What is mind? Yes, matter?

Within the past couple of days there have been two things published that I have been thinking about.

Firstly has been the two part series of the irrationality of Substance Dualism by QualiaSoup.

Secondly has been Newsweek's recent cover story: Proof of Heven by Eben Alexander. Its certain to give the people who agreed with QualiaSoup a headache. I don't have my finger on the pulse of the neuroscience community but I think that there has been a resurgence in the belief that the brain and the mind are distinct entities, or at least there is a distinct aspect to the human mind. Mario Beauregard and Pim Van Lommel have written on the experiences that people who have been on the threshold of death; Eben Alexander is an inductee to their ranks. Nobel Prize winner  Sir John Eccles also has argued for an external element to consciousness; so has Dr. Stuart Hameroff.

I'm not convinced that their position is correct: to be fair, I do believe that mind states are different from brain states but it is unarguable that the former depends on the latter. The squishy grey meat in our skull is required for there to be a you or me. Yes, I've listed a bunch of bright, intelligent people who believe in a non-material component to the mind, but I know that appealing to authority is a logical fallacy. Plenty of smart people have believed in things that have been disproven.

In the case of Eben Alexander, first hand experience of a Near Death Experience would be very convincing. He isn't starting a cult or anything like that, but he has written of his experience in the good natured, good faith manner in the interest of scientific exploration. No doubt this will provide comfort to those suffering a loss, and many people will smile, nod and accept that their mortality is nothing but a transition. Speaking from my perspective, I'm just too intellectualy honest to accept that at first blush. It hurts. I'm happy they're happy, but I cannot share that happiness.

The argument in vogue is for quantum processes of some kind to be influencing our mental state. I'm not prepared to dismiss it on the face of it: new evidence suggests a link between photosynthesis and quantum physics. Evidence of quantum effects on the brain would not surprise me, though neither would it fully convert me. Its a controversial position, and in the wrong hands it could be used to handwave away any aspect of substance dualism that cannot be explained. Convinenent---but is it correct?

I don't know of any way to prove the influence of quantum whatever on the brain---again, I am neither a neuroscientist, and I am not very topical on the subject. I do not know how, much less why, quantum processes would be required to turn the human mind from a near robotic state into the creative, organized thing that it is. Maybe quantum processes are involved, but I'd hesitate to associate that with dualism or immortality.

I think that the mind emerges from the brain, the idea of a self. I believe in a more tiered idea of the soul: the brain produces consciousness, consciousness produces the mind, the mind produces the soul. No great theological or philosophical challenge; this revises, but does not erase, any such position. I do not believe this heart and soul, though I would argue for this interpretation. Its eccentric, unprovable, but dammit its mine!

Or perhaps our memories and our personality survives but both are reliant upon the brain to turn them into consciousness---after we die our selves float blissfully like old books on a great library shelf? Thats not so bad, we get two out of three, we're not gone forever. Again, eccentric, unprovable, but mine! I think I'd prefer a pantheistic fate than the traditional Abrahamic interpretation of the afterlife.

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A month ago I was reading something that shook up my worldview. My secular, milquetoast property dualist worldview. It was the death of someone two years ago that I did not know personally. Nerdfighter Esther Earl, dying at the absurdly young age of sixteen, by all accounts with her head held high, accepting death as the next big adventure. I would have, in her position, died stoically. However, I think I would be more resigned to my extinction than embracing of death as a change from one state of life to another.

About a decade ago I decided that I was an atheist. Not that this was a terrible transition from belief to disbelief: I was just honest to myself. I'd whittled down God to glorified flipper of the great light switch. Losing God was just jettisoning dead weight. I never liked throwing away the afterlife, for understandably selfish reasons. I'm afraid of oblivion, of the great nothingness, though after I die its not like I'll be dwelling on it. Okay, so I backslide into spirituality from time to time. Richard Dawkins can burn me at the stake for insufficent apostasy.

Hopefully it will be awhile before I find out firsthand. It better be good.