By Charbel Eltarraf
This essay is the fruit of a simple, inescapable realisation. We use thought every day, yet rarely consider what a thought actually is. Science has taught us much about the brain’s material processes, but what it hasn’t answered, (and perhaps cannot) is this... what is the thought itself once it has been processed, stored, or remembered?
This question, for me, opens the door to a deeper truth. It reveals that thought, in its nature, its content, and its function, points beyond the material. More boldly put, it exposes a contradiction in those who use thought to deny the existence of anything beyond matter. In doing so, they unknowingly invoke the very immaterial reality they claim does not exist.
We already know that a thought can be studied in terms of brain activity. We observe neurons firing, patterns forming, and regions activating. But this is not the same as the thought itself. These are the conditions for thought, not its content.
Consider this analogy. On a computer, we type, save, and reopen documents. These files can be read and reviewed. But when we try to apply this analogy to the brain, something odd happens. The brain stores far more complex information than any machine, yet when we open it, (literally, cut it open), we find nothing resembling a stored thought. No memories, no concepts, no dreams. Just tissue. Even when we cut into the hippocampus, the region associated memory, no memory appears. Not even a cluster, shape or pattern that reveals a specific concept, image or recollection. Why? Because a thought, once processed, transcends the material process that produced it.
The process of thinking may be physical. But the thought itself, once formed, is immaterial.
Take a simple idea, the concept of "one." We can illustrate it using material examples, like one cup, one chair, one person. But these examples are not the concept itself. They only point to it.
Strip away the objects, and the meaning of "one" remains intelligible. The concept still exists, understood, communicated, passed on. It doesn’t reside in the cup. It doesn’t vanish with the object. It is immaterial, and yet undeniably real.
We use matter to point toward immaterial meaning. This is true for “one,” for “truth,” for “justice,” and even for “being” itself. These are not material things, yet our minds grasp them, which means our minds are capable of immaterial abstraction. Something material cannot contain something immaterial unless it is cooperating with something beyond itself.
To be clear, I am not dismissing the brain. It is essential. But it is not sufficient.
The brain is the physical processor. The mind is the immaterial user. The two cooperate, deeply and mysteriously, but they are not the same. The brain can store, trigger, and express thoughts, but it cannot be the thought.
If you destroy the brain, the ability to express thought may vanish. But that does not prove that thought itself is the brain. It proves that expression requires embodiment. It does not prove that meaning is material.
This leads to the central paradox... when someone denies the supernatural, they are almost always doing so using reason, in other words, using thought.
But thought, if it is truly immaterial, makes their claim self defeating. They are wielding an immaterial instrument to argue against the existence of immaterial things.
This is more than irony. It is a contradiction at the core of materialist denial. It is like using language to argue that language doesn’t exist, or breathing to argue that air isn’t real.
Materialism collapses not because of external refutation, but because it undermines itself from within.
If even one thought is immaterial, then not everything is material.
And if not everything is material, then reality must include something else. Call it soul, mind, spirit, or supernatural, but denying it now becomes not just questionable, but irrational.
To affirm thought is to affirm the immaterial. And to affirm the immaterial is to open the door to transcendence, to realities beyond matter, energy, and empirical verification.
This doesn’t prove the existence of God. But it does show that the door to the supernatural cannot be closed without sawing off the very branch we’re sitting on.
I am not a philosopher by training. I’m a businessman, a father, a man of faith, someone who thinks a lot but claims no title beyond honesty.
But the more I consider what a thought really is, the more I’m convinced... we are not merely physical beings. Thought is not a trick of biology. It is a window into the immaterial, a signal that something greater is present, even within the ordinary.
To think at all is to witness the supernatural. And to deny it while thinking is to betray the very power we depend on.