Mario Beauregard on "The Neuroscience of Spirituality"

Here's the link to Mario Beauregard's presentation at the American Scientific Affiliation's conference this summer at Baylor University in Texas, including both audio and slides.

The slides explain the non-materialist perspective to date visually quite well.

Neuroscience: Focus of attention and phenomenal achievement

Reviewing Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, David Brooks says,

Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention. We know from experiments with subjects as diverse as obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers and Buddhist monks that people who can self-consciously focus attention have the power to rewire their brains.

Brooks is clearly referring to the work of non-materialist neuroscientists such as Jeffrey Schwartz, author of The Mind and the Brain. He adds,

Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. This individual power leads to others. It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses. If forced to choose, we would all rather our children be poor with self-control than rich without it.

That said, Gladwell’s overall thesis is - on the face of it - astonishing in what it misses, assuming that Brooks has got it right. Apparently, he told Jason Zengerle of New York magazine:

The book’s saying, ‘Great people aren’t so great. Their own greatness is not the salient fact about them. It’s the kind of fortunate mix of opportunities they’ve been given.’

Oh? What fortunate mix of opportunities was Mother Theresa given? She was a nobody from Albania, a nun stuck in a convent in Calcutta in the aftermath of World War II, while India struggled through independence.

Mother Theresa was removed as principal of a girls’ school because she was suspected of an improper relationship with her Father Confessor.

She was in fact seeking his confidential guidance regarding certain visions she had experienced - visions in which she was asked to start a missionary movement to help the poorest of the poor … but it seemed so unlikely to her that she could do so.

Surely, the very best person to start a worldwide movement to aid the destitute was a disgraced nun, banished to the boonies …

And yet, … and yet …

What's missing in the conflict between Brooks and Gladwell is an awareness of the critical importance of vision. Real, original achievement always requires vision, which is not best described as a “fortunate mix of opportunities.” Lots of people who had a fortunate mix of opportunities have no vision and lots of people who have vision do not have a fortunate mix of opportunities. The remarkable thing is how often the latter outstrip the former.

Consciousness: A physicist on the recent New Scientist flap re non-materialist neuroscience

British physicist David Tyler blogs on the recent flap created by a smear job against non-materialist neuroscientists in New Scientist (non-materialists think that your mind is not merrely an illusion of your brain):

The prevailing paradigm in neuroscience is materialism. Everything about the brain is interpreted in terms of physics and chemistry: our sense of free agency, our consciousness, our hopes and our ability to appreciate beauty. Yet this paradigm has only limited results to show for all the effort expended and "scientists have yet to crack the great mystery of how consciousness could emerge from firing neurons". The UN conference set out an agenda for going beyond reductionism. Jeffrey Schwartz warned the delegates that what they were doing would be met with heated opposition, because materialism is deemed by many to be of the essence of science:

"YOU cannot overestimate, how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about. . . how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it. . . I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."

Sure enough, the event has raised alarm! The New Scientist reported it with the headline: "Creationists declare war over the brain". It has become commonplace for the science media to portray every departure from philosophical naturalism as "creationism" as though that were the ultimate crime for a scientists and no more needs be said. There is evidence that some of the conference speakers have links with the ID Movement, and apparently that is enough to shower derision on them. Since scientists are supposed to be able to grapple with complex issues and think rationally and objectively (rather than emotionally), I do not understand why there is so little outcry against the intolerant attitudes of so many science journalists and writers.

I do understand why there is so little outcry. Believing that materialism is "the truth," many journalists assume that their role is to promote materialism, even at the expense of evidence. Non-materialist views are okay for fooling people into helping the poor, paying their taxes, or avoiding crime, but they are not a source of true information, in their view, jsut sentimental bluff.

So now that non-materialist approaches are gaining a foothold in neuroscience - based on evidence and practical considerations - the New Scientist writer was forced to see the development as "creationism" - oh yes, and also as the work of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.

In reality, the institutional sponsors" of the mind-body conference at the UN on which she was reporting are unrelated to the Discovery Institute and are unlikely enthusiasts for its overall views. Their concern is medicine in the 21st century, and the failure of materialist explanations to provide useful answers in a vast range of situations.

But that just isn't something that a New Scientist writer would see.

Changing the magazine's masthead name to "Fast Backward to the Twentieth Century" might make sense at this point.

Tyler muses further,

No interviews with the scientists that were at the symposium are reported. This was noted by Angus Menuge in a letter (unpublished) to New Scientist: "I find it very troubling, that while Amanda Gefter took the trouble of interviewing sources who advocate scientific materialism, she did not interview any critics of that position, instead relying on third-hand reports. This does not seem to reflect journalistic best practice."

No, it doesn't reflect journalistic best practice, but it does reflect the practice of people who think that their readers do not really want to be told what happened at the conference and why, but do want to be told a story that makes them feel comfortable. (links to conference coverage below)

For example, what about Esther Sternberg, Christina Puchalski, Bruce Greyson, Sam Parnia, and Andrew Newberg, who had lots of useful things to say at the conference?

I guess if you "connect the dots" to include them, you don't find a conspiracy that involves creationism or the Discovery Institute. And that is the principal difficulty with connect-the-dots thinking.

See also:

New Scientist publishes non-materialist neuroscientist's letter

Selected moments from "Beyond the Mind-Body Problem Symposium - morning panel

Selected moments from "Beyond the Mind-Body Problem Symposium - afternoon panel

My response to the New Scientist bid to be the National Enquirer of pop science mags. (But, why?)

New Scientist - a philosophy prof responds

Vast conspiracy files: Connecting the dots to include non-materialist neuroscience

Over at Neurologica blog, Steve Novella speculates about non-materialist neuroscience, about which he seems to have learned from New Scientist and the Discovery Institute's News and Views blog.

My favourite lines:

I also think the New Scientist is correct in pointing out that the ID movement may be shifting their emphasis to neuroscience. I think it is fair to say that the ID attack on evolution has been largely a failure. They failed in Dover (where a conservative judge ruled that ID was warmed-over creationism and could not be taught in public school science classes), and the movie Expelled turned out to be a huge boondoggle. They are getting some traction with their “academic freedom” deception, but not much, and I think that effort will ultimately fail as well.

A man capable of thinking that a bid for academic freedom is a "deception" in a society where academic freedom is widely* under attack is himself the best argument for Ben Stein's academic freedom drive.

*widely under attack: On its membership page, the National Association of Scholars offers

Is It dangerous to join?

It can be. We recognize that graduate students and untenured faculty members run a risk if they join an organization that is famous for challenging campus orthodoxies. So we won't tell your colleagues -- or your dean, and we’ll mail Academic Questions to your home if you wish.

Is joining NAS worth the risk? That’s a decision you must make for yourself -- and something you should consider the next time you bite your tongue in a department meeting for fear of the consequences of expressing what you really think.

They add

today, the pressure on faculty members to conform to ascendant political ideologies is at an all-time high and encompasses college life from freshman orientation to the selection of commencement speakers.

If this type of experience sounds familiar, NAS may be the organization for you. We offer the chance to meet and work with other scholars who have had similar experiences and who have found ways to resist the petty -- and sometimes not so petty -- tyranny of the PC campus. We are not of one mold. Our members include mainstream liberals and conservatives, secularists and the religiously committed, senior scholars and graduate students, women and men, citizens and international visitors --united by a concern that the tradition of academic freedom in the United States is imperiled by the abuses of some and the complacency of many.

Sounds like a good organization.

Non-materialist neuroscience: Jeffrey Schwartz on business leadership

If you can get past the awful title, "neuroleadership" - as if that's something different from plain old leadership - non-materialist neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz offers "How NeuroLeadership Can Impact Business and Talent Management" here (November 3, 2008.)

All I have ever known about leadership is this: We can lead people to where we live, but not to where we don't live.

Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, "What do you want?"

They said, "Rabbi" (which means Teacher), "where are you staying?"

"Come," he replied, "and you will see."

They went, and yes, they saw amazing things. But that is because Jesus really lived there and showed them what he really knew.

All real leadership begins with the recognition of reality and helping people adjust to it.

Multidirectional skepticism? - skepticism finding its true voice?

In the fallout from New Scientist's ridiculous hit piece against the non-materialist neuroscientists, I made some interesting new acquaintances, including the folk at Skeptiko. From what I can tell, they are multi-directional skeptics - that includes skepticism of the "skeptical" pose when it is merely a defense against a counter-opinion reality.

Unfortunately, for decades now, materialists have advanced their agenda claiming to be"skeptics", when in reality, "any old nonsense" will do as long as it advances a materialist agenda.

The "God meme" as a unit of thought? Swell. Temporal lobe epilepsy as the explanation for the world's great religions? Yeah. Bring it on.

Public funding morphs materialist nonsense from an eccentricity to a scandal!

Here's a list of Skeptiko programs you can choose from, including some with transcripts:

57. The Psychic Detective Challenge

56. Dr. Jon Klimo on Channeling and Consciousness
55. Carol Tavris on Mistakes and Skeptics
54. Skeptic Ben Radford, Police & Psychic Detectives
53. Noreen Renier, Psychic Detectives and Skeptics
52. Skeptic Lynne Kelly on Cold Reading Techniques
51. Dr. Julie Beischel Responds to Critics of Psychic Medium Research
50. Skeptical Inquirer Editor, Ben Radford
49. Craig Hogan, Your Mind Is Not Your Brain
48. Jonathan Balcombe on Animal Rights

Do I know if it's all valid? No.

Do I know that something other than materialism is true? Yes, of course.

What I always say is, if it sounds unbelievable, don't believe it, and when in doubt, doubt. This is a time for exploration, not dogma. We are lucky to live in such a time. Enjoy.

You could have been born in a time when the "truth" shovelled out to you by "The Wise" crushed your soul to bits, but there was no alternative!

Is THIS your best shot? A response to New Scientist's recent hit piece on non-materialist neuroscientists

A few days ago, a friend alerted me to an interesting development: In its Perspectives section, New Scientist - the National Enquirer of popular science magazines - had published a hit piece on the non-materialist neuroscientists, including Mario Beauregard, my lead author on The Spiritual Brain. ("Creationists declare war over the brain" Amanda Gefter, 22 October 2008)

Non-materialists, essentially, think that your mind really exists; it is not simply an illusion created by the buzz of neurons in your brain. In fact, your mind is one of the key factors that shape your brain. On the medical side, non-materialist neuroscientists use this fact to alleviate illnesses such as obsessive compulsive disorder and phobias. They have good evidence for their case, and that is addressed here in an introduction to a recent symposium at the UN in New York. This post, however, will focus on the hit piece.

For me, the New Scientist piece was a gift. I sometimes teach non-fiction news writing. And it struck me as an excellent teaching opportunity ("the structure and function of the irresponsible hit piece, unpacked"). Of course, I mean to discourage my students from investing time or energy in such enterprises.

This piece is especially useful for two reasons: As Beauregard's co-author, I happen to know about non-materialist neuroscience already. So I need no research project to uncover the misrepresentations. Second, this piece is a very conventional example of the "hit" genre. That means I don't need to keep stopping and saying, "But, students, please note that this particular feature is rare."

Best of all, if I unpack this story now for interested Mindful Hack readers, I can save time in June (my busiest month) by just dusting it off for Write! Canada. So, let's have a look.

Sections

1 Scare their pants off before they even start reading: The art of the panic headline

2 Reveal that a popular villain is behind it all (cue "evil" music)

3 Haul out the goblins that scared them before

4 Context reduces fear. So get rid of context

5 Finally, an idea! Wow, a real idea! But wait ...

6 Scare their pants back on again and send them out to raise hell about stuff they know nothing about

Next: 1 Scare their pants off before they even start reading: The art of the panic headline

1 Scare their pants off before they even start reading: The art of the panic headline

First, note the headline of Gefter's hit piece: Creationists declare war over the brain

The headline was chosen for its inflammatory value, not its information value. So far as I know, only one of the people mentioned in the piece (Angus Menuge) is a creationist, and the fact that he is one is irrelevant to the story.

[Update 2008 11 01: Angus Menuge has written to say that he is NOT a creationist*.]

Creationism attempts to square the accounts of the creation of the Earth and life found in scriptures and traditions with accounts based in current science. However, typical creationist concerns like the age of the Earth and the origin of life are not a focus of neuroscience. Nothing much would follow for neuroscience from the triumph of one hypothesis over another in these areas because neuroscience studies the human brain in real time in the present day. Nothing discovered about the past can override observations in the present.

The words "creationists" and "declare war" do serve a purpose, but the purpose is not to provide information. The purpose is to scare New Scientist readers and discourage careful thought among them.

The piece opens with a quotation by neuropsychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, author of The Mind and the Brain at a recent panel discussion:

YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality.

It's an effective opening because, to the New Scientist fan - usually a loyal foot soldier for materialism, Schwartz's words must sound like frightening heresy. Readers will be eager to read down to the part where someone reassures them that it's all lies and Schwartz is a suspicious or despicable figure.

Reality check: I can’t begin to keep up with all the news stories whose basic message is that the materialist paradigm is breaking down. Mario Beauregard and I devoted a good part of The Spiritual Brain to examining just a few of these areas (before moving on to a discussion of more viable approaches).

To cite two examples: It has become increasingly obvious that computers cannot think like people, and ramping up their computing speed is not really going to help. Second, chimpanzees do not think like people either, despite many efforts to demonstrate that they do. Thus, the puzzle of human consciousness is still called "the hard problem of consciousness."

Remarkably, the "hard" problem of human consciousness is not just another example of researchers angling for more grant money by inflating the importance of the question they are studying. In fact, in this case, the researchers are considerably underestimating the problem. If granting agencies knew how difficult the consciousness problem is, they might choose to allocate the money elsewhere.

Moving right along, we read,

Earlier Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, Canada, and co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, told the audience that the "battle" between "maverick" scientists like himself and those who "believe the mind is what the brain does" is a "cultural war".

Oh yes? Well, he did use the chopped series of words quoted here, but the original statement sounds very different.

For now, the New Scientist piece itself handily demonstrates Beauregard's point. Not that typical readers would be likely to notice. They will be offended by the very suggestion of a cultural war. A "war" would imply that there are two sides to the question, an assumption they will not wish to grant.

In any event, readers will assume - because they are not told otherwise - that Beauregard is himself an eager combatant. A modest amount of research would turn up a very different story. Non-materialist neuroscientists prefer to work in peace but are sometimes harassed by senior colleagues who view them and their findings as a threat. For example, regarding Beauregard's own work, as we relate in The Spiritual Brain,

... , with the grant received from the Metanexus Institute and John Templeton Foundation, we were expected to conduct a third study, a PET (positron emission tomography) study, on the nuns, in this case at the Brain Imaging Center of the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI, the famous institute created by Wilder Penfi eld in the 1920s). The goal of the study was to measure serotonin (5-HT) synthesis capacity during the same conditions (baseline, control condition, mystical condition). The project was blocked by the PET Working Committee. We were given to understand that some committee members reacted violently to our submission. They thought that mystical states could not be studied scientifically (and they probably did not want the MNI to be associated with what they consider pseudoscience). We ended up using the money for another project in which we examine brain activity (with fMRI and QEEG) in NDErs who have been spiritually transformed by their NDEs. (p. 339, n. 32)

But that's nothing compared to the uproar that broke out when the Dalai Lama was scheduled to give the opening lecture at a 2005 neuroscience convention. Comments like this,

Neuroscience more than other disciplines is the science at the interface between modern philosophy and science. No opportunity should be given to anybody to use neuroscience for supporting transcendent views of the world. — Neuroscientist Zvani Rossetti, opposing the Dalai Lama’s lecture (p. 255)

were often heard. So yes, that was a cultural war, and no, the Dalai Lama did not start it. He remained gracious throughout.

So our writer has now convinced our New Scientist readers that "creationists" have started a "war" over the brain. At this point, she needs to convince them that the evil plot is headed up by intelligent design think tank [cue evil music] the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.

*[Re Angus Menuge and creationism: I had been relying on a generally reliable source for the information about his view, a source I will not use again. Here is Menuge's own comment: "Angus Menuge is a Christian apologist and a defender of Intelligent Design, and is a creationist in the sense that he believes God created the universe, but he has not sought to defend a specific reading of Genesis." So, to the best of my knowledge, no one whom hit piece author Amanda Gefter identifies as a creationist is in fact one.) ]

Next: 2 Reveal that a popular villain is behind it all (cue "evil" music)

2 Reveal that a popular villain is behind it all (cue "evil" music)

At this point, Gefter, Philadelphia-based opinion editor at New Scientist, devotes a fair amount of space to the Seattle-based intelligent design think tank, Discovery Institute - an ever popular villain among her readers. They would believe anything of Discovery Institute (DI). So Gefter implies that DI is a key force behind non-materialist neuroscience:

In August, the Discovery Institute ran its 2008 Insider's Briefing on Intelligent Design*, at which Schwartz and Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University in New York, were invited to speak. When two of the five main speakers at an ID meeting are neuroscientists, something is up. Could the next battleground in the ID movement's war on science be the brain?

Conspiracy thinking is a weak substitute for information. Discovery Institute is sympathetic to non-materialist neuroscience** (no surprise there), but it is not in any sense a key player. Non-materialist neuroscience probably owes much more to the Templeton Foundation, about whose science efforts Gefter is quite ambivalent, to say nothing of the Nour Foundation, which co-sponsored the recent symposium. But that would not fit the picture she is trying to paint.

Incidentally, will Templeton sour on non-materialist neuroscience, if Discovery gets more involved? Templeton and Discovery are not on friendly terms. Maybe, but Templeton may refuse to cede a fruitful area to a hated upstart. You don't get to be big that way, and Templeton is big.

*Note 1: A blind link was removed from the original at this point.

**Note 2: For the record, I spoke at Discovery's 2007 "Insider's Briefing," introducing The Spiritual Brain, which was released in hard cover that month by Harper One. That was where I first learned about Ben Stein's Expelled movie, and pelted back to my hotel room to blog about it - which is why that post originated in Seattle, not Toronto. Does Expelled - in which Jeffrey Schwartz makes a cameo appearance - mean that Stein and the Discovery Institute also intend to declare war on Hollywood? Hey, connect the dots, and ... celebs, shed those three-inch heels and run for the exits!!

Next: 3 Haul out the goblins that scared them before

3 Haul out the goblins that scared them before

One thing to know about the New Scientist's readership, or The National Enquirer's, for that matter: On some topics they actually do not particularly want correct information.

Just as National Enquirer readers do not gladly hear that a movie star is not getting a rumoured divorce, New Scientist readers do not want to know why many doctors and psychologists find non-materialist neuroscience promising rather than threatening. So they probably won't seek corrrect information or thank anyone for providing them with it.

So the Gefter piece obligingly illustrates another key strategy in the "hit piece" technique - misleading definitions.

1. We are told that Schwartz and Beauregard are "attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism."

There are a number of models of dualism, and Beauregard and Schwartz think that interactive dualism is the best model, not Cartesian dualism. But knowing that might leave readers with questions or possible subjects to follow up on privately, in which case they might discover a whole new world out there that they don't want to know about and New Scientist never intended them to know about.

Anyway, while we are here, "dualism" is typically used by materialists as a term of abuse. That helps prevent people from seeing what should be obvious: The only alternative to dualism is monism - in other words, everything is material. That means that your consciousness - and any ideas you have as a result - are merely an illusion created by random firings of neurons.

So if you think that your consciousness and your ideas are in some sense real, that they do bring you into contact with reality, you are a dualist already! You think that non-material entities such as your ideas can actually exist. We can sort out what kind of dualist you are later. If, by contrast, you think that everything you have ever thought or ever will think is an illusion, arguing the case with you would be a waste of time.

Making "dualism"into a term of abuse is one way that hard core materialists keep a hold on their loyal and/or frightened followers. So, if the term scares you, think.

2. "ID [intelligent design] argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution."

Here, Gefter repeats a legacy media fidget - a false definition of intelligent design theory. For the record, intelligent design theorists like Michael Behe and William Dembski argue that the intricate machinery we find in cells requires design as well as chance and the repetitive laws of nature. That has nothing to do with whether evolution occurs, though it strongly implies that evolution is not random and purposeless.

However, I will not belabor that point here because - strictly speaking - it is not relevant to non-materialist neuroscience. If evolution had been random and meaningless, but had nonetheless produced minds that can act on brains, non-materialist neuroscience would be just the same today. As with her use of the term "creationists", Gefter is using the term "ID" to frighten her readers into refusing to consider non-materialist neuroscience in a reasonable way.

3. Henry Stapp's interpretation of quantum physics is "non-standard."

Stapp uses the von Neumann interpretation, which is a standard one:

In the interpretation of quantum physics created by physicist John Von Neumann (1903–1957), a particle only probably exists in one position or another; these probable positions are said to be "superposed" on each other. Measurement causes a "quantum collapse," meaning that the experimenter has chosen a position for the particle, thus ruling out the other positions. The Stapp and Schwartz model posits that this is analogous to the way in which attending to (measuring) a thought holds it in place, collapsing the probabilities on one position. This targeted attention strategy, which is used to treat obsessive-compulsive disorders, provides a model for how free will might work in a quantum system. The model assumes the existence of a mind that chooses the subject of attention, just as the quantum collapse assumes the existence of an experimenter who chooses the point of measurement. - The Spiritual Brain, p. 34.

Misleading statements and definitions can do a great deal to reassure readers that they need do no thinking outside the box. But these techniques cannot do everything. There is also the art of stripping context from people's words and then adding another, irrelevant context.

Next: 4 Context reduces fear. So get rid of context

4 Context reduces fear. So get rid of context

Usually, when you hear a person's words in context, you understand the person's concerns.

So the hit piece author, seeking to demonize her subject, may strip words from their context and assign a different context, creating a misleading picture.

Amanda Gefter's New Scientist hit piece on the non-materialist neuroscientists provides a number of good examples. Here's one - she quotes Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard as follows:

Earlier Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, Canada, and co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, told the audience that the "battle" between "maverick" scientists like himself and those who "believe the mind is what the brain does" is a "cultural war".

So Québecois Beauregard - of all people - is a U.S.-style right-wing culture warrior?

Now, reading that and knowing how wrong it is, I did something that few New Scientist faithful will likely do: I got and read the actual transcript of Beauregard's remarks. And here are his words in context, with the quoted words highlighted:

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.

So, it turns out that Beauregard is - as noted earlier - talking about the problems non-materialist neuroscientists have confided in him about and is not himself seeking a battle with anyone. Gefter needed to take his remarks out of context in order to portray him as a threat to her readers.

Here's another example:

Well, the movement certainly seems to hope that the study of consciousness will turn out to be "Darwinism's grave", as Denyse O'Leary, co-author with Beauregard of The Spiritual Brain, put it. According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one.

If you go to the page at The Mindful Hack where I wrote that consciousness might be Darwinism's "grave", you will find that I was responding to hard core materialist Nicholas Humphrey, who himself uses the term the "Achilles Heel." Now, an Achilles' heel is a spot where a fatal wound may be inflicted in an otherwise invulnerable person, and he asks whether consciousness is the Achilles Heel of Darwinism.

Do you see how this works? I did not originate the idea that consciousness might be a problem for Darwinism. Humphrey titled his own essay that way (though he believes the problem surmountable). I responded, suggesting that "grave" might be a better term, given the evidence. But Gefter's piece cleverly creates the impression the Discovery Institute or the "wedge document" had something to do with it - and that it is all part of a plot to "replace the scientific world view with a Christian one."

And if you got all your science news from New Scientist, you would never even wonder ...

Next: 5 Finally, an idea! Wow, a real idea! But wait ...

5 Finally, an idea! Wow, a real idea! But wait ...

Right in the middle of "Creationists declare war over the brain," New Scientist's gift to writing teachers (= "the structure and function of the irresponsible hit piece, unpacked") we suddenly segue away from the National Enquirer style. We encounter an actual argument against the non-materialist interpretation of neuroscience.

It was unclear to me at first why anyone would bury an actual argument in all this scare-the-pants-ology. But then, when I had a closer look at the argument, I sort of understood. Here it is:

To properly support dualism, however, non-materialist neuroscientists must show the mind is something other than just a material brain. To do so, they look to some of their favourite experiments, such as research by Schwartz in the 1990s* on people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use "mindful attention" to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.

From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology - the material brain is changing the material brain.

The problem is that Gefter's explanation does not explain anything. The brain is a semi-liquid organ, always in motion, so live brains do indeed change themselves all the time. However, when the mind changes the brain, it is a result of information received by the immaterial consciousness itself. Here is an example, from The Spiritual Brain, that dramatically illustrates the difference information received into one's consciousness can make:

University of Michigan researchers recently demonstrated the placebo effect in young, healthy men. They injected saltwater into their volunteers’ jaws and measured the impact of the resulting painful pressure via PET scans. Volunteers were told that they were receiving pain relief. They reported feeling better. The placebo treatment reduced the brain responses in a number of brain regions known to be implicated in the subjective experience of pain. No pain-relief drug was used in the study.

The researchers commented (2004): "These findings provide strong refutation of the conjecture that placebo responses reflect nothing more than report bias."47

47 Tor D. Wager, James K. Rilling, Edward E. Smith, Alex Sokolik, Kenneth L. Casey, Richard J. Davidson, Stephen M. Kosslyn, Robert M. Rose, Jonathan D. Cohen, “Placebo-Induced Changes in fMRI in the Anticipation and Experience of Pain,” Science 303, no. 5661 (February 20, 2004): 1162–67. They write: "In two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments, we found that placebo analgesia was related to decreased brain activity in pain-sensitive brain regions, including the thalamus, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex, and was associated with increased activity during anticipation of pain in the prefrontal cortex, providing evidence that placebos alter the experience of pain."

- The Spiritual Brain, p. 142

As the study authors observe, these findings certainly provide "strong refutation of the conjecture that placebo responses reflect nothing more than report bias." But they also demonstrate something else: the critical importance of what the mind believes is happening.

Essentially, volunteers did not feel pain when they were told they should not expect to, despite the fact that they were receiving no pain relief. Their brains apparently did not know that because their minds were not informing their brains correctly.

That cannot be accounted for by claiming that "the material brain is changing the material brain," in Gefter's phrase. The material brain isn't doing anything in this case except receiving input from the immaterial mind and acting on it - in this case receiving incorrect information and failing to produce sensations of pain that might otherwise be expected. And, as anyone who has suffered severe jaw pain will acknowledge, it's hardly something one can just fail to notice or choose to ignore.

I can now see why Gefter needs to offer her argument to her readers in a hit piece. Presented all by itself as an account of the interactions of the mind and the brain, it would not fare well.

Before we move on, let me offer a brief word about explanations in science in general. Any grand theory can "explain" a broad variety of phenomena. Some theories are presented as "theories of everything." For example, Freud, Marx, and Darwin (a familiar triad of theorists of everything) could each offer an "explanation" for the life and works of Mother Teresa or Gandhi. For example, Freud might say that Mother Teresa was sexually repressed, Marx might say that she was a useful idiot for capitalism, and Darwin might say that she was spreading her ideas instead of her genes by raising thousands of abandoned children as traditional Catholics.

In each case, the explanation supports the theory, but beyond that it doesn't lead anywhere. That is, if I wanted to know why Gordon "greed is good" Gecko is the way he is, one of these contradictory "theories of everything" might be useful at some point. But if my goal is to understand people who have transcended materialism and accomplished remarkable things as a result, materialist explanations are useless.

To sum up, a useful explanation in science must shed light, not merely come up with a story that supports the theory. Gefter's explanation of mind brain relations as mere brain-brain relations supports a materialist theory, but does not shed any light on the way the mind and the brain actually interact.

(*Note: When I tried this link, it did not lead to the article, only to The New York Times 's site.)

Next: 6 Scare their pants back on again and send them out to raise hell about stuff they know nothing about

6 Scare their pants back on again and send them out to raise hell about stuff they know nothing about

Once readers have settled into a "conspiracy" mode, as per Amanda Gefter's hit piece in New Scientist, they can swallow the most extraordinary displays of foolishness without curiosity.

Have a look at this comment from Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, UK on the non-materialist approach to neuroscience:

"This is an especially nasty mind-virus because it piggybacks on some otherwise reasonable thoughts and worries. Proponents make such potentially reasonable points as 'Oh look, we can change our brains just by changing our minds,' but then leap to the claim that mind must be distinct and not materially based. That doesn't follow at all. There's nothing odd about minds changing brains if mental states are brain states: that's just brains changing brains."

Amanda Gefter advises us that Prof Clark's view is "the voice of mainstream academia." Is it indeed? Wittering about a "mind-virus"? No wonder materialist theory is in trouble.

Gefter ends by rallying her readers for a "big pre-emptive push" to educate the public about the brain. Does that mean more hit pieces?

In a letter to various notables, accompanying a copy of the hard cover edition of The Spiritual Brain, Mario Beauregard and I said

Today, non-materialist neuroscience is thriving, despite the limitations imposed by widespread misunderstanding and, in a few cases, hostility. Readers are urged to approach all the questions and evidence presented in this book with an open mind. This is a time for exploration, not dogma.

At the time, it hadn't occurred to either of us that dogma would be supplemented by dark tales of conspiracy. But maybe that is a typical end state for a failing dogma.

Anyway, it's Hallowe'en, right?

Return to: Is THIS your best shot? A response to New Scientist's recent hit piece on non-materialist neuroscientists

Neuroscience: Getting beyond mind-body problem

Actually, there isn't a mind-body problem. There is a materialism problem. If scientists cannot talk about non-material entities like the mind, they cannot help us understand basic facts like why so many people in the control group get better just because they know they are taking part in a study. Or why so many people die within a few years of losing a life partner (statistically beyond normal). What we think and how we think matters.

A recent symposium "Beyond the Mind-Body Problem", held at the United Nations, featured many non-materialist neuroscientists, including Mario Beauregard, lead author of The Spiritual Brain.

Here's the lineup:

Mario Beauregard, Ph.D.
Elie During, Ph.D.
Ebrahim Elahi, M.D., FACS
Bruce Greyson, M.D.
Andrew B. Newberg, M.D.
Sam Parnia, M.D., Ph.D.
Christina M. Puchalski, M.D., FACP
Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D.
Henry P. Stapp, Ph.D.
Esther M. Sternberg, M.D.

I am told that Jeffrey Schwartz, lead author of The Mind and the Brain, vastly livened up the proceedings ... as I very well believe.

And listen here to Kevin Keough's North Star Guardian interview with Mario Beauregard.

The photo above, taken by Bruce Greyson, features Schwartz, and physicist Henry Stapp, with Beauregard on the right - the three are the authors of a paper offering a model for non-materialist neuroscience (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 2004).

Here's the conference overview:

Over the past decade, an increasing number of physicians and neuroscientists have sought to uncover the complex relationship between mind, brain, and consciousness as they continue to search for a more comprehensive perspective on the "self" and the workings of the human mind. Though much remains to be done, their findings to date have shed a more holistic light on our understanding of the elusive mind-body problem. Join our panel of renowned experts as they explain how new paradigms fueled by the latest scientific research are beginning to fundamentally alter how we perceive and relate to the physical world.

The symposium will also serve as the occasion for the formal launch of The Human Consciousness Project—a multidisciplinary collaboration of international scientists and physicians who have joined forces to research the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the brain. Led by Dr. Sam Parnia, The Human Consciousness Project will conduct the world's first large-scale multicenter studies at major U.S. and European medical centers on the relationship between mind and brain during clinical death. The results of these studies may not only revolutionize the medical care of critically ill patients and the scientific study of the mind and brain, but may also bear profound universal implications for our understanding of death and what happens when we die.

Hat tip to Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose.

Animal minds: How well can we understand a cat ... or a bat?

In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel published a most interesting essay called "What is it like to be a bat", which reminded us that animals not only have different minds from humans, they - in some cases - have different senses. Their whole experience of life may be different: For example, he notes:

To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would not be anything like the experiences of those animals. On the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysiological constitution of a bat. Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew what they were like.

[ ... ]

I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

Nagel's main purpose was not really to understand what it is like to be a bat, which he believes unlikely. Rather, he opposed reductionism - as in "the mind is nothing but ..." as a strategy for understanding the mind. His point is that reductionism is not even a good way of understanding animal minds, let alone human minds.

As he says,

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction.

[ ... ]

Every reductionist has his favorite analogy from modern science. It is most unlikely that any of these unrelated examples of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of mind to brain. But philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different. This has led to the acceptance of implausible accounts of the mental largely because they would permit familiar kinds of reduction. I shall try to explain why the usual examples do not help us to understand the relation between mind and body—why, indeed, we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless. The most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena is very poorly understood. Most reductionist theories do not even try to explain it. And careful examination will show that no currently available concept of reduction is applicable to it. Perhaps a new theoretical form can be devised for the purpose, but such a solution, if it exists, lies in the distant intellectual future.

Conscious Entities notes,

Nagel's aim is to launch a kind of counter-attack against physicalist arguments, which would reduce the mental to the merely physical, and which were evidently getting into the ascendant in 1974 when the paper was published. Tempting as it may be to fall back on the familiar kind of reductionist approach which has worked so well in other areas, Nagel argues, phenomenal, subjective experience is a special case. Reductive arguments always seek to give an explanation in objective terms, but the essential point about conscious experiences is that they are subjective. The whole idea of an objective account therefore makes no sense - no more sense than asking what my inward experiences are really like, as opposed to how they seem to me. How they seem to me is all there is to them. Any neutral, objective, third-person explanation has to leave out the essence of the experience. The point about conscious experience is that there is something it is like to see x, or hear y, or feel z.

Non-materialist neuroscience, which we explore in The Spiritual Brain, treats the relationship between the mind and the brain in a non-reductionist way, like the relationship between a television program and a television set. The program requires the set but cannot be reduced to it. Little will be discovered about the program by analyzing the set. On the other hand, if the set is damaged, it may not transmit the program very well.

There are, of course, other non-materialist ways of looking at the relationship between the mind and the brain.

Other "animal mind" stories from The Mindful Hack

"Animal minds: Monkeys understanD money?"

"When pop science TV wants to hear only one side ... "

Animal minds: Art produced by animals: Is it art?

Researchers ask: What does it mean to be an animal?

Deception in humans and animals: The differences

Medical journal published article on cat's death predictions

Jeff Schwartz lectures in Ireland on changing the troubled brain by changing the mind

Neuropsychiatrist Jeff Schwartz, Mario's colleague and lead author of The Mind and the Brain, has been lecturing in Ireland. According to Dick Ahlstrom, science editor for the Irish Times (July 11, 2008),

THE FANCIFUL notion of "mind over matter", where the mind can exert influence over the body, is not so fanciful after all. It is possible for the mind to impose lasting physiological changes on the brain to overcome psychiatric problems such as obsessive compulsive disorder.

So argues Prof Jeffrey M Schwartz, one of the world's leading proponents of mind over matter in a psychiatric sense, who was in Dublin yesterday to deliver a lecture at St Patrick's Hospital.

Ahlstrom talks about Schwartz's work treating obsessive-compulsive disorder - which highlights something I always stress when discussing non-materialist neuroscience: It is, first and foremost, a practical discipline.

Non-materialist neuroscientists like Schwartz and Beauregard are not trying to have a faculty common-room fight with materialist neuroscientists over abstract issues that begin and end in "ism." How would that help anyone?

Rather, they are concerned that many mental problems are not effectively treated when the brain is viewed materialistically as a pre-programmed machine - whose addled programming can somehow be knocked back into kilter by powerful drugs.

Non-materialists see the brain as the organ that connects our minds to life. Like any organ, it can have problems. Our minds can have problems too - we can have attitudes that are wrong and destructive.

That is not a brain problem, it is a mind problem. A mass murderer might have a perfectly healthy brain.

The non-materialist works with the patient whose behaviour is creating a problem, such as obsessive compulsions, to help change their mind. Then the mind changes the brain in the process, and thus the person's life changes slowly over time. Neuroscientists like Mario and Jeff have imaged this very process.

As Mario and I show in Chapter Six of The Spiritual Brain, non-materialist treatments work - and that is what keeps the non-materialist neuroscientist at work, despite much misunderstanding and occasional misrepresentation.

Neuroscientist: Most opposition to new science ideas comes from fundamentalism within science

Well, another non-materialist neuroscientist has just been sighted.

Edward F. Kelly, lead author of Irreducible Mind, writes at the Rowman blog (sponsored by publishers Rowman and Littlefield),

The word “fundamentalism” probably evokes for most of us only images of bomb-wielding Islamic terrorists and other examples of religious extremism, but fundamentalism exists within science as well. When scientific opinion hardens into dogma it becomes scientism, which is essentially a secular faith and no longer science. Galileo was persecuted by the Inquisition, but in modern times the main opposition to new scientific ideas has derived not from religious orthodoxies but from other scientists for whom contemporary opinion established the limits of the possible.

Consider in this light the question of post-mortem survival. The notion that aspects of mind and personality survive bodily death is central to the world’s great religions yet scorned as impossible by present-day establishment science. But few participants in this contentious debate have any inkling that there exists a large scientific literature collectively suggesting that at least some of us, under largely unknown conditions and for some unknown period of time, do in fact survive. The primary threat to this interpretation, ironically, has nothing to do with the quality of the evidence—problems of fraud, credulity, errors of observation or memory, and the like—but with the difficulty of excluding non-survivalist interpretations based solely upon supernormal (“psi”-based or parapsychological) processes involving living persons. The voluminous evidence for such processes includes both spontaneous cases and experimental studies, and in my opinion has long since passed the threshold where competent persons who take the trouble to study it in depth and with an open mind will routinely conclude that these things exist as facts of nature. Indeed, future generations of historians, philosophers, and sociologists will undoubtedly make a good living trying to understand why it took so long for scientists in general to accept this conclusion.

Kelly is Research Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Hat Tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

World Magazine's interview with Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary dispels all doubt

Yes, we really ARE non-materialists. And we have good reasons for being non-materialists.

Mind over matter
Interview: A new book on neuroscience challenges the prevailing materialist worldview | Daniel

James Devine

Your mind doesn't get the credit it deserves. Not according to The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul (HarperOne), a new book aiming to show that the mind—as distinct from the brain—is a real entity with nonphysical qualities. That's opposite the current dogma in the field of neuroscience, where materialism—the philosophy that physical matter is all that exists—has held sway, promoting drug treatments for most psychiatric disorders and fueling atheists who argue spirituality is a delusion created by the brain.

Hey, we go on, uttering worse heresies yet:

WORLD: Your book argues, "When we treat the mind as capable of changing the brain, we can treat conditions that were once considered difficult or impossible to treat." Which conditions?

BEAUREGARD: Anxiety disorders—specific phobias, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder—and mood disorders like major depression. By recognizing that mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and volition can significantly influence the functioning and plasticity of the brain at various levels—molecular, cellular, neural circuitry—nonmaterialist neuroscience could markedly alter the way psychotropic (mind-altering) drugs are prescribed.

O'LEARY: Tom Wolfe wrote an influential essay in 1996 called "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died," ascribing enormous power to the new antidepressants. Later, a very large amount of the miraculous effect turned out to be the placebo effect. Once people honestly believed that a drug could lift them out of depression, it could have been lithium or blue Smarties mix. Their own minds were apparently doing the heavy lifting, but they didn't even know it. I wonder if Wolfe will write another essay titled "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Prefers the Blue Smarties."

Learn more here.

The Spiritual Brain: Here’s the cover!

This is what the cover for The Spiritual Brain looks like. Mario liked it and so did I. Here’s what I said when someone asked me recently what the book is about:

The Spiritual Brain examines the claim that the mind is simply the functions of the brain and rejects it, not because it is uncomfortable, but because it conflicts with key evidence. In fact, materialism is approaching a crisis. Unable to account for such fundamental features of the human being as consciousness and free will, it is reduced to asserting that they are illusions. As one small example, the 1990s generation of antidepressants that was famously hyped as proving that there is no such thing as the soul turned out to perform only somewhat better than the familiar placebo effect. Similarly, claims that spirituality can be reduced to a God gene or lobe in the brain are paltry, and sometimes ridiculous. Having demolished the nonsense, the book introduces the quietly growing discipline of non-materialist neuroscience, which treats the mind as real and demonstrates the ways in which it changes the brain. A non-materialist approach to neuroscience is not merely another new theory: It offers hope for treating difficult disorders such as phobias and obsessive compulsions. Treating the mind as real, we also examine claims for such puzzling and controversial experiences as the psi effect and near death experience. We also let the public in on a little secret you won’t hear from the current spate of anti-God books on the market: Overwhelmingly, the evidence shows that spirituality is good for you. More significantly, Beauregard and Paquette's Carmelite nun studies demonstrate that it is reasonable to believe that mystical contemplatives do indeed contact a power outside themselves.

Hey, there’s lots for some people to like and others to be mad about.