At the Podcast Knight & Rose, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose had many questions to ask Michael Egnor and scientific writer Denyse O’Leary About their book, The immortal spirit (Worthy, June 3, 2025):
(47:01 min)
Here are some exchanges:
Egnor: When I read Dr. Sperry’s work on Split Brain – he won the Nobel Prize for showing the anomalies of people who divided brain surgery – what struck me, how much they are completely normal. In other words, if you meet them, you cannot make the difference. They are perfectly normal people.
And they tell you, I am a person, I am not two people. They essentially notice anything different in their lives.
And it would be like taking your computer and just taking a chainsaw and you cut it in the middle. And then you found that it always worked very well. There is something strange on this computer.
I therefore think that the existence of an intangible soul is the best way to explain the remarkable results of divided brain surgery.
Knight: So, fundamentally, we discover thanks to the progress of the science that there are many things that we can demonstrate on mental activity, things like consciousness and free will and abstract thought that are not like filling perfectly with the brain. So we can take parts of the brain and, you know, cut the brain in half and we always preserve this mental function.
Dr. Egnor also talked about imminent death experiences, a key subject to discussion in the book:
Egnor: In a way, I have made a list of four things that I think that any explanation of the experiences of imminent death must explain. The first is that people who have these experiences have a remarkably clear reflection. It is very organized.
They often have an examination of life and they have an explicit decision to return to their bodies. The second thing is that they have about 20% of patients who have this clear corroboration, which means they see things that can be verified. They know what happened in the room when their brain did not work.
The third thing is, and it is remarkable, it is that as far as I know, there has never been a relationship of experiences of imminent death where people met living people on the other side of the tunnel. When they descend into the tunnel, they always meet people on the other side who died, even if they did not know that they were dead …
And the fourth characteristic of these phenomena is that they change life. People’s lives change very often in relation to what they see.
And I reviewed all the materialist explanations. There are probably 20.
Generally, as illustrated by the book, materialist explanations do not take into account the key elements of the experience of imminent death, including the fact that people observe things that they should not have seen (true experiences).
Computers and free will?
Wintery Knight had a specific question for Denyse O’Leary:
Knight: I am a day software engineer, and it seems just crazy that people would think that by typing additional code lines, the machine would become aware of what it does. When I play a game on my computer, I know it’s just to perform code like anything else. This has no idea what is flowing.
So why do people have this idea that you can make a computer complex enough to have consciousness and especially free will?
O’Leary: Well, let’s start with the fact that people hear this in the media all the time. Like that soon, computers will think like people. Sam Altman says it. Elon Musk says it. All kinds of people say it. And I often read articles in news by software engineers like you say no, it is nonsense.
But who do you think get most advertising? Now let’s look at some realities. First, we don’t even know what consciousness is. One of my subjects on which I write a lot is the theories of consciousness, which are extremely disputed.
No one has a good theory of consciousness anyway, of human consciousness. But there are a number of theories, let me tell you. The fact is that if you don’t even know what consciousness is, how will you determine if a computer has consciousness anyway? As there is no reference.
We all know that we are aware, but that’s it. It is not a reference. All right.
Now the other thing is free will. Free will require reason and computers do not reason. I mean, essentially, a computer can not think anything except in Ones and Zeros, right? So if you can’t do them zeros, it’s not something that a computer can do.
Now, I do not think that the human mind works quite in this way, or anyway, I have never heard a very good explanation on the functioning of the human mind, but computer theory is not more widely accepted than others.
So let’s say that I think you have to be a human person to really have free will if we understand it. You can’t just be a chain and zeros.
But when people say that computers develop free will, I think what you will see is that there is a certain sleight of hand.
Accept? Disagree? The book falls on June 3.