- Edited
According to my essay, we should not totally dismiss the possibility of an intentional Creator of the world / universe.
By assuming God to exist, one runs into the so called “mind-body problem”. If the following should be true
“And the Lord God made man from the dust of the earth, breathing into him the breath of life: and man became a living soul.”
and the standard model of particle physics is also true, then one needs a concrete solution to the mind-body problem.
Parts of the solution may be the following points:
- Every animated creature gets that breath from God at an early stage of its physical development, presumably at the stage where that creature is either an egg or a fetus or something like that.
- The thing that the bible calls living soul has some attributes of God himself inherent within it.
- One of these attributes may be a low-level ability for psychokinesis.
- The newly created brain has areas that causally will effect every aspect of the physical body.
- The living soul will – in a dream-like fashion – begin to figure out how to “pull the strings” to control its environment (means the body)
- During step No. 5, the living soul completely identifies itself with its environment (the body/brain)
- The procedure of figuring out that environment is similar to the pre-training of an artifical intelligence: the living soul tests and evaluates – from within its premordial dream-state – all the probabilities for all the brain areas for the sake of fully controlling the “apparatus”.
Notice that the manipulation of the pre-programed brain areas by psychokinesis cannot be determined / discovered by any empirical test – since what the living soul does is merely pushing the right buttons in the brain to receive the desired, pre-programmed outcomes.
Before this conditioning-process, the living soul has no world-model in its brain, it is an blank slate in this respect. But it may well have – dream-like- emotions. After that conditioning-process, the living creature has a model of itself (the body) and at least a model of parts of its environment in its brain: it learned to accurately predict what the modules in the brain will do to the rest of the body. This comes about by the very nature of these brain areas, since they must be information processing areas. Both models will be refined and occasionally actualised during the lifespan of the animated creature.
Surely, that kind of low-level psychokinesis works just like we understand the term “magic”. The soul “pushes physical buttons” means it triggers a pre-programmed chain of causal events in the brain by psychokinesis. After that trigger, the other particles involed in the chains of causal events cannot and do not know wether or not their triggers have been “biased”, the result will be undecidable from what people think today about the deterministic behaviour of the brain. Maybe there is some violation of energy-conservation involved in this, I do not know for sure.
Moreover, since the soul has identified itself with the physical body during that process and its cognitive impressions (Qualia, senses) of the world have been built up by that process, altering this process by drugs or aneasthesia will have an impact on the Qualia that the subject will experience. Note also that for defining certain Qualia, like for example seing the colour blue etc. necessitates that there is also a well defined correlation between the physics of the person's environment and its pre-programmed body/brain physics.
These correlations could be such that only a limited, well defined set of Qualia can be experienced during the time the soul is totally identified with its body. The soul has itself entangled with its environment according to a given set of correlations between the brain and the physical environment: it is able to accurately predict what happens if it pushes certain buttons in the brain, pulls certain strings.
Moreover, it is these pre-given correlations that the soul has figured out during its “training”-phase mentioned above, and has identified with them – also within its living soul. The latter could perhaps explain why intrusions of the brain lead to intrusions of Qualia. These correlations can be considered as being facilitated by God and once the soul has identified itself with its brain/body-environment, the brain then acts like a filter, filtering out any Qualia that could give definite, holistic answers to how and why these correlations are setup the way they are. As long as the body is not life-treateningly endangered, these correlations guarantee to form a closed epistemological circle of possible experiences. Only when the bond of the soul with the body gets somewhat lost due to some severe trauma, it can happen that the soul gains insights into the realms from which the above mentioned, pre-set correlations originated.
These suggestions are a kind of psycho-physical parallelism, a self-induced hypnosis based on the ability of the soul to execute some non-physical, psychokinetical influence on certain parts of the brain, which in turn can also influence the soul's Qualia.