#-996 Unconscious Minds

Dr. craig’s response

Your question, Justin, assumes that there can be no such thing as an unconscious mind. You seem to equate a mind with a state of consciousness, so that by definition if someone loses consciousness, he loses his mind.

But that is not how dualist-interactionists, who distinguish between the mind and the brain, understand the mind. For them, the mind is not a phenomenal state, but an intellectual substance, a thing, which has phenomenal states like consciousness. Your view would seem to require that the mind has no unconscious states. But we know that to be false. We have all sorts of beliefs and memories of which we are not conscious.

On dualism-interactionism our mind is intimately tied to our brain in such a way that if the brain is incapacitated or impaired, then the mind cannot operate properly. The great Nobel Prize-winning neurologist Sir John Eccles compared the mind (or the self, as he called it) to a pianist using a piano as an instrument to make music. If the piano is damaged or out of tune, the pianist will be unable to produce his beautiful music. Similarly, Eccles argued, the mind uses the brain as an instrument for thought, so that if the brain is impaired, so will be the mind in its operations. So it’s hardly surprising that the mind might lose consciousness when the brain is drugged. Should we really think that when you are knocked unconscious you cease to exist? Thus the evidence you cite does not prove that the mind ceases to exist under such circumstances.

So why do I believe that the mind survives bodily death and decay? The short answer is that the Bible tells me so, and I have good reasons to believe that what the Bible teaches is true. But if you were to ask me for rational justification for what the Bible teaches concerning dualism, then I would point you to the sort of arguments offered by dualist-interactionists surveyed in J. P. Moreland and my Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 2d. ed. (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP, 2017), or in greater depth in J. P. Moreland and Brandon Rickabaugh, The Substance of Consciousness (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2025). Our mind’s currently being linked to a brain is a contingent, not a necessary, state, and since the mind can exist independently of the brain, we cannot rule out conscious states after death.