Twins who literally share a body have different selves, personalities

Do we have individual selves, or is individuality just an illusion? Consider the case of two girls who share one body, Abigail and Brittany Hensel - conjoined twins who, at 18 years of age, are clearly different people even though from the neck down they have only one body. They wanted to make the documentary offered by The Learning Channel so that people would not just stare at them and take pictures. Also here. Here they are as young children.

Most conjoined twins don't live anywhere near as long as Abigail and Brittany. Vital organs may not function properly in a semi-twinned state, and efforts to separate twins may kill one or both. But these girls are consistently separate above the navel and united below.

As their mother says, when she greets them - it is two kisses and one hug. And the future will be most interesting.

Does neuroscience leave room for God?

A friend, Angus Menuge, of Concordia University, Wisconsin, offers a PowerPoint called "Does Neuroscience Leave Room for God? And he obviously thinks it does.

Menuge showed this PowerPoint when he was debating PZ Myers of the University of Minnesota (Morris), a frequent critic of non-materialist viewpoints. Menuge comments,

Moving closer to the central issue of the debate, I argued that there is considerable evidence against the materialist contention that the brain reduces to the mind. There is the “hard problem” of consciousness, that subjective awareness is not explained or predicted by impersonally described states of the brain. Then there is the evidence from neuroscientists such as Jeff Schwartz and Mario Beauregard that, in addition to the bottom-up influence of the brain on the mind, the mind has a top-down influence on the brain (cognitive therapies that exploit neuroplasticity) and on health (psychoneuroimmunology). I focused on how these approaches gave hope to patients by showing that their own conscious choices could play a role in their recovery and health. I also mentioned the remarkable studies of Near Death Experiences by Pim van Lommel. I held up and recommended Jeff Schwartz and Sharon Begley’s The Mind and the Brain, and Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’ Leary’s The Spiritual Brain, and said that if someone is a true skeptic, they should be skeptical of materialism as well as of non-materialistic claims.

Apparently,

Dr. Myers held up a large standard volume on neuroscience, and asserted that it was better than Schwartz’s and Beauregard’s books, apparently because it was bigger! He then showed some interesting slides detailing the standard “homunculus” model of the brain, mapping various sensations and bodily functions to parts of the brain. He acknowledged the reality of neuroplasticity, but claimed that this could all be understood in terms of chemical processes in the brain, without appeal to consciousness. Yet, interestingly, he admitted that no-one could explain consciousness. Dr. Myers also mentioned a recent scientific experiment showing that in advance of conscious awareness of decision, there is already a 60% probability of action. (He did not, however, claim that this showed there was no free will*, and since the result was so recent and under-analyzed, I chose not to take the bait.)

Dr. Menuge says he is greatly indebted to Mario Bearegard and me for The Spiritual Brain , which shows how gracious he is. We only pull together what everyone should know, in a way that makes it easy to understand.

*This experiment probably does not have much to do with free will. I will post more on it later, but consider the following example: A woman vows to give up coffee for a week, and donate the proceeds to charity. Around noon on Monday, she finds herself "automatically" heading for the coffee urn at work. Does that mean she has no free will? Of course not. She had free will when she decided to forego coffee for a week, but force of habit suggests habitual routines. Perhaps it was 100% probable that she would start for the coffee urn at noon on the first day. But that doesn't mean she is forced to carry through with her usual habit.

Human mental abilities: The result of "cultural cross-fertilisation"?

Hot on the heels of BoBos author David Brooks acknowledging that materialist neuroscience is failing (!), New Scientist's Andy Coghlan argues, in "How Culture Made Your Modern Mind,"

IT IS one of the hottest questions of our time: how did our cognitive abilities explode, leaving other animals for dust intellectually?

Now a new explanation is emerging. Controversially, it challenges the idea that biology alone is what drove the evolution of intellectual skills. What if we acquired abilities such as the capacity to invent, converse or work in unison as a result of a continual process of cultural cross-fertilisation with the world we inhabit, and through the way we interact with other people and material things?

Well, Andy, I don't doubt that your current idea is way closer to the mark than the crass materialism for which New Scientist is legendary.

You replace what we know can't be true with something that at least begins to resemble reality.

Humans, of course, influence each other. Most important skills require a definite knowledge base. For example, historically, everyone wanted harder, sharper tools, but skills in forging iron and smelting steel must be developed, taught, and learned.

But why did this happen for human beings, and not for rats, mice, moles, and voles? And how? The answers may not fit into a materialist scheme.

On the other hand, maybe New Scientist will come up with a study next month "demonstrating" that the rudiments of human cognition are latent in the rat holes, mouse nests, and molehills that surround us after all.

As if.

Note: When I was working on my share of The Spiritual Brain, New Scientist was one of my favourite venues for materialist theories about the human mind that do not really work. During that entire, exhausting project, New Scientist never failed me. If NS starts to smarten up, I will need to either find another source of materialist silliness, or write about something else.

Language: No current theory of its origin is worth much

Further to the question of the origin of language, in "Selective scenarios for the emergence of natural language"* Szabolcs Számadó and Eörs Szathmáry opine,

Explaining the evolution of human language is likely to remain a challenge for the coming decade. As we have discussed, there is no single theory that could sufficiently answer all the questions about honesty and groundedness, power of generalisation, and uniqueness. Table 1 summarises these criteria. As one can see, most of the theories fail to answer most of the questions. Perhaps the easiest criterion to fulfil is shared interest, as there are several social situations that assume shared interest between communicating parties (such as hunting or contact calls). There are only two theories, 'tool making' and 'hunting' 22 and 26, that do significantly better than the others as they can answer three out of the four questions asked of them (Table 1). Thus, it might be tempting to say that some combination of the two could provide a series of selective scenarios that would fit all of our criteria. The most notable conclusion, however, is that all the theories fail to explain the uniqueness of human language. Thus, even though indirect evidence strongly suggests that the evolution of human language was selection limited, it remains difficult to envisage a scenario that would show why.

Theirs is, on the whole, a glum look:

The recent blossoming of evolutionary linguistics has resulted in a variety of theories that attempt to provide a selective scenario for the evolution of early language. However, their overabundance makes many researchers sceptical of such theorising. Here, we suggest that a more rigorous approach is needed towards their construction although, despite justified scepticism, there is no agreement as to the criteria that should be used to determine the validity of the various competing theories. We attempt to fill this gap by providing criteria upon which the various historical narratives can be judged. Although individually none of these criteria are highly constraining, taken together they could provide a useful evolutionary framework for thinking about the evolution of human language.

They go on to hope that Darwin's natural selection will answer the question, but it is hard to see how. Natural selection eliminates life forms that express genes that do not help them survive. It is not known to produce ideas that must be expressed in language.

*(Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Volume 21, Issue 10 , October 2006, Pages 555-561)

Language: NOT a sopisticated version of primal screams

Explaining language, Elizabeth Svoboda writes,

Lots of animals make noise; much of it even conveys information. But for sheer complexity, for developed syntax and grammar, and for the ability to articulate abstract concepts, you can’t beat human speech.

No you can't beat human speech, but if you are a human, you won't even be trying to beat it. Maybe Vulcan speech is actually better for some abstract concepts, but only Vulcans would care, right?

And that is the fundamental problem with materialist efforts to explain human language. The tomcat, for example, doesn't speak a human-like language because he has nothing to say that requires it. He can get by with yowls, snarls, and purrs.

Humans need a language that expresses ideas because we need to communicate ideas. The ideas come first. The complexities of our languages are structures chosen to express ideas and feelings the tomcat does not have.

The materialist needs to explain language as a sophisticated version of primal screams, but that project is bankrupt and pointless because that isn't really what human language is.

If your math teachers wants to explain to you why dividing by zero is not an acceptable operation in mathematics or your civics teacher wants to explain the advantages and disadvantages of proportional representation, they want to explain to you things that are irrelevant to primal screams.

On the same topic, Sver Eldoy, among others, commented recently,

[ ... ] Any human from any part of the planet are capable of learning any language; this fact lends credit to the assumption that languages are indeed something living in systems within the brain. The sheer complexity of human language is way too high to be a bi-product of the other mental faculties; if it were not we would have made talking computer programs already and "artificial intelligence" would be a "walk in the park".

But are languages really "living in the systems of the brain"? How about this: The idea to be communicated, along with the desire to communicate, is living in the systems of the brain.

Spoken language is the most obvious method that we adopt, because we have the equipment and we are encouraged to use it. But people deprived of hearing and/or speech have developed sign languages that function in the same way as vocal languages. And non-verbal people often express themselves in a sophisticated way in art or music.

So the desire to communicate exists independently of the usual equipment, and the ideas to be communicated are a necessary condition and justification of human language.

Albert Einstein's letter coming up at auction: Does it show that he was an atheist?

A letter by Albert Einstein in the last years of his life has just come up at auction, and is being touted to show that he didn't really believe in God, as when he says, for example,

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. (Breitbart, May 13, 2008)

Has anyone noticed that the article is written in such a way as to imply an atheism that the actual quotations in the article do not back up?

Or that the managing director of the Bloomsbury auction house, Rupert Powell, is treated as the authority on Einstein's views? Surely information released to the media was intended to flog up the sale price of the letter. This would be a very convenient time to do that, given the recent spate of "new atheist" books.

Einstein talks about the word "God" in the quotations, not about God as such - as he usually does when he is describing what he does believe. Einstein's God was not personal in the sense that Western theists attribute personality to God. In any event, Einstein probably changed his views at various times, but usually revolving around a central pole. Anyway, here's an excerpt (pp. 101-3) from There IS a God by Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese, that may shed some light:

--- --- ---

Einstein clearly believed in a transcendent source of the rationality of the world that he variously called "superior mind," "illimitable superior spirit," "superior reasoning force," and "mysterious force that moves the constellations." This is evident in several of his statements:

I ahve never found a better expression than "religious" for this trust in the rational nature of reality and of its peculiar accessibility to the human mind. Where this trust is lacking science degenerates into an uninspired procedure. Let the devil care if the priests make capital out of this. Ther is no remedy for that. [12]

Whoever has undergone the intense experience of successful advances in this domain [science] is moved by profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence ... the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence. [13]

Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order .... This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God. [14]

Every one who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that or men, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. [15]

My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God. [16]

--- --- ---

He made quite clear how he felt about popular religion:

It is a different question whether belief in a personal God should be contested. Freud endorsed this view in his latest publication. I myself would never engage n such a task. For such a belief seems to me referable to any lack of any transcendental outlook of life, and I wonder whether one can ever successfully render to the majority of mankind a more sublime means in order to satisfy its metaphysical needs.[17]

In other words, he thought popular religion childish but better than nothing. Incidentally, Flew criticizes Richard Dawkins for flogging up the idea that Einstein was an atheist.

Although it won't help sell the letter at Bloomsbury's, Einstein name should be removed from the rolls of persons believed to be atheists.

Also: Here is my review of There IS a God.

Sources for quotations from Einstein:

[12] Albert Einstein, Lettres a Maurice Solovine reproduits en facsimile et traduits en francais (Paris: Gauthier-Vilars, 1956), 102-3.
[13] Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, trans. Sonja Bargmann (New York, Dell, 1973), 49.
[14] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 255.
[15] Max Jammer, Einstein and Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 44.*
[16] Albert Einstein, The Quotable Einstein, ed. Alice Calaprice (Princeton, +NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 195-6.
[17] Jammer, Einstein and Religion, 51. (Citation [10] in the book.)

*This is a full citation. In the original, it is abbreviated, as it is not the first citation.

Materialists start to come to grips with global failure, but materialism dies hard

In "The Neural Buddhists," David Brooks references Tom Wolfe's dramatic 1996 article "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.

Uh huh. Mario and I took it all to pieces in The Spiritual Brain. Modern neuroscience provides no basis whatever for that view - on the contrary.

Brooks, the author of BoBos in Paradise, acknowledges,

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states.

Do they indeed? In that case, to learn what is really going on, they must acknowledge where they have been mistaken.

Brooks, however, hopes that the revolution will stop with "neural Buddhism,"which turns out to mean things like "the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships" and "God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is."

Sorry, BoBos, it's not up to you to decide where it will end. It will end where the evidence leads, and the evidence simply does not favour materialism - yours or anyone else's.

Evolutionary psychology: So you don't stick to your goals? Blame your kludgebrain ... or maybe not

I see where Gary Marcus, author of Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind encourages us to blame "the sloppy engineering of evolution" for the fact that we often do not stick to our goals.

But why evolution? What happened to our stars, our parents, our societies, our religion, and our genes as the explanations for why we do not meet our goals? Oh, come to think of it, evolution is in the news right now, what with Darwin's anniversary celebrations and the Expelled film.

Marcus's basic thesis is this:

Our attempts to pursue our goals are often thwarted by the fact that evolution has built our most sophisticated technologies on top of older technologies -- without working out how to integrate the two. We can plan in advance, using our modern deliberative reasoning systems, but our ancestral reflexive mechanisms, which evolved first, still basically control the steering wheel. When the chips are down, it's those mechanisms that our brains turn to, and that means that our brains frequently wind up relying on machinery that is all about acting first and asking questions later, squandering some of the efforts of our deliberative system.

No sensible engineer would have designed things this way. Why design fancy machinery for making long-term goals if you're not going to use it? Yet the brain is structured such that the more tired, stressed or distracted we are, the less likely we are to use our forebrains and the more likely to lean back on the time-tested but shortsighted machinery we've inherited from our ancestors.

Which is nonsense. The examples he gives are failure to lose weight and failure to meet deadlines. But it takes no very great insight to see that goals like these are too socially and personally complex to be often met.

Take losing weight, for example: Most people don't lose weight because - overall - thinness doesn't matter as much to them as living comfortably. It doesn't matter as much in their forebrains or anywhere else. That has nothing to do with evolution.

As I have written elsewhere - there is very little evidence that overweight, all by itself, is an important health hazard. Lack of physical activity is a much more serious health problem.

Now that probably has a lot to do with evolution!

Obviously, the human body evolved or was designed to support specific activities, not to support a lack of activity. But it's hard to imagine the body either evolving or being designed in such a way that a bit of extra weight would be a serious health hazard. After all, food shortages and wasting illnesses have been endemic through human history, so a bit of padding is a good insurance policy.

At any rate, people who are trying to achieve an arbitrarily set weight dictated by health professionals or fashion gurus - when they are in no physical discomfort with the weight they now carry - are likely to experience internal conflict over their goals. But don't blame evolution or poor engineering. Blame the adoption of goals that conflict with reality.

Now, what about deadlines? In my line of work (writing), there is an expression "phantom deadline." That means a deadline with a weak relationship to reality. Young freelancers often half kill themselves to finish a project for a Friday deadline only to discover that the boss left at noon - so the job will just sit on her desk all weekend!

Actually, most people learn to fudge deadlines for their own well-being. Again, if this is evolution, it is the evolution of survival skills in relation to one's environment, and not a symptom of poor engineering. Sometimes, lateness is also a social message.

Some people even use lateness as a form of manipulation. And then we must ask, does it work? Often, it does - but only for accomplished practitioners. (If you have never in your life tried to control others by being chronically late, trust me, it would be a mistake to start now. You just haven't evolved in that direction.)

In short, I don't think that "blame it on kludgy brain evolution" will fare any better than the 1950s' "blame it on cruel potty training" as a reason why we behave as we do.

See also: Evolutionary Psychology: Eliot Spitzer is a kludgebrain! psychologist opines (but so are we all)

Health can sometimes be fun, free, and painless: The placebo effect gets its own Web site

One of the non-material phenomena that Mario Beauregard and I wrote about in some detail in The Spiritual Brain is the placebo effect: You take a pill that you are told will help you feel better, and you do. That's pretty convincing evidence for the pill's curative powers - except for one thing. Studies* show that you might have experienced the same effect if the pill were only compressed sugar. Most people have experienced this action of the immaterial mind on the body.

A light-hearted Web site - sponsored by Australians Marg, Brian, Ludmila, and Michael - explores the effect in more detail, and addresses some common misconceptions - for example, that the placebo effect only works if you don't "know"that the pill is a placebo:

One of the rare studies into the action of the placebo effect in 'non-blind' clinical trials was undertaken by Lee C. Park and Uno Covi at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1964. 'Non-blind' means that patients were informed that the pills they were issued were totally inert, that they were placebos, and in this case they were also assured that despite this the pills would be of benefit to them. The study concluded:

'The primary finding is that patients can be willing to take placebo and can improve despite disclosure of the inert content of the pills; belief in pill as drug was not a requirement for improvement.' (Ref. L. C. Park, U. Covi, Nonblind Placebo Trial - An Exploration of Neurotic Patients' Responses to Placebo When Its Inert Content Is Disclosed, Archives of General Psychiatry, April 1965, Vol. 12, pp. 336-345)

Research from the page also reminds us that nearly half of all physicians admit to prescribing placebos. As our Aussie "placebists" explain,

Whichever way we cut the arguments and the theories, the placebo effect is real and it is real because it engages those parts of human beings which defy reduction to the mechanical. It is real because it therapeutically engages human capacities and capabilities for which conventional medicine has only approximations and crude theorization, if not actual distrust. It may work in what to many are the scientific borderlands, but the important thing for us is that it works.

"The placebo effect can occur," as the physician Herbert Spiegel once put it, "when conditions are optimal for hope, faith, trust and love."

In my experience, most "skepticism" about the placebo effect - possibly the best attested effect in medicine - is linked to mechanistic materialism. If the mind doesn't exist, the placebo effect shouldn't work. But the one does ... so the other does.

On the main page, the enterprising placebists offer "Universal Placebo" pilules for sale. They are not, please note, claiming that it is a pharmaceutical. They emphasize that it is just plain sugar - add belief and swallow.

*Note: For more examples of such studies, see Placebo Effect: Your "mind's role in your health."

The Spiritual Brain is shortlisted for three Write! Canada awards

According to today's release from The Word Guild, The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul is shortlisted in Book-Culture, Book-General Readership, and Book-Leadership/ Theoretical, in the Canadian Christian Writing Awards.




I am also individually shortlisted for a piece I wrote for St. Mike's Alumni magazine*, "The God they don't believe in is certainly not great."

Awards night is not till June 11, by which time I should have found my summer suit.

*This piece was written at the behest of the friend. I am not an alumna of St. Mike's at the University of Toronto but of Sir Wilfrid Laurier University.

Placebo effect: Your mind's role in your health

Recently, a group of writers from The Word Guild got together and contributed essays to a book, Hot Apple Cider. I offered an essay that looked at some of the findings from The Spiritual Brain - what I learned about how mental states affect physical health. Here's part of my reflection, for your enjoyment:

--- --- ---

You probably aren’t waiting for science to come up with “the perfect pill for every ill,” but if you know anyone who is, he or she likely will be waiting a long time. Not because dramatic science discoveries will fail, but because the effect of many medical treatments depends at least in part on the patient’s expectation. Doctors know this by experience, of course, but research has shed new light on how powerful the patient’s expectation is.

In 2004, University of Michigan researchers reported on a study of pain experienced by healthy young male volunteers. To induce pain, they injected saltwater into their volunteers’ jaws and measured the impact by positron emission tomography (PET). They then gave the volunteers a substance described as pain relief. Not only did the volunteers report feeling better thereafter, but a number of brain regions that activate when we experience pain showed a reduced response. In other words, there was external evidence that the volunteers’ subjective belief that they felt better corresponded to the reality of pain signals in their brains.

However, … and this is the key point … no pain relief drug had actually been used in the study! The volunteers felt less pain simply because they believed they had received a powerful drug. The researchers commented that their study demonstrates how our perceptions truly affect the amount of pain we experience. This study, along with many others, showed that the effect of what we believe is real and measurable in scientific terms.

This effect is usually called the placebo effect, after a Latin phrase meaning “I will please.” Some researchers prefer to call it the “meaning effect” or the “remembered wellness” effect. Whatever its name, the meaning you attach to a treatment helps determine how effective that treatment will be for you.

For example, anthropologist Daniel Moerman of the University of Michigan notes that various studies have shown that large pills work better than medium-sized pills and four pills work better than two, even when all the pills are sugar and all the injection are sterile water. And culture can make a difference in the relief we experience too. North Americans tend to believe that injections are more powerful than pills, so injections of sterile water may provide us more relief than a sugar pill (even though both are placebos). But that does not work for Europeans who do not think that injections are more powerful than pills. Blue sleeping pills work better than other colors—except when given to male Italian soccer fans whose team colour is blue.

Even sham surgery works. Sylvester Colligan of Beaumont, Texas, could barely walk before his 1994 knee operation. He was mobile and free of pain six years later. But, as he later learned, he was actually in the control group. Yes, he received three knee incisions, but he was just sewn up again afterward; no conventional arthroscopy was done. But his body did not know that because his mind did not.

Similarly, a 2004 study compared 30 patients who received controversial embryonic stem-cell implants for Parkinson’s disease to patients who received only sham surgery. The patients who thought they had received the stem cells reported better quality of life a year later than those who thought they had received the sham surgery—regardless of which surgery patients had actually received. Ratings by medical personnel tended to concur with the patients’ own views. That last point is significant. The more your doctor believes in a treatment, the more likely you are to experience relief from it.

At one time, doctors suspected that more emotionally expressive people responded more strongly than stolid souls, but that does not seem to be the case. Our minds are real, and what we expect to happen is important.

Still, there are limitations on the power of our minds. Placebos do not help to treat cancer (though they help cancer patients with appetite and pain control). Also, only a person who is intellectually capable of believing that a medication provides relief can experience the effect of hope. One study found that Alzheimer patients whose cognitive deficits interfered with their ability to expect relief did not experience it.

Still, looking at the big picture, the effect—call it “placebo” or “meaning” or whatever you like—is pretty powerful. All drugs are tested against it—not because it doesn’t work but precisely because it does. A medication must work five percent better than a placebo to be licensed for use. That makes sense. You certainly would not want to pay $159.95 for a prescription that worked only one percent better than faith that you will get well. The money would be much better spent on a day at the spa.

So... throw out the medications? By no means! They already have been tested and found to be more useful than placebos, or they would not be on the pharmacist’s shelf. But, as Moerman says, the power of expected healing shows that meaning—our interpretation of what is happening to us—can make a huge difference to how effectively medications work. He sums it up: “Meaning can make your immune system work better and it can make your aspirin work better too.” Whether medications are intended to help us with physical or psychological problems, we must actively cooperate with them to make them work their best for us.

Philosophy of Mind: In case you wondered whether you are conscious and reading this ...

This preprint is an academic argument (I think) for the actual existence of consciousness (as opposed to the materialist view that consciousness is merely an illusion) that you do not want to try at a party this Saturday night:

Is Consciousness primary?

Abstract:
Six arguments against the view that conscious experience derives from a material basis are reviewed. These arguments arise from epistemology, phenomenology, neuropsychology, and philosophy of quantum mechanics. It turns out that any attempt at proving that conscious experience is ontologically secondary to material objects both fails and brings out its methodological and existential primacy. No alternative metaphysical view is espoused (not even a variety of Spinoza's attractive double-aspect theory). Instead, an alternative stance, inspired from F. Varela's neurophenomenology is advocated. This unfamiliar stance involves (i) a complete redefinition of the boundary between unquestioned assumptions and relevant questions ; (ii) a descent towards the common ground of the statements of phenomenology and objective natural science : a practice motivated by the quest of an expanding circle of intersubjective agreement. (By Michel Bitbol (2008))

Actually, there is hardly a materialist explanation for consciousness that is even worth discussing, as Mario and I point out in The Spiritual Brain, because the phenomenon is non-material in principle.

For instance, as John Searle, among others, has said,

“The most striking feature is how much of mainstream [materialistic] philosophy of mind is obviously false….[I]n the philosophy of mind, obvious facts about the mental, such as that we all really do have subjective conscious mental states…are routinely denied by many…of the advanced thinkers in the subject.”

-- John Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 3.

Well, those who cannot account for something deny it.

Some recent Mindful Hack stories on consciousness:

Mind vs. meat vs. computers: The differences

Consciousness: Recent public squabble between philosophers of mind rates better than most sitcoms

Interview with Spiritual Brain authors Mario and Denyse at campus Web site

Books: New physics takes on the human mind

Is consciousness a trick to ensure survival?

The Spiritual Brain reviewed in Jesuit thinkmag America

Animal minds: Learning may not pay, but some animals do it anyway

In "Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn't Better" (May 6, 2008), New York Times science writer Carl Zimmer tackles the question of how learning evolves.

If your science prof told you long ago that learning evolves because animals that learn faster are more likely to survive, forget it. Learning imposes costs of its own, as one experiment showed:

Dr. Kawecki and his colleagues pitted smart fly larvae against a different strain of flies, mixing the insects and giving them a meager supply of yeast to see who would survive. The scientists then ran the same experiment, but with the ordinary relatives of the smart flies competing against the new strain. About half the smart flies survived; 80 percent of the ordinary flies did.

Reversing the experiment showed that being smart does not ensure survival. “We took some population of flies and kept them over 30 generations on really poor food so they adapted so they could develop better on it,” Dr. Kawecki said. “And then we asked what happened to the learning ability. It went down.”

The ability to learn does not just harm the flies in their youth, though. In a paper to be published in the journal Evolution, Dr. Kawecki and his colleagues report that their fast-learning flies live on average 15 percent shorter lives than flies that had not experienced selection on the quinine-spiked jelly. Flies that have undergone selection for long life were up to 40 percent worse at learning than ordinary flies.

Actually, most life forms have not relied on high levels of individual learning to survive (or not, as the case may be). Quick learning is, after all, an alternative to built-in behaviour. Whether it is better or worse depends on the circumstances, I suppose.

The article closes with speculations about human learning. But I don't think the comparison to fly and worm learning really works.

The reality is that we humans must learn. If we don't, we suffer, just as we would if we didn't exercise. Friends who nurse people with Alzheimer and other dementias say that the best defense against the disease is to keep on learning. One Alzheimer nurse recommends learning a new language, for example.

A healthy neuron is a busy neuron? I would love to see a neuroscience study on that!

Heard way, way too often: The soul boils down to a few genes?

Materialism, as I learned while working on The Spiritual Brain, is exceedingly difficult to parody effectively. Materialists put me out of work by parodying themselves.

Take for example, this gem of a puff by reviewer Michael A. Goldman for the latest molecular biologist Lee Silver's latest book, Challenging Nature, in Science (the AAAS's publication). Silver, a molecular biologist, believes that his field is "compared with every other field of scholarship and science the least compatible with spiritual beliefs." GOldman goes on to say,

Many scientists are afraid to ask what differentiates humans from all other animal species. The Christian view is still heavily influenced by the idea that the human spirit remains beyond scientific inquiry. In Silver's view, the major emphasis of human genome analyses in the Western world has been to enhance health, but some investigators (including researchers at the RIKEN Institute in Japan) have been asking how we differ genetically from chimpanzees. Silver thinks that one day the difference will boil down to a few dozen genes, a kind of "soul code." Of his host at RIKEN Silver writes, "Sakai yearns to answer a question possibly as old as humankind itself: What gives a human being a human mind with the ability to ask the question 'What gives a human being a human mind?'" These investigators were "trying to find the DNA code for the human soul." When Silver asked the researchers at RIKEN whether or not they might one day try to transfer those very genes into a nonhuman primate, their answer was affirmative: they would, if they could, try to imbue a chimp with a human soul. The Neandertal genome projects may provide even more exciting information for the next edition of Silver's book.

If Silver really thinks that the difference between humans and chimpanzees will boil down to a few dozen genes or a kind of "soul code", I think that the incompatibility is not between spirituality and molecular biology but between spirituality and Silver.

Interestingly, Goldman admits that he didn't read Silver's earlier Remaking Eden because

I found the author's bravado in interviews as an unabashed salesperson for our biotechnological future distasteful and embarrassing. I almost dropped a popular textbook just for adding him as a co-author. I still cringe a bit after reading Challenging Nature, but now I think it isn't so bad to have an eloquent, well-traveled, and well-read counterbalance for Leon Kass and Jeremy Rifkin. It is refreshing to see Silver's careful, though biased, examination of the issues from a scientific perspective on bioethics. The Princeton professor's new book provides insight into and ammunition against almost any anti-biotechnology argument scientists are likely to encounter.

It sounds suspiciously like Goldman is willing to put up with any nonsense Silver offers as long as he thinks that spirituality boils down to a few dozen genes or a soul code. Or, as the free summary* of Challenging Nature at Science puts it, "Proclaiming an unlimited promise for biotechnology, the author paints its varied critics as uniformly ignorant and blinded by spiritual beliefs" - which means he is on the side of the lumps of flesh, I guess (a good thing, apparently).

There, you see, if I had just said that on my own initiative, you might criticize me for misrepresenting materialism, implying that it is more foolish than it is. But I didn't say it, I only reported it.

The culturally significant fact is that so few in legacy media take issue with or critique any of this stuff. But then, that's why they are legacy media, right?

By the way, have a look at the next post down, Materialist Mythbusting: Genes 'R' Not Us, if you think genes tell us everything. (For one thing - and this is only one thing among many - with genes, as with music, it is the expression that counts, not the notes written down somewhere.)

Here's Silver's book:


*Note: Michael A. Goldman's review of Challenging Nature at Science (Oct. 20, 2006: Vol. 314. no. 5798, p. 423) is hidden behind a subscribewall, and you need to scroll down at the Biotechnology Knowledge Center link provided above.

Materialist Mythbusting: Genes 'R' NOT Us

"Score one for the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate, " says the ambitious press release from the North Carolina State University, following some of their researchers' discovery that

By studying gene expression of white blood cells in 46 Moroccan Amazighs, or Berbers – including desert nomads, mountain agrarians and coastal urban dwellers – the NC State researchers and collaborators in Morocco and the United States showed that up to one-third of genes are differentially expressed due to where and how the Moroccan Amazighs live.

The research team, which looked at the 23,000 human coding genes of members of three Amazigh groups, discovered that whether people followed urban, rural, or nomadic lifestyles significantly influenced which genes were expressed, even though members of the group had very few genetic differences. For example,

... they found respiratory genes were upregulated, or turned on, more frequently in the urban population than in the nomadic or agrarian populations. This makes sense, Idaghdour says, as urban dwellers deal with greater amounts of pollution in the city and encounter more difficulties with diseases like asthma and bronchitis. So it stands to reason that certain respiratory genes in city dwellers go into overdrive while staying quiet in rural and nomadic populations, he adds.

Anyone remember the 1997 film GATTACA? Produced in the looming shadow of the mapping of the human genome (2000), it captures the basic idea behind genetic determinism - Genes 'R' Us - and then subverts it.

In the words of David A. Kirby of Science Fiction studies at DePauw University in Indiana,

GATTACA depicts a future world in which parents are encouraged to decide the genetic makeup of their offspring before birth. In this world not everyone has access to the technology, and individuals who have not been genetically enhanced encounter severe discrimination. GATTACA’s narrative focuses on Vincent Freeman, a genetically unenhanced individual, and his interactions with three characters, Eugene, Irene, and Anton, who are genetically enhanced. During the course of the film, Vincent avoids genetic discrimination by passing off Eugene Morrow’s genetic makeup as his own. Because everyone believes that Vincent has Eugene’s genetic profile, he is able to obtain a job at the prestigious Gattaca corporation, which arranges offworld expeditions. ... Early in the film an executive is murdered at Gattaca, and the subsequent investigation is conducted by Vincent’s genetically augmented younger brother, Anton. A stray eyelash provides DNA evidence, making Vincent the prime suspect in the murder.

But GATTACA assumes that determination to succeed is the only thing that eventually enables Freeman to overcome his handicap ("There is no gene for the human spirit"). The handicap itself is viewed as fixed and irrevocable. In a scene near the movie's opening, a health technician informs Freeman's parents that, among other things, he will die in his late twenties, due to a heart defect. There it is, his whole fate, just like a sum drawn correctly on a chalkboard ...

That conventional view of the future of genetics has been widely disseminated in popular media, but recent research, like this North Carolina State study, has dealt some serious blows. As the study illustrates, genes must be expressed in order to be effective, and environment and lifestyle play a role in how they are expressed. Determination to succeed plays a key role in humans, to be sure, but the "Freemen" of the world will doubtless be glad to discover that they have other heavy hitters on their team as well.

Abstract, citation, paper, and other resources

Abstract: The different environments that humans experience are likely to impact physiology and disease susceptibility. In order to estimate the magnitude of the impact of environment on transcript abundance, we examined gene expression in peripheral blood leukocyte samples from 46 desert nomadic, mountain agrarian and coastal urban Moroccan Amazigh individuals. Despite great expression heterogeneity in humans, as much as one third of the leukocyte transcriptome was found to be associated with differences among regions. Genome-wide polymorphism analysis indicates that genetic differentiation in the total sample is limited and is unlikely to explain the expression divergence. Methylation profiling of 1,505 CpG sites suggests limited contribution of methylation to the observed differences in gene expression. Genetic network analysis further implies that specific aspects of immune function are strongly affected by regional factors and may influence susceptibility to respiratory and inflammatory disease. Our results show a strong genome-wide gene expression signature of regional population differences that pesumably include lifestyle, geography, and biotic factors, implying that these can play at least as great a role as genetic divergence in modulating gene expression variation in humans.

Citation: "A Genomewide Gene Expression Signature of Environmental Geography in Leukocytes of Moroccan Amazighs" by Youssef Idaghdour and Greg Gibson, North Carolina State University; John D. Storey, Princeton University; and Sami J. Jadallah, HRH Prince Sultan International Foundation for Conservation and Development of Wildlife, Agadir, Morocco was published April 11, 2008, in PloS Genetics.

The paper is here.

Other resources:

North Carolina State News Release

Note: Materialist myths about human origins and existence - like Genes 'R' Us - are busted weekly at Design of Life blog.

Thoughts for the day: Reasons not to be a materialist if you have a mind

Unless, that is, you have a grant and must spend it advocating materialism. Even so, consider what you are up against:

“The most striking feature is how much of mainstream [materialistic] philosophy of mind is obviously false….[I]n the philosophy of mind, obvious facts about the mental, such as that we all really do have subjective conscious mental states…are routinely denied by many…of the advanced thinkers in the subject.”
-- John Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 3.

“It is not that we know what would explain consciousness but are having trouble finding the evidence to select one explanation over the others; rather, we have no idea what an explanation of consciousness would even look like.”--Colin McGinn, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 61.

“We don’t know… how a brain (or anything else that is physical) could manage to be a locus of conscious experience. This last is, surely, among the ultimate metaphysical mysteries; don’t bet on anyone ever solving it.”
--Jerry Fodor, In Critical Condition: Polemical Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 83.

Actually if you say silly enough things, you could end up working against materialism, which might be a good idea.

The Spiritual Brain is not a brainiac menace!

Here are some kind words about The Spiritual Brain from Brian T. Olszewski of the National Catholic Reporter's Book Club column:

For the initiated ... The Spiritual Brain is a fascinating exploration of relationships between God and neuroscience. Since it is not possible to determine how God "thinks," the exploration that takes place does so through the eyes and experience of science. Even those for whom discussions of God and neuroscience are foreign matter might be intrigued by such questions as "Is there a God program?" and "Does the God module even exist?"
Beauregard and O'Leary are thorough in presenting the cases, and in demonstrating for their peers how God, despite science's best efforts, still transcends the laboratory, the research and the theories.

Actually, while Olszewski really likes our book, he makes The Spiritual Brain sound much more formidable than it actually is. Look, if that book were half as learned as he makes out in his column, I could never have co-written it.

Here's an easy test: This is the Introduction . It actually does not get harder than this. And parts of it are very, very funny - but it was mostly materialists supplying the fun, not usually intentionally.

Introductory Chapter at a Glance

The Spiritual Brain: Introduction
Part One: Neuroscience as if your mind is real
Part Two: Who has enough faith to be a materialist?
Part Three: The uses of non-materialist neuroscience
Part Four: Materialism is running on empty

Zombie lurches across screen intoning "The ... Spiritual ... Brain ... is ... not ... a brainiac ... menace ... " No wait, cut, cut! That graphic is for a different blog.

Neuroscience: Human brains are unique, neuroscientist observes

Are human brains unique?, Dr. Michael Gazzaniga asks and - in more news that shouldn't surprise anyone - decides that the answer is yes:

I always smile when I hear Garrison Keillor say, "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch." It is such a simple sentiment yet so full of human complexity. Other apes don't have that sentiment. Think about it. Our species does like to wish people well, not harm. No one ever says, "have a bad day" or "do bad work" and keeping in touch is what the cell phone industry has discovered all of us do, even when there is nothing going on.

There in one sentence Keillor captures humanness. The familiar cartoon that makes its way around evolutionary biologists circles shows an ape at one end of a line and then several intermediate early humans culminating in a standing tall, erect human. We now know the line isn't so direct but the metaphor still works. We did evolve and we are what we are through the forces of natural selection. And yet I would like to amend that cartoon. I see the human turning around with a knife in his hand and cutting his imaginary cord off, in being liberated to do things no other animal comes close to realizing.

This is, of course, an introduction to his forthcoming book, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (Ecco; June 24, 2008), in which he tries to mesh his insights with materialism. He especially needs to believe that the human brain can be explained entirely in terms of natural selection. That's wildly improbable, but watching him try will likely be interesting.

One interesting topic Gazzaniga addresses is the importance of brain size:

From my own perspective on this issue, I have never been taken with the brain size argument. [= bigger is better] For the past 45 years I have been studying split-brain patients. These are patients who have had their two hemispheres of the brain surgically separated in an effort to control their epilepsy. Following their surgery, the left brain can no longer communicate meaningfully with their right brain, thus isolating one from the other. In effect, a 1340 gram interconnected brain has become a 670 gram brain. What happens to intelligence?

Well, not much. What one sees is the specialization that we humans have developed over years of evolutionary change. The left hemisphere is the smart half of the brain. It speaks, thinks, and generates hypothesis. The right brain does not and is a poor symbolic cousin to the left. It does, on the other hand have some skills that remain superior to those on the left, especially in the domain of visual perception. Yet, for present purposes, the overarching point is that the left hemisphere remains as cognitively adept as it was before it was disconnected from the right brain, leaving its 670 grams in the dust. Smart brains are derived from more than mere size.

I'm skeptical that the right brain is as useless as Gazzaniga thinks. But a reductionist always needs to leave a pile of stuff on the cutting room floor.

Chimpanzees more rational than humans?

In news that shouldn’t surprise anyone, German researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology found that chimpanzees choose more "rationally" than humans - if by "rationally" you mean that, in a reward game,

Humans typically make offers close to 50 percent of the reward. They also reject as unfair offers of significantly less than half of the reward, even though this choice means they get nothing.

The study, however, showed chimpanzees reliably made offers of substantially less than 50 percent, and accepted offers of any size, no matter how small.

The researchers concluded both that chimpanzees do not show a willingness to make fair offers and reject unfair ones. In this way, they protect their self interest and are unwilling to pay a cost to punish someone they perceive as unfair.

The study (published in Science, October 5, 2007) continues in the well-worn path of trying to derive human behavior from primate ape behavior, and when that doesn’t work, the outcome is supposed to be something of a surprise.

Why? Humans often assign values other than the expected ones, have specific ideas about what's fair, and prefer emotional satisfactions to other types. Don't believe me, believe Woody Allen.

Service note

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy, and of Faith@Science. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, detailing events of interest in the intelligent design controversy.

Disorder: Increasingly, anything you do that annoys me ...

In “Psychology: The Hard Truth About a Soft Science”, Selwyn Duke observes,

I recently read about psychiatrists who are labeling the desire to engage in excessive text messaging a mental disorder. Then there is "Muscle Dysmorphia," or the obsessive belief that one isn't muscular enough; "celebriphilia," the strong desire for amorous relations with a celebrity; "Intermittent Explosive Disorder," or road rage; "Sibling Rivalry Disorder"; "Mathematics Disorder"; "Caffeine Related Disorder"; and "Expressive Writing disorder," to cite just a handful of the hundreds of made-up conditions in the DSM. And every time a new variety is conjured up, psychology's market and earning potential increases. I have to wonder, though, what do they call the obsession with labeling behaviors mental disorders? Some might call it greed.

Actually, it’s mostly a way of gaining social power, isn’t it? If I’m giving a talk and you are text messaging people who interest you more, I can get my revenge by getting your behaviour classified as a “disorder.” Of course, you could do the same to me. But we both need to qualify as psychiatrists first.

When "secular" means "materialist"

Zachary Gappa, director of the Center for Research for a Just Society, observes that the Google search engine folk seem to have bought into a definition of “secular” that does not mean “no one perspective rules” but “religious perspectives are excluded.” For example,

The Christian Institute sought to purchase an advertisement from Google, "so that whenever the word 'abortion' was typed into the popular search engine, its link would appear on the side of the screen." Google refused this request, stating, "At this time, Google policy does not permit the advertisement of web sites that contain 'abortion and religion-related content'".

If Google had simply declined to allow advertisements involving the controversial topic of abortion, their decision would be completely understandable and fully within their rights as a private company. By removing a controversial topic from their advertisements they would not be discriminating against one religious view in favor of another. But this is not what they did.

Instead, Google accepted "adverts for abortion clinics, secular pro-abortion sites and secularist sites which attack religion," while refusing to accept The Christian Institute's "religious" ad. They did not shun the topic of abortion—just the "religious" view on abortion. In other words, they have discriminated against those whose view on abortion is influenced by their belief in God in favor of those whose view on abortion is influenced by their belief that God does not exist.

The organization has filed suit, but they are one of many straws in the wind right now, and not the largest.

Politics, religion, and civil rights - a teetering balance worldwide

Recently, I wrote about my friend Mustafa Akyol’s response to the controversial film Fitna. Another reader, Mohammed, notes that Fitna’s renditions of the Koran are not very accurate, according to a scholar to whom he directs my attention.

I’m no Arabist, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Atheist authors often quote the Bible out of context, ignoring the history, and I suppose that many can play at that game, and use the Koran too.

To show how complex real life is, Ezra Levant, the Jewish lawyer who is fighting for free speech in Canada, says that he prefers the Canadian Muslim Congress to the Canadian Jewish Congress on this key issue. (You would have to live here to understand in detail, but basically, Canadian leftists ally with politicized Islamists to undermine free speech - the two groups have nothing in common expect their disdain for things like free speech. And groups that lean left tend to buy into the package, without considering the big picture.)

While we’re here, here’s Mustafa’s contribution, along with that of a number of other thinkers, to a symposium on Turkey’s future:

First of all, Turkey’s secularism is one of a kind, and it has almost no resemblance to the separation of church and state in the United States. In Turkey, secularism means that the state can dominate and control religion. Secularism protects only the state, in other words, not religion.
Turkey’s secularist establishment even speaks of the need to protect the society from religion. “The secularism principle,” Turkey’s Constitutional Court argued in a 1989 decision, “requires that the society should be kept away from thoughts and judgments that are not based on science and reason.” (This is also quoted in the indictment against the AKP.)

Turkey’s secularists abhor “moderate Islam” as much as radical Islam. Indeed, they see any sort of religious influence on society as a threat to “modernity.” According to Princeton historian Sükrü Hanioglu, the extreme secularism of the Turkish Republic is rooted in the “vulgar materialism” of late-19th-century Germany, which heralded a post-religious age of “science and reason.” This philosophy, which was emulated by some of the Young Turks and was inherited by most of their republican successors, has become the cornerstone of the official state ideology. That ideology, often called “Kemalism,” also includes a very staunch nationalism, a belief in a protected and state-regulated economy, and, as foreign visitors to Turkey will notice, a cult of personality created around the county’s founder, Kemal Atatürk.

This ideology tolerates no “deviation,” and therefore political parties in Turkey need not be “Islamist” to clash with the secularist establishment.

Yes! Many people worldwide do not understand that secularism in North America has NOT historically been the same thing as “laicisme” (routinely translated as “secularism”) in France or Kemalism in Turkey.

Secularism in North America has - at least historically - meant that church and state were separated for the benefit of both. Separation of church and state means, among other things, that the government is not supposed to dictate to religious bodies what they should think, say, or do beyond protecting the basic civil rights of members of a religious organization.

Unfortunately, in the wake of globalization, there are dark hints that the less benign French approach may be gaining ground in North America, and we can all only hope that reason will prevail in Turkey.

Fred on everything, including evolution: Hot air about big brains

Columnist Fred Reed offers a send-up of speculative theories about the evolution of large brains in humans, “Circling the Paradigm: Protecting the Theory at Any Cost” (April 21, 2008):

A standard theory among a large school of evolutionists is that intelligence is low among people in sub-Saharan Africa, where humanity apparently originated, because life in tropical climates doesn't impose great intellectual demands; when people migrated to colder climates, as for example in Europe, they had to evolve higher intelligence to survive. To most people it seems obvious that higher intelligence would be useful anywhere at all, so why, they ask, didn't it arise below the Sahara?

Hart replies that larger brains carry not only benefits but also costs and, by implication, that in some places the costs are greater than the advantages. The costs of larger brains are, he says:

1) Larger brains require larger amounts of energy.

2) Larger brains require larger heads, which create strains on the muscular and skeletal structure.

3) Larger brains (and larger heads) require wider female pelvises and the wider pelvises result in less efficiency in walking and running."
This is evolutionary boilerplate, and also absurd. The two are often seen keeping company.

I won’t even try to keep up with Fred in debunking the “big brains” nonsense, but here is an interesting fact: Size of brain does not necessarily correlate with intelligence in humans. See these Mindful Hack stories, for example:

How much brain does a man really need? Not much.

Also: How much brain do you need? Could you use that space for something else?

While we are here, it is worth noting that some creatures, like whales, have much bigger brains than humans, but have not used them to develop thinking faculties similar to humans.

My own view is that when people believe in mechanistic theories, they tend to reach for them as an alternative to other theories, whether they are useful or not. Where they are not useful, they spin them out a little more, as in Fred’s hilarious examples. Here is more of Fred on Everything.