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Couples In Love As Particles In Motion

Newspapers will not herald in bold headlines that "Your World View Is Changing," but it will happen to the public, slowly, almost imperceptibly, as research thinking on brain, neuroscience, and the philosophy of consciousness spreads into the public sphere.

Let there be no doubt: the current thinking is revolutionary. Whatever you thought was obvious about yourself is threatened to be undermined by the revolution. Among potential threats, one is that people will come to believe that life is pointless, meaningless.

A young couple in love, walking along the bank of the Seine in Paris become only moving particles. Such is the logical culmination of the revolution in reductionism. Reductionist approaches to brain and consciousness study have the ear of mass media, and that view is trumpeted to the public.

As society and culture absorb the view, there will be no moment when thought shifted, no memory of an earthquake in public perception. It will happen quietly, over many years, seeping into society and culture. It will be a change as powerful as the impact Darwin had on the Victorian world, but without the explosive quality. It will whisper, relentlessly corrosive.

Unless a counter-view becomes ascendant.

Let me be clear. I am not a creationist. I believe in scientific evidence and not superstition. I have one argument, and it is not with reductionism as fruitful science, but with the sweeping claims of reductionism.

In reductionism we already witness an erosion of belief in meaning, value, agency, and a sense of purpose in life. As physicist Steven Weinberg put it, “All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.” Weinberg also says, “The more we know of the universe, the more meaningless it appears.” That is the consensus among thorough-going reductionists.

There is an alternate view, non-reductive emergent phenomenalism. It is a mouthful, and other terms describe the same concept, but essentially it argues that you can't get there from here--from the top down to a reductionist explanation of everything at the top--because Darwinian evolution is not a simple two-way street. Preadaptations are an example of the dynamic and creative quality of evolution. (As an example, an early fish jaw became tiny parts of the inner ear.) Purpose, agency, meaning, and value are real in their own right precisely because they are at the top and cannot be entirely explained by downward-pointing physics and biology. You and I are not simply a bunch of moving particles.

Mass media unquestioningly presents scientific research to the public. People can be influenced by the loudest reductionist voices for explanations of consciousness and the brain. Your neurons made you do it, according to these experts interviewed by reporters.

Below, a pundit addresses the issue--the effect on the public of brain and consciousness research--but I am not as sanguine as he is about public reaction to the new thinking on the subject. In his New York Times column David Brooks provides window dressing, but does not explore the field in depth. I wish he had given even some attention to the alternate view, non-reductive emergent phenomenalism, a top-down, dynamic systems approach that could well rescue morality, value, purpose, and agency. For Brooks, read on.

"In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called 'Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,' in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists.

To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion is an accident.

In this materialist view, people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems. You put a magnetic helmet around their heads and they will begin to think they are having a spiritual epiphany. If they suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, they will show signs of hyperreligiosity, an overexcitement of the brain tissue that leads sufferers to believe they are conversing with God.

Wolfe understood the central assertion contained in this kind of thinking: Everything is material and “the soul is dead.” He anticipated the way the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate. They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God exists.

Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.

The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as The Origin of Species reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world." More

The Seige of Vicksburg & The Velocity of Time

I am cursed and blessed by memory. When two and a half years old, I rode in the back seat as the Ford passed farms and climbed the hill. I got out with my parents and walked into the Old Stewart Place to see my uncle sweeping gravel out of the living room, as the house had been abandoned and used to stable horses. Max, my uncle, had Down's Syndrome in today's parlance. In those times he was mongoloid. He looked at me, smiled, went on sweeping. The house had been owned by an ancestor, Doctor David Stewart, captain in the 28th Iowa Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War. He fought at Vicksburg and returned home to take a seat in the Iowa State legislature. Uncle Max passed away years ago. Doctor Stewart died long before I was born. They fell out of time into memory and I now have an ancient reprint of a picture taken in 1863 of Captain Stewart in uniform with epaulettes and brass buttons.

I touch the picture, feel the edges, note the sepia and white, and wonder about a light that captured it like this, froze it into a minor immortality before the years work at the edges, fade the tones, blur the features. There is decay in this thing I hold and I seem to feel it under my fingers, indiscriminate of flesh or paper, a rot impartial to all, except the picture knows nothing about it while I do. Then TS Eliot comes to mind--"I will show you fear in a handful of dust." That is an unsettling thought, so I tell myself that the paradox is merely one of concepts--emotion and matter. Still, concepts are what we have.

I also have Dr. Stewart's medical accounts book. It is a big book, bound in heavy, brown, padded leather, its pages ruled and columned. "March 10th, 1879. Set Abe Gentry's broken arm," one entry says, then explains, "He paid in ten bushels of corn and promised to work the South Forty next spring." Another states simply, ""Will Langtree's son, Jake, knocked on the door in the middle of the night. I dressed and grabbed my bag while Jake hitched Bess to the buggy. Hurried to the Langtree place. Delivered the wife of an eight pound girl. Came home, too tired to arrange accounts." When a boy, I imagined the doctor and his family on Sunday morning, his wife and children climbing into their surry, and the horses trotting to church in the village. Try as I might, though, I cannot summon much today. Instead, I think of the mystery that enfolded them as it does me. The world feels solid, real. We awaken to the sunrise, then we warm to summers, chill into winters, and suddenly we are gone.

Instead, I sometimes think of the sky that hovered over them like a mask, veiling the black infinitude of space, making the day warm and bright, as if it were the way the world was, and make no mistake. As they rode off to church, a Turkish regiment attacked an Assyrian village, a Chinese peasant drowned in the Yangtze, a prostitute in London felt Jack The Ripper's knife. Here is God's plenty as well.

We live by lies, some of them useful. We live by memories, all of them reminders. The best reminders are not the sieze-the-day sort, but those which tell us something there is that no photograph can explain. As I look at this picture I know that light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, captured the Doctor's eyes as he gazed into the camera lens, expecting that somehow the future would be better than the past. I can use scientific datum to explain the event, but how can I render the person? The War of The Rebellion would one day be over. He could return home. He would marry and father children. He would grow old gracefully. How is it that he reaches me on this distant shore of time, this Twenty First century while he remains in the Nineteenth? He touches me with his hopes, his tribulations, his genes. I am his bridge to the future. I live in a time beyond his ken; he, in one beyond mine.

That mystery serves like TS Eliot's paradox. For me, it is what we have in place of the certitude of data. We are all incessantly hurled out of the past into the future, despite our self-reminders to live for the day. Our Earth spins its equatorial girth 25,000 miles every 24 hours (1670 km/hr). We don't sense it. This planet orbits the sun at 67,000 miles per hour (107,870 km/hr), and yet we feel a different kind of change, that which moves our muscles, ages our skin, dims our hopes. How can we judge magnitudes when death is more calamitous than a major shift in the solar system? We are caught up in our own velocities, which numbers cannot explain.

Perhaps memory itself is orbital, and we always cycle through the same life, committed to time's strange entropy. We await disorder, the uncertain future, and leave patterns in our wake. Perhaps we loop through time and space in an eternal return. That would be fine so long as I experience no déjà vu. Captain Stewart lays down his rifle, returns home, and resumes his medical practice. The Ford stops at the Old Stewart Place, I get out, and see Uncle Max. You read about me holding the picture and it is all new.

John Wren-Lewis' Endarkenment

Where did you come from, baby dear?
Out of Everywhere into here. (Children's nursery rhyme)

John Wren-Lewis: his near-death experience, his endarkenment. As a professor and humanist psychologist, Wren-Lewis was in the forefront of a 1960s Death of God movement before his experience. He saw mysticism as "an escape into fantasy" and a shirking of "creative struggle." He was a "skeptic about all things mystical," and "saw mysticism as a ' failure of nerve'."

In 1983 at age sixty, his transformation began when he and psychologist Ann Faraday boarded a 9:15 a.m. bus for a journey of several hours through the mountainous jungles of Thailand. A charming, well-dressed young Thai helped with their luggage and offered him and Faraday candy, which she declined and Wren-Lewis ate. Later, they surmised that the Thai got off the bus after concluding Faraday would not eat hers.

Becoming drowsy, Wren-Lewis fell asleep, but Faraday noticed him turning blue and told the bus driver, who said he was merely drunk. She insisted and eventually Wren-Lewis woke up in a hospital bed, a Thai policeman sitting at its foot. The candy, of course, had been poisoned by the would-be thief.

In looking back he says, "I'm now convinced I really did die, if only for a few seconds . . . and was literally 'resurrected' by the medical team. . . ." Of his waking up, he says, "My impression is that my personal consciousness was actually 'snuffed out' (the root meaning . . . of the word nirvana)."

He said that he "put [his] hand up to probe the back of [his] skull, half wondering if the doctors had sawn part of it away to open my head to infinity." It was if he "had a cataract taken off [his] brain to open [his] head to infinity."

He experienced no tunnels, no white light, no celestial beings, no dead relatives. Instead, he found "a vast blackness that . . . had no separation within it, and therefore no space or time. There was absolutely no sense of personal continuity." He writes of a "stop in time." He calls this The Dazzling Dark.

Personal consciousness cannot exist apart from the brain, he says, despite the claims of near-death researchers who say it can. He experienced its snuffing-out. He writes that he awakened into "a kind of focusing-down from the infinite eternity of that radiant dark pure consciousness" which recreated his personal consciousness.

He lost fear of death when eventually resuscitated, not that he found his immortal soul. Instead he discovered a "dimension of aliveness in the here and now," rendering "separate survival" a "very secondary matter." Each day is wholly satisfactory, so much so that he no longer regards success or failure as important in his creative efforts.

Nobel laureates. Like Suzanne Segal, he sought help to understand his condition. (Unlike her, he didn't regard it as pathological.) Eventually, he found that nobody, "either in person or through books, had a clue." Ancient traditions and modern movements both impute his condition to "mystical equivalent of Nobel laureates," while Wren-Lewis saw his experience as nothing extraordinary and as everybody's birthright.

He no longer feels bound to time. He was "liberated from what William Blake called obsession with futurity," making him more efficient rather than less.

He sees eternal life everywhere, right here and now.

He feels a "personal essence," and unconditional love, from The Dazzling Dark. He finds real closeness with departed family and friends, a feeling that what was "good" in them is still contained in the Dark. He says that it is more than just a "sense' that there is "life" after death; he knows.

Down The Rabbit Hole: Self-Transcendence, Brain Cancer, NDEs, & Consciousness

Raise the index finger on your right hand. There, that was easy, wasn't it? You just told the finger to lift and it did. Now I have something not so easy, a question. How did the finger get raised? You did it, you tell me. Sorry, but that's not good enough. Your finger is a physical object. In terms of cause and effect, a physical effect, your finger, can only be acted upon by a physical cause--you? Are you only physical, a lump of matter? To say your brain is physical and it lifted the finger is an acceptable answer, but what is the difference between you and your brain? Are you, your consciousness, physical?

You can say yes--that, at least, is a perfectly rational viewpoint, and one that has been developed by those who argue for emergent non-reductive physical systems. (Of course, others argue for it as reductionists.) The perspective is rational because it answers the problem of causal closure--a non-physical thing, consciousness, should not be able to act upon a physical thing, your finger. The answer from this vantage is that consciousness is a physical system and can be regarded as an emergent phenomenon, emergent from biology.

Obviously, if you accept this proposition, then you must also accept that you have no soul, no spirit, no ghost in the body machine. Your "you" along with your body is a lump of dust, so to speak.

Maybe, though, you don't accept the answer, or at least not so easily. If so, then you have company. Most people would share your viewpoint, but that is because they are what philosophers call naive realists--they really haven't thought about it.

Whether you accept or not, now that you are thinking about this, I want to take you on a trip down the rabbit hole, the same one Alice fell into. I must warn you, though, that once you start thinking about this kind of thing, Alice's pills won't help you. You will find yourself deep in the rabbit hole and will have to find your own way out if you seriously ponder the evidence of neuroscience and of those who have had feelings of transcendental unity, or experiences of Near Death. If followed relentlessly, the question of consciousness leads you to quantum physics and right back into metaphysics that a physicalist would avoid in order to have a rational, discussable model.

First this. People sometimes experience feelings of transcendence when their brains have been damaged by cancer. This can be construed as a wholly physical phenomenon. Feelings of transcending the physical world--as parts of religious experience, or other forms of spirituality--may find their explanation, then, in scientific evidence.

I quote: "The brain region in question, the posterior parietal cortex, is involved in maintaining a sense of self, for example by helping you keep track of your body parts. It has also been linked to prayer and meditation.

To further probe its role, Cosimo Urgesi, a neuroscientist at the University of Udine in Italy, turned to 88 people who were being treated for brain cancer."

Urgesi suggests that removal of neurons from the posterior parietal cortex--also responsible for personality change--may increase feelings of transcendence. According to this view. the sense of higher consciousness is only a biological phenomenon.

But could their removal simply widen the brain's bandwidth to attune with something it receives much as a TV set receives? I mean that there is another possible interpretation and it is this: Our brains do not produce consciousness--as suggested by non-locality in quantum physics.

Rather, consciousness is in the world. Just as there are photon particles there may be an undiscovered consciousness particle. (Strange things have been indicated by quantum theory, such as the Many Worlds theory.) This view would support an analogy between the brain and a television or radio receiver. The brain is attuned to what is out there and the "external" world complements the "internal," both being necessary for consciousness. *

Although not to the above point, an interesting argument can be made of a kind of interactive cognition with the world. For that, see an article on Extended Mind, a theory posited by Andy Clark and David Chalmers. An interesting perspective is that of Stuart Hameroff. (Find him in the sidebar.)

There is also another vantage. Instead of a material explanation for transcendent experience, isn't it also possible that our brains are wired to tap into invisible realities? In his The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley wrote of the brain as a dimensional filter that reduced the world to what we can deal with. In this view, sometimes the filter does not work as well and we get glimpses of a greater way of being.

Near Death Experiences (NDE) with Out of Body Experiences (OBE) occur when a patient is flat-lined or brain-dead on brain monitors. Occasional and accurate instances of remote viewing are reported. If consciousness arises from neurons and they are not firing, how can a patient recover to describe accurately what instrument the surgeon was holding, what he said, and what the patient saw on another floor of the hospital, a floor which he or she had never seen before? In a study of over 600 NDEs, the majority regarded theirs as a life-changing experience. They lost their fear of death and became more compassionate toward others.

As Hamlet said, There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
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* Nothing is lost from the rigor of scientific inquiry by accepting this point of view. (Its findings have proven and objective predictive value; on the other hand, self-transcendence experiences are unique and subjective. Moreover, no objective replication and verification is possible for NDE patients, although they report astounding observations of the operating room and hospital while they were brain-dead.)

There are those, however, who are less than objective when they insist on as superstition that which holds views of other-dimensional reality. Of course, I include Richard Dawkins among them, but must include neuro-scientists who share his view. I am reminded of the so-called Expert Bias: The more expert one becomes in a field, the greater the resistance to assimilating information that can undermine her expertise.