Posted on 07 November 2024, 9:17

What are we, physical body or personal consciousness? Most of us would agree it’s the conscious self. The self does the knowing, the feeling, the deciding, the loving, the hating. It makes us who we are. It goes to the essence of our identity. The body can be viewed as a kind of housing with which it interacts in a wonderfully felicitous way.

Where does our consciousness come from? Materialists say from the brain. Electrochemical events in the brain create consciousness. In contrast, dualists think the brain transmits consciousness but doesn’t generate it. For dualists like me, the conscious self, or soul, is different from the physical brain.

For dualists, the brain can be compared to a TV that tunes into specific electromagnetic waves and converts them into image and sound. The brain doesn’t generate consciousness. Rather, the brain is the self’s instrument.

When the brain goes bad, as in Alzheimer’s or a severe injury to the head, the self is not damaged, though it appears to be. It can’t navigate the physical world in a normal healthy way, in the same way that a computer with a virus can’t work properly. The electromagnetic waves don’t stop or slow down when they bombard the computer. They are in no way damaged. In the same way the self is not damaged by a dying or damaged brain. It’s just trapped inside and dependent on a failing instrument and can’t manifest itself in the normal way.

At death the instrument, the brain, fails absolutely. What happens to the conscious self at death according to dualism? It frees itself from the brain and moves on. This freeing is what constitutes death.

Materialists disagree. But they can’t account for the brain’s ability to create consciousness; they call it “the hard problem,” which to date remains “the insoluble problem.”

Materialists can’t explain how paranormal phenomena arise either. Materialists usually dismiss the paranormal as superstition; they often deny it even exists. For them, the afterlife is another superstition. It never happened or can happen. Dualists, however, have no problem accommodating the afterlife. The “hard problem” disappears. The consciousness that we all have—just is. It doesn’t owe its existence to the brain. Thus it doesn’t have to suffer the same fate as the brain at death. It can cut and run. And it does. It survives death.

Stafford Betty, Professor of Religious Studies, CSUB, (ret) is the author of When Did You Ever Become Less by Dying?  and Heaven and Hell Unveiled. His latest novel, Guardians of the Afterworld is published by White Crow Books.

Stafford can be found at www.staffordbetty.com.