Personal Blogs

If I am only a brain, then all my longings—for meaning, for connection, for eternity—are foolish.

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The older I get, the more precious a quiet conversation becomes. Those unhurried exchanges across a table, or the gentle companionship of someone who truly sees you, feel almost sacred. There is something in these moments that touches a deeper place. A spark. A knowing. But if naturalism is right, if all we are is a bundle of neural firings shaped by evolution and accident, then what exactly is happening in those moments? Are we merely biological machines exchanging electrical signals, our thoughts no more substantial than static?

Naturalism, with its emphasis on material causation, insists that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. There is no ghost in the machine, no soul behind the eyes. Personhood, in this framework, is an illusion. We are not beings with intrinsic worth, only complex organisms reacting to stimuli. Love becomes a neurological cocktail. Thought becomes a transient storm of electrons. Everything we hold dear—truth, beauty, memory, even our sense of self—dissolves into chemistry.

At first glance, this sounds clinical but harmless. Yet something vital slips through our fingers when we accept it fully. If our interior lives are illusory, if the very "I" who writes and the "you" who reads are nothing but echoes of brain activity, then we are profoundly alone. No true communion can exist between illusions.

It fosters alienation. Not the kind that arises from being misunderstood, but something colder. A sense that, deep down, nothing connects. The self is an epiphenomenon. The other, a projection. Our relationships are convenient illusions, evolved for survival. Love, in this view, is useful but not real. And meaning? That is just another adaptation, a story the brain tells to keep us going.

There is a reason totalitarian regimes have often flirted with this mechanistic view of man. Reduce a person to a function, and you can reassign them, reshape them, or remove them. It is much easier to justify cruelty when there is no soul to harm.

But even the most committed materialist hesitates when their child laughs, or when they hold the hand of a dying friend. In those moments, we all act as if there is something more, some essence that matters. We name our dead. We write poems. We whisper love into silence, hoping it echoes beyond the brain. Why?

Because we know, instinctively, that to be human is to transcend mechanics.

Naturalism may describe the body, but it cannot explain the soul. It has no room for mystery, no vocabulary for wonder. And while it can study the brain’s activity when we fall in love, it cannot account for why love breaks us open or binds us together across time and death.

If I am only a brain, then all my longings—for meaning, for connection, for eternity—are foolish. But if I am more, if there is a spirit in the machine, then perhaps the ache itself is proof of a larger story.

We were not made for wires and neurons alone. We were made to love and be known.