How does the soul interact with the brain? How does free will work? What is the explanation of consciousness?
Editor’s note: This is a long but important question with an even longer answer!
Question:
Kind of a tough question here that has been on my mind for a couple years now… I’ve been reading up about free will, philosophy of mind, and neuroscience and am having trouble reconciling these things with the Christian faith/ the idea of a soul. I’ve come up with the following ideas:
1. The concepts of morality, (libertarian) free will, and Christianity are intimately connected. It’s hard to conceive of any of them without the other.
2. In order for humans to have free will, there needs to be some sort of immaterial component to the person such that it’s not just a person’s physical brain acting and reacting solely based off of physical law and deterministically (or randomly) producing action.
The immaterial agent/ part of the person needs to (I believe) have meaningful causal influence over the physical brain or else it is just a passive observer to what the body does (pretty much property dualism).
3. Saying that this immaterial mind is emergent from the brain doesn’t seem to help since its behavior would be entirely dependent on physical brain states/ components. This again seems to fall into the trap of a non-causal mind; no free will.
4. I think a sort of substance dualism, where there is mutual interaction between the mind and brain, would give free will the best chance of existing. Property dualism just sounds like physicalism.
5. The biggest objection to substance dualism is the “interaction problem”: How does an immaterial substance causally influence the physical?
I should also be clear that I don’t find the Libets experiments to be particularly compelling in either direction. It is definitely jumping the gun in terms of concluding epiphenomenalism.
Okay, now that some context is provided, I can ask my question:
Is there any way that you can think of that would even in principle solve this so called “interaction problem”? I was thinking maybe quantum mechanics since that breaks the deterministic mold that a lot of people presuppose, but that probably sounds speculative saying an immaterial agent is “harnessing” that power. (Though, I suppose any theory of how to solve this would be speculative) This is one of those things that I have come across where it feels like an atheist has the upper hand. I would think that if there is some sort of immaterial agent impacting brain states and therefore decisions that this would have been detected by now through observation of its effects when studying the brain. Of course, I am no scientist, so you can correct me if I’m wrong about how much neuroscientists really know about how the brain works. I realize the field is not nearly as mature as physics.
There is, of course, the “hard problem of consciousness” which I agree is a cracking problem to solve (and I think is much more expected under theism) but I don’t think there is anything in the problem that necessitates that the subjective experience alone would definitely have a causal role. That being said, I think intuition/ lived experience, the Kalam, and simply considering the other worldviews on the table heavily supports Christianity. The neuroscientific arguments are a tough nut to crack though.
TLDR: I was just curious about if you had any ideas about how in immaterial agent could influence the brain and therefore decisions. Some sort of idea to “solve” the interaction problem based on our current understanding of how the world works.
Thanks