AN EFFICIENT CAUSE, AND THIS IS MIND.”

THE AUTHORS CANNOT IDENTIFY JUST HOW THE CAUSAL INTERACTION OCCURS BETWEEN MIND AND THE SYNAPTIC NETWORKS. IN PREVIOUS BLOG POSTS i HAVE PROPOSED A MECHANISM BY WHICH INTERACTION OCCURS VIA SYNCHRONOUS, COHERENT WAVE FORMS WITH SPECIFIED TRAJECTORIES THROUGH SYNAPTIC NETWORKS TO BRING ABOUT DESIRED ACTIONS. IT IS INTERESTING THAT THESE AUTHORS ALSO SEE EVIDENCE OF INTERACTION, DRAWING UPON QUANTUM MECHANICS. I HAVE IDENTIFIED THIS PARTICULAR ARTICLE TO GIVE FURTHER SUPPORT FOR DUAlist interactionism.

The authors continue:

“. . . only some researchers have tried to connect the concepts of mind and brain through quantum aspects, and can explain part of mind’s features through quantum properties [and they cite Eccles’ and beck’s work which has been described extensively in my writings and is the foundation of my research]. . . . to preserve human’s free will, we need both causality, (which related to self-agency and refers to ‘will’), and mind’s freedom of choice (which refers to ‘free’). in physics, we chose the bohmian quantum mechanics, due to its causal description of events.” the authors describe “the incorporeity of mind, which leads to its non-temporality.” both terms are consistent with Ken samples’ description of god’s nature in the book, testable faith, which was cited in a previous blog post. god’s nature includes being uncaused, self-sustaining, atemporal, nonspatial, immaterial and personal. the mind of man was created in the imago dei (image of god), so it too has the property of causality and is nonspatial, immaterial, atemporal and personal. in my next blog i will add the authors’ discussion of their model of mind-brain interaction.

in my next several blog posts I will address mind-brain interaction, drawing from several articles. in these articles the cognitive mind CAN BE considered immaterial, but with causal effects on material brain activity.

i am leading off with a 2019 article composed by mohammad jamali and coworkers entitled “a proposed mechanism for mind-brain interaction using extended bohmian quantum mechanics in avicenna’s monotheistic perspective.” (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e02130) the authors state that "mind is very different from the matter due to its specific properties, such as unity, integrity and irreducibility to components, and the presence of some special laws and concepts such as perception, specific qualtiy of mental states, thinking, creativity, self-awareness, consciousness, etc. in contrast, matter, especially in classical physics, is known to have properties such as locality in time and space, reducibility to components, atomistic individuality, etc.” the authors show that mind and mental states can affect brain’s activity withouT any violation of physical laws.” the connection between mind AND BRAIN IS MADE THROUGH QUANTUM MECHANICS, SPECIFICALLY BOHMIAN QUANTUM MECHANICS. (i HAVE ALLUDED TO THIS CONNECTION IN MY WRITINGS.)

THE NEXT SERIES OF ARTICLES THAT WILL FOLLOW ADDRESS THE RELATION OF WAVE FORMS TO BRAIN ACTIVITY. I SUGGEST THE INTERESTED READER ACCESS THESE ARTICLES SINCE I WILL ONLY BE GIVING RELEVANT SUMMARIES.

in this blog post i am including comments by ken samples, theologian and philosopher with reasons to believe (WWW.REASONS.ORG). i have cited his work a number of times in my books and blogs and have highest respect for his teaching. excerpts in this blog come from the book, testabe faith: a reasons to believe anthology and the chapter, “isn’t faith incompatible with reason?”

“in historic christianity, reason and faith function in a complementary fashion. . . . both scripture and long-standing tradition teach christians to seek rational understanding of their faith. . . . the expression ‘faith seeking understanding’ best captures the spirit of the consensus of christian philosophy.”

samples cites three “great christian thinkers’ perspectives ON THIS POINT:

“augustine: ‘believe in order that you may understand.

“anselm: ‘i believe in order that i might understand.

“thomas aquinas: ‘i understand and i believe.

“the christian worldview offers a plausible explanation for affirming an objective source for knowledge, reason, and rationality. that explanation is found in a personal and rational god. christian theism affirms that an infinitely wise and all-knowing god created the universe to reflect a coherent order of laws and logic. . . . he also created humans in his image . . . and endowed them with rational capacities to discover that coherent order.”

by the grace of god and his bounDLESS love for fallen mankind the sin sacrifice of his son, jesus christ, has provided for the restoration of the intimate communion with his indwelling holy spirit sent as jesus promised after his resurrection to repentant sAINTS. GOD DESIRES THIS COMMUNION, LOST AT THE FALL, BUT RESTORED AND FULFILLED IN OUR TIME. OUR FAITH SEEKS AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE “HOW” OF THIS COMMUNION, AND THIS HAS BEEN THE FOCUS AND OBJECTIVE OF MY RESEARCH FOR OVER TWENTY YEARS. THE HOLY SPIRIT SEEKS TO COMMUNE WITH US AND HAS PROVIDED THE MEANS FOR IT. A RATIONAL UNDERSTANDING OF THIS PROCESS ONLY GROWS FAITH IN THOSE WHO SEEK IT. I THANK KEN SAMPLES FOR PROVIDING SUBSTANCE TO FAITH COMPATIBLE WITH REASON.

patrick suppes and associates published an article in proc. natl. acad. sci. USA entitled “brain wave recognition of words.” It is an older article but important to share since wave forms are increasingly recognized in the transmission of specified information within THE WAVE FORMS OF spike trains of action potentials generated by AND PERCEIVED BY the immaterial mind.

IN THE ABSTRACT OF THE PAPER IT IS STATED, “these results show that brain waves carry substantial information about the word being processed under experimentAL CONDITIONS OF CONSCIOUS AWARENESS.”

I CITE FROM THE EXPERIMENTAL PROTOCAL, “SUBJECTS s1-s5 WERE RECORDED IN THE INTERNAL SPEECH CONDITION OF SEEING ON A COMPUTER SCREEN A SINGLE WORD AT A TIME, FOR 100 TRIALS PER WORD; IN THIS CONDITION A SUBJECT WAS ASKED TO SILENTLY ‘SAY’ THE WORD IMMEDIATELY AFTER SEEING IT. . . . OF THE 24 RECOGNITION RATES SHOWN, . . . ALL BUT ONE IS SIGNIFICANT AT THE 0.01 LEVEL, 15 ARE SIGNIFICANT AT THE 10^-5 LEVEL AND 8 AT THE 10^-10 LEVEL. THESE SIGNIFICANCE LEVELS SUPPORT THE CLAIM THAT BRAINWAVES CARRY SUBSTANTIAL INFORMATION ABOUT WORDS OF WHICH SUBJECTS ARE MADE CONSCIOUSLY AWARE.”

THE RESEARCHERS DESIRED TO USE “AS [THEIR] PRIMARY REPRESENTATION OF A WORD THE SPATIOTEMPORAL, CONTINUALLY CHANGING BRAIN IMAGE OF A WORD” WHICH ULTIMATELY CONSISTS OF THE NEURAL CODE OF THE IMAGE THAT IS INTERPRETED BY THE COGNITIVE MIND, AS I HAVE DISCUSSED IN MY BOOKS AND IN SELECTED BLOG POSTS. THE AUTHORS STATE, “. . . RELEVANT COGNITIVE PROCESSING USES IN AN ESSENTIAL WAY TIME-VARYING POPULATIONS OF NEURONS.” i SHARE THIS ARTICLE TO PROVIDE VALIDATION TO INTERACTION BETWEEN THE IMMATERIAL COGNITIVE MIND AND THE MATERIAL SYNAPTIC NETWORKS OF THE HUMAN BRAIN. IT IS AN INTERACTION CREATED FOR MANKIND BY THE MIND OF GOD TO PROVIDE A PERSONAL COMMUNION WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT.

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.

i conclude this series of excerpts from the cepelewicz article with a discussion of steven wise’s perspective on how cortical areas process combinations of information.

“to the retired neurobiologist steven wise . . . the findings imply that instead of categorizing cortical areas in terms of their specialized visual, auditory, somatosensory or executive functions, researchers should study the different combinations of information they represent. . . . wise argues that this brain organization scheme explains why there’s so much unexpected functional overlap in the traditional maps of mental activity. when each region represents a particular combination of information, ’it does that for memory, and for perception, and for attention, and for the control of action,’ wise said.”

in my books and in a number of blog posts i have shared that information is encoded in its structure to transmit meaning, purpose and action. neural codes are instantiated within spike trains of action potentials that transmit specified information. I have offered that the immaterial cognitive mind interprets coherent neural codes (in combinations?), and wise suggests that the sources of the codes can be multiple. it is the mind that integrates the codes to bring about various actions.

i have presented data in more recent blogs showing how the mind has been documented to generate wave forms that represent words, images and the like. the “so what” of my offerings is that the mind of god, his indwelling holy spirit, can transmit specified information to our brains in our time as can the human mind. the mind of god created the mind of man in his image to be in a personal bidirectional communion with him. as neuroscientists reject the commitment to materialism we are learning more about how this communion works through dualist interaction.

joseph ledoux is a neuroscientist at NYU known for his studies of the amygdala, thought to be the fear center of the brain. in the article being cited ledoux states “that the amygdala isn’t involved in generating fear at all. fear, he points out, is a cognitive interpretion of a situation, a subjective experience tied up in memory and other processes. the psychological phenomena that some people experience as fear may be experienced as something very different by others. research shows that the feeling of fear arises in the prefrontal cortex [active in cognition] and related brain areas.”

so we are seeing a revision in the understanding of brain function and beginning to see a connection with cognition. in my books and a number of blog posts linguistic neural codes have been discussed as they relate to memory. is it not possible that the immaterial mind interprets neural codes archived in memory and associated with “related brain areas” such as those that function in perception, attention, will, intent and the like? Such could account for fear.