Scientific Evidence for an Immaterial Mind - aka the Soul

Yes, we do have some evidence that the mind is separate from the brain.

1) cerebral localization

It's been known since the 19th century that for motor and sensory function there are very specific locations in the brain that seem to mediate those functions. Hand movements are controlled by a specific part of the opposite cerebral hemisphere. Vision is controlled by a very discrete area in the occipital lobes.

However, Higher intellectual functions, such as abstract thought, mathematics, ethics, are not localized like that. There is no calculus center of my brain. There's no ethics center in my brain.

The brain seems to be necessary for doing calculus and doing addition and thinking about concepts like justice and mercy, and so on, but it's not localizable. The belief that higher abstract thought was going to be localizable was held by materialism in the 19th century, and they developed the theory of phrenology from that. He has the idea that all of these individual higher intellectual Functions have a spot in the brain that controlled them. Phrenology has been discredited. It's been shown to be wrong.

Because only certain things in the brain seem to be mediated by the brain other aspects of the mind, don't have a spot in the brain. The implication there is that they're not really material, but they're an immaterial power of being able to reason and use logic. And frankly, that's a very old dualist idea. It was an idea proposed by Aristotle. So for thousands of years duelists have predicted that and modern neuroscience, for now, confirms that.

2) split brain operations

Back in the 1960s, Roger Sperry, a prominent neuroscientist did a series of studies on patients, who had split brain operations due to severe epilepsy. An epileptic focus would begin in one hemisphere of the brain and travel through the corpus colosum, which is a bundle of fibers connecting the two hemispheres, and cause a generalized seizure.

It was recognized by surgeons in the mid-20th century that if you cut the fiber bundle that connected, the two hemispheres of the brain that you could prevent the seizures from becoming generalized, and you could greatly improve the quality of the patient's life. So a number of patients had this operation called corpus callosotomy. The patient's seizures would get better. But they really weren't much different, that is that their brains were essentially cut in half, but they still seem to be a unitary person. They still seem to be fairly normal. Sperry was a neuroscientist who studied these people in detail, and he did find that there were some subtle abnormalities as a result of cutting the brain in half, but the abnormalities were very subtle; so subtle that the experiments he won him the Nobel Prize.

And what that implies is that the human mind is not purely generated by the matter of the brain, otherwise cutting the brain in half would have profound effects on the human mind. It might make two people. Certainly, it should create a profound difference in a person's state of consciousness, but it doesn't. You've cut the brain in half and the person can't tell the difference, except that he has fewer seizures.

3) epilepsy neurosurgery

Dr. Penfield was the first neurosurgeon to systematically operate on the human brain when people were awake; he would work on the brain while they were awake in an effort to identify the focus of their seizures and to remove the focus from the brain. So their seizures would stop, and he operated on upwards of a thousand patients like this and very carefully recorded his results. He believed that all the mind originated from activity of the brain., but by the end of his career, he was a passionate dualist.

He repeatedly observed that there were aspects of the patient's mind that no matter what he did to the brain he couldn't affect. He could elicit memories, make a muscle move, or make a patient have a sensation. But he couldn't change their consciousness, he couldn't change their intellect, he couldn't change their sense of self. There was a fundamental core, that no matter what he did to the brain, remain the same. So, he said there was something he couldn't reach.

He asked the question, why are there no intellectual seizures? When people have epilepsy, commonly a person will have jerking of a muscle. Sometimes so many muscles jerk that they actually go unconscious. Sometimes they have a tingling on their skin, or sometimes they'll have a funny smell, or sometimes they can even have a little behavioral tick.

But they never start doing calculus. They never contemplate, justice or mercy. They never think about Shakespeare. So Penfield says, why aren't there intellectual seizures? If the mind comes from the brain entirely, the mind is material in some sense, then you ought to have seizures that make you do addition. Or think about politics. But you don't. What that implies is that the intellect is not the brain.

4) vegetative state brain function

Neuroscientist Adrian Owen looked at brain function in people who were in persistent vegetative state, Persistent vegetative, where a person has such severe brain damage that they show no sign of consciousness. And sometimes their caretakers will say something like, *I get the sense that the person is there that they understand things*, but there's no clinical evidence for it. Doctors would examine them, but there's no sign of any reaction at all and scan their brains are shrunken and obviously severely damage.

So Owen did a fascinating experiment. He used the technique called functional MRI imaging, which is MRI machine that images changes in blood flow in the brain that seems to correlate with brain function. So if you're moving your arm, the part of your brain that involves moving your arm lights up on the functional MRI. If you're thinking about stuff, your frontal lobe, slide up, things like that. So what Owen did is that he took a woman who had been diagnosed for several years and persistent vegetative state from a car accident, who showed no sign at all of any awareness, deep common, put her in the MRI machine and ask your questions. He said, pretend that you are playing tennis. Or imagine that you're walking across the room. He asked her to imagine all these things, and her brain kind of lit up in places.

But you could say that the brain lighting up, doesn't mean she was understanding anything. Maybe the sound coming into her ears, was causing a reflex or something. So, he took 15 normal people. And he did the same thing with them. Stuck them in a machine, put an asked the same questions. And then he asked, neurobiologists to look at the functional MRI images of this woman and the 15 normal people, And see if you can tell a difference between the two and they couldn't. Her pattern of reaction was identical to the normal people. That seemed to imply that she could understand what he was asking.

But perhaps the lighting up of areas in her brain and the lighting up of the area is a normal people's brains was just because of the reception of the sound, and didn't really understand. So what he then did is he took the same words that he had asked her before, but he took away the semantics. And just left some syntax. And her brain stop stopped reacting. As did the normal controls. Her brain only reacted when what he said to her made sense. It didn't react from just sound.

And this has been repeated by a number of different investigators that show the same thing that he found. That even when your brain is so massively destroyed and there's no clinical evidence for any mental activity at all, functional MRI can find that these patients are capable of thinking. Some patients who can do mathematics, ask "what's six plus six" and then give them different answers and when you hit the right answer of the brain lights up. So, very clearly, there are aspects of the mind that cannot be destroyed by severe brain damage. That's what Owen's work is showing us. It's showing us our aspects of the mind that aren't connected tightly to the brain, our minds are immaterial.

Conclusion

So not only is this a blow to a naturalistic understanding of the world it is also evidence for the existence of the soul, since in religion and philosophy, the soul is often considered to be synonymous with the mind or the self.

See Michael Egnor's The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul for a more in depth look at the arguments above

While this doesn't show how an immaterial mind could interact with the physical brain in A Scientific Case for the Soul Robin Collins offers some idea how the immaterial mind can interact with the material brain - see sections 4 & 5.

This added with the argument that Philosophical Naturalism is logically self-refuting is additional evidence that a physical only view of the world is not sufficient to explain it; i.e. there must be some supernatural, nonphysical, element at play in the world

Objections

for [1] cerebral localization

1) seems like they're "localized" to many different areas that work together. source

Reply: You seem to be misunderstanding the meaning of "localization". When I write a mathematical equation on a piece of paper, the area of my brain that generates the movement of my right hand can be localized to millimeter accuracy on the precentral gyrus of my left frontal lobe. But my understanding of the equation cannot be localized at all.

Mora Leeb and oter have defied the widely accepted view that human thought is controlled entirely by the physical brain. But they are not alone; medical literature offers a striking number of such cases. For example, a 2019 study of six people who had up to half of their brains removed (hemispherectomy) showed that, despite the loss, each of them adapted well. [Laura Sanders, “Some People with Half a Brain Have Extra Strong Neural Connections,” 

A 2022 study of forty adults who had half the brain removed as children to combat severe epilepsy found that despite that, they performed within 10 percent of other study subjects on face and word recognition. [Bob Yirka, “Adults Who, as Children, Had Half Their Brain Removed Still Able to Score Well with Face and Word Recognition,” 

If higher thought was tied to a specific part of the brain the above would not be possible since cutting out that part of the brain would affect cognitive thought.  This is the problem for those who think all highrt level thinking is physical only. 

for [2] split brain operations

1) Sperry rejected Cartesian dualism, supported a mentalism theory and believed that consciousness was a ‘supervenient result of neural activity. Citing a scientist who rejects dualism in support of dualism is pretty wild.

Reply: I am citing his research. I'm arguing that dualism is a better explanation than mentalism theory - whatever that is. 

You say "consciousness was a ‘supervenient result of neural activity". Supervenient means an additional, unexpected, or extraneous development or occurring subsequently. How did Sperry prove this to be true? 

for [3] epilepsy neurosurgery

1) Penfield: In 1974, he completed The Mystery of the Mind, an account for laymen on brain research. There, he set out his views on the relationship between the human brain and the human mind. [Penfield W. The mystery of the mind: A critical study of consciousness and the human brain. Princeton University Press; 1975.] Source

Instead, I reconsider the present-day neurophysiological evidence on the basis of two hypotheses: (a) that man's being consists of one fundamental element, and (b) that it consists of two. I take the position that the brain mechanisms, which we (my many colleagues and I all around the world), are working out, would, of course, have to be employed on the basis of either alternative. In the end I conclude that there is no good evidence, in spite of new methods, such as the employment of stimulating electrodes, the study of conscious patients and the analysis of epileptic attacks, that the brain alone can carry out the work that the mind does. I conclude that it is easier to rationalize man's being on the basis of two elements than on the basis of one. But I believe that one should not pretend to draw a final scientific conclusion, in man's study of man, until the nature of the energy re sponsible for mind-action is discovered as, in my own opinion, it will be.

Reply: there is no such thing as a final scientific conclusion. On any subject.  Why? Science is provisional; if more data comes it must be accountted for.  For example, the Steady State theory of the universe was widely held to be correct 100+ years ago.  But more and more data led to the formation of a new theory, an expanding universe theory.  

Thus, let me state again that, working as a scientist all through my life, I have proceeded on the one-element hypothesis. That is really the same as the Jacksonian al ternative that Symonds and Adrian seem to have chosen, i.e., "that activities of the highest centers and mental states are one and the same thing, or are different sides of the same thing." Source

Reply: Is he saying that he will hold onto this hypothesis no matter what?  Shouldn't he be led by the data, evidence, or argument? Wherever it leads? 

2) seizures do, of course, affect cognition. Focal seizures can disrupt cognitive functions, including memory, language, attention, and higher-order processing. These manifestations vary according to the cortical regions involved and are particularly common in seizures arising from the temporal or frontal lobes. Language disturbances may include speech arrest, expressive aphasia, or paraphasic errors. Source

Reply: I'm looking into europlasticity as a explanation. 

for [4] vegetative state brain function

1) fMRI measures brain activity. if they're measuring brain activity in an fMRI, they have measurable brain activity.

Reply: Incorrect. fMRI measures blood flow. Your brain cells use more oxygen when they’re working. That means following the blood flow shows the areas of your brain that are working hardest. Those areas appear brighter on an fMRI scan. Blood flow changes does not always directly correlate with neuronal activity.

2) Owen: These results confirm that, despite fulfilling the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of vegetatives tate, this patient retained the ability to under-stand spoken commands and to respond to them through her brain activity, rather than through speech or movement. Source

Reply: coming soon

Other

1) cause comes before effect, and brain states precede mental states by up to 11 seconds

Reply: Libet’s Experiments?

In Libet’s initial experiments people were instructed to press a button with one of their fingers while he monitored their brain activity. Libet discovered that prior to a person’s awareness of his decision to press the button, a brain signal had already occurred which resulted in his finger’s later moving. So the sequence is:

1) a brain signal occurs about 550 milliseconds prior to the finger’s moving; 

2) the subject has an awareness of his decision to move his finger about 200 milliseconds prior to his finger’s moving; 

3) the person’s finger moves.

In a second run of experiments, Libet discovered that even after the brain signal fired and people were aware of their decision to push the button, people still retained the ability to veto the decision and refrain from pushing the button! 

So some interpreters take the brain signal to indicate but a “readiness potential” to initiate movement which the subject may go along with or cancel.  Angus Menuge, for example, writes,
“if you look at Libet's experiments closely, there was a prior conscious decision by the instructed subject, then a readiness potential, then awareness of that readiness potential, and then a movement. So one can still say that a distal conscious decision was the cause of the movement, even if the proximal cause is the readiness potential” (Angus Menuge, “Does Neuroscience Undermine Retributive Justice?” in Free Will in Criminal Law and Procedure)

Libet himself considered his experimental results compatible with the existence of free will. Libet proposed humans retain a "free won't," or the ability to consciously veto an action initiated unconsciously. The conscious mind can still choose to inhibit or allow the action to proceed, even after the brain shows a readiness potential.

Alex Rosenberg, a materialist and determinist, agrees that the experiments do not prove that there is no free will but appeals to them merely to show that we cannot trust introspection to tell us whether or not we have free will. [The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), p. 154]

Furthermore this is exactly what the dualist-interactionist would expect. The soul (or mind) does not act independently of the brain; rather, as the Nobel Prize-winning neurologist Sir John Eccles put it, the mind uses the brain as an instrument to think. So, of course, the soul’s decisions are not simultaneous with the conscious awareness of them.