Hello Mike,

You asked, "What do you think about the new study at M.I.T.s moral psychology lab where they have demonstrated that strong magnetic fields in the right side of the brain can impair some ones moral judgment for a period of time?"

When we enter Earth school, we're dealt a hand that we've chosen. We have a gender, stature, intelligence, health, and all the rest of what we start with. We then play out that hand. We obey the rules of the physical realm and are limited by whatever we have to work with.

If we drink a bottle of vodka, that impairs the brain. We've changed the rules. We've made a free will decision to make the game different, and we have to live with that. We're falling down, blind drunk, and we wake up with a hangover. But while we're drunk, the mind just isn't able to use the body as well. The mind isn't affected. We're just constrained by the rules of the physical realm.

So when someone who is mentally retarded or paralyzed drops off the body, the eternal self continues, whole, healthy, and able to learn perfectly well. The rules only apply when we're in Earth school.

While here, if someone does something to the brain, it affects what the mind is able to do. Getting drunk doesn't affect the eternal mind, but it affects what the mind can do while in the body.

So changing the brain, through chemistry or electromagnetism, just impairs what the mind can do through the body. It doesn't affect the mind.

Wilder Penfield, the famous neurosurgeon, who stimulated parts of the brain to bring up snippets of memories, decided at the end of his career that the mind is not in the brain because he could never stimulate the brain to make it do anything we associate with mind, such as thinking, imagining, making decisions, and so on. The mind isn't in the brain, but doing something to the brain does affect what the mind can do in the physical realm.

Ernst Mach and the logical positivists take a stand on reality that we have to use to assess what we know about mind and the universe, we have to figuratively take all of the evidence and lay it out on a huge table. Then we have to say, "What is the explanation or conclusion that is the most parsimonious explanation that takes into account as much of the data as possible to explain how all of these facts fit together." We can't take a corner of all of the facts and try to make sense of it without looking at all the others. That's what the fundamentalists and skeptics do.

That means we have to consider all of the evidence that the mind is not in the brain, which is considerable, and fit it with phenomena such as amnesia, brain malfunctions, brain manipulations through chemistry and electromagnetism, and so on. We have to fit it all together. Suggesting the mind is in the brain because we can manipulate the brain and limit or distort the person's thinking or perception doesn't account for all the evidence the mind isn't in the brain. That's just taking a small sampling of data and trying to draw conclusions from it.

When we bring together all of the data from everything we know, it's apparent that the mind is not in the brain and the brain just functions as the mind dictates.

Love and peace, Craig

Love and peace, Craig