At the Knight & Rose podcast, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose had many questions to ask neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and science writer Denyse O’Leary about their book, The Immortal Mind (Worthy, June 3, 2025):

(47:01 min)

Here are a couple of exchanges:

Egnor: When I first read Dr. Sperry’s work on split brain — he won the Nobel prize for showing the abnormalities of people who have split brain surgery — what struck me was how completely normal they are. That is, if you meet them, you can’t tell the difference. They’re perfectly normal people.

And they tell you, I’m one person, I’m not two people. They basically don’t notice anything different in their lives.

And it would be as if you took your computer and just took a chainsaw and cut it right down the middle. And then you found it still worked just fine. There’s something odd about this computer.

So I think that the existence of an immaterial soul is the best way to explain the remarkable outcomes of split brain surgery.

Knight: So basically we’re finding out through the progress of science that there are a lot of things that we can demonstrate about mental activity, things like consciousness and free will and abstract thought that are not like lining up perfectly with the brain. So we can take away parts of the brain and, you know, cut the brain in half and we’re still preserving this mental function.

Dr. Egnor also spoke about near-death experiences, a key topic of discussion in the book:

Egnor: I’ve kind of made a list of four things that I think any explanation for near-death experiences must explain. The first is that people who have these experiences have remarkably clear thinking. It’s highly organized.

They often have a life review and they have an explicit decision to return to their body. The second thing is that they have about 20% of the patients who have this have clear corroboration, meaning they see things that can be checked. They know what happened in the room when their brain wasn’t working.

The third thing is, and this is remarkable, is that as far as I know, there’s never been a report of near-death experiences where people met living people on the other side of the tunnel. When they go down the tunnel, they always meet people on the other end who are dead, even if they didn’t know they were dead…

And the fourth characteristic of these phenomena is that they’re life-changing. People’s lives change very often dramatically from what they see.

And I’ve reviewed all of the materialistic explanations. There’s probably 20 of them.

Generally, as the book illustrates, materialist explanations don’t account for key elements in the near-death experience, including the fact that people observe things that they should not have been able to see (veridical experiences).

Computers and free will?

Wintery Knight had a specific question for Denyse O’Leary:

Knight: I’m a software engineer by day, and it just seems crazy to me that people would think that by typing in additional lines of code, the machine would become conscious of what it’s doing. When I’m playing a game on my computer, I know that it’s just executing code like anything else. It has no idea what’s being run.

So why do people have this idea that you can make a computer complex enough so that it has consciousness and especially free will?

O’Leary: Well, let’s start with the fact that people hear that in the media all the time. Like that soon computers are going to think like people. Sam Altman says it. Elon Musk says it. All kinds of people say it. And I often read items in the news by software engineers like yourself saying, no, that’s nonsense.

But who do you think gets most of the publicity? Now, let’s look at a couple of realities. First, we don’t even know what consciousness is. One of my topics on which I write a great deal is theories of consciousness, which are wildly contested.

Nobody has a good theory of consciousness, of human consciousness anyway. But there are a number of theories out there, let me tell you. The thing is, if you don’t even know what consciousness is, how are you going to determine whether a computer has consciousness anyhow? Like there’s no benchmark.

We all know we have consciousness, but that’s it. That’s not a benchmark. Okay.

Now, the other thing is free will. Free will requires reason, and computers don’t reason. I mean, essentially, a computer can’t think anything except in ones and zeros, right? So if you can’t make it ones and zeros, it’s not something a computer can do.

Now, I don’t think that the human mind quite works that way, or anyway, I’ve never heard a really good explanation for how the human mind works, but the computational theory is not more widely accepted than others.

So let’s just say that I think you have to be a human person to actually have free will as we understand it. You can’t just be a string of ones and zeros.

But when people say that computers are developing free will, I think what you’ll find is that there’s a certain amount of sleight of hand going on.

Agree? Disagree? The book drops June 3.