Consciousness and the Organic Brain Machine

At one time, people had souls. Some classical philosophers called it perception. Nowadays, secular scientists and philosophers are almost making their research into a comedy by their conflicting views. Many deny the existence of consciousness but still try to find it in the brain.

Someone named Mr. Gordons referred to humans as "meat machines." Alan McComas is a neurosurgeon, one of many people to think they have a location for consciousness in the brain — which he says is an organic machine.

Brain as a machine, MR LIGHTMAN at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

His comparison may seem reasonable at first, but it has some problems because his criteria can make many things into "machines". Also, McComas thinks those clumps of neurons called hippocampi are where consciousness resides. This idea falls apart as well. The truth is that we are created in the image of God, each one with a soul (or consciousness), and it is not a part of the container in which it resides.

Over centuries, neuroscience folly repeats itself. Philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650) broke from the classical (and quite satisfactory) traditional understanding of the soul. He proposed that the immaterial soul and the material body were separate substances, and he speculated that the soul and body meet in the pineal gland, a tiny gland in the center of the brain.

With the rise of mechanical philosophy and materialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, philosophers discarded Descartes’ immaterial soul. They replaced it with the concept of the mind, which was not necessarily immaterial. And then they concocted a jumble of crazy theories — behaviorism, identity theory, functionalism, and eliminative materialism — to square the circle. Somehow they had to account for the emergence of first-person experience from a wrinkly three-pound lump of meat.

The rest of the article is located at "Looking for Consciousness in All the Wrong Places."