Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?

Nancey Murphy is a Christian theologian and philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary. Psychologist Warren S. Brown is director of the Lee Edward Travis Research Institute there. He spent 11 years as a research scientist at the UCLA Brain Research Institute. As their background might suggest, their book, takes as key interests the physicalism of science and the room it leaves for the existence of God. I offer a review of the book, but do not want it to become overlong. For that reason, I do not develop explanations of some of their points.

Both Murphy and Brown believe in God but hold that the world can be explained by a physical account of it. Still, they argue that a physicalist account alone cannot make sense of meaning. We find meaning in our lives and in the world, which cannot be explained by a resort to only physical explanations. More
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Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?

Nancey Murphy is a Christian theologian and philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary. Psychologist Warren S. Brown is director of the Lee Edward Travis Research Institute there. He spent 11 years as a research scientist at the UCLA Brain Research Institute. As their background might suggest, their book, takes as key interests the physicalism of science and the room it leaves for the existence of God. I offer a review of the book, but do not want it to become overlong. For that reason, I do not develop explanations of some of their points.

Both Murphy and Brown believe in God but hold that the world can be explained by a physical account of it. Still, they argue that a physicalist account alone cannot make sense of meaning. We find meaning in our lives and in the world, which cannot be explained by a resort to only physical explanations. More

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

Have You Had A Spiritual Experience? What Does It Mean?

"According to polls, there's a 50-50 chance you have had at least one spiritual experience — an overpowering feeling that you've touched God, or another dimension of reality."

But is all this the result of neurons firing in your brain? Or is it an actual spiritual experience? Put differently, scientists can track neurons in your temporal lobe while you are having the experience, but does this "mean that there's nothing spiritual going on?

'No,' [one scientist, Devinsky,] says simply.

Think about a man and woman who are in love, Devinsky says. They look at each other, and in all likelihood, something fires in their temporal lobes.

'However, does that negate the presence of true love between them?' he asks. 'Of course not.' " More

Science has its own dogma and doctrine, with reductionism as part of them. In terms of scientific reductionism, there is this to consider, which can stand against reductionism without help from the dogma or doctrine of religion, if that is your choice. The writer is himself a secular Jew. His "religious education did not take." Here is what he says:

"Whatever the elementary particles are doing, they are not forming political alliances, or looking on one another with mute incoherent longing, or casting an anxious eye at the clock, or waking with a start in the early hours of the morning, wondering what it all means, or coming to realize that they are destined to fall like leaves of the trees leaving not a trace behind." Found in this.

I don't regard gaps in our knowledge as evidence for the divine; neither do I deny it. (I hold to what John Keats called Negative Capability.) Some gaps, but not all, will be narrowed, not closed, by reductionist methods. The divine? That requires faith and belief, a different approach.

With reductionist investigation a degree of mystery will always remain. Some call the mystery God. Others call it God of The Gaps, to diminish or disappear as they narrow.

Daniel Dennett and Choice Machines

Daniel Dennett and Choice Machines

In his book Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett says we have more freedom if determinism is true. A determined world has less randomness, less unpredictability. It allows us to make informed judgements on reliably future events. If you are about to cross an open field in a deterministic lightning storm you can plan when lightning will next strike by measuring intervals and making your run to safety. If it strikes wholly randomly, you are at its mercy.

He says people confuse determinism with fatalism. They think JFK's assassination could not have been prevented, or that they can never avoid getting a disease.

Determinism holds every event as a result of earlier events. Cause begets effect; no event is purely accidental. "Choice" derives from antecedents.

Fatalism is determinism with you left out. It is the idea that something will happen no matter what you do. Determinism holds that an event depends on what you do, on what you know, or what you are caused to know. In short, determinism doesn't mean inevitability. (Even if the you is omitted, as in Advaita or Buddhism, fatalism is not necessarily implied. See My comments, appended to the 28 December Balsekar/Goswami/Libet article.)

Dennett distinguishes between situation-action machines and choice-machines. He calls humans choice-machines. Situation-action machines' rules say, "If in situation X, do A," "If in situation B, do Z." If the action is on the list, it is done. The rule says so. Choice machines see options, "If I did this, what would happen? Or, if I did that? If I did this other thing?" They don't have lists of rules to follow.

Where do we get our values to make these choices? They evolve over time. Of them, he says in an interview, "our responsibility for our values is not absolute and it’s not zero." You can’t choose your parents, your culture, nor even your kindergarten teacher. As you mature you can gradually assume responsibility for your own actions. We try to raise our children as moral agents, which means eventually letting go of them by saying, "I’ve done the best I can. . . . I’ve created this hopefully moral agent. . . ."

But some take responsibility; others don't. How do they differ? Dennett doesn't refer to irresponsibility, but to nonresponsibility. If you are simply unable to notice what you’re doing and its implications, you’re less responsible than somebody who can.

We learn morality much as we learn language. "We hear stories, or we watch how people get rewarded or punished, and what we see and hear shapes our characters over time." We are not born moral.

Memes. Ideas culturally evolve analogous to biological genes in evolution. Some ideas survive better than others, mutating, recombining into new ideas. Such units of cultural evolution have been called memes. Copyright and patent laws deal with some memes. Like genes, memes may be worth copying.

Genes "speak" the language of DNA and RNA. Memes are culturally more varied. Just as biology evolves, so does culture, and through memes. They don't transmit DNA information but cultural information. In fact, natural selection can favor memes over genes in that culturally well-equipped social groups can survive others. (See Richard Dawkins, Memes, genes, and God.)

The self is only a metaphor for our bodies and brains as they exist in time. Without social interactions, the self wouldn't exist. This contravenes Descartes' idea that the self does all the person's work. For Dennett, the self is functionality. It is not one thing, but little things, neurons wired together, so to say. This explains why when philosopher David Hume looked for the self he couldn't find it. It is not localized and is rather like the internet, existing as a whole but not traceable to a single node. Unlike Eastern thought, however, the self doesn't disappear. "It bottoms out with the neurons." (In practice, Eastern religions allow that ego never completely vanishes.)

To those who charge he has disenchanted the world, rendering it meaningless, he replies that he has disenchanted it but it retains meaning, which doesn't depend on magic.

It's reductionist Professor Arthur Deikman, University of California, San Francisco, would say. It reduces us to less than we are. Are we choice machines? Deikman has responded to points of view similar to Dennett's. "When mathematics and chemistry define your world, it has no meaning; the world dries up,. But, for you, as you walk the streets, engage others, live your ife, your world is charged with meaning, filled with purposes, conflicted or aligned at every level." In a context about the "realistic" perspectives of science, he asks do they "really fit what you feel, what you experience, moment by moment--or are they something you have been told, something you now think?" (From Personal Freedom, found in Spiritual/Mysticism, a web site no longer existing.

Memes, Genes, and God

Memes, Genes, and God

Originally proposed in Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene, 1976, memes can be defined as any self-referential belief system with inherent instructions for its own propagation. As Dawkins explained, they can be "tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. . . . . As [Dawkins'] colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up . . . 'Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically'."

Memes are analogues for genes, which is to say they are analogues for natural selection. The two may reinforce one another or come into competition. Celibacy is a meme but as a gene has no biological survival value, although culturally it may have such value. Priests or nuns transmit the meme to young boys or girls who are trying to make a life choice. Suppose the celibacy meme made better priests and nuns because they are not distracted by family duties. If this supposition is true, then celibacy does have better cultural survival value. On the other hand, a gene for celibacy almost by definition would not produce celibate offspring. Rather, no offspring would ensue from it.

Like genes, memes rest on one fundamental principle. All life evolves by varying survival abilities of replicating entities.

When we die we leave behind memes and genes. Of the two, our genes will be forgotten in three generations. Our child, maybe our grandchild, can bear a resemblance to us in face or musical talent, but our characteristics soon become negligible in succeeding generations. If we have memes such as Shakespeare's we become part of deathless literature. The same can be said for Einstein, Socrates, or Leonardo da Vinci.

Dawkins and other meme theorists regard religious memes as dangerous to human futurity. The idea of God is a particularly strong meme, and has persisted from before recorded history until the present day. It has extremely high survival value. According to Dawkins, its survival results from its psychological appeal. He says that it "provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. . . . God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or ineffective power, in the environment provided by human culture."

Here, Dawkins is bent by his Western understanding. Some, as in Christianity and Islam, claim to have the one true meme. It and it alone must be propagated at the risk of damnation by God. He doesn't understand that Buddhist memes make no claim to exclusivity and Hindu memes espouse tolerance.

When Dawkins says religious memes provide "a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence," he reveals a rather rudimentary understanding. Superficially plausible? Without Dawkins' intensive study, meditation, and effort, Buddha's teachings would not be immediately accessible to him because Buddha speaks of the quality of various experiences. Science tends to ignore the qualities of experiences and assumes all experience to be the same for its purposes. Once studied, pondered, and filtered through life experiences, the implications of Buddha's teachings open an entirely new way of seeing, one which reveals the flaws in conventional world views, particularly those which assume all experience is equal and only objective observation is necessary. Those views are superficial. (See the discussion of experience quality in Cartesian anxiety: Francisco Varela, 6 January.)

Dawkins would attach little or no credence to people such as Nisargadatta, Ramana Maharshi, or medieval Germans, Meister Eckhart or Jacob Boem as they all spoke about what might be called the "God meme." The single interesting facet of their contribution has much to do with all memes, however.

Each of them, Nisargadatta, Maharshi, Eckhart, and Boem, said that human beings can reach a point when mimesis is realized as empty phenomena. That is, they observed that the mind replicates as its natural function, but that this replication can be seen through.

This implies that the "God meme" has a basis not in superstition, but in an intuitive, innate human recognition, a recognition that mimetics derives from the source of all memes. To determine that, of course, Dawkins and others must learn attitudes, mental skills and concentration currently unknown to them; they must stop theorizing and immerse themselves in an initially alien perspective in order to experience directly whether the "God meme" is superstition or not.

From memes to genes. Dawkins would have no problem if I said that individual organisms, "selfish" or not, reveal a compulsion to perpetuate their genes and that this compulsion is a dynamic of biological regularities not apparent in an isolated system. The dynamic cannot be described in terms of DNA biochemistry. In fact, no definitive explanation can be found in any isolated system. Yet we observe among organisms the selfish gene, as Dawkins calls it.

Would he have a problem if I replace "a compulsion to perpetuate their genes" with a phrase about a compulsion to seek God? The only difference between accepting one statement and rejecting the other is not logic but mind set.*
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* ". . . I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking simply as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind. . ." Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond

Meme theory is not a science, nor at present has much chance of becoming one, although it does provoke stimulating and lively discussion.