The latest episode of Secrets of the Human Body identifies what might be the body’s most profound secret: that there is a “disconnect” between a physical organ of the body — the brain — and the “immortal mind,” the human spirit, that transcends it. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, co-author with Denyse O’Leary of The Immortal Mind, considers near-death experiences among other startling phenomena in his field that point to this immaterial reality.
Dr. Egnor concludes dramatically by noting that the recognition of that reality extends increasingly across scientific disciplines. In biology, Dr. Richard Sternberg speaks of the “immaterial genome,” described in my book about his thinking, Plato’s Revenge. Egnor draws a parallel conclusion:
I think there is what some people might call a Platonic turn happening in science. Plato argued that the most fundamental real things that exist are ideas more than physical things. And physical things are instantiations, imperfect instantiations, of these perfect ideas.
There is a movement, I think, in science, some of it subtle, some of it overt. Discipline after discipline in science is moving out of this mold of purely materialistic thinking and beginning to look at the information content in living things. Beginning to look at conceptual reality in the quantum world and cosmology, and beginning to look at neuroscience with an understanding of the immaterial aspects of the human intellect and will.
That “Platonic turn” could be the most significant, revolutionary thing going on in science at the moment.