Last month at Popular Mechanics, Hanna Webster who has a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience, took a look at Michael Egnor’s and my recent book, The Immortal Mind (2025). She found our non-materialist approach to the human mind a bridge too far and thus sought out alternative viewpoints.
One of her sources was neurologist Steven Novella. In his view, books like TIM do harm:
The real concern, says Newsome and Novella, of a book like The Immortal Mind — and the Discovery Institute in general, where Egnor pens regular articles — is that proof of God is couched within a scientific framework, giving credentials and a veil of credibility to a belief. It’s common for certain movements to use the framework of science to misrepresent an issue — this is frequently seen in vaccine debates.
“This Neurosurgeon Studies the Brain Close to Death. He Believes the Soul Transcends the Body,” Popular Mechanics, April 30, 2026
It’s worth noting that, as Webster points out, Novella co-founded the New England Skeptical Society and hosts the podcast The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. Are the range of opinions of his group not similar instances of “belief”? If not, what are they?
Materialism vs. Materialism?
I found the definition of materialism offered in the article most interesting: “Materialism is the reality scientists collectively agree on in order to start at a common baseline of experimentation.” The trouble is, that doesn’t sound very specific; what precisely is the reality that good materialists are supposed to collectively agree on?
American Heritage Dictionary was rather more helpful: Materialism is “The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena.”
As a result, a virtuous materialist must shoehorn a variety of unusual phenomena into the theory. Here are a few of them:
First, quantum mechanics dealt a huge blow to materialism early in the 20th century, one that Albert Einstein (1879–1955) never came to terms with. As we noted in The Immortal Mind,
In 2022, physicists Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments that established that, contrary to what Einstein had hoped, at the most fundamental level, nature is governed by probabilities and not by certainties. (p. 141)
Particles can share a fate even if they are on opposite sides of the universe (entanglement or action at a distance). Systems can exist in multiple states at once.
Last year was the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. One of the featured phenomena was the quantum Zeno effect: The watched pot never really boils. As explained by Margaret Harris,
Imagine, if you will, that you are a quantum system. Specifically, you are an unstable quantum system – one that would, if left to its own devices, rapidly decay from one state (let’s call it “awake”) into another (“asleep”). But whenever you start to drift into the “asleep” state, something gets in the way. Maybe it’s a message pinging on your phone. Maybe it’s a curious child peppering you with questions. Whatever it is, it jolts you out of your awake–asleep superposition and projects you back into wakefulness. And because it keeps happening faster than you can fall asleep, you remain awake, diverted from slumber by a stream of interruptions – or, in quantum terms, measurements.
“The quantum Zeno effect: how the ‘measurement problem’ went from philosophers’ paradox to physicists’ toolbox,” Physics World, April 14, 2025
If physicists keep observing a system, it stops changing. And if the very act of our observation changes the system, we probably don’t live in a universe where “everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena.”
Now Let’s Look at the Mind
Is the mind simply what the brain does? That’s how cognitive neuroscientist John Gabrieli applies the materialist view to the mind.
Actually, many phenomena of the mind are not very good advertisements for materialism at all. The placebo effect comes to mind. It is the best attested fact in medicine. Pharmaceuticals licenced for use are tested against it. Why? Briefly, what patients think is happening to them is a critical part of what is happening. If they think a medication works, it will work for many of them even if it they are in the control group and it is only a sugar pill.
The mind can definitely affect the body. Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson (1935–2022) found that lifetime Buddhist meditators could significantly raise their temperature or slow their metabolism as a result of focused attention.
More remarkably, many people who have been lost in dementia for years suddenly gain clarity just before dying (terminal lucidity). That was one of the factors that tipped political scientist Charles Murray toward a non-materialist viewpoint.
There is actually no evidence-based reason from human experience to think that “physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena” (a standard general definition of materialism).
People are entitled to their own definitions of materialism or anything else, of course. But once we apply a standard one, we see that materialism is false to the reality of the human mind. And that is why Dr. Egnor and I wrote The Immortal Mind.
We are indebted to Hanna Webster for creating an opportunity to clarify these matters.
Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.