The Mind, Free Will, and the Universe: Life and Afterlife

By Dr. Muafaq Wafi

We are living in two worlds: the physical world of matter, forces, and motions and the mental world of ideas, impressions, and emotions.

The aim of this books ten essays is to explore the world of the mind. It is a world claimed to be supernatural, but rational justifications, supported by scientific investigations, demonstrate that it is of our natural world. Once the mind is rationally explained in terms of the brains functionalities, then it becomes possible to answer far-reaching existential questions: Why do I exist? What is life? What happens when I die?

Be warned: this book isnt an easy read. Each essay is a step upward into the unfamiliar and unconventional, requiring effort, patience, and above all a mind that tolerates the extraordinary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: May 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546289371

Book preview

© 2018 Dr Muafaq Wafi. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/21/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8938-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8937-1 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Contents

Acknowledgment

Preface

Introduction

Essay 1: The Mind and Existence

Essay 2: What Is Knowledge?

Essay 3: What Development in the Human Brain Facilitated the Mind?

Essay 4: What Are the Similarities between the Working of a Computer and the Working of the Brain?

Essay 5: Is the Mind the Software of a Supercomputer? Is Its Hardware the Brain?

Essay 6: How Much Knowledge Can the Mind Accommodate?

Essay 7: Do We Have Free Will?

Essay 8: Why Is There Evolution?

Essay 9: The Falsification of the Supernatural

Essay 10: Rational Answers to the Ultimate Existential Questions

The Appendix

Acknowledgment

To my sons, Kamal and Hasan, who inspired me with many ideas and rectified my poor English grammar.

To Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia of specialised knowledge.

To Google, the source of everything else I needed.

To Microsoft Word, the intelligent word processor.

Thank you.

Without you, this book wouldn’t exist.

Acknowledgment and credit to:

Creative Commons for permission to use image in fig. 3.2, fig. 4.3, fig. 8.2,

WildFact at https://wildfact.com/forum/ for permission to use image in fig 3.1

Wikipedia public domain for permission to use image in fig. 4.1, 4.2, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, fig. 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, fig. 9.1, 9.6

Starline - Freepik.com for permission to use image in fig. 9.3

Preface

We are living in two worlds: the physical world of matter, forces, and motions, and the mental world of ideas, impressions, and emotions.

The aim of this book’s ten essays is to explore the world of the mind. It is a world claimed to be supernatural, but rational justifications, supported by scientific investigations, demonstrate that it is of our natural world. Once the mind is rationally explained in terms of the brain’s functionalities, then it becomes possible to answer far-reaching existential questions:

Why do I exist?

What is life?

What happens when I die?

Be warned: this book isn’t an easy read. Each essay is a step upward into the unfamiliar and unconventional, requiring effort, patience and above all a mind that tolerates the extraordinary.

Introduction

When the mind is brought down from the supernatural dominion to the natural dominion, we are faced with the problem of explaining it within the nature of brain matter. Every aspect of nature is ruled by strict natural laws that seem to render the human a soulless robot. The mind becomes an aspect of the brain’s functions, dictated by the laws of physics and chemistry. Ideas, impressions, and emotions are processes in the brain, just like the processes associated with executing a software program. In this robotic sense, human consciousness is no more than awareness and responsiveness to physical stimuli. Free will is an illusion, since its origin is a mind ruled by natural laws.

There is no escape from the fact that explaining the mind in terms of natural phenomena robs the human the privileged association with the supernatural and the hope of eternal afterlife. But isn’t the belief in the supernatural the result of unanswerable existential questions? It seems to me that the human shifted the bucket containing the unanswerable in the natural world to the unquestionable in a supernatural world.

The book is an attempt to explain the mind, within the realm of nature, and suggest rational answers to the ultimate existential questions.

The first essay discusses the philosophical issue concerning the mind versus true existence. I will show that the proof of human existence is in the engagement of the processes of thoughts with emotions. The second essay provides a brief account of the theory of knowledge. I will discuss the types of knowledge and argue that knowledge cannot be complete. The third essay discusses how the human brain’s development facilitated the mind. I will show that the mind, which signifies the emergence of individuality and personal identity, was evolved amid conflicts with inborn instincts. The fourth essay concerns the similarity and dissimilarity between a human brain and a computer. I will elaborate the main structural, information processing, and coding similarities and dissimilarities.

The fifth essay elaborates the differences between the mind and computer software. I will argue that the mind is not just a rational operations machine, since its structure and the way knowledge is manipulated give rise to the creation of ideas and imagination. The sixth essay assesses the capacity of the brain for ideas. I will show that the estimated capacity of the brain for ideas is almost infinite when interneuron patterns are taken into account. The seventh essay discusses the concept of free will. I will briefly explain the free will concept in religion and philosophy, explore its meaning, and assess its scientific validity. The eighth essay answers the question, why is there evolution? After all, the general tendency in nature is devolution to simpler, more resilient forms of existence. I will argue that the answer is embedded in the degrees of freedom (DOF), a concept related to the science of physics.

The ninth essay questions the validity of the supernatural world. I will examine the validity of the most influential arguments for the existence of a supernatural power that created the natural world. I will provide convincing arguments showing that the development of the protein molecules on Earth was possible when nature used a technique I call nesting. The tenth essay starts with a summary of the previous nine essays and provides rational answers to some ultimate existential questions. Some questions I will attempt to answer are the validity of a mind for an assumed universal living existence, the nature of consciousness, and the meaning of life.

Essay 1

The Mind and Existence

The mind illuminated human life with knowledge, and it is due to many creative minds that mankind progressed from an instinctive animal to a Wiseman (Homo sapiens) who initiated civilizations. But what is the mind? A short answer is human consciousness that originates in the brain and is manifested especially in thought, perception, emotion, will, memory, and imagination¹.

It was believed that the mind is associated with an ethereal, immortal spirit that departs the material body at the moment of death to join an eternal supernatural world. The belief in spirits and an eternal supernatural world, which became the cornerstone of most religions, was justified by the fact that the mind’s activities are intangible, timeless, and free from the material world’s determinism, which is rigorously dictated by cause and effect. We all accept as a fact that what defines humanity’s existential status and distinguishes us from animals is our mind. But we cannot assert that the mind is exclusive to humans, since many of its capabilities are available to primates and other animals, like canines. I am sure that my dog is thinking of the identity of other dogs while he is sniffing their urine marks on tree trunks during our daily walk. He must have some limited knowledge about his owner and the world around him. He must have a kind of reasoning capability demonstrated as he restrains from harming my infant grandson, who keeps hitting him with a toy. However, the human mind’s superiority is evident in its large capacity for amassing and processing knowledge in the form of symbolic abstracts, i.e., language.

I know that I have a mind, but how do I know it is in a real physical body and world rather than in a very well-crafted illusion, like in the film The Matrix?² The French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650) asked himself a similar question: how do I know that I exist rather than being, with everything else around me, a deception created by the mind of a demon? Descartes realised while he was questioning himself that the proof of his existence was in the question itself. He concluded that doubting is a kind of thinking, and thinking vindicated his real existence. Hence his famous statement in Latin, "cogito sum ergo, meaning I think, therefore, I am" (I exist).

At first glance, Descartes’ statement makes sense, since there is no thinking process without the thinking human being; but wait a minute. Thinking without the participation of the emotions is a deterministic process that can be formalized into a procedure. A formalized procedure can be converted into a program and then executed by a computer. An absurd conclusion arises when we grant the thinking quality performed by humans, like the number division operation, to a computer. The human mind is not like software executed in a computer. However, there are in the human brain parts that act like an information processing computer, e.g., the occipital lobe for processing visual information and the frontal lobe for processing knowledge. Descartes assumed that doubt is a kind of thinking, but it is not. It is a kind of feeling associated with an emotion, triggered by some kind of thoughts. A fuller form, penned by Antoine Leonardo Thomas, aptly captures Descartes’ intent: "Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum" (I doubt, therefore I think therefore I am).³

Contemporary scientific views associate the mind’s activities with the brain’s complex electrochemical processes. But this seems to reduce the mind to determined orders of physiochemical interactions, described by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels as vulgar materialism.⁴ The philosophical trend of existentialism, on the other hand, is generally opposed to the doctrine that the universe is a determined ordered system.⁵ Existentialists⁶