Brains on purpose: The Mindful Hack welcomes an interesting new neuroscience blog

Over at Brains on Purpose, Stephanie West Allen, who - in collaboration with Jeffrey Schwarts - specializes in neuroscience in relation to conflict resolution, is skeptical of the
pop science craze for neuroscience explanations for, like, everything:

Neuro-talk is popular these days. You can read about neuro-this and neuro-that. Much extrapolation is being done from the findings of neuroscience; often the extrapolation is not warranted or accurate.

I've called it neurobullshipping myself, but I am sure Allen is far too polite for that.
Brains on Purpose has been added to the blogroll at the right. When I'm a few days between posts, go there.
Brains on purpose: The Mindful Hack welcomes an interesting new neuroscience blog

Over at Brains on Purpose, Stephanie West Allen, who - in collaboration with Jeffrey Schwarts - specializes in neuroscience in relation to conflict resolution, is skeptical of the
pop sicnece craze for neuroscience explanations for, like, everything:

Neuro-talk is popular these days. You can read about neuro-this and neuro-that. Much extrapolation is being done from the findings of neuroscience; often the extrapolation is not warranted or accurate.

I've called it neurobullshipping myself, but I am sure Allen is far too polite for that.
Brains on Purpose has been added to the blogroll at the right. When I'm a few days between posts, go there.

(Note: Dr. Schwartz was lead author of The Mind and the Brain, a pioneering book in non-materialist neuroscience. He is a colleague of my lead author, Mario Beauregard. Our book The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, will be out in August. It is billed as "Finally, the counter-argument in the case against God.")

Articles of interest: On materialists, atheists, consciousness, tenured authoritarian crackpots and more

Here's a Breakpoint commentary on "Breaking the Spell of Materialism"by Regis Nicoll, arguing that materialism is a new form of fundamentalism:

Materialism is a worldview based on a naturalistic understanding of reality. In materialism, the natural world is all there is. There is no supernatural—neither spirit nor soul nor God. There is only “nature”: the cosmic matrix of matter and energy operating according to physical laws. Reality is what is objective, observable and reproducible. For the materialist, the science is “in”: everything is a product of physical processes. On the surface of things, this would seem correct.

But it is not only incorrect, it is impossible.

Madeleine Bunting thinks that the United States is to blame for Dawkins's tirades against religion:

This wave of new atheism is deeply political -- and against some of its targets even a churchgoer might cheer them on. What they all share is a loathing of increasing religiosity in United States politics, which has contributed to a disastrous presidency and undermined scientific understanding

Oh well, that's all right then, I suppose, as long as Dawkins himself isn't to blame for what he says. She makes an interesting point, however, that for the most part the new atheists are "in danger of a spectacular failure." Yes, I think so: Shrill hostility is a tough sell.

Mary Grabar, offering students an antidote to tenured authoritarian crackpots, quotes Elizabeth Kantor:

"It's fatal to any totalitarian project for people to believe that there is an authority that they can appealo over the heads of the political power. That’s why totalitarian governments cannot tolerate religion. The postmodernist pretense that all authority is just a mask for raw power and that all reasoning is only rationalization is no defense at all against oppression—in fact, it can be a justification for it. Christianity, in contrast, is a guarantor of individual human freedom, not a threat to it."

Oh, and here's British physicist David Tyler on the latest attempt to deconstruct consciousness:

The materialist mind-set is a universal acid that eats away at everything, including itself. Consequently, the mind has to be a product of hierarchical levels of neuronal firings, and personality has to be an illusion. We are ultimately conscious machines. Why anyone with these views should think that our neuronal activity can have anything to do with truth and reality is a mystery to me! But even more important, the materialist approach to consciousness is commonly dignified by the name "science". Other approaches, which are likely to be linked to Theism, are labeled "religion" and are excluded, on demarcation grounds, from science. This is an unacceptable situation, for as metaphysics, materialism has a philosophical standing that is entirely equivalent to Theism.

(Note: For the rest of this week, I am tied up with a big writers' conference and won't likely be able to blog. If I'm not too tired, I'll be back to it Sunday.)

Evolutionary psychology: Why Clan of the Cave Bear makes more sense as a novel than as a science

Regular readers of this space will know that I consider evolutionary psychology (the attempt to derive human psychology from the qualities that may or may not have been adaptive, passed on in our genes) as something of a joke. Speculations on the dishonesty module or the infidelity gene are fun for the pop science media, of course, and no harm is done if they are left there.

Recently, I wrote about the quite serious proposal by an evolutionary psychologist to bid the uncomprehending and unsympathetic Western world goodbye and try exporting evolutionary psychology to the purportedly more welcoming world of Asia. Several commenters have noted at Uncommon Descent that when the evolutionary psychology missionaries arrive among their heathen, they will find monotheism (especially Christianity) - to which they were very anxious to bid farewell - pretty firmly established in many places that were not formerly Christian. So they should not assume that Islam is their only competition.

In a comment at Uncommon Descent, I also noted,

One of the difficulties with evolutionary psychology is that the traits identified need NOT have survival value, but only be associated with traits that do.
That's part of the general incoherence. To see what this means, consider the following:

If producing fertile offspring confers survival value (a logical idea), then homosexuality should be counterproductive. However, in the era of gay rights, the evolutionary psychologist cannot quite make that argument, so he pulls the ever-obliging rabbit out of the hat: The homosexual confers survival value by helping siblings raise children. So, it turns out that both having children and not having them confer survival value.

Notice that we have gone from something obvious (if you are not a successful parent, your line will come to an end) to something speculative (how homosexuals - assumed for the purposes of our discussion to be non-parents* - might help parents).

The only thing we can really be sure of is that we have a current population of over six billion humans who come from a very small number of common ancestors.

Were those common ancestors doing something unusually correct? Given the small numbers, it is hard to know what, in particular, without specific historical information.**

That's why I think Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear, admittedly fiction, makes way more sense than evolutionary psychology, which is actually fiction but not admittedly so.

*The whole evo psycho enterprise is riddled with mere "assumptions du jour". In traditional cultures, people attracted to persons of their own sex married and had children simply because the culture required them to. Whatever else they did was a different matter, judged according to the culture. Thus people who were homosexually inclined did pass on their genes in large numbers - and probably needed about the same amount of help from their sibs as they gave, overall.

**If there were a large number of ancestors, you might be able to make some reasonable guesses as to the relationship between behavior choices and survival of offspring. But not necessarily so for a small number of ancestors.

For example, if you knew that 400 men out of 500 had survived a battle, you might assume that their group contained a larger number of capable warriors than the fallen, treated as a group. But if only one single man survived the engagement, that may be because he is a great hero, or because he hid or ran away, made a deal with the enemy, was left for dead but somehow survived, or was too drunk to get up on the morning of the battle, or was in the stockade for stealing from his fellows. In other words, even assuming that his behaviour is passed on in his genes, what behavior is passed on? And what inferences can we make about its relation to his survival generally?

Here is an interesting resource on the problem with evolutionary psychology, from a "common sense" philosopher, and here's another one.

Atheism: New York atheist gives millions to Catholic schools

Honestly, it makes way more sense than you think for an atheist to give money for tuition to Catholic schools. Here's retired hedge fund manager Robert W. Wilson's explanation for why he gave $22.5 million to the Archdiocese of New York's program for needy students' tuition:

"Let's face it, without the Roman Catholic Church, there would be no Western civilization," Wilson said. "Shunning religious organizations would be abhorrent. Keep in mind, I'm helping to pay tuition. The money isn't going directly to the schools."

"It was a chance for a very modest amount of money to get kids out of a lousy school system and into a good school system," Wilson said.

It's not hard to see, in the background to this story, an indictment of the performance of the inner city public education system.

Frankly, I don't think that the problems of secularist inner city school systems are fixable.

When I was a child in the 1950s here in Canada, the "public" system was actually the "Protestant" system. Underlying British North American values, including spiritual values, were taken for granted. But as the Protestant bedrock moldered away or was legislated away over the decades, asserting any value whatever against a contrary value statement became more and more difficult.

Finally, it reached the point where a friend phoned me, bewildered by a school board document she was reading that pointedly refused to make any moral judgments about schoolyard bullying. That might hurt the bully's feelings, after all. He mustn't be encouraged to think that he is to blame for his behaviour and should just change it.

As policy analyst Robert Novak notes in a recent edition of First Things (June/July 2007, not on line yet), secularism did not really replace transcendent commitments with a humanist value system. On the contrary, secularism is more vulnerable than most habits of mind to deconstruction by post-modernism. No ethical standards can be confidently asserted in such an atmosphere (though endless irrational rules are made, together with strategic exceptions for whiners who have perfect pitch).

Plaudits to Wilson for providing an escape for thousands of child refugees.

(Note: What about successful secular private schools, you ask? In my experience, where they work well, they stay in touch with the broad, older Western culture where, for example, people are considered responsible for their conduct and bullying is considered shameful. But it is important to recognize that even the non-religious aspects of that culture were and are non-materialist. A wonderful movie illustrating that culture is The Emperor's Club, whose story revolves around the character issues created by the Mr. Julius Caesar contest at a not-especially-religious private boys' school. And what about religious schools mired in sex scandals? In general, these schools gave up older, spiritually oriented accounts of the human person for modernist therapy-centred ones - and reaped the bitter fruit in vast abundance.)

Quantum physics, consciousness, and just plain weirdness

In an article titled "Why Quantum Mechanics Is Not So Weird after All", Paul Quincey struggles to convince us of his title's argument, but then admits:

... quantum physics is not weird and incomprehensible because it describes something completely different from everyday reality. It is weird and incomprehensible precisely because it describes the world we see around us-past, present, and future.

Physicist friends note that some popular sources do OD on all the weirdness down there at the subatomic level, ignoring any continuity with classical physics.

That said, the lack of causal mechanisms, the ability of particles to be in more than one place at a time, and the fact that the observer is part of the system mean that, yeah, it's weird down there. Also, it is difficult to find language to describe what is really happening.

A friend writes to say that Eugene Wigner, Nobel Laureate in Physics who laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics, commented, "It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness." If he's right, the connection between consciousness - an immaterial entity - and physical nature may only be understood through quantum principles.

Another friend, a computer scientist, thinks of it like this:

String theory predicts that there are 11 dimensions, four of which "uncurled" at the origin of the physical universe. The other seven dimensions remain curled in the Planck length (10^-33 centimeters) which is a quantum, the smallest unit, of space-time. If this is correct it means we are surrounded by another, invisible realm that can only be detected indirectly. The stories told by people who experience NDEs are consistent with more dimensions of space-time. For example, they talk about time and space being compressed, expanded or malleable. These experiences suggest to me that consciousness is not a physical phenomenon and that it transcends our physical existence.

Personally, I suspect we are on the cusp of great, non-materialist, discoveries, but I wouldn't give five cents for the future of materialism, no matter how many boffo intellectuals endorse it..

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

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), anoverview 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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).