Recently, I was giving an informal talk about neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s and my The Immortal Mind (Worthy, June 3, 2025). Someone asked, “Are you saying that the brain is material but the mind is immaterial?”
Yes, I was. And I sensed some doubt among attendees about whether anything can really be immaterial. Actually, it’s quite common. So I said something like this in response.
Here’s an Example
I have a bank account. That means I have a bank card and a password. Also a checkbook. Are those items “the account?” Well, no, not really; they are all connected with the account.
So where is the account? Technically, at a bank branch in a major city in which I lived thirty years ago. But in another sense, it is a series of electronic signals in the bank’s vast computer system. It’s not clear that the account has a location in the usual sense because electrons are, famously, non-local.
Every shop I deal with assumes that such an account exists. I can load up a shopping cart full of goods, tap the card, and walk out with the loaded up cart — and both the owners and the employees expect to get paid electronically. My account exists mainly as an immaterial assumption in everybody’s mind.
The account is backed by other such assumptions: that the currency is stable and has a certain value, that the bank is honest, and so forth. There are material elements in this process, especially the goods in the cart. But the entire process is driven by immaterial assumptions about a source of payment based on electrons with no fixed location.
A Source of Authority
Many realities in our day to day life are similar. The national or provincial flag on a public building tells me that the building houses a source of authority. A police officer’s badge would have the same effect, as would a legal seal on a document.
Our brains alone do not create the minds that enables us to live in a world that is based on immaterial as well as material realities, because they can’t.
One way of understanding the relationship between our minds and our brains is that our brains instantiate our immaterial minds. Thus we can function as hybrid beings in our hybrid material-immaterial world. We can handle both material facts (a series of loud sounds) and immaterial ones (it’s Labor Day so firecrackers are allowed).
You may also wish to read: An ancient argument for the existence of the human soul. Sixteen hundred years ago, Augustine told a friend about a dream a skeptical local doctor had had. In the dream, a sharp youth asked the doctor some pointed questions he couldn’t answer. One issue that arose in that age of philosophical controversy, just as today, was how anything like a human mind could function without a body?