Mind: Questioning "may haves" and "might haves" officially labelled "science"TM

In "A One Hundred Year-Old Challenge", Michael Flannery, author of a just-published biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, comments on Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker's latest attempt to explain away the human mind, taking the non-materialist Wallace as a starting point:

Now, after more than a century, Pinker pledges to address once and for all the "profound puzzle" Wallace posed with "the cognitive niche." Let's see if Pinker's argument matches his bravado.

The cognitive niche is not new; it was first proposed by Tooby and DeVore in 1987. But Pinker believes it has special significance in explaining the evolvability of the human mind by means of natural selection, precisely what Wallace denied. The cognitive niche rests upon two hypotheses: 1) "a mode of survival characterized by manipulating the environment through causal reasoning and social cooperation"; and 2) "the psychological faculties that evolved to prosper in the cognitive niche can be coopted to abstract domains of processes of metaphorical abstraction and productive combination, both vividly manifested in human language."

It all sounds impressive until Pinker tries to actually make a case for any of this. The narrative quickly degenerates into a trivial recounting of what humans currently do and then into a collection of speculative scenarios about how certain primordial hominids "might have" done this or "perhaps" did that. Festooned with hedges like "may have been," "may serve as," "perhaps," "may connect" -- twenty-one in a seven-page paper! -- Pinker promises to "dissolve" the Wallace paradox. If it were all mere speculation it might simply be chalked up to the desperate wishful thinking so common among evolutionary psychologists. But Pinker goes on to try and explain "how cognitive mechanisms that were selected for physical and social reasoning could have enabled H. sapiens to engage in the highly abstract reasoning required in modern science, philosophy, government, commerce, and law." His answer: most humans don't do that! Only a few humans were able to do what "all are capable of learning." Examples? Instead of Newtonian mechanical physics most human "physics" has consisted of intuitions more akin to "the medieval theory of impetus," most have believed in an "intuitive biology" like "creationism," most have reasoned towards "vitalism" over "mechanistic physiology," and with regard to the mind most people have adhered to mind/body dualism over "neurobiological reductionism." Only "some humans," he insists, were "able to invent the different components of modern knowledge." The mechanism for how the apparent "few" were able to achieve this comes from what Pinker calls the "psycholinguistic phenomenon" called "metaphorical abstraction."

Now this most surely isn't science; it's rank presentism and wishful thinking. It privileges those things Pinker values as "progressive" and "modern" and relegates all the rest to a self-fulfilling ignorance.

Find out why Pinker is surely mistaken:

Mind: I'm with the goldfish - but only for this universe

Professional skeptic Michael Shermer takes issue with Stephen Hawking's "radical philosophy of science", asking, "Is Hawking right to claim that reality is dependent on the model used to describe it?" (Big Questions On Line, November 23, 2010):

In his new book, The Grand Design, co-authored with the Caltech mathematician Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking presents a philosophy of science he calls “model-dependent realism,” which is based on the assumption that our brains form models of the world from sensory input, that we use the model most successful at explaining events and assume that the models match reality (even if they do not), and that when more than one model makes accurate predictions “we are free to use whichever model is most convenient.” Employing this method, Hawking and Mlodinow claim that “it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation.”


[ ... ]


“If there are two models that both agree with observation, like the goldfish’s picture and ours, then one cannot say that one is more real than another. One can use whichever model is more convenient in the situation under consideration.”

Shermer thinks he has a better idea - science:

The tools and methods of science were designed to test whether or not a particular model or belief about reality matches observations made not just by ourselves but by others as well. When one scientific lab corroborates the findings of another lab, and those findings support of a tested model, then it strengthens our confidence that the model (or hypothesis, or theory) more closely corresponds to reality, even if we can never know with 100 percent certainty the true nature of that reality.

Perhaps, but scandals emerge all the time about science-based nonsense or fraud.

Actually, in this life, we are condemned never to know for sure if we are right, and not even science is magic. That is why the truly wise put such a strong emphasis on acting prudently, justly and charitably. If that does nothing else, it probably minimizes the damage we may do by being wrong.

Brain as illusion?

I see where Discovery Institute has put up a podcast with me, on “Is the Brain Just an Illusion?

This must be one of the ones I did in Seattle in 2007, when they asked me to come and explain the book.

What I always ask is, “If the brain or the mind are an illusion, whose illusion are they?”

This question is modelled on the Jewish zen: “If the mind is an illusion, whose arthritis is this?”

On this episode of ID The Future, Anika Smith interviews science writer Denyse O'Leary about her book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul.

In the book O'Leary and her co-author Mario Beaurogard, neuroscientist and Associate Professor at Université de Montréal, explore the question of whether or not the mind is an illusion as materialists believe. The Spiritual Brain looks at whether religious experiences come from God or are merely the random firing of neurons in the brain. Drawing on his own research with Carmelite nuns, Beauregard shows that genuine, life-changing spiritual events can be documented. He and O'Leary offer compelling evidence that mind creates matter, rather than matter creating mind.

Listen here. By the way, I always call myself the co-author and recognize neuroscientist Mario as the lead author.

Mind and society: Why you can trust the people, when they have a chance

A correspondent commends to me "Pray the Devil Back to Hell", an award-winning documentary about how Liberian women put a stop to a long and brutal war.

If so, they are deeply commended from my safe apartment in Toronto.

No country can prosper without good citizens. It is an old notion, called - in Latin - civitas , and in English "citizenship."

Liberia was founded by people who had lived in slavery in the United States, and we must all wish them well in this matter.

The lesson I take from these women's experience is, don't wait for the government to do things we can do ourselves.

That includes - in my experience, admittedly much less painful than these Liberians' - dealing with incidents of racism or anti-Semitism or just plain uncivil behaviour on one's own. Why ask for a big, expensive, and possibly useless or Constitnution-denying government process?

Yes, it creates government jobs. But why not just make clear that we think that the person who talks and acts that way is a useless, tasteless boob who probably couldn't get a job picking up after dogs?

Wouldn't that be far more useful and cheaper?

Neuroscience: When reduction fails

In "Chimaeras of Experience", science writer Jonah Lehrer writes,

The paradox of modern neuroscience is that the one reality you can't describe as it is presently conceived is the only reality we'll ever know, which is the subjective first person view of things. Even if you can find the circuit of cells that gives rise to that, and you can construct a good causal demonstration that you knock out these circuit of cells, and you create a zombie; even if you do that... and I know Dennett could dismantle this argument very, very quickly ... there's still a mystery that persists, and this is the old brain-body, mind-body problem, and we don't simply feel like three pounds of meat.

Oh? Could materialist philosopher Dennett really "dismantle this argument very, very quickly"?

Alva Noe would say no, in his recent Out of Our Heads, of which my review is here.

Reduction can be elegant. On the other hand, it can be lazy and greedy.

To say that the brain is "three pounds of meat" is like saying that the world's oceans are billions of tonnes of salt water.

Some reductions reformulate information in a simpler and more elegant way. One thinks of Newton's laws of planetary gravity, for example.

Other reductions just hide problems that more correct and inclusive statements do not hide. Reductions of the mind to the brain belong to the latter group.

The latest on God neurons: There ARE no God neurons

I am sure glad Mario Lopez posted this "Wired" item under "eyes rolling" at Uncommon Descent.

Whatever those people are Wiring themselves with, they should stop.

Here's the deal: Let us compare humans to weasels (a pine marten weasel is pictured at right).

Humans think about God because we have human mental faculties, period.

Weasels do not think about God because they do not have human mental faculties.

Humans realize that we will die one day, and wonder what happens after that. (Weasels do not.)

Humans think that some of our behaviour is good and some is bad, and we wonder whether the universe is organized in such a way as to promote the good and penalize the bad. (Weasels never think of these things.)

It is not correct to say that humans only think of these things because we are socialized to do so. Moral revolutions are often started by people who go against the leaders of their society. These revolutions can be good or bad, of course, depending on their outcome. It could be Gandhi - or Hitler - for example.

Human societies have changed a lot in the last couple of thousand years. (Weasel dens have not changed at all. They may not have changed in a million years, and will probably never change.)

There is a lot to know about being a human that we don't yet know. (There is nothing to know about being a weasel that weasels don't know.)

I think "neuroscience" studies about religion are often a waste of time because, as I said when I first climbed back onto my coffee perch in 2006, they are starting from a fundamentally flawed premise: That the explanation should be some God gene or circuit, rather than awareness of mortality and moral responsibility.

What they don't want to confront is the reality of the mind. And they will never get anywhere until they do.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

Mind: Yet another effort to explain to materialists why minds are not like computers

In "Why minds are not like computers," in The New Atlantis (Winter 2009) Ari N. Schulman explains:

Hmmm. What can go wrong with that reminds me of "The Computer's First Christmas Card," "Merry Chrysanthemum". And as a result,

Thus it is only partially correct to say that a computer performs arithmetic calculations. As a physical object, the computer does no such thing—no more than a ball performs physics calculations when you drop it. It is only when we consider the computer through the symbolic system of arithmetic, and the way we have encoded it in the computer, that we can say it performs arithmetic.

Okay, but what about the famed "Turing test" that would show that computers can think?

... they indicate crucial errors in AI researchers’ understanding of both computers and minds. Suppose that the mind is in fact a computer program. Would it then be possible to conclude that what’s inside the mind is irrelevant, as is supposed by some interpretations of the Turing Test? If we have some computer program whose behavior can be completely described as if it were a black box, such a description does not mean that the box is empty, so to speak. The program must still contain some internal structures and properties. They may not be necessary for understanding the program’s external behavior, but they still exist. So even if we possessed a correct account of human mental processes in purely input-output terms (which we do not), such an external description by definition could not describe first-person experience. The Turing Test is not a definition of thinking, but an admission of ignorance—an admission that it is impossible to ever empirically verify the consciousness of any being but yourself. It is only ever possible to gain some level of confidence that another being is thinking or intelligent. So we are stuck measuring correlates of thinking and intelligence, and the Turing Test provides a standard for measuring one type of correlate. Similarly, although social interaction requires communication in the form of such “input-output” as speech and hearing, it also requires two or more agents who experience that interaction: A teddy bear may provide a child with the same comfort and companionship—and elicit from the child the same responses—that another human being would, but we cannot say that it loves.

Schulman, whose comments I commend to all, is assistant editor of The New Atlantis.


Personally, I think that the artificial intelligence project is dead, but no one has got round to raising the funds for a decent burial.

See also:

Getting computers to pretend to converse is an extremely hard computatinal problem

Artificial intelligence: Conversing with computers or with their programmers?

Computers: Most engineers must have that they are not robotsArtificial intelligence: A look at things that neither we nor computers can discover

Can a conscious mind be built out of software?

Also: Mind vs. meat vs. computers - the differences

Let the machine read your mind (We offer an installment plan!)

Mind-computer blend: Who believes in this? Artificial intelligence:

Making the whole universe intelligent?

Brain cells release information more widely than previously thought.

(Note: Thanks much for all kind readers who are still here. I would have hoped to be here more often too. And thanks to kind PayPal donors. As media move online, it is best to support the news you want to see. - Denyse)

A Beautiful Mind: When the mind restores order to the brain?

A friend writes to ask,

I was wondering if you were aware of the movie A Beautiful Mind? It may make for a good brain/mind point.

John Nash's malfunctioning brain kept telling him that the people, which he was hallucinating, were real but his mind eventually figured out that they were not (even though he kept experiencing the hallucinations after figuring it out).

The film is based loosely* on the life of schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, who won the Nobel Prize for economics. Here's a synopsis.

Essentially, my friend is right. In the film, Nash must decide whether to believe what he is experiencing or what he knows to be true. The more he believes what he knows to be true, the more distant the fantasy figures that formerly dominated his life become. In some ways, that is a useful analogy to the importance of the focus of attention in non-materialist treatments of brain disorders.

Perhaps my friend is also recalling this comment by neurosurgeon Mike Egnor regarding the great neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield:

Penfield was a neurosurgeon who pioneered the field of epilepsy surgery. He operated on thousands of patients who were awake (under local anesthesia), and were able to speak to him while he stimulated various regions of their brains.

Penfield found that he could invoke all sorts of things- movements, sensations, memories. But in every instance (hundreds of thousands of individual stimulations- in different locations in each patient- during his career), the patients were aware that the stimulation was being done to them, but not by them. There was a part of the mind that was independent of brain stimulation and that constituted a part of subjective experience that Penfield was not able to manipulate with his surgery.

I've performed some epilepsy surgery (although it's not my primary specialty), and my experience has been the same. Patients always know that the memory or sensation or movement is is imposed on them, not by them. Some colleagues who do specialize in epilepsy surgery have confirmed Penfield's observations as well.

Penfield called this "double consciousness", meaning that there was a part of subjective experience that he could invoke or modify materially, and a different part that was immune to such manipulation.

*Doctors tell me that, in reality, most schizophrenic delusions are not nearly as interesting as described in the film.

See also:

Just how much brain do you need? Could you use that space for something else?

Non-materialist neurosurgeon's criticisms of current medicine called well-founded

Neuroscientist Michael Egnor to lecture on why we got eugenics

Here is a trailer for A Beautiful Mind:

The new atheists: Santa's sleigh came and went, and never gave them what they needed

In The Ottawa Citizen, Robert Sibley advises

From New Age cults to murderous fundamentalism, these are dark times for religion, and the 'new atheists' are in the ascendant. The problem with their movement is that they don't understand the source of their hostility ... (December 26, 2008)

Oh? In the ascendant? In the legacy mainstream media, maybe, but not in the world at large.

In fact, this year - for the first time in a long while - I noticed a decisive pushback against their efforts to stop people from saying "Merry Christmas!"

Be a Christian, don't be a Christian, ... it's your choice. But December 25 is Christmas Day. In Canada, both December 25 and December 26 are statutory holidays - and pretty popular ones, too, so you need to keep that fact in mind if you intend to try litigation. No one is going to thank you for forcing them to work on one of those days, if they are not in an essential service field.

Anyway, I don't think the new atheists' movement is really going anywhere because what they don't have is any important new ideas.

I mean, once you get past Richard Dawkins explaining to Ben Stein in Expelled that space aliens might have created life - but not God - or Lee Smolin's zillions of flopped universes, theirs are not new ideas that we can compare with, say, the discovery of neuroplasticity in the brain.

Now THAT was a discovery - oh my heavens, what a discovery! Just think of all the old people who realize that they are not consigned to involuntary senility after all! But that discovery did not help materialist atheism one bit. Neuroplasticity makes way more sense if your immaterial mind is real and directs your brain.

Which reminds me: What discoveries would have helped materialist atheism? Here are some:

1995: It is conclusively proven that there is a single gene switch that causes people to be gay or straight. Soon after, the single switches that cause people to be fat or thin, faithful or unfaithful to their partners, and liberal or conservative in their voting patterns are quickly found.

1996: It becomes impossible to determine whether one is communicating by keyboard with a human or a chimpanzee.

1998: Major science geek gets Nobel Prize for discovering the God gene, which causes people to be religious.

1999: It becomes impossible to determine whether one is communicating by keyboard with a human or a computer.

2000: A rogue module is found in the brain that controls the sense that one is an "I" rather than an "it." Everyone is really an "it" after all, and the "I" factor is a delusion caused by a glitch.

2001: Evolutionary psychologists lead the way in developing effective treatments for mental disorders, using their theories, including the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution, which wins a Nobel Prize for its sheer cogency.

2004: A computer program is developed that can predict within 99.99999% certainty who will commit a crime - or do a variety of other things - in the next twelve months, all based on hormones and similar factors.

2007: Most people worldwide agree that belief in God is harmful because it leads to bad ideas like right and wrong, and the harmful practice of accepting responsibility for one's own actions. Billions of people urge their governments to take over intimate details of their lives to prevent further harm.

Okay, obviously, none of this happened. And Bill Maher's Religulous came and went.

The real reason for the spate of New Atheist books, as I have mentioned elsewhere, is that they want you to become an atheist now - before you figure out that atheism is a crock. There is no way out of the desperations of human existence through atheism.

Look, I am NOT one of those feel-good Christians who try to tell you that God has a wonderful plan for your life. Maybe he does, and I am glad for you. But the figure at the front of my own church is of a crucified man (depicted above), and it is in that knowledge that I am instructed to live the rest of my life.

There is no escape from the glory and tragedy of being human, not an animal, and the "new atheist" movement is a paltry cheat and a waste of your time.

If you want to be an atheist, be an old atheist, not one of these new atheists, looking for the latest buzz from the popular science press to bolster lame ideas. Believe in God or don't believe - you are still accountable for what you do. You really are.

Mind: We still have no explanation for why humans have minds - or thoughts

In James Randerson's "We know nothing about brain evolution" (Guardian UK, February 19, 2008) we learn that Harvard's Richrd Lewontin has pointed out the obvious:

"Why we know nothing about the evolution of cognition". He systematically dismissed every assumption about the evolution of human thought, reaching the conclusion that scientists are still completely in the dark about how natural selection prompted the massive hike in human brain size in the human line.

The main problem is the poor fossil record. Despite a handful of hominid fossils stretching back 4m years or so, we can't be sure that any of them are on the main ancestral line to us. Many or all of them could have been evolutionary side branches.

Worse, the fossils we do have are difficult to interpret. "I don't have the faintest idea what the cranial capacity [of a fossil hominid] means," Lewontin confessed. What does a particular brain size tell us about the capabilities of the animal attached to it?

Of course Lewontin is right! First, cranial capacity is not the best measure of intelligence, as brain absent humans show. While we are here, a number of studies show that some birds (notably crows) are smart - even though they do not have the brain parts we humans associate with smartness. At the time, I said,

I've long been skeptical of claims that intelligence evolved as an aid to survival. The vast majority of life forms that have survived for millions or even hundreds of millions of years did not require - or acquire - intelligence. The newer notion that intelligence is spurred by the need for complex social interactions seems a bit closer to the mark, though not entirely satisfactory. After all, many insects have achieved complex social interactions without anything like what we humans regard as intelligence.

There is no "survival of the fittest" reason why humans should be conscious! None whatever. Bacteria are way more fit than humans, but do they have thoughts? Nada. And they are probably better off without them.

So we are stuck being human and having minds, and we really can't claim that our minds give us a survival advantage. Its more the opposite. We give our minds a survival advantage.

Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista

Mind reading technology: In your face and in your mind - or maybe not ...

Here is a Fox News interview with Japanese physicist, Michio Kaku, who is quite convinced that in the near future we will be able to read people's minds - high tech phrenology, really.

(= Bumps on the brain explain your mind.)

You know, I heard all this a zillion years ago when video killed the radio star.

As I recall, computers were going to think like people. That didn't happen, but ... on to the next thing, no delays!

Evolutionary psychology! You ARE the cave man! Okay, so that didn't turn up a single piece of useful information, and just got further and further from science? Well, obviously, .. More money for research is needed ...

Oh yes, and ... chimps think like people! Didn't you know? When was the last time you tore off your neighbour's arm and ate it before her eyes?

Was it last summer at the block barbecue? I guess her aunties must have been kind of cautious about offering her bracelets for Christmas ...

Actually, it makes more sense to argue that dogs think like people than that chimps do (at least dogs like being around people, which is a beginning .... )

Anyway, look, welcome to the latest schtick: Neuroscience will soon read your thoughts, as per this video. Wowza! Or maybe not ...

A couple of thoughts, to orient a reasonable person:

1. From Mario Beauregard, lead author of The Spiritual Brain:

This study is based on a certain correspondence between elementary visual stimuli and the spatial organization of very basic visual processing in the occipital cortex.

Thoughts are much more complex and correlated with diffuse neural processing throughout the brain. That is, there is no correspondence between the spatial organization of neural processing associated with thoughts and the nature of these thoughts.

This is why it is impossible to read thoughts with fMRI scanners (this is also true for other neuroimaging techniques).

2. From me, following up on Mario:

Thoughts are not like bricks in a building. Here's an obvious example: Consider abstractions like: Toronto

My idea of Toronto (Canada's largest city, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, where I live) is probably different from yours. I've lived here for about 45 years, so I probably have many more ideas and associations than you would. So how could there be a "one on one" map of our ideas and of all other possible subjects' ideas?

3. Friends have offered additional thoughts, for example, neurosurgeon Mike Egnor:

It's interesting scientifically only in that it highlights fMRI's ability to image cerebral metabolism in real time with much better resolution than was ever possible before (it's much better than PET scanning, which was the gold standard).

fMRI works by imaging local changes in cerebral blood flow, which corresponds to activation of small regions of the brain.

This latest flurry appears to be the usual 'science-as-press-release', although at least it's not some idiotic evolutionary theory. Researchers in Japan have tweaked fMRI to be able to image geometrical patterns of blood flow (and neuronal activity) in the occipital cortex that corresponds to reading letters. It so happens that the visual system maps with high fidelity. That is, the patterns of light activation of the retina are transmitted with spatial fidelity to the occipital cortex, so if you're looking at a circle of light, there actually is a tiny circle of neurons activated in the occipital cortex. fMRI can resolve this, so it can read 'letters' that the person is reading by imaging the cortex. It is quite laborious (it takes multiple images and, as I understand, many minutes of looking at a letter to get an image).

The ocular system is a bit atypical in its mapping fidelity. In most other regions of the cortex, especially in the large association areas where much of our thought seems to be mediated, there are no maps that we know of. The motor system and the somatic sensory system have maps, but less refined.

... fMRI doesn't allow us to 'read minds'; it merely images patterns of cortical activation that we've know about for decades. There is nothing qualitatively different about the 'lie detection' capabilities of fMRI and the stuff we already use. People give physiological clues when they are lying; wives of cheating husbands and parents of naughty children have known this for millennia. Liars sweat, get tachycardia, avoid eye contact, stammer, and get different patterns of blood flow in their brains. It's all physiology. There's nothing spooky about fMRI.

By the same account, there is no substitute for skillful evaluation of the data. If fMRI is to be used for lie detection (it apparently has already been used for that purpose in a criminal case in India), it needs to be vetted with the same rigor as lie detectors used in courts today. The potential for abuse, even tyranny, is real and scary. People defer to fancy technology, and fMRI is very alluring.

I must say that I'm appalled at the sensationalization of scientific research today, and at the idiotic things that scientists ... are willing to say in public. These advances in fMRI are genuine technical advances, and they will probably prove quite valuable in future brain research. But the notion that they allow us to 'read minds' is nuts.

Besides, we can already read minds. We can converse, which has orders of magnitude more sensitivity and specificity than a 3 million dollar fMRI machine.

4. And from another friend:

What it appears that they did at a basic level does not extend to the fantastical notions of Dr. Kaku. He's projecting into the future, and we know how well that works. I have no problem with the possibility that they may eventually be able to reproduce visual imagery from brain scans. But there would need to be massive breakthoughs in the resolution of brain scanning equipment.

The visual cortex is actually reasonably well mapped. Unfortunately, I think most of the data comes from animal studies. By recording signals at the thalamus level in cats, researchers were able to basically reproduce some of the images from the nerve signals. This was done with implants and not through fMRI equipment.

Essentially, I think the researchers are employing ID notions of reverse engineering to try and decode the signals within the brain. Even if many of these signals are decoded, it says nothing about how these signals give rise to consciousness or to the mind. It also says nothing about how the mind can "re-wire" the brain as in neuroplasticity. Dr. Kaku's notion of using this to read minds in a perfect way that won't be subject to the same problems as a polygraph is ridiculous. If there is a way to confuse the "mind reading" equipment, people would figure it out. It's all pure speculation in that regard.

Well, I have no doubt that people would find a way to confuse any brain equipment, though cats may not.

I also think that the best way to understand a cat is by following the cat around. You can take the cat apart, but then you have a dead cat. You will learn some things that way. But you would be amazed at what you can learn by just following the cat around. Remember that the cat's world is about 6 cm from the ground ... so the first thing you want to do in understanding a cat is lie down on the floor for a while and notice how different the world looks. It's as world that few humans see much of and all cats see a lot of).

Another resource: A psychologist's view of the question.

Here's the YouTube:

Can ideas be reduced to purely material causes?

A friend wrote, wanting to know whether ideas could or could not be reduced to material causes.

I replied,

Ideas may have material correlates, but they are not in themselves material things.

Consider the placebo effect: A woman is enrolled in a clinical study of a drug that treats rheumatoid arthritis. She is informed that the medication she is about to receive will probably greatly reduce her pain, but could result in the side effect of nausea.

And the medication does indeed greatly reduce her pain, but unfortunately, she does have the side effect. She is offered another medication to treat the side effect, and it works too. So she is very sure that medication works.

One minor further piece of information: For the medication for rheumatoid arthritis, she was in the control group. The “medication” was sterile water. As it happens, the medication for the side effect was a demonstrated anti-nausea drug.

I made the example up, but this sort of thing happens every day in clinical research, and books have been written about it. It does not happen more often to designated “neurotic” people than to others.

The placebo effect simply demonstrates the power of ideas – which, by definition, are not material things – over people. Ideas have power because the minds that apprehend them are real. And the mind plays a role in instructing the brain and the body about what feelings to pay attention to, to focus on.

That is how the woman “knew” that her arthritis was better, but that she nonetheless felt nausea.

In The Spiritual Brain, we reported on a research study in which young men were persuaded not to feel painful jaw pressure because they had received an anaesthetic, but no anaesthetic drug was used in the study!

The researchers concluded that their study provides "strong refutation of the conjecture that placebo responses reflect nothing more than report bias."

It also demonstrates the importance of the mind in medicine.

One critical role that non-materialist neuroscience can play is in helping older people manage medications effectively. The fewer medications one really needs, the fewer the problems from conflict between the effects of medications (resulting in still more medications!).

If mental states - our ideas about what is happening, basically - play a role in the effectiveness of medications, doctors and patients need to access and use that information.

It would be unfortunate if ideology or commercial concerns interfered with serious study of this area because longevity is increasing worldwide, so awareness of how mental states affect health is important.

Selected moments from the Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium - morning

"Mind-Body Connections: How Does Consciousness Shape the Brain?", the morning panel of the Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium (September 11, 2008), sponsored by the Nour Foundation, UN-DESA, and the Université de Montréal, featured some interesting exchanges featuring a number of non-materialist neuroscientists. Non-materialist neuroscientists think that your mind is real and that it helps shape your brain. It is not a mere illusion created by the workings of the brain.

(Both panels were televised and can be viewed here.)

Non-materialist neuroscience is practical!

French philosopher Elie During led off the first panel (Mario Beauregard, Esther Sternberg, Henry Stapp, and Jeffrey Schwartz, in order of speaking) by noting that the French mathematician Descartes - who believed that the mind was real - was, in a sense, the unlikely father of materialism because he tried to separate the mind entirely from the body:

Once the body and the brain were reduced to their sheer mechanical functioning and the mind was considered as substantially distinct from matter, the way was open for materialism: one only needed to drop the second part of the scheme—namely, the spiritual substance—and explain everything along mechanistic lines.

He also noted that quite a few of the panelists are medical doctors, and that doctors tend to be practical minded:

Here we have physicians who were led to psychoneurology by an intensive clinical or therapeutic practice. I believe this outlook makes a real difference. It means these people share a very concrete perspective. Their take on mind-body connections cannot be separated from the way they interact with patients who generally have their own views on the issue.

The focus of most non-materialist research is not armchair theorizing but treatments that work.

The question they are asking is not so much: “What is the nature of consciousness?” but rather, “What does consciousness do?” And such a query implies more than how consciousness operates. It echoes a deeper concern: “What can consciousness do for us?” In other words, can it improve our lives? Our selves? This pragmatic bent, I believe, is also palpable in Ostad Elahi’s description of the ethical underpinnings of spiritual life, so the pragmatic stance may well be one of the major threads of today’s event.

Of course non-materialist neuroscience needs theoretical underpinnings. But as pragmatists, the non-materialists tend to think that the theory emerges from the evidence. So the place to begin is gathering evidence.

The panel and audience then watched a clip from a documentary in which Leonard diCaprio shares with panelist Jefffrey Schwartz how he interacted with OCD patients to develop a proper acting method for his film The Aviator, on the life of Howard Hughes.

Here's a clip from The Aviator :




And here's DiCaprio talking about his portrayal of Hughes, who had the disorder (which Schwartz treats successfully with mindfulness techniques).




The panelists:

Mind-body panel 1: Mario Beauregard - A Tale of Two Cultures ...

Mind-body panel 1: Esther Sternberg - "Esther, you're going to ruin your career by doing this."

Mind-body panel 1: Henry Stapp - Quantum theory makes us agents

Mind-body panel 1: Jeffrey Schwartz on how Leo DiCaprio gave himself obsessive-compulsive disorder and then cured it

Next: Mind-body panel 1: Mario Beauregard - A Tale of Two Cultures ...

Mind-body panel 1: Mario Beauregard - A Tale of Two Cultures ...

Mario Beauregard, an Associate Researcher at the University of Montreal in the Departments of Psychology and Radiology, as well as the Neuroscience Research Center, spoke on both the morning and afternoon panels of the Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium. In this morning session, he talked about how non-materialist neuroscientists (= the mind is real) interact with materialist ones (= the mind is an illusion).

Elie During [moderator]: He is of course an expert in the field of neuroscience and especially in issues regarding the spiritual side of the brain, if one may say so. I am referring to the book he co-authored, The Spiritual Brain, which is really a wonderful synthesis of almost all the questions that arise today in the field of the neuroscience of consciousness, and beyond. So my first question for you is the following: I’d like you to tell us a little bit more about the way your research, and more generally the kind of research you document in your book, is perceived by your colleagues. Is it easy to raise the kind of questions you’re concerned with? Do you perceive a form of embarrassment in the scientific community? And if so, how would you explain it?

Mario Beauregard: Thank you. Well, I would say that it depends where you are presenting your research, and also on the specific cultures associated with the various academic institutions.

I'll give you an example. In Montreal, we have two different cultures, an Anglophone culture and a Francophone culture. I am a French-Canadian and I’m at the University of Montreal, which is the second largest French university in the world after Paris. We have a very famous institution in Montreal, McGill University. It's called the “Harvard of the North,” as you know.

A few years ago when I decided to do a project with the Carmelite nuns, funded by the Templeton Foundation, two of the studies were supposed to be conducted at the University of Montreal, and a third was supposed to be conducted at McGill University, at the famous Montreal Neurological Institute founded by Penfield in the late 20s. This project was supposed to involve PET scanning to examine what's going on with regard to a chemical messenger in the brain called serotonin that is related to all sorts of functions, including mood regulation as well as various spiritual and mystical states. We asked for permission to use their PET SCAN to conduct this project over there and we were flatly rejected, whereas at the University of Montreal the other two projects were welcomed because the researchers there thought the projects were pioneering, innovative, new, and exciting, and that such questions were considered to be worthy of scientific investigation.

I was told later that at McGill University, neuroscience and spirituality/religion should not have anything to do with each other. And one of the members of the committee was a famous neuroscientist over there—I’m not going to mention her name, but she is known all over the world and she's even studied with Penfield in the 60s; some of you may know her. She said that as long as I'm here, as long as I am on the PET-working committee, there is never going to be any study about neuroscience and religion/spirituality. So that illustrates the differences in views regarding this question. It depends on where you are, but in general it’s very polarized.

For a minority of my colleagues, they think that his new kind of research is important, which tackles the mind-body problem and at the same time reveals all the shortcomings and limitations of the materialist view. I would say this is true for the minority of my colleagues who dare to say this publicly.

But in reality, many more colleagues have sent me e-mails or have had secret discussions with me saying that it's time for a major paradigm shift in neuroscience, but since we're only a minority of maverick scientists at this point, it's not possible yet to reverse the old paradigm, even though a lot of young neuroscientists are very encouraged to look in this direction. But they're still afraid of having trouble securing research funding and encountering opposition from universities. The field is still controlled by the old guard, and the old guard still believes in the old doctrine that the mind is what the brain does and that you can reduce all spiritual and mystical experiences to simply electrical or chemical processes in the brain. So there's a battle. It's like a cultural war, if you will. But we are making progress slowly. I'm sure that in 10 or 20 years from now, things will change dramatically, especially if we can receive important funding to do these types of studies. Interestingly, more and more private foundations are open to these questions in Europe as well as in the United States.

Elie During: Well, I guess in 10 years, you can eventually publish these secret emails and make a book out of it!

Beauregard later said: To come back to the question of how consciousness can influence brain events, I would like simply to note that during the last decade, there’s been a series of brain imaging, functional neuroimaging studies that have been done by Jeffrey [Schwartz], in my own lab, and in many other labs as well showing clearly that intention can modulate brain activity in the brain regions and neural circuits involved in the processing of emotion; this has also been shown with respect to the placebo effect. In the placebo effect, neuroimaging studies have shown that beliefs and expectations about various types of treatments can significantly influence the way the brain is functioning. In other words, mental factors like beliefs, desires, emotions, and feelings can exert a very important influence on how the brain is functioning electrically and chemically. This is something that is very important to remember and that can be used in everyday life.

The line of inquiry to use is to demonstrate that perhaps mind and consciousness are non-local, to use terminology similar to that in quantum physics. In other words, it’s possible to demonstrate that mind and consciousness can exert non-local effects between humans at certain distances, or between humans and animals, or even electronic machines. That’s the goal of “psi” research, or so-called parapsychology. These types of studies have been done now for several decades, though they’re still taboo among mainstream science. Yet, if you consider all the data that has been accumulated in this field of research, it seems clear that mind and consciousness cannot be associated solely with the brain and the body, for they seem to be able to exert an action, a non-local action. So that’s one line of investigation that would be useful.

Next: Mind-body panel 1: Esther Sternberg - "Esther, you're going to ruin your career by doing this."

The difference between the mind and the brain ... in under one minute

Explained by Dr. Jeff Schwartz, pictured here.

The easiest way to understand the difference between the mind and the brain is - the brain is a piece of biological matter ( protoplasm) in your skull. That's the brain. It's a thing; you can hold it in your hand. The mind is your experiences, and especially for scientific purposes your attention and attention focusing capacity so they aspect and the way in which you focus attention on your experiences.

and put to music by Marcia Bauman! Here’s the song, "Blowin' in the mind"

Hat tip Stephanie West Allen at Idealawg.

Photo © Laszlo Bencze

Reviewer thinks The Spiritual Brain should have been longer?

Quite a favourable review of The Spiritual Brain by Derrick Hassert, associate professor of Psychology at Trinity Christian College (University of Southern Illinois), appeared in Christian Scholar’s Review ((Volume XXXVII, Number 4 Summer 2008)). It ends with:

Overall, one is left with the feeling that, given more time, each section of the text could have been developed into a stand-alone volume. While this may be one of the book's weaknesses, it may also be one of its strengths, for in one unintimidating volume, the reader is exposed to current and past neuroscientific attempts to explain religious phenomena, empirical and philosophical problems with an eliminativist approach to the psychology and philosophy of mind, and cutting-edge research examining the neurological correlates of religious experience. It is recommended to general readers as well as those with an interest in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind.

This sounds like a somewhat academic way of saying, "If you read this book, there are books out there that you needn't bother with."

By the way, Dr. Hassert notes, "Each section of the text could have been developed into a stand-alone volume."

Sure it could, but I don't think our publisher thought the market was quite ready for a ten-volume set? Maybe in a couple of years ....

Mind: Current science less and less precise as it approaches the mind?

Mathematician David Berlinski's essay, "On the Origins of the Mind" (Commentary, 2004) is the best I have ever read on that vexed subject. But it is the sort of essay one may need to read twice, to get the point.

That is not Berlinski's fault - he is an exceptionally lucid writer. The problem is that we are so accustomed to hearing sludge - sludge that attempts to efface the difficulties of a materialist understanding of the mind - that we may need some time for the nature of the difficulties to present themselves clearly.

He offers an excellent example: Current science becomes less and less precise as it approaches the mind (when not trying to explain it away). For example, in trying to understand how the mind works, we have

(1) Quantum chemistry: “For a molecule, it is reasonable to split the kinetic energy into two summations—one over the electrons, and one over the nuclei.”

(2) Biochemistry: “Initiation of prokaryotic translation requires a tRNA bearing N-formyl methionne, as well as three initiation factors (IF1,2,3), a 30S ribosomal subunit GTP,” etc.

(3) Molecular biology: “Once the protein binds one site, it reaches the other by crawling along the DNA, thus preserving its knowledge of the orientation of the first site” (emphasis added).

(4) Embryology: “In the embryo, cells divide, migrate, die, stick to each other, send out processes, and form synapses” (emphasis added).

(5) and (6) Developmental genetics: “But genes are simply regulatory elements, molecules that arrange their surrounding environments into an organism” (emphasis added). “Genes prescribe epigenetic rules, which are the neural pathways and regularities in cognitive development by which the individual mind assembles itself ” (emphasis added).

(7) Developmental biology: “The pattern of neural connections (synapses) enables the human cortex to function as the center for learning, reasoning, and memory, to develop the capacity for symbolic expression, and to produce voluntary responses to interpreted stimuli” (emphasis added).

(8) and (9) Evolutionary psychology: “Genes, of course, do influence human development” (emphasis added).

“[Genes] created us, body and mind” (emphasis added).

Note how we go from a simple mathematical statement in (1) to morea nd more activities that sound like the things humans do, not like the things natural forces do. By (8) we are into vague handwaving and finally we have a statement of religious belief in materialist atheism in (9).

Understanding the mind requires taking it seriously as a real entity. It can be studied, certainly, but not simply as a product of material things.

Podcasts: Mind vs brain, plus exclusive interview with parts of your brain

Dr. Jeff Schwartz, lead author of The Mind and the Brain explains the difference between the two here in less than one minute.

Whew! Thought I was trying to unload an 800-page book on you, eh? Nah. Also, in t his video of the neuroscience of conflict resolutin, he plays various parts of the brain (amygdala, Mr. Myg, and the frontal cortex), interviewed by "Radio NEURO."

As in

Radio NEURO: Mr. Myg, what do you do all day?

MYG: I watch for people who look threatening ...

Hilarious, have a listen!

Animal minds: Monkeys understand money?

Well, no, they don't. And then again, who does?

Why is so much of our communal life governed by an entirely abstract concept? And if that does not help us see that the human mind is immaterial, what does?

Well, some do try to find other explanations.

In a "Cultural Animal "post coauthored with Kathleen D. Vohs, "The Evolution of Economic Rationality: Do Monkeys Understand Money?" Roy F. Baumeister reports at Psychology Today (July 15, 2008) that

Keith Chen and Marc Hauser at Yale University taught monkeys about resources that bear a strong resemblance to money. Monkeys don't care about money, per se, but they do care about marshmallows. (This already is a difference of gigantic proportions in that monkeys must learn about resource-exchange using something that is already a primary reinforcer - food - whereas humans can extend the range of their motivations to secondary reinforcers.)

That should have ended the experiment, if the object was to understand an abstraction as pervasive as the power of money, but ...

A resource (marshmallows) exchange task was introduced whereby pressing a lever would give another monkey a marshmallow; hence this was a task that involved a bit of altruism. Not only were monkeys taught about the game. Two specific monkeys were conditioned (entrained), such that one always pulled the lever for his monkey partner (thus being a very generous partner) and the other never pulled the lever for his partner (stingy). Then they let these conditioned monkeys play the game with other monkeys. Monkeys that played with the highly generous monkey figured it out and quickly took advantage of him. Monkeys that played with the stingy monkey also figured it out quickly and subsequently shunned or were aggressive toward him.

Thus, monkeys can at least understand and respond effectively to the difference between a generous provider and a tightwad. Still, the fact that these differences had to be done with marshmallows instead of a more abstract representation of value (which is what money is) suggests a limited capacity to use or understand money.

Apparently yrying to promote monkey intelligence over human intelligence, Baumeister proclaims,

If you and someone else worked equally to earn $100, and that person has the power to divide it and chooses to offer you only one dollar while keeping $99 for himself, well, you are still better off with one dollar than with nothing. Hence economic rationalists find it slightly scandalous that people ever refuse any offer. Economists think that if people were true to financial logic, they would act more like monkeys.

Well, only if they had nothing better to do, right? The rest of it gets slightly more interesting:

But a fully developed sense of fairness means that you are uncomfortable with being overbenefited as well. That is, it bothers you to get more than your fair share. Here is where humans seem to part company with other creatures.

Now herre Baumeister seems to connect with reality. Surely we have all suffered through overly lavish compliments, overly generous rewards? ... what's going on? (I did my job. Can't I just please go home now?) However,

What happens when monkeys overbenefit from an exchange - do they experience guilt, embarrassment, shame, or try to rectify the situation? Apparently not.

Well, monkeys wouldn't see the problem, would they?

In The Spiritual Brain, Mario and I spent some time on the problem of people tryingto understand human psychology from ape or monkey psychology. Basically, it doesn't work. Having a human mind, however you want to interpret it, really does make all the difference.

A number of interesting issues are raised in the Comments.

How not to study science ...

From an interesting blog called Standing on my Head, operated by Father Dwight Longnecker:

Some time ago I read a book by a guy who says he lost his Catholic faith when he began to study science and discovered that there was no evidence for the existence of angels. Duuh. Angels are non materialistic beings. Trying to devise a trap for an angel is like trying to make a potted fern receive radio waves.

Of course, if that guy had studied psychology, he would have lost his faith when he discovered that the human mind can only be understood as a non-material entity.

Actually, it is possible to devise a trap, so to speak, for the mind, because we can watch it at work, modifying the brain. Mario and I talk about that in Chapter 6 of The Spiritual Brain.

Now, I wonder, could a trap be devised for an angel? If we go by accounts in the Bible, angels can be very dangerous, so I do not advise it except as a thought experiment.

Note: I think this crowd scene includes some angels. I hope the picture is public domain.