Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion provoked many discussions. Typically, the praises came from materialists, that is, people who consider that there are only physical matter and processes in the universe and in living beings.

I am not a materialist, but I do not belong to any instituted religion either. I admit, as a working hypothesis, that there are non-physical processes in the universe and in all living beings, that is, processes that cannot be reduced to physical ones.

I have to comment on the phrase: "Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain." (p. 34). Richard Dawkins expresses it as truth. Unfortunately, this is not a scientific fact, it is at most a scientific speculation, because we don’t know how our thinking ‘emerges’ from our brain, and much less our emotions. We don’t even know where and how our memories are stored. For instance, neuroscience cannot point to the ‘place’ in the brain where a simple symbol as the following, 2, is ‘stored’, much less how it is stored and retrieved. Now take the concept of 2, what is common to all representations of this number, such as 2, II, ii, ||, .., ‘dois’, ‘two’, ‘dva’, ‘shtaim’, etc. This is a pure concept and has absolutely no symbolic representation, so how can it be physically stored in the brain or elsewhere in a human organism? Or take the concept of a perfect circle. Nobody has seen it, and it has no physical geometrical representation – we only see and draw approximations thereof. How can it be physically stored in the brain?

Richard Dawkins cannot point out where in our brain we accommodate mental models. This is pure speculation. The number 2, and of a perfect circle are pure concepts, which have no symbolic representation, thus impossible to be ‘stored’ in the brain. Other examples are the geometrical concepts of point, line and plane: they only exist as abstract concepts; how can they be physically represented and ‘stored’ in the brain? How is it possible that we surpass the necessary circular definitions in a dictionary?

It seems to me much more reasonable to get rid of Richard Dawkins’ prejudice against ‘supernatural’ entities, and suppose that these concepts do not reside in our brain, but in a non-physical Platonic world of ideas, and we are able to reach and observe it with our thinking. Rudolf Steiner wrote:

"... the content of a concept, which is added to the percept by means of thinking, is not subjective. This content is not taken from the subject, but from reality. It is that part of the reality that cannot be reached by the act of perceiving. It is experience, but not experience gained through perceiving. If someone cannot see that the concept is something real, he is thinking of it only in the abstract form in which he holds it in his mind. But only through our organization is it present in such isolation, just as in the case of the percept." Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom,  The Consequences of Monism

excerpt from AN EXTENSIVE REVIEW OF RICHARD DAWKINS’ THE GOD DELUSION
Valdemar W. Setzer

POF 10-3 Whereas the materialistic dualist makes man an automaton whose actions are only the result of a purely mechanical system, the spiritualistic dualist (that is, one who sees the Absolute, the Being-in-itself, as something spiritual in which man has no share in his conscious experience) makes him a slave to the will of the Absolute.

As in materialism, so also in one-sided spiritualism, in fact in any kind of metaphysical realism inferring but not experiencing something extra-human as the true reality, freedom is out of the question.

POF 10-6 According to the monistic view, the human being acts unfreely when he obeys some perceptible external compulsion; he acts freely, when he obeys none but himself…

If anyone asserts that the action of a fellow is done unfreely, then he must identify the thing or the person or the institution within the perceptible world, that has caused the person to act.

Are our thoughts determined by material processes?

FOR
Steven Pinker, Evolutionary psychologist
I don’t believe there’s such a thing as free will in the sense of a ghost and a machine, a spirit or a soul that somehow reads the TV screen of the senses and pushes buttons and pulls the levers of behavior. Our behavior is the product of physical processes in the brain.

On the other hand, when you have a brain that consists of one hundred billion neurons connected by one hundred trillion synopses, there is a vast amount of complexity. That means that human choices will not be predictable in any simple way from the stimuli that I’ve hinged on beforehand.

If the human mind is the product of a “Ghost in the Machine" (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology) and not the result of electrochemical interactions among neurons, then the mind should not be dependent on the configuration of the brain that houses it. In short, there should be aspects of the mind that owe nothing to the physical functioning of the brain.

AGAINST
Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom Chapter 3
It can be observed that thinking is not determined by material processes in the brain. We know WHY our thinking connects one concept with another. The relevant context and the connection between the concepts is clear to us from the content of the two concepts themselves. For example, the concept "organism" links up with other concepts such as "lawful development" and "growth". Introspection shows me that in linking one thought with another there is nothing to guide me but the content of my thoughts; I am not guided by any material processes in my brain.

Subliminal Messages
Because of copyright youtube blocks this video in Guernsey, Ireland, Isle of Man, Jersey, United Kingdom.

Einstein wrote in 1921, "Here arises a puzzle that has disturbed scientists of all periods. How is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of physical reality? Can human reason without experience discover by pure thinking the properties of things? "

Wigner concluded that the structure of mathematics and the structure of the physical universe are disturbingly similar. Wigner capped off his paper with a quote from the late philosopher Charles Pierce "that there is some secret here which remains to be discovered".

Rudolf Steiner's answer to this problem is straightforward and revealing. Thought maps so well onto external reality because, in its very essence, it is that reality.

As Steiner describes the act of cognition, the world comes to us not from just one direction, as has long been assumed in philosphic materialism, but from two opposite directions. Sense-born percepts are private, in that they are the product of our external sense organs, which are different for each of us, and because we each must occupy a different point in space. Percepts, however, do not carry their conceptual content with them, and without that content the world remains meaningless to us.

Ideas or concepts become a part of the cognitive act through the brain's capacity as an organ of sense for spiritual reality, i.e. for thought, which is the spiritual 'inside' of everything that is real. All ideas and concepts, therefore, have a universal or 'public' content in addition to the private content which we give them when we marry them, correctly or incorrectly, to our private world of percepts, and to the mental content, true or false, that we have already made into our own 'world-view'.

He tells us that the seeming paradox "I think, yet the world thinks in me" is a profound truth, and that any truly critical introspective study of the cognitive act will show this to be the case. He insists that the modern world has been almost totally blinded to this truth by the prevalence of materialistic assumptions in science and philosophy, i.e. by the view that ideas and concepts are merely the end-products of physical sense stimulation. Given this assumption, even great minds like Albert Einstein are left to impotently wonder why it is that human thought, seen as an entirely subjective activity, maps onto external reality in so remarkable a manner.

excerpt from
Chomsky and the Universal Grammar
by Don Cruse

My Philosophy of Freedom is based upon an experience which consists in the understanding of human consciousness within itself. In willing, freedom is practised; in feeling, it is experienced; in thinking, it is known. Only, in order to attain this last, one must not lose the life of thinking.

While I was working at my Philosophy of Freedom, it was my constant endeavour in the statement of my thoughts to keep my inner experience fully awake within the very thoughts. This gives to thoughts the mystical character of inner perception, but makes the perception like the perception of the outer physical world. If one forces oneself through to such an inner experience, then one no longer finds any contradiction between the knowledge of nature and the knowledge of spirit.

It became clear to one that the second is only a metamorphosed continuation of the first. Since this appeared thus to me, I could later place on the title-page the motto: "Some results of introspective observation following the methods of Natural Science". For, when natural-scientific methods are followed in the spiritual sphere, they lead one to knowledge of this sphere.
RS, The Story of My Life, chap. 12

"What's especially sad is that most people of a certain generation only know Michael Jackson as a crazy guy who had a lot of plastic surgery -- whereas the truth is, he was not only an unbelievably talented, groundbreaking performer, he also helped break down the racial prejudice in this country. He was an extremely powerful symbol -- a black performer who whites could relate to and then later in life, a white performer who blacks could relate to." -JK

"Only in America can someone be born a poor black kid, and die a rich white woman." CH