Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Latter-day Saint
Some thoughts on mind and brain

Some thoughts on mind and brain

Last updated on: August 1, 2026 at 11:13 pm by Dan Peterson

0 Comments

Some thoughts on mind and brain 2026-08-01T23:13:18-06:00 Dan Peterson

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

A Utah sunrise from the summit of Mt. Timpanogos
(2005 photo by Joseph Bullough)

Here’s a nice Deseret News article about the late Carol Lynn Pearson, who passed away this last week: “‘A person of faith and courage’: Carol Lynn Pearson’s legacy of compassion: The beloved Latter-day Saint poet and author leaves a legacy of love and faith in wrestling with difficult questions”

The DVD cover (fair use)

Prompted by having just seen the musical version of The Scarlet Pimpernel at the Ruth and Nathan Hale Theatre in Pleasant Grove, my wife and I watched the 1982 television film adaptation of the story (which stars Anthony Andrews, Jane Seymour, and Ian McKellen) again, in two installments on Thursday and Friday nights. We still like it.

Astronomer Håkon Dahle at the European Southern Observatory located at La Silla, in the mountains on the edge of Chile’s Atacama Desert. Not directly relevant, but definitely very cosmic. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

Quite a while back, I worked up some notes for a still far-from-complete writing project, and here is a portion of them that I hope somebody out there might find of interest. I’ve been looking at the notes again after a long time away, hoping eventually to take the project up once more. It’s not likely to happen for most of the month of August, though, at the very earliest, because I have a lot of commitments for the month and, well, I’m rather desperately behind on them. Anyway, here’s a selection from the notes. It’s by no means a finished piece of prose:

Lecomte du Noüy noted the strangeness of the fact that “freethinkers” do not, really cannot, admit free will.[1]

The memorable formulation of Marvin Minsky, a prominent computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that we are merely machines made of meat.[2]

Such a notion seems, for reasons that will soon become apparent, self-defeating.

Berkeley philosopher John Searle puts the question well:

We think of ourselves as conscious, free, mindful, rational agents in a world that science tells us consists entirely of mindless, meaningless physical particles. Now, how can we square these two conceptions? How, for example, can it be the case that the world contains nothing but unconscious physical particles, and yet that it also contains consciousness? How can a mechanical universe contain intentionalistic human beings—that is, human beings that can represent the world to themselves? How, in short, can an essentially meaningless world contain meanings?[3]

I quote the widely respected English philosopher John Hick. If, he argues, the human mind is entirely reducible to the human brain, this fact seems to entail determinism, for the physical brain

is an integral part of the wider causal system of the material world. We assume of the physical system of nature that every constituent event is caused; that given the causal nexus which has produced it, an event that has occurred could not have failed to occur; and that the universe, as a causal system, constitutes a temporal continuum of which the earlier states determine the later, so that an observer knowing the entire state of the system at one point in time could, in principle, calculate its state at any later point in time.

Hick terms this picture of the universe “total determinism.” He argues—in my view, convincingly—that such a view unavoidably suffers “from the crippling circumstance that any argument . . . for the conclusion that it is rational to believe the total determinist thesis must be logically suicidal, or self-refuting.” Why? Because

The concept of rational belief presupposes intellectual freedom; so that a mind whose history is determined cannot be said rationally to believe anything or therefore rationally to believe that total determinism is true. Thus any attempt rationally to establish total determinism involves the contradiction that in arguing for it the mind must presume itself not to be completely determined, but to be freely judging, recognizing logical relations, assessing relevance and considering reasons; whereas if the determinist conclusion is true the mind is, and always has been, completely determined and has never been freely judging, etc. Thus if the mind has the intellectual freedom to come to rational conclusions, it cannot rationally conclude that it is not free rationally to conclude. That would be absurd because self-refuting, in the same way that it would be self-refuting and therefore absurd for someone to profess to prove that he himself does not exist. There would be a logical incompatibility between his conclusions (that he does not exist) and—not his arguments for this conclusion, but—the fact that he is there producing the arguments. And there is, I am suggesting, a similar incompatibility between a man’s conclusion that he (as well as everything and everyone else) is totally determined and—not his arguments for this conclusion, but—his implied claim that he is a rational mind who has seen the validity of certain reasonings and who is offering these reasons to convince other rational minds.[4]

To say that my present thinking as I am now writing is continuously correlated with specific activity in the brain is entirely intelligible, and is indeed well established by extensive neurological research. But to say that my present thinking actually is, identically and without remainder, a series of electro-chemical events is to say something unintelligible. The mind-brain identity theory holds that my present mental image of a tree actually is, as distinguished from being correlated with or caused by, a series of electro-chemical events. But it is impossible to give this any testable meaning that could be either verified or falsified.[5]

And if it can’t be either verified or falsified, which is to say that it cannot really be tested, this cannot be a scientific belief. It goes beyond science. It is not demanded by science.

[1]$ Du Noüy, Human Destiny, 13.*

[2] George F. Solomon, “The Development and History of Psychoneuroimmunology,” in Harold G. Koenig and Harvey Jay Cohen, The Link between Religion and Health: Psychoneuroimmunology and the Faith Factor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 31-42, offers a brief sketch of the rise of the notion of the human body, and then of the human in toto, as a machine.

[3] John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 13.

[4] $John H. Hick, Death and Eternal Life (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1976), 116-117.*

[5] $Hick, The Fifth Dimension, 28.*

Previous Post

July 31, 2026

While bravely fighting a cold, I joined in an Irish podcast

Next Post

August 2, 2026 A sacred experience of my brother's

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"Another class of memories are of individuals who previously lived. Some of these remembered individuals ..."

PlasmaMiasma

Accounts of Premortality?

"Sutherland's lecture sounds interesting. He seems to restate the Washington consensus that trade brings peace ..."

B. Wilson

Learning more about a region of ..."

"In a meeting today, I learned another important reason why accurate (or at least as ..."

the PROBLEM

From Serbia’s “White City,” Belgrade

"I've been watching a lot of video interviews of NDErs and researchers. I think in ..."

brotheroflogan

Accounts of Premortality?

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 March 2014 August 2013 February 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What did God provide for meat for Israel in the desert?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Beef Fish Goat Quail