Page 108 - Darwin's Dilemma: The Soul

Darwin’s Dilemma: The Soul

Andrew B. Newberg, an Associate Professor in the
Department of Radiology and Psychiatry at the University of
Pennsylvania, states:

There were philosophers in the past that said, “Look, if I kick a rock
and I hurt my toe, that’s real. I feel that. It feels real. It’s vivid. And
that means it’s reality.” But it’s still an experience and it’s still this
person’s perception of it being real. 62
For instance, when you touch something hot, if the nerves re-
sponsible for transmitting the sensation of pain to your brain are
impaired, it is impossible for you to feel that you are being burned.
The burning sensation and the consequent feeling of pain are all
just interpretations by the brain. Similarly, a feeling of perception
may be established by artificial production using electrical signals,
even though no outside stimulant is present. So we may feel that
our hand is burning, even though there is no fire nearby. This is an-
other proof that the sensations arise solely in our perceptual world.
This significant fact was expressed by the famous 20th-century
thinker Bertrand Russell:
As to the sense of touch when we press the table with our fingers,
that is an electric disturbance on the electrons and protons of our fin-
ger-tips, produced, according to modern physics, by the proximity of
the electrons and protons in the table. If the same disturbance in our
finger-tips arose in any other way, we should have the sensations, in
spite of there being no table. 63
For our perceptual world, the essential feature of matter, its
solidity, disappears in the scientific sense. In the same way that our
seeing a thing provides no evidence about its true physical ap-
pearance, so our touching an object provides no clues concerning
its real solidity. What we touch consists solely of an entity form-
ing in the brain. Its true nature and appearance on the outside
is a dream that we can never know, as the science writer J. R.
Minkel sets out in an article in New Scientist magazine:

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