Posted on 12/14/2025 11:44:02 AM PST by Eleutheria5
“Neuroscientists who stand up and say ‘we have souls’ are few and far between,” says pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor.
“But when you look carefully at the neuroscience—the best neuroscience over the past century—it clearly points to the existence of the soul and to the existence of aspects of our mind that don't come from the brain.”
Egnor himself started off as a materialist and atheist. But 40 years and more than 7,000 brain surgeries later, he concluded that reason and free will do not reside in the brain. In this episode, he reveals what he’s found.
“Neuroscience is just fundamentally wrong in a lot of ways … because of the materialist bias in neuroscience. We can't get away from this machine analogy, [but] we're not machines, and we don't work like machines work. And there's overwhelming evidence in neuroscience for the existence of a soul,” he says.
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“But stoopid.”
He’s a neurosurgeon. Anything other than stoopid.
.
“Soul” is just a word, some of its connotations don’t fit but we don’t have a term that fits better. Eastern Masters refer to a “Universal Lifestream” that runs just above us 24/7. They say it’s all of our brain outputs flowing by together.
This is an area that is hard to even discuss given our language constraints.
Don’t forget the fact that all our physical material—molecules/atoms—are replaced every few years. Yet, the person remains.
This tells us we are not our body.
Great point, agreed. We are not our bodies, they are just our “vehicle” for interacting on the physical plane.
This is where a lot of the misalignment problem in AI is going to come. We can build really useful, very smart machines - intelligent in terms of sheer knowledge, powerful in terms of speed, highly capable of selection and prediction; but it’s not going to have the full ability to *understand* and weigh things on the many levels that humans do. There’s just that “something” that can’t be built into an AI or prompted to develop there.
(One useful outcome may be that AI causes us to question the materialist bias in our science, and pursue some new ideas and possibilities. While scientists are generally less ‘believing’ than the general public, at least half of them do believe in some kind of higher or universal spirit or power.)
>given our language constraints.
Yes. English ‘soul’ comes from older English equivalents and potentially back to a bunch of Germanic roots overlapping; a faint connection to a Germanic base as ‘sea’ with (very speculative) idea that souls come from and return to the sea; personally I think this is an attempt by 20th century people to force a bridge to this Eastern concept.
People often almost use ‘spirit’ interchangeably although ‘spirit’ means ‘breath’ as does the Hebrew ‘naphesh’ which gets translated ‘soul’ in most Bibles.
Either way you’re right; languages have a bunch of terms which inadequately capture one or another version of meaning that people are not just their mechanical bodies. (Contrarily the WEF globalist types absolutely *insist* that people are just machines and that this is why and how they must and will control everyone. They are of course wrong on both counts but they seek to gaslight enough people into believing them).
“all our physical material”
There is no physical material. Only energy fields.
“all our physical material—molecules/atoms—are replaced every few years. Yet, the person remains.
This tells us we are not our body.”
Excellent post—nailed it.
Summary of the Interview: Dr. Michael Egnor on "American Thought Leaders" with Jan Jekielek
Dr. Michael Egnor, a professor of neurosurgery at Stony Brook University and author of The Immortal Mind, argues that modern neuroscience supports the existence of an immaterial human soul and that the mind is not fully produced by the brain.
Key Arguments:
Which implies that "Artificial Intelligence" will never be anything more than intricate levels of stimulus/response.
Are their Large Language Models (LLM) that have all of the Pravda archives as part of their "data"? Does the LLM programming state that communism is just another culture?
If a LLM has both AlGore's Inconvenient Truth and Michael Crichton's State of Fear as part of it's data, would it be able to determine that BOTH are fiction?
But what it labels is very real, and very vital.
Excellent fleshing out of the issue, thanks.
Why should the AI need to do that, when the academy has been doing a very good job of it for decades?
I don’t think AI will need Pravda lies to run a water treatment plant, build a car, or read X-rays and scans.
Yeah, sometimes those molecules get really dense, oddly providing room for thought in the process:
“Antony Flew-
The atheist who changed his mind after breaking his leg on a bench in the dark is Antony Flew. He was a prominent philosopher known for his atheism but later came to believe in God after reviewing scientific evidence and philosophical arguments. Flew’s conversion was documented in his book, There is a God, where he describes the gradual process of his belief change over two decades”
The danger of AI is not its “intelligence” or “judgement”.
It need be no smarter or have better judgement than a lion to conquer the planet—smashing everything in its path.
Excellent, thanks.
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