The Sean McDowell Show - BEST Case for the Existence of the Soul (w/ JP Moreland)

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

What is the soul? What is does it mean to have a soul? JP Moreland delivers a defense of contemporary substance dualism, which claims that the human person is an embodied fundamental, immaterial, and unifying substance. Multidisciplinary in scope, the book explores areas of philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and the sociology of mind-body beliefs. READ: The Substance of Consciousness by JP Moreland (https://a.co/d/fiGFJLS) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for $100 off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Buckle your seatbelts, friends, because we are about to go deep. What things really exist? Our guest today, Dr. J.P. Moreland, has written a comprehensive case for the existence of the soul. It's called the substance of consciousness. But it animates the body, and it's what makes the body living. The body was purely physical and was more or less just a physical machine. Then it's still a body. Some people might be thinking, okay, what is the soul? JP, you ready to go, my friend? Well, Dr. McDowell, it's always a privilege to be with you.

Thanks. Well, let's jump right in. Before we talk about your case for the soul, let's define some terms. What do you mean by substance dualism and then what you call mere substance dualism? Well, historically, substance dualism meant that there is a soul and a body, and they are two different substances that causally interact with one another. So that would mean, for example, that my soul can cause my body to move if I will to raise my hand, or if my body gets stuck with a pin, I will feel a sensation of pain in my soul now in contemporary terms the notion of substance dualism has more or less given up the idea of the body being a substance in its own right so so i i'm trying to capture that when i uh defend in this book with my colleague Brandon Rickabaugh

what we call generic substance dualism. And that means the following, that I am an immaterial soul, I have a body, and the two are not the same thing but are related to one another in some way so i am a soul that has a body the two are not the same thing and they relate to one another in some way or other and so that leaves the door open for several different versions of subs of generic substance dualism to still be a part of the family, the bigger family. Gotcha. We won't go into some of those particulars that you do in the book, but at this age, substance dualism is that a human being is both body and soul, and they interact in some fashion. For simplicity's sake, we'll keep it there. Now, I don't think there's a lot of questions about what people would mean by what is the body. But some people might be thinking, okay, what is the soul?

Maybe explain what you mean by the soul so we have clarity on that. That's a very, very, very good question. There would be two views and one view would be if you follow the thought of the early modern philosopher Descartes and the other view would be if you follow the thought of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. So the first view is that the soul is an immaterial substance or thing, what I mean by substance

is an individual particular thing. So by substance is an individual particular thing so the soul is an individual thing that has the properties of consciousness and so the soul would be a particular individual reality that that has the properties of having sensations and having thoughts and having beliefs of different kinds, perhaps having desires and being able to exercise willpower to choose and act. So in that definition, the soul is what contains and unifies our consciousness. Now, the Aristotelian Thomistic view goes beyond that and says that the soul is an individual individual thing or if you want a substance or substance like thing so let's just say it's a particular individual reality that contains the properties and the powers of consciousness and the properties and powers of life So the soul doesn't just contain consciousness, but it animates

the body, and it's what makes the body living. For Descartes, the soul simply contains our powers of conscious thought and feeling and so on. The body was purely physical and was more or less just a physical machine. And as long as the body was functioning, even if it was sustained by an artificial respirator of some kind, then it's still a body. It's still a physical object that's moving in various ways. But for Aquinas, the soul informs the body and gives it life. And what that means is if the soul is no longer in the body, it's not a body any longer, it's a dead corpse. So it is the soul that is responsible for the life of the body on that view so it's an immaterial particular thing that either contains the powers and abilities of consciousness or consciousness and the powers of life and animating a body so on this view death then is when the soul leaves the body and they're separated permanently

yes that's right okay and there will be different tests for how when that happens but but the metaphysical fact of death is when the soul uh relieves the body uh permanently okay super helpful jp you're like me you talk with your hands and get excited it's rocking the the screen a little bit and tapping so you're gonna have to contain yourself for a minute i love the excitement about the soul do your best is all i can ask okay a couple more terms because we're going so deep, it's important that we define what is consciousness, what is it like, and how do we study it? Well, a simple definition would be consciousness is what you're aware of when you introspect. So imagine a person waking up from surgery, and he's in the recovery room and that dude is out. And all of a sudden he starts feeling a throb in his knee. And then he has the thought,

I think I'm home and I'm going to go to surgery today because he's forgotten that he had surgery. And then, oh no, he has this belief. Wait a minute. I just had surgery and then oh no he has this belief wait a minute i just i just had surgery and i'm recovering and then he feels thirsty and he chooses to to to yell out if anybody can hear my voice would you please bring me something to drink so what that person is regaining is consciousnessciousness and Consciousness involves things like sensations of a pain or the taste of a lemon a thought or a belief or a desire or an act of free choice one thing that it seems conscious States have is that any state of consciousness so you're having a state of a thought or you're thinking about lunch or perhaps your desire you're feeling a desire for uh

something cold to drink or you're having a sensation of pain there is always a what it is like to be in that state of consciousness so there's a what it's like to be a pain there's a what it's like to be a desire for ice cream but there is no what it's like to be an electron there's no what it's like to be negative charge so it seems like only conscious states have a what it is like uh to be in that state gotcha that makes sense that's helpful okay so we've explained what we mean by substance dualism the soul consciousness and the what it is like that we really are aware of through introspection what is considered the hard problem of consciousness? Now we're getting to the level of worldview, and now that we've described what this phenomena is, we're asking what worldviews can best explain it. So maybe lay out for us what the hard problem of consciousness is and maybe the challenge that it poses for certain worldviews.

Well, the hard problem of consciousness is why consciousness appeared in the first place. I mean, if you begin with matter in the Big Bang, and if you don't ask what caused it, the history of the universe is just a history of the rearrangement of matter according to the laws of chemistry and physics and so on and so the history of the universe will be a history of matter forming a larger complex arrangements of atoms and molecules and so on now all of a sudden you get popping into existence something that has never existed before in the whole history of the universe and that is sensations and thoughts and feelings and beliefs conscious states so the question is how could there be such a thing as consciousness coming from brute matter, which doesn't even have the potential for consciousness.

And why are certain states of consciousness correlated with certain states of the brain? So for example, when a certain neuron called a C-fiber fires in your brain, that is correlated with a sensation of pain. But why isn't that C-fiber fires in your brain, that is correlated with a sensation of pain. But why isn't that C-fiber firing correlated with the taste of cherry pie? There doesn't seem to be the relationship between the two appears to be contingent. That means it could have been different. And that raises the question, which is the hard problem problem not only why is there such a thing as consciousness to begin with but why are the specific conscious brain correlations that way instead of some other way so essentially a hard problem of consciousness is where does this phenomenon come from in a purely

material world it seems to be qualitatively different, not just quantitatively different. So it's a problem for worldviews in particular that tend to describe and explain the world through physical interaction. That seems to be the heart of it. Did I catch that? You absolutely did. I think the naturalist who believes that science and science alone tells us what's real will tend to reduce everything to things that exist that physics and chemistry study. Well, if that's true, then the existence of consciousness would be a case of getting something out of nothing. And you can't get something from nothing. And so it raises a real pressure problem on naturalists who don't want to believe there's anything but the physical universe. That's really helpful.

We're going to get to some of these explanations and your critique of them and your positive case for the soul. But you have a pretty provocative statement in the book that I highlighted and I circled, and it didn't surprise me because I've known you for probably almost three decades now, which is pretty cool. Here's what you wrote in the book. You said, substance dualism, again, the idea that human beings are body and soul, substance dualism has not been tried and found wanting so much as it has been judged unacceptable and left untried. Explain what you mean and defend that statement.

Well, in the 1800s, you have in Europe the emergence of a doctrine called scientism. And that's the idea that the only way that we can know what's true about reality is through the hard sciences, especially physics, and then chemistry and geology and biology. Okay. So the idea was that anything that cannot be empirically measured and tested in the science laboratory, and that is not a respectable scientific entity, like an electron is respectable in a magnetic field and so on. You know, you can believe it if you want to,

but there's no evidence one way or the other for it. And probably things don't exist that aren't the things that contained consciousness kind of went the way of the dodo bird. It became extinct. And it wasn't because it was argued against successfully. It fell out of favor because you can't measure conscious states in the same way you can measure brain states. And there were attempts in the first three decades of the 19th century to, because all the psychologists then were Cartesian dualists, and they tried to measure, let's say, pain in terms of whether it was intense or not. The problem was the laboratories all over the country got different results

because they couldn't be precise enough in measuring consciousness. Well, that caused scientists to want to just forget about consciousness and start focusing on the brain and body movements and things of that sort. So it was because holding that we are brains or our physical nervous system was more amenable to scientific measurement that the idea of a soul or immaterial consciousness lost favor. It wasn't argued out of existence. It was more or less just dismissed because we're not interested in that kind of stuff.

That's essentially what I mean. Okay, that's really helpful. Now you also make another provocative statement. As you say that substance dualism is making a comeback. What do you mean by making a comeback? In what circles are you talking about? And give us the evidence for that bold claim. Right. 80ish you have secular material physicalists materialists who from about 1930 up until for

50 years had tried different forms of just complete physicalism that we are just totally physical and only physical the problem is that just didn't work because consciousness resisted stubbornly being identified with states of the brain or the nervous system. And that's because there are things that characterize consciousness that don't characterize matter. For example, a thought has intentionality. It's about something. So I have a thought about the apple or a belief about the city of London, but no brain state is about anything. Again, a thought can be true or false, but brain states can't be true or false. There's a what it's like to conscious states, which we already mentioned, and not brain states and so it materialists like

John Searle and and even Jaguon Kim a well-known materialist began to admit that at least consciousness was no longer to be treated as physical and so it was treated as an emergent property in the brain. And so the brain was still physical, but somehow when the brain reached the right level of complexity, a really brand new thing called immaterial consciousness rose into existence. And so they were property dualists. That meant that they believed that conscious properties were not physical, but they still believed that the possessor, the thing that had consciousness, was the fact that we have free will, arguably, that cannot be explained if I'm a brain. And so there has been a renewal of scholarly work that is being done by substance dualists.

And this revival is being noted across the discipline and i think our book the substance of consciousness at least that the critics are saying that this is going to contribute significantly to this new wave of substance dualist scholarship i think there's no debate about that as long as we can get the word out and that's in part what we're doing here. So even if people disagree with you, they need to wrestle with the force of the arguments that you make and help move the ball forward with conversation. That would be a value in itself. All right. So we've defined our terms. We've talked about what's at stake. Let's start shifting towards your critique a little bit of other forms trying to explain consciousness and your case for the soul. So one question would be,

why can't we just reduce mental states to brain states? So Paul Churchland has argued that sound is just a train of compression waves traveling through air. Light is just electromagnetic waves. Warmth is identical with low average molecular kinetic energy. And similarly, things like color can be reduced. Why can't we just reduce these kind of mental events and sensations down to brain states? Well, let's just begin with color, for example. Color cannot be reduced to, or that just means identified with, a wavelength of light. And the reason is that there are things that are true about colors that aren't true about wavelengths of light, and so they can't be the same thing. This is called the law of identity. If X is identical to Y so that water is identical to H2O,

then whatever is true of water will be true of H2O and vice versa because they're not two things, they're the same thing. If you can find one thing true of water that's not true of H2O, then they can't be the same thing. So red is darker than yellow but no wavelength is darker than any other wavelength one wavelength can be longer than another wavelength or could vibrate more rapidly than another wavelength but a wavelength isn't lighter or darker than another wavelength. Wavelengths are rapidly moving and vibrating, but colors are stationary. They're on the surface of

an object and they're just, they're not moving. They're just there. So it it's and i can add other things it's clear that color has features that wavelengths don't and vice versa so they can't be the same thing the only thing science has discovered is that there is a correlation maybe even a causal relationship between wavelengths and colors. What I mean is that every time a color appears, there might be a wavelength of light that's associated with it. And that wavelength of light, perhaps the apple absorbs a wavelength and reflects another wavelength and that causes the surface to be colored red so redness may be caused by wavelengths but it's not the same thing as a wavelength now the same thing is true of brain states and mental state um take take a pain if you get if you have a severe pain in your knee there is a what it is like that is the very essence of that pain it

wouldn't if you experienced the pleasurable taste of strawberry shortcake after you got stuck with a pin on the knee, you would be pretty weirdly wired, but you wouldn't be in pain. You would be experiencing a pleasurable taste of strawberry shortcake. So the very essence of a pain is the what it is like to be in pain. There is no what it is like to be in a certain C-fiber firing configuration. Neurons can be described exhaustively using scientific language. If you want to describe, a neuron is a cell in the brain, and if you want to describe it, you can appeal to things like calcium ions and how they flow down the dendrons and the axles of the neuron and how the movement causes a little spark of electricity in a little gap between one neuron and the other called a synapse. It doesn't matter if you remember the words, but we can describe, Sean, a neuron

exhaustively in third-person scientific language, but one thing is left out. And there is no description of what it is like to be in pain. That is described by what we learn from first person awareness of what is going on within us. Whereas the neuron is described by a third person description of an object the neuron in your brain uh using scientific language and so the two are completely different but that doesn't show they're not correlated but that's the reason that you can't reduce pain to a neuron firing because there are things that are true of pains that aren't true of neurons firing, and vice versa. That's really helpful.

By the way, you've mentioned strawberry shortcake and cherry. When this is done, I'm going to take you for dessert, just so you know. I'm ready to go, buddy. Good. I'm ready to go. So with high school students, obviously we're colleagues at Biola, Talbot School of Theology, but I still teach one high school Bible class. And I'll say, if Professor McDowell is Spider-Man, we're going to have all the same properties together.

Both 150 pounds, both 5'9". But if I'm from California and Spider-Man's from New York, then I'm not identical to Spider-Man or Peter Parker. So if light just is electromagnetic waves, they will share all the properties in common. But your point is light can be brighter and less bright, but electromagnetic waves aren't going to have the property of brightness. They'll have other kinds of properties. Therefore, light might be correlated always with electromagnetic waves, maybe caused by it, but not reducible to and not identical with electromagnetic waves. Now, the same would be with pain. This is really helpful with students. I'll say, okay, describe pain for me in physical terms,

and somebody will say it's C-fiber firing. And then as I push back a little bit, they begin to realize that the essence of pain is a feeling of hurtfulness that could have been experienced in potentially a different physical base if we had silicon bodies. Therefore, pain cannot be reduced just to the physical state. So what we've done so far is we're critiquing some of these naturalistic or physicalist attempts to reduce mental things down to the physical. It doesn't work because they share different properties. Did I sum that up well? Wonderful. I couldn't have done it better myself that's exactly right and it's important for people to remember we

are when we're asking can a conscious state be this reduced to a brain state we're asking the question of what a conscious state is. We want to know what one is. Is it identical to a brain state? That's very different than asking the question, what causes the conscious state? Or what has to be working in the brain before you can feel a conscious state. So, I mean, if you give me anesthetize my gums at the dentist chair, I will not feel pain when the dentist drills my teeth. But that doesn't show that pain is identical to those nerves firing in my gums. All that shows is that before a pain can

occur within my conscious life, certain things in my body have got to be working. But this means that body and soul work together, not that they have the same properties. That's great. That's very helpful. Now let's shift to another provocative claim in the book where we're going to start moving towards the positive case for substance dualism. You say, quote, here are two widely acknowledged, even by steadfast detractors, two widely acknowledged points. Physicalism seems false to nearly everyone, while substance dualism seems obviously true.

Now, how much stock should we put in these seemings that people have that I seem to be body and soul, and it seems that physicalism is false, especially because there's a lot of things that seem like they're common sense, that like a table is physical all the way through or the sun is rising and the sun is setting. How much stock do we put in the fact that you say is nearly universal, that it seems like physicalism is false and that dualism seems obviously true. I think that the word seems just means it appears to be this way to me. That's the way it seems or appears to me to be. Okay, I think that if cross-culturally, so that this just can't be a cross-cultural phenomenon, if human beings around the world and throughout their history, if things seem a certain way to them,

and they're almost all in agreement about that, then that doesn't prove they're right about it. But what it does is it places a substantial burden of proof on those who are going to disregard the way things seem. Because if an object seems a certain way to me, it usually is that way. My senses can be wrong sometimes, but we generally trust the way things appear to us unless we have good reason to believe the opposite. And so we did find a good reason to believe that the sun doesn't literally rise and set.

And so the way things seem to us has a very nice explanation that explains why it seems that way, even though it's not that way. But that's not true when it comes to the fact that I seem to be different from my body, and I seem to be the kind of thing that is capable of surviving in some afterlife when my body is fragmenting in the grave and deteriorating. is capable of surviving in some afterlife when my body is fragmenting in the grave and deteriorating. And so what this does is, that's not, doesn't prove it, but it does play the burden of proof

that physicalists have not yet met. And so this has surfaced what is called the hard meta problem of consciousness earlier we looked at the hard problem of consciousness why is there consciousness to begin with and this is called the hard meta problem of consciousness and here's what the problem is if physicalism is true why does everybody in the world from neanderthals to the present believe that they're souls that could survive the death of their bodies in other words why is everybody some kind of substance dualist there have been at least 30 studies that in our book

the substance of consciousness we document at least 30 studies Sean that psychologists have done on little children and they are naturally Cartesian dualists one psychologist said they don't have to be taught that they're a soul by the time there are three or four they naturally recognize that they're different than their bodies and brains. And there's a little incipient belief of survival after death that they already have. This is true in atheist cultures. This is true before they have religious training. This is true before they're old enough to even understand religious doctrine.

So it can't be due to indoctrination from the culture this this is a spontaneous formation of a belief about ourselves that little children automatically have all over the world they're natural born duelists is what the studies have shown everybody believes that they're non-physical and different from their body except for a few people who have been indoctrinated that that is a stupid thing to believe and i think that the reason people might have questions about the soul is they've been told well that's not scientific and so you should give it up or in atheist countries when they start wanting to push a materialist agenda after a few generations they they talk children out of believing in the soul so now the hard problem is what where would anybody

come up with the idea of a soul if physicalism is true i mean after all no one had ever experienced one it's an almost impossible thing to explain why everybody's a cartesian dualist and and so they have got to answer that question and what they have to say is that our awareness of ourselves when we just focus on us when i'm trying to focus on my own self, or maybe close my eyes and wonder what's going on inside of me right now, what am I feeling, that I am systematically deluded about what I find. Because what I'm really aware of is my brain. Not something that hurts or that is immaterial or not some ego or self

but i'm just aware of part of my brain i will tell you sean i'm 75 years old there has never been one time in my life when i've ever been introspectively aware of my brain in fact if i only relied on what i knew by direct awareness, I wouldn't even know I had a brain. I know I have a brain because I know that other people have brains, and I've seen when you open their heads, they have a brain in surgery, and I'm very analogous to them. So obviously, it's most reasonable for me to know I've got a brain but i'm not aware of it by introspective awareness the dualist has an answer to the question the reason everybody's a dualist is because we have souls and we're just aware of ourselves it's kind of a simple common sense answer but i think that's in its favor but the physicalist doesn't have a good answer to that

question and they need to offer us one because they have a fact that they've got to explain okay so that's really how oh i'm sorry and if they don't explain that fact and we do that's a problem okay that's helpful so the c means that it appears to children across culture you have examples of the book across time that yes human beings understand themselves as body and soul in some sense and that identity can continue after the grave that's after death that makes sense in a theistic worldview a substance dualist position but within physicalism it would seem to me that the only explanation could be some kind of evolutionary story, wouldn't it be? That's about the only thing you can come up with.

I mean, you could say that people were indoctrinated by religion to believe this. But number one, atheist countries, little children are born and they automatically are dualists. And little children are automatically dualists without having understood any religious teaching it's before they even form those religious concepts so you can't explain it by by religious indoctrination the evolutionary explanation is going to be the only one and here's where evolutionary explanations as as Thomas Nagel, the famous atheist, said, embarrasses itself because it's used to explain every single thing in sight, including things that are beyond its ability to explain.

I mean, how is having a concept of me being a soul, survival enhanced it. I mean, you would think that if organisms began to believe that, they would be less concerned about their bodily death because they would realize that they were gonna be happier in an afterlife without their body. So it might actually contribute to organisms not being concerned about being eaten or dying they they they might want to

in other words you can explain the evolutionary advantage of the belief and the disadvantage of it both equally well so evolution doesn't explain uh the origin of this belief at all in some ways if we do attribute it to evolution, then it raises the question, if this belief of substance dualism is so deeply ingrained, it's strong, and it's so diverse, then what other beliefs do we hold that seem to be true are also mistaken if we give this one up. Now, that is a very separate argument we don't have to go down to, but would seemingly follow if we explain this away in a purely naturalistic evolutionary fashion. Well, if you're going to be consistent, you've got to follow the question you raise to its logical conclusion, and you have to start asking about these other entities. And so at the end of the day, you've got to say, well, what's left in my worldview? I mean, does it really explain the world and life as I experience it every day?

And the answer turns out it's pretty lean stuff. It's pretty lean. All right, friends, we're here with Dr. J.P. Moreland, who's committed his life to apologetics. His philosophy really in particular has a life tome you might say called the substance of consciousness we're going to unpack it more but make sure you write your comments in and your questions your toughest challenges he invites him and deals with his top critics in this book and we're going live on friday to take these together so make them sweet and short and to the point best chance that we will take it.

All right. Now, you mentioned a couple of times that death is the separation of the body from the soul. Do you think near-death experiences in any way contribute towards the case for substance dualism? And if so, how? Well, they do so very powerfully. And they do so, Sean, in two ways. Now, let's go back to the law of identity. It says that if you're identical to Spider-Man,

then everything true of you will be true of Spider-Man and vice versa. If there's one thing that's true of Spider-Man that isn't true of you, then you're not the same. Okay. But it's also the case that if there's one thing possibly true of you, that wouldn't be possibly true of Spider-Man, then even if those aren't actual,

if they're at least possible, then you can't be the same thing let me give you an example uh you said uh uh suppose that you're from california but spider-man was from new york well suppose that both of you were from california but suppose that we knew that there was something about your makeup where it was not even possible for you to have been born outside of California. Let's just assume there was something about your biology that that geographical location was essential for you to be born. OK, so you're not even possibly able to be born outside of California. Now, let's suppose that Spider-Man is born in California, just like you are, but he could at least possibly have been born in New York, okay? So that means that there's something that's possible about Spider-Man, even though it's not true, but it's possibly true, that's not possibly true about you.

And that's enough to show you're not the same thing. Are you with me on that? Yep. Okay. So if we had two little piles of grain and they both were the same color of white and they had the same shape and the same weight and everything and and we were going to annihilate both of them but we knew that if we possibly put one in water it would dissolve but the other pile wouldn't dissolve it was put in water even though we would never put them in water because we're going to burn both of them up before we have a chance to. The simple fact that one could dissolve if it were put in and the other couldn't is enough.

Well, now listen to this argument. I am. My brain and body not only do not survive the death of my brain and body, but they couldn't even possibly survive in a disembodied state after the death of my body. I have no idea what it would mean to say my brain could exist and disembodied so one thing i know about my brain is not only my body i'll just say brain for simplicity i know that my brain is not going to survive the death of my brain and body but i know that it couldn't even possibly survive now maybe i don't survive in the afterlife maybe all these near-death extor stories are false but they're surely possibly true i mean i debated i with two christians debated three atheists on life after death for six hours over two days and the three atheists were all willing to allow the evidence to decide the issue

and their argument was that there's not enough evidence for life after death. Well, I pointed out that the fact that they and everybody who watches a Dateline NBC that's going to talk about near-death experiences, everybody who watches that, even if they're completely disbelieving in near-death experiences, they all have the attitude, look, get off my back, honey. I know you believe in this. I don't. But I'll admit they might be true. And I'll let the evidence settle it, so I'll watch the show. We'll see what the evidence is. Well, that means they're admitting it's possible. Because nobody would watch a show that was going to prove that archaeologists discovered square

circles in Montana because I mean you're going to say I don't need to watch that because there can't be evidence it's impossible and just like those atheists who let the evidence settle the issue they were admitting that it is possible that I could survive in the afterlife, but I don't think there's enough evidence that I do. Well, what does that show? It shows not that I survive in the afterlife. That requires evidence, but it shows that I can't be my brain and body since I have a potential. I am this kind of thing that could very well possibly survive without my brain and body, but that's not true of my brain and body. They're not even possibly such that they could survive. So I cannot be identical to anything physical because I have a potential that nothing physical

has. I could survive disembodied. That's number one. Okay, now hold on. Before you go to the second one, I want to make sure people understand that you're making a point that even the concession that near-death experiences are possible, not even actual, is a recognition that a human being, in principle, could survive their identity intact in a disembodied state. It wouldn't make any sense to say that my brain could survive in a disembodied state, which shows that I'm not just my brain, because there's a distinction here between body and between soul. So just not even getting to the evidence, which is where I suggest you're going next, the very idea that people concede and even debate the evidence for near-death experiences, rather than just stopping it in the past and saying such a thing is absurd and not possible

and can make sense, concedes that we are not identical to our bodies. That's the first one. Excellent. Yeah. Okay. Not evidence for an afterlife, but evidence that I'm not my body, I'm a soul. Now, the next one is that it is beyond reasonable doubt that near-death experiences are largely true. There've been something like 300 million people that have had near-death experiences around the world due to statistical analyses and we have cases where two research scientists at the at university of connecticut school of medicine studied 25 patients that were born blind and had never seen in their lives they had near-death experiences and they were able to describe in complete detail uh they did not have color words but they could say bright and dark uh they they could describe moles and things on on another person's on their mother's face that they couldn't feel

or know any other way and so they they gained sight but once they came back into their bodies they lost their ability to see again and these were research scientists at the university of connecticut school of medicine there have been hundreds of cases medically documented where people gain who who claim to have had a near-death experience and gain information about things that were going on in the hospital cafeteria or in the intensive care unit, which is on the second floor, and they were on the first floor, or they could describe crazy details about what happened when they were dead that are later verified by the doctors and nurses and eyewitnesses that there's no way they could have known if what they'd experienced was just a loss of oxygen to

the brain or some kind of dying brain phenomenon that happens to people because their brain is dying. There's no way that these could be explained that way. And so this provides evidence that people do survive, their souls depart their bodies, and they are able to be aware and gain information that is factual and that is verified. And so that this is evidence that life after death is real and that we can't be our, we are souls. We're not our bodies or brains. JP, I've had our mutual friend,

Steve Miller on here a couple of times and I'll link to his interview below. We have gone into depth making a case for near death experiences. We don't hear, but if they're even possibly true and then actual, minimally,

we at least have evidence that a human being is more than matter and that there is a soul or conscience part of the self that continues after the body stops functioning. So one piece of evidence on the column for the soul. Let's move to another piece of evidence here. And this word is big. Some folks might not be tracking with it. So just explain a little bit what it is. It's called the myriological argument for the soul. Well, yes. Um, persons are all or nothing kinds of things. Either something is a person or it's not a person. There is no sense to saying that my sister Susie is 75% of a person. She used to be 85%, but now she's down to 75%. Persons can't be divided. I mean, you can't take a person and divide them. So you've got a third of a person over here and two thirds over there. Persons can lose functioning.

I could be functioning 75% of what I used to, but notice it's still me that used to function 100%, that's now functioning 75. I am the same in the comparison. But brains and bodies and material objects can be divided into percentages and can come as two thirds. I mean, a table, if you cut a third of it off and separate them, you say, where's the table? And the answer is two thirds of it's over there and a third of it's over there. Well, your brain in many surgeries, they take out 55, 56% of the brain, and you're only a 45% of a brain left. And yet, when you wake up from surgery, you are a single whole person. If you were your brain, you would be a 45% person. There's a syndrome called Dandy Walker syndrome, which you can go online and actually see x-rays of a person's head. These are people that have 10% of a brain. The inside of their skull is 90% a sack of fluid. And there's a little about a centimeter thick sheath of brain tissue on the inside of the skull these people have normal lives they can function 70 to 80 percent of a normal person

they get married have jobs but they don't have but 10 percent of a brain now what we what we know then is that is that we can't common percentages but physical objects can so we can't be physical objects another way to put that is to say that if a physical object loses parts and gains new parts. It's not the same physical object. So I suppose I have a wooden podium I'm lecturing on. And every day, one of the janitors comes in and takes a little piece of the podium off and puts it in a closet and replaces it with a green, little piece of green plastic so i come in the next day and the desk is the same size and shape but there's this odd little green plastic part on it he keeps doing that until all of a sudden the podium is entirely made of green

plastic parts it's the same size and shape as the original podium, but the original podium doesn't exist. There's just a bunch of little wooden parts in the closet, and if he takes those and puts them back together to form a podium that looks exactly like the first original one, and I have to choose as to which one's the original podium. It's clearly going to be the one that's reassembled because there's no way that you can take a wooden podium and say it's the same thing as one that's totally made out of green plastic. So a physical object can't lose parts and gain parts and literally be the same thing.

It can for popular purposes, but not really. Now, my body is constantly losing cells, including my brain. My brain parts are moving, atoms in my brain are sloughing off and new atoms are being absorbed. And that's true of the cells and the atoms in my body. So from one day to the next, my brain and my body are not literally

the same brain and body if we're talking about the whole brain and the whole body. But I am the same person from one day to the next or one minute to the next. How do I know that? Well, first of all, there's nothing more obvious than if I'm humming a tune and I'm halfway through the first verse, that I am the one who just hummed the first half of the verse, am now humming the middle of the verse, and am anticipating humming the rest of the verse. I'm just aware that I am the same hummer through the process of singing that tune.

And we are just aware that we are the same from one moment to the next, the same self. Another thing would be this. If we are not literally the same person from one day to the next, I should never fear going to the dentist because it will not literally be I that goes to the dentist. It'll be a lookalike that has a lot of my memories, but it won't, strictly speaking, be me that goes. Nor should a person be punished for something that they, a crime they committed a year ago, because they're not literally the same person that committed the crime. But we all know that it's the same person, and that's why we punish them, because we know they

stole the money. And so my body is not the same from day to day because it gains and loses parts, even though it's pretty much, it looks very much like it, but strictly it's not the same, but I am the same. And therefore I cannot be my brain and body. And i've got to be something that is not physical because i can survive the gain and loss of parts of anything physical that's connected to me my brain and body and so on i remember when i was doing the m.a phil program 2000 to 2003 i know it's been two decades plus since I started. And I've told you this, but my wife said it was one of the most, and we're high school sweethearts, just transformative time for me, which is why I love teaching at Biola and want to get as many students there as I can.

But I remember in your metaphysics class, you made a point about identity over time. And even our criminal justice system assumes that I am identical to the person who committed a crime six months ago. It could be six decades ago. So the body changes and no one's going to be able to give a defense and say, but it wasn't me because I've got gray hair. I've lost some hair. I've gained some weight, lost some weight. No, you are identical amidst the bodily changes. Now, some people will say things like, what about memories? Why can't memories be the source of identity over time? Well, because first of all, I'm aware of being the thing that has memories, I'm not aware of being a bundle of memories. When I remember scoring a basket in my senior year in high school basketball,

that is a memory, but I'm aware that it belongs to me and not you. I'm having the memory. So that means I'm also aware of me in addition to the memory because i'm aware of being different from but having the memory that's the first thing secondly i am constantly gaining and losing memories dude i mean uh uh as i get older uh i i have to be reminded of things by my my daughters because i forget them so if and i'm gaining new memories i mean two days ago i didn't have the memories i now have of yesterday because as i go on i have new memories so my memories are in a constant state of flux i'm gaining and losing new memories and they would not and i'm also my personality changes slightly i've i've over the years developed some new values and some of the values i used to hold i don't hold to as much anymore you know like you know physical

appearance is not a value that i have like perhaps i used to have so i i can't just be a set of memories and personality traits because those things are in constant change. But I'm not. I'm the same person over time. What about DNA? DNA arguably is not physical. From the moment of conception, you had DNA and your DNA can't change. Could that ground identity over time? Well, I think DNA is very much like smoke is to fire.

Smoke is not the same thing as fire, but it's darn good evidence that fire is there and i don't think dna is identical to is what my identity consists in because i am one thing but my dna is all throughout the body uh each cell has dna, but I would say DNA is a sufficient test that it's, it's me. Okay. But, but, and also, you know, a lot of scientists are starting to say that there's DNA is immaterial and really there's only one DNA and it's, it's fully present in all the cells of the body. So it's kind of fully everywhere. Well, I mean, that's not matter because matter is not in different places at the same time. And it sounds an awful lot like Aristotle's soul.

So what I wanna say is that many of the modern analyses of what information is makes it very, very close to the essence of an Aristotelian soul in the ancient world. They seem to me to be almost interchangeable. Okay, so let's shift to one more positive argument for the soul and then look at some challenges and objections that you also cover in the book. You hinted at this one earlier, the existence of free will. What do we mean by free will? How do we know we have it? And why does that point towards the reality of the soul?

Well, by free will, I'm using what philosophers call libertarian free will and which studies have shown is the common sense view. It doesn't mean it's right, but it is the common sense view of what free will amounts to. And that basically means that if I'm deciding whether to raise my hand and vote, or just to keep my hand down and not vote, or maybe to go home and watch a ball game instead of sticking around for the vote. At the moment of choice, the choice is completely up to me. I can either raise my hand or not raise my hand, and there's nothing that determines that one happened versus the other.

What I choose to do is entirely within my control, nothing that determines that one happened versus the other. What I choose to do is entirely within my control. It is the result of me choosing it and nothing determines it because if it's determined by something then it's not a free choice. That's what we mean by common sense libertarian freedom. The choice is up to me and i could have done otherwise without anything determining what i do one way or the other okay now the problem is that no physical object of any kind no matter how simple it is like just a simple tiny rock or how complicated it is like uh uh

the the a fish's body and all the intricate cells that make it up if it's a physical object then it is not free to choose what it's going to do because physical objects behave according to the laws of physics and chemistry and what happens what impinges on the body so just a silly example but suppose you have some kind of projectile moving through space. Let's say it's an arrow. Now, if that arrow is moving at a certain velocity, and somebody throws a rock and it hits the arrow, then that arrow is going to move in a specific direction, change directions at a specific new velocity

dependent entirely on the forces in the laws of contact and gravity and how much mass the rock had that hit the arrow. It doesn't get hit and then somehow decide, and how much mass the rock had that hit the arrow. It doesn't get hit and then somehow decide, eh, I'm going to go a different direction this time. Now, even if the laws of quantum physics are indeterminist, that doesn't matter because a free choice has got to be self-determined. It's not enough for it to be random.

Because if I just randomly one day in my arm, I had a nervous twitch in my arm randomly, just shot out and popped some guy in the face, I wouldn't be responsible. That would have been a random accident. A free choice has got to be one I choose. So random quantum events can't explain free will and responsibility because they're not self-chosen, they're random. The other thing is that if quantum events and quantum laws are indeterministic, then at least the universe at some time and the laws of quantum nature fix the

probabilities of what's going to happen next at least they do that okay but but if i choose to act that's unless there's somebody holding my arm down that there's a hundred percent chance that's going to happen uh unless i'm disabled in some sense and so there's not it's not probabilistic once the choice is made now whether i choose or not is probably going to depend upon how i see things and you know if i have weakness of will or what have you. So the bottom line is this. If I'm my brain or my body, then I'm governed by the laws of nature and what impinges on me. That's not self-choice or self-responsibility.

In order to have that or libertarian freedom, I have to transcend the laws of nature and be able to act into the natural world from a standpoint above and not determined by it. And that would be possible if I were a transcendent soul. But if I'm not, then free will, as we obviously self-evidently know it to be, in my opinion, is just ridiculous. Nobody's responsible for anything. So now, of course, it's possible that we live in a universe in which we just think that we have free will. It's an illusion, and we're not actually responsible for anything.

But I suspect you would push back and say, but nobody really believes that. Nobody thinks that. Nobody lives that way. So it seems like a worldview that can account for free will at least has a checkmark on its side versus one that can't is that where you would go in response I would absolutely say that and I would also add that if we don't have free will nobody could affirm that nobody could

ever say it because if there's no free will then rationality is gone and here's why consider that you're deliberating about a problem you're trying to solve. And you're looking at the problem and you're weighing the evidence on one side and the arguments on the other. And you go through a process of deliberation and you end up drawing what you think is the best conclusion possible. And you say, I think the answer is a i don't think it's b i think it's a okay now when you're in that five minute process of weighing both sides and the arguments for and against a and b you are assuming that you're in a process of reasoning towards the best rational most likely to be true conclusion you could possibly get right you're assuming that and that means that you're assuming that

what you're going to conclude has not been determined yet if you thought that what you're going to come down on a or b was already determined before you started reasoning about it, what would you be thinking yourself doing in reasoning about? You're assuming that your deliberation is actually going to contribute to the answer you end up with, right? And that you're going to decide it once you've got all the evidence before you and make your best choice so if determinism is true or if there's no libertarian freedom then there is no such thing as deliberating about what you're going to do that's what you end up is already set in concrete by factors before you even started thinking about it that were outside your control so rationality presupposes a debt to freedom and so if a person denies libertarian freedom they can't do so rationally because they're undercutting a necessary condition

for there to be rationality in the first place. And thus, they ought to remain silent because they can't trust anything they say to be true. The entire moral enterprise rests upon free will as well doesn't it absolutely we hold people to be worthy of punishment or praise i mean you take somebody who has a high-paying job but they sacrifice and go into the inner city in a very dangerous area, and they start teaching seventh grade math at a rundown, kind of a rough school. And they do that for 25 years and retire. Now, that person is worthy of a tremendous amount of respect and praise, i mean i i think it would be a

legitimate thing if they're a believer for the church to bring that person in front of the congregation and say joe is retiring at the end of this year this is what this man's done let's have a celebratory feast for him but that is assuming that he's worthy of praise. But that assumes that he could have done otherwise. And the fact that he went down and did that for 25 years was due to a choice that he freely made. And it wasn't that he was determined by forces outside of his control. If we knew that he had been drugged and somehow these drugs that he was given every day determined that he would have to do that and it wasn't his choice, we would no longer praise him.

Same with punishment. We only punish because we think that people had a choice in the matter and they made a bad choice. And thus it's on them. We've looked at a few positive evidences for the soul. We've talked about the seemings that is universal and strong. We've talked about the myriological argument, how identity stays the same over time, which points towards something non-physical. We've talked about the possibility and arguably actuality of near-death experiences. And then we just talked about free will,

which is tied to the moral project and rationality. Each of these points towards the soul. Now, when you book The Substance of Consciousness, you have other positive arguments for the soul. But for sake of time, let's start moving towards some of the other explanations for the soul and why you would critique them. And by the way, those of you watching, we're going to come together live on Friday, this Friday, take your toughest questions. So if you write question or comment, succinctly write your question in there, and I will give to JP the toughest questions that are there as long as I can understand them and as long as they're on topic.

So one of the explanations, you hinted at this earlier, within a naturalistic worldview is what's called emergence. That maybe consciousness is just an epiphenomenon. I mean, H2O, when you have that, when you have hydrogen and oxygen together you get this new property that emerges that is say wetness maybe consciousness is a similar kind of thing your take very good well the the first problem is that consciousness is not uh emergence is not a solution it's just a name for the thing that needs to be solved it's it is what it's the problem and so by appealing to emergence all you're doing is naming the fact that consciousness at at certain point shows up but that doesn't answer why. So it's really not a solution. It's just a state, a name for the problem. Another reason that's not a solution is because if you believe that

emergence is somehow a fact about the world, then it ends up being what philosophers and scientists call a brute fact a brute fact is a fact that has no further explanation it just is uh how why does emergence of consciousness take place at that time it just does that's all it just does. That's all. It just does. There's no explanation. So it's the announcing of a fact that in principle cannot be explained by science or by anything else. So it turns out then to just be a hear ye, hear ye, emergence is a fact. And that's all it is because no evidence can in principle be given on its behalf due to its nature as a brute fact third it's a case of getting something out of nothing if you start with brute matter which is the way what physicalists mean by brute by matter that means that matter doesn't even have the potentiality for consciousness so the question

is how is it that you take brute matter that is fully characterized by the properties of mass and shape and size and positive and negative charge and all that. And you rearrange it in space to make it a more complicated arrangement. And all of a sudden, out of nothing, consciousness emerges. That's a case of ex nihilo and if consciousness appeared out of nothing then there would be no reason why a pain emerged as opposed to a thought about uh abraham lincoln because it's a brute fact so it would be very it would be a miracle that every time your brain was in the same state the same same conscious state showed up. There should be absolutely no correlations between the two because there's nothing to explain it. It's just a brute happening

with no further explanation. But here's another problem besides getting something from nothing, and that is a problem that the ancient Greeks called the psoriasis problem. S-O-R-I-T-E-S. And that worked in these cases where you have a guy with a full head of hair, and you say, if I took one strand of hair away, would he be bald? No. How about another one? No, no.

Well, it seems like you could keep taking another hair out of his head forever, and he'd never end up being bald but we all know the difference between a bald head and a head of full head of hair the problem is that there is no spec it's hard to pinpoint a place where they go from being bald to not now let's suppose that as the emergentists believe that Consciousness emerges when the brain reaches the right level of complexity now let's call that level level n n is the level the brain has to be at before consciousness emerges on the brain. N is composed of literally trillions of atoms and molecules, hundreds of billions of neurons, multitudes of cells, all in a very, very specific structure.

It's not just a scattered group of neurons that are scattered on a table. They have to be put into the right structure. Now, this is on the order of trillions of things that constitute the, quote, right level of complexity. And let's add up all the Subatomic particles and say they're in number of them and that includes the precise Different parts of the structure they have to be in okay when n obtains boom consciousness Well, what if we had one less electron?

So that the structure is now instead minus one because those are so they're almost exactly identical I mean why one additional electron and you get Consciousness but with one less you don't so you say well okay there well how about one less from that you see where this is going right at some point the the emergentist is going to have to say this. There is some point, I don't know where it is, but if you remove one single electron from the billions that are there, you will have consciousness disappear and there will be no consciousness at all now that is making a huge effect the presence and then the absence of consciousness itself depend on the change of an absolutely minuscule cause the removal of one ultimate tiny particle, which would be compared to the billions that would have to still be there because you can't have consciousness with 100,000 brain cells.

So the point is that it just seems utterly arbitrary to say that, well, this is the right level and that's when things emerge. There's a better solution, and that's to say that consciousness always belongs to a soul or a mind or a self. It doesn't emerge on the brain, though it needs the body to be functioning to some degree or other in order for the soul to work while you're in the body. Like a driver in a car, if the steering wheel doesn't work, he won't be able to get around town if he's locked in the front seat, but that doesn't prove he's the car. Same with being in the body. If it's broken down, I might not be able to do certain things like remember yesterday, but that doesn't prove on my brain. So when we talk about emergence, you've given a few critiques to this, that you're

getting something from nothing. It's what needs to be explained. It's not an explanation of how it does so. The sorites problem. But what if we concede that you do get consciousness? It would seem that whatever emerges is dependent upon its physical base. And thus there's bottom-up causation, and you couldn't have top-down causation through thinking, through rationality and acting, which is the very thing consciousness has to explain. Is that just another level of difficulty or challenge? I'm so glad that you brought that up, because the problem of so-called top-down causation has been a horrible problem, and it really has not been solved yet though some think they have but they really haven't because they they change what it means by the top

causing things they fudge the word so no and if if consciousness is epiphenomenal that means the brain causes conscious properties and states to emerge, but then it doesn't in turn cause anything. Then once again, rationality is gone by the board. I mean, look at what we're doing right now. We're having a discussion and we're presenting arguments for and against things because we think that the contents of our thoughts and beliefs could change someone's mind it could bring about an effect somebody might change their position right because they grasped the content and they chose based upon the reasoning to hold to a new view now why would anybody waste time giving a talk

or write a book or a journal article or give a college lecture if they believe that the contents of their thoughts and assertions had no effect on anybody? What would be the point of making an utterance? So epiphenomenalism makes what we do in arguing and reasoning and lecturing pointless because it doesn't do anything.

JP, one of your critiques of emergence is that it just is turned into a brute fact. Now, I think everybody in this discussion, correct me if I'm wrong, panpsychists, naturalists, at some point have to have certain brute facts yes i do believe in the book that you wrote with uh william and craig philosophical foundations for christian worldview when the question of causal interaction came up in terms of if we are body and soul how does this immaterial and material substances interact? One explanation was that it might just be a brute fact. So why is a brute fact not okay with emergence, but then it's potentially okay when it comes to causal interaction? That is a great question. And you do not want what are called contingent brute facts,

except in the case that they avoid a vicious infinite regress. And then you can postulate a brute fact because it saves you having to be stuck with a vicious regress. And so we postulate there's a first cause, God, who doesn't need another cause as a necessary brute fact. Because if we don't, you end up with a vicious infinite regress where nothing would exist and I can't explain that in more detail sure but let's suppose that a situation involves a vicious infinite regress that's the time to posit a brute fact because it avoids an embarrassing rational problem a vicious infinite regress now this interaction of soul to mind to body suppose you say it has to happen through a physical intermediary well then how does the

soul interact with that physical intermediary well there's got to be another intermediary that it operates you get a vicious infinite regress. So establishing that the interaction is just a primitive brute fact and it's direct and there is no further intermediary is the best solution to avoid an infinite regress. Because we all know that I can raise my arm. And when I get stuck with a pin, I'll tell you, I feel pain. I don't know about you, but so there is causal interaction. And if you have a vicious symphony of regress between mind and body, they can't get to each other. So that is when you do it. But with emergence, there is no problem of some intermediary because they just announced that it's just when matter reaches a certain level of complexity, bingo, it just emerges. And it is not postulated to avoid any kind of vicious infinite regress that has to take place between the brain and the conscious state.

So these are not parallel cases. And that's what i would say and and by the way this out of nothing problem is why david chalmers and others are moving to panpsychism their consciousness emerges from little particles of matter already having consciousness. Now, at least that solves the problem of getting something out of nothing. It raises other problems, like how do you take a bunch of little conscious things and put them together into a unified single consciousness?

But at least it solves the ex nihilo problem, and the fact that panpsychism is on the move shows that there is a problem with naturalism. And it's got to be solved. I want you to flesh this out a little bit, because this is going to be one of the next questions I asked is, panpsychism is this idea that kind of soulish material is built into matter on some level. I heard Philip Goth, who's written some books on this and defended it, he said, we don't really know what matter is and there's something mysterious about it. Maybe

there's this mental element, so to speak, that's a part of it. Okay, so your first point that makes sense is this is a pushback against naturalism, that everything is purely physical in the way we've taken it to be. I want you to flesh this out a little bit because it seems to me one of the biggest problems with panpsychism is what you referred to not by name, the combination problem. Explain in a little bit more depth what that problem is and why it's particularly pointed for panpsychism. Well, consciousness comes in in a unity right

now I have a visual field and I can see a painting I can see your face I can see the closet over here and right now I am seeing 150 different things all at once in my one single visual field. Now, it's not as though I am 150 different selves where one self is constantly looking at that picture. Another self has the task of constantly looking at your face. Another is constantly looking over here at the vase. No, I am one single self that brings all of these different objects into one unified experience. We can put that by saying this. Whenever one has an experience of A, let's say a table, at the same time one has an experience of B, the chair. So there is a what it's like to see A, and there's a what it's like to see B. There will always be a third experience called a totalizing or unifying experience. And that's what it's like to see A and B taken together.

Now, the best explanation for what unifies experience is that there is a simple single self or i or ego that unifies all of these different aspects of my experience into the experience of one single subjective substance a soul the the panpsychist has all these individual little unified consciousnesses and somehow by bringing them together you end up with this big single unified conscious being and it's not clear why you wouldn't just have a crowd of individual consciousness conscious beings just herded closer together. But there would still be a multiplicity of individual conscious subjects. You can't get one from many. That's the problem.

Yeah, that makes sense. Like it doesn't matter how close you and I get, there's still distinct individual consciousness, but there's not one that unites us. By the way, I love that you gave me a hard time a minute ago. I don't know if you remember this, but our first, my first class of metaphysics was probably 2000 with you, two of our colleagues now at Talbot, Tim Pickavance, and I think Kyle Strobel was in there. And I raised my hand, I made some contribution. He said, that's really good,

Sean, I appreciate that. And you paused, you said said something like it's about time you joined the class i was wondering when you and you just rode me humbled me and i thought man i got a long ways to go but it was all in love uh which was fun tim reminded me of that the other day he goes hey you remember the time a couple decades ago i was like i remember i was scarred no that's you know who needs friends when you got enemies like tim, you know? Exactly. That was fun. Okay. Now you mentioned that there's this unity of consciousness that ties things together. Hume had what was called a phenomenological report where he kind of said, I don't see this enduring self through time.

Rather, it's just this series of experiences over time. What did Hume mean? And why do you think he's misguided there? Well, Hume believed that the only thing that existed were little patches of sensations, like a little patch of red and a little patch of sweetness and a little patch of brown. And when you put all those little sensations together,

you ended up with something like an apple. So Hume said, when I enter most deeply within myself, that means when I go within introspect, I always confront this sensation, he called them idea, this sensation or that sensation. So a little taste of sweet or a little taste of salt or a sour or a little smell of pungency or a little patch of color, what have you. But I never come across any experience of my eye or my ego uh so i conclude that i have no since it's outside my experience i have no reason to believe in it and i must just be a series of sensory experiences through time without any self or solar ego sustaining and unifying them all right that's what he meant now the problem is how did hume know whose stream of consciousness he was entering into suppose he did this in a room with 20 people and you have 20 streams of consciousness going on at the same time

in that room you understand they're all awake there are 20 flows of consciousness occurring in the room hume says i entered most deeply within myself so he thought that he was attending to the flow of listen to this his consciousness but how did he know he wasn't poking around in some other person's consciousness instead of his own you see the reason the way he knew that he was looking into his Consciousness is because first of all he was aware of himself and subsequently he was aware of the states of Consciousness that belonged to him so in order for him to recognize of these 20 streams of consciousness, which one's mine, I first have to have an experiential awareness of my substantial bearer or owner of consciousness, that is myself or I or ego or soul, call it what you want.

And then I'm aware of which experiences belong to my self or soul now Hume's problem was that he limited experience to the five senses but we experience things that go far beyond that we experience our own conscious states for example and I'm having a thought I'm directly aware of what that thought is even though I can't see touch taste smell or hear it we are aware of the laws of logic simple laws of logic and we are aware of ourselves and I think that explains the hard metaproblem of Consciousness is the reason everybody's duelists is they're just aware of themselves. I'm sorry, but they happen to be aware of themselves. And I think Hume should have expanded experience to count as anything we're aware of, whether it's the senses, we use the senses or not.

And I think that's what he meant by that. And that's the problem with his argument. That's really helpful. I appreciate that pushback and that clarity because there's a little line in your book that's almost so obvious but it's important is you said something effective there's nothing that would convince you dear reader that you are not the same identical person who started reading this book and maybe you had different thoughts you maybe had different experiences maybe they set it down and

we'll come back to it in months but there's an ongoing eye that continues through and it's just so obvious the other point that you make is sometimes people say well this this idea of the eye or the self is invented and you say it's not that it's invented like it's not like human invented this self or will at some point go, oh, I have a feeling of hot. Now I have an experience of the eye. The eye is the self that goes over time and has those different experiences and ties them together. It's not an independent experience. It's the one that has the experience. I thought that was really helpful when you said for example like mental things are not conscience they need a mind to kind of ground them so to speak experiences

need an experiencer and i think the same thing would apply to hume all right one last question for you on this and i have kind of a personal question for you and we'll wrap up. Some might just in turn say, JP, naturalism is simpler. Why not appeal to Occam's razor and not multiply entities beyond what is required to explain reality? You're adding all these spooky, immaterial entities. Let's keep it simple. Well, yes. And we have to remember that Occam's razor or the epistemological problem of simplicity, which is different than the metaphysical issue of simplicity, but you're stating it. Remember, that's a tiebreaker. It is the last resort when all things are equal on both sides. And it says, if two theories do an equally good job of explaining the facts, go with the simpler theory and not the more complicated one.

And that makes common sense. Because if you're in that situation where two theories equally explain the facts, then the excess baggage that one theory has is really not doing any good. Because you can do an equally good job of explaining without it. So lump it off. But what the dualist is going to insist is that all things aren't equal this is not a lie uh and you can't appeal to simplicity at the beginning of the discussion to stop the debate you got to conclude it once you've made you've heard all the arguments on both sides and concluded, this is 50-50 equal. I'm going with the simpler and so would I. But I maintain in our book that

the arguments for substance dualism are far stronger than the arguments against it and the arguments for physicalism. And so Occam's razor never gets a chance to come on the tape. That's great. So you're all for simplicity when breaking a tie, but if you have a naturalist worldview and it can't explain free will, if it can't explain identity over time, if it can't ground rationality, if it can't explain certain phenomena that we know is a part of reality, then simplicity is not going to help you because it's not accounting for all the facts. Once all the facts are accounted for, then let's go with the simplest explanation that does so at that point. That's really helpful. JP, here's kind of a personal question for you. You've been studying this your whole life. This book is a philosophical book with Blackwell, Wiley Blackwell, a leading academic publisher.

What does this personally mean to you? Especially, you told me, I hope this is okay, you said you're 75. So I'm guessing as somebody gets older, they think about the afterlife more and more. You've expressed some physical challenges that you faced, even beyond any of those questions. What does this personally mean for you in your spiritual life? Well, it means so much to me personally, because because I have believed for years, decades actually, that the church was being harmed because it did not give enough attention to developing the Christian mind and learning how to know why we believe the things we do.

And that was hurting us spiritually. Sean, you know me, I believe in prayer and I believe in the emotions, so I'm not just an intellectual type guy, but I still think that we've neglected that so much. And one of the things that I felt like I could do would be to kind of hold down the fort at sort of the highest levels of academic inquiry. Whereas I believe in every level. We're a team and every level's got to be filled. I have kids in junior high, they need stuff for them. Okay. But I'm talking about my calling and this is kind of my magnus opus, I guess you'd say. and Brandon Rickabaugh. That book would have never been

done without him. He was such a great colleague. And just because you've been interviewing me, we've been sort of talking like I wrote it, but it really was the joint effort of both of us. But it is kind of my chance before I die to say that I believe I sort of left, I sort of dropped this little bomb out there in the other guy's territory, and it's going to keep exploding, you know, and we're going to have to deal with it. And it's going to strengthen Christians who go to grad school and, or who are really thankful really thoughtful Christians who like to read philosophy. And I think I've given them a gift that is maybe the culmination of a lot of what my life has been about. And so it means a lot to me to see the Lord honor this, and I'm excited to see what he might

do with it. It's going to be exciting. Friends, if you're watching this one way you can honor JP and his lifetime effort here is to get a copy of the book, share it with a friend, share this video and this interview with others, Christians or with skeptics to help spread the word. It's a good time to be an apologetic JP. We have Gary Habermas making his lifetime contribution on the word. It's a good time to be an apologetic, JP. We have Gary Habermas making his lifetime contribution on the resurrection. Bill Craig doing a philosophical theology from his lifetime. These are

very important contributions. Can't thank you enough. Now, before we sign off and come back Friday, I want to make sure folks hit subscribe. We've got some other shows on all sorts of topics related to apologetics, worldview, culture, sexuality, the afterlife kind of, you will not want to miss them. And think about studying with JP and I at

Biola. I'm specifically in the Talbot Apologetics Program. He's distinctly in the M.A. Phil Philosophy of Religion Program. Both can be done completely by distance. There's information below. Check it out. As I've said many times, that MA field program was life-changing for me, and I hope folks will check it out. JP, I will gather up the tough questions for you, and we will be back Friday to do this live. Thanks for joining me. Really, really well done. My privilege, my friend.