Is there a God ?

for people asking questions about God

Are our brains like computers?

A quick look at our amazing brains

A brief look at some facts about the amazing human brain and how it works. But what is our mind or self, what is consciousness, and do we have freedom of choice?

How the brain works

Research continues to discover how amazing our brains are. A brain weighs about 1.5 kg, yet has more connections and more "messages" than the phone systems for the entire planet. Brains work by intricate electrical and chemical processes and are far more complex, and different in their operation, than computers. For example:

• Signals travel around electrical circuits in a computer, but in the brain the transmission of information is via a much more complex combination of electrical and chemical actions. The human brain has about 100 billion neurons connected by more than 100 trillion synapses. Neurons are basically electrical on/off switches which work similarly to the miniaturised transistors in computer chips. Information is passed between neurons via chemical synapses, which release neurotransmitters which act on another neuron.
• Most neurons are connected via synapses to several thousand other neurons, making the brain's circuitry exceptionally complex.
• A computer would generally store all the details about a picture of a car in one location, whereas the human brain may store the colour in one location, its sound in another and its movement elsewhere again.
• Computers are programmed (though they can be programmed to learn by experience), whereas brains learn by experience and thus, in a sense program themselves, and are capable of re-programming themselves.

Thus brains are like computers in some ways, and a computer can be programmed to act like a brain, but they operate by very different processes.

The Turing test

A computer can be programmed to act like a brain (artificial intelligence), so how can we tell the difference? Can we conclude that computers can think? Could computers have consciousness and freewill?

Mathematician Alan Turing considered these questions and proposed a test for whether a computer can think. A computer and a person (known simply as X and Y) are in one room and a questioner is in another. The questioner can ask any question she chooses, directed to either X or Y. If the computer passes the Turing test, it is able to give answers that cannot be distinguished from the answers of a human, so the questioner is unable to identify which of X and Y is the computer and which is the human. One could say that the computer is able to think like a human being.

Not everyone agrees with Turing, and so far, despite the amazing growth in capability of computers (even including their ability to defeat the world chess champion), they cannot pass the Turing test with any consistency. So we may conclude that, at present at least, computers cannot think.

Mind and consciousness

Philosophers and neuroscientists find it very hard to define mind and consciousness. We experience them, in a sense we are them, yet in another sense thay do not exist in any tangible way. Scientific definitions tend to focus on neuronal activity in the brain, but it seems like we are more than that. For now, we can simply say that consciousness is self awareness, or the feeling that accompanies brain activity (e.g. the pain that accompanies the brain activity leading to the automatic reaction to remove one's hand from a hot stove) and mind is the sum of the brain's conscious processes.

There are many questions we may ask. What is self? Is the mind or consciousness simply a way of describing brain activity, or are they something more?

Dualism vs monism

Some scientists and philosophers point to the deterioration in the mind and consciousness as the brain deteriorates, and argue that mind and consciousness arise from brain activity and are not separate from it. Hence they are described as "emergent" properties of brain activity, and thus everything can be explained by physics (= monism, or physicalism).

The alternative view, that there is mind or self above and beyond the brain (a viewpoint which cannot be proven, or disproven, scientifically, but which can be argued philosophically), is called dualism. Dualism tends to be scorned by most scientists because it cannot be demonstrated by science (although neither can it be refuted), and is thus to some degree an article of faith. Scientist John Polkinghorne tries to avoid this by proposing "dual aspect monism" (that is, there is no mind outside our brains, but our brains have both physical and mental attributes), but it sounds a lot like dualism to me.

However philosophers have developed arguments that support dualism and freewill, just as they have developed counter arguments. Supporters of dualism point to research by Wilder Penfield and others showing that people can distinguish between actions caused by the artificial stimulation of part of the brain by researchers, and the actions they originate themselves, suggesting that although the same parts of the brain are involved, there is something else involved.

In evaluating these two views, we come across a logical problem. Scientists tend to assume that science can (in principle) explain everything in the universe (an assumption which is not demonstrable by science, as can be seen from the quotes below from Alwyn Scott and James Trefil), then argue that since dualism cannot be proven by science it is not respectable. It is a circular argument. Thus the materialist belief is also an assumption, or even an act of faith. Nevertheless, science cannot do other than study what it can study. But we may best remain open-minded about those areas which science cannot study, and not simply assume them to be non-existent.

Delving into these questions gets into deep areas of neuroscience and philosophy, which are beyond our purpose here (if you're interested, check out some of the references below). But the views we hold about mind and consciousness can affect our behaviour and our views about life, meaning, God, ethics and the value of human life.

Free will?

One important question which arises out of considering the brain, mind, consciousness and self, is that of freewill. Are our actions fully determined by these brain processes, as is the case with computers? Do our brain processes control us, or do we control them? Do "we" exist separately from our brain processes? Are consciousness, choice and personality real?

Such questions are hotly debated. Many academics these days are determinists, that is, they believe we cannot initiate new thoughts, because there is no "self" outside the brain to initiate anything. Our brains are "us". Thus every thought is in fact determined by electro-chemical processes and external stimuli, and we have no real freedom of choice, that is, the possibility of changing the flow of events. They point to experiments which appear to show that the brain processes which cause a physical action (say, raising one's arm) begin in the subconscious, thus showing that the conscious mind does not originate the process. This would appear to show that our actions are determined, and we have no real choice about them. However compatibilists argue that determinism does not negate free will but is compatible with it.

Definitions of free will

It all depends on how "free will" is defined. If it is freedom from external compulsion, then most of the time we have free will, because the "choice", albeit a determined choice, lies within our brains. However this seems to be a very low level of "freedom". If free will means the freedom and ability to make choices among several options (as most people would define it), then most scientists and philosophers would believe that we don't have that freedom, because our brain processes are inevitable, although unpredictable.

Nevertheless, most people act as if we are more than the products of our brain processes. For example, we hold people morally and legally responsible for their actions, which would be unjustified if their actions were determined. Paradoxically, even the same neurological researchers who write about deterministic processes, use language in other places that infers freedom of choice (words like "should" or "may" often imply choice between options), although they generally do not demonstrate how they can think this.

Conclusions

So it appears our brains are not very much like computers at all. Computers operate differently, and most people would say that they lack minds, consciousness and freewill. But if you believe humans also lack these .....

How does this change if there is a God?

Our conclusions about free will probably be determined by our assumptions.:

1. If we assume the physical is all there is, we will think the only correct explanations come from science. We will conclude that our minds and consciousness are the product of our brains alone, and we are therefore controlled by our brain processes. Thus we have no genuine free choice, we cannot be held morally responsible for our actions, and we cannot regard humans as anything more than a more intelligent animal.
2. If we assume we can trust our experience of being ourselves we may conclude there is a non-physical self that science cannot measure. It feels like we have free will and we will conclude that indeed we do, and we can therefore be held morally responsible. Humans are thus more than just intelligent animals. This view is often, though not always, associated with a belief in God.

Those who trust neuroscience to address questions of metaphysics will probably feel that the latest discoveries add to the reasons not to believe that God exists. But those who think neuroscience should stick to what it can measure (not what it can't), and instead trust their own experience of being human, may conclude that, if the choice is between no God and no free will, or God and free will, they will choose the latter.

Clues

Can we find evidence for God?

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Last updated 6 January 2012