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:

Do selfish genes explain why you want to hear about your great grandfolks?

An anthropologist offers a critical look at the claims of evolutionary psychology that your selfish genes cause you to care more about your relatives than about other people (because your kin have more of the same genes). Evaluating Harvard cognitive scientist Steve Pinker’s attempt in "Strangled by Roots" to account for the current American craze for genealogy by evolution, poster Rex notes that human groups do not even have fixed ideas of who their kin are:

The overall plot of "Strangled By Roots" will be familiar to any one familiar with evolutionary psychology: a New Field Of Research has been opened up that sheds Scientific Light on a previously untheorized and salaciously quirky bit of human life. The Social Scientists, of course, with their Social Science Models, have got it wrong, but luckily New Experiments have revealed the hidden evolutionary basis of said quirky behavior.

Unfortunately—alas!—however adaptive this behavior once was, it no longer suits the rigors of modern life and is currently the source of many social woes.

This time around its kinship. In the article Pinker claims that "for all its fascination, kinship is a surprisingly neglected topic in the behavioral sciences." While "many social scientists have gone so far as to claim that kinship is a social construction with no relation to biology" others disagree. "Genetics and evolutionary theory," Pinker says, "predict that the biology of kinship should have biased our thoughts and emotions about relatives in several ways"—for instance, that we like to share resources with them (this helps perpetuate their genes, including the genes we share with them).

[ ... ]

Pinker’s argument sounds plausible at first—especially if you don't know anything about the centuries-old literature on kinship or lack in-depth knowledge of the cultural complexity of ours species. In Pinker's case the problem is mostly naivete. ... Pinker's failure to review the literature on the topic can be blamed on many things, but our failure to write it is not one of them.

[ ... ]

But let me get to the main point: there are two main problems with Pinker's argument. First, there is that we have no evidence of what social organization was like deep in our evolutionary past. Of course we can imagine what they might have been like, but speculation is not science—especially for someone sufficiently serious about intellectual rigor that they feel the need to conduct experiments to prove the obvious fact that people who are raised together feel related. So his claim that feelings of kinship were once nontrivially adaptive in the evolutionary past but no longer are is in fact based on speculation. There is nothing wrong with speculation—indeed, it is all we have to go on with in some cases—but this point needs to be flagged.

The second problem is with Pinker's claim that kinship is currently no longer adaptive. The problem here is that Pinker, as philosophers say, 'proves too much'. For, as he himself shows and anthropology has already demonstrated, folk theories of relatedness and accurate biogenetic reckoning are so loosely coupled as to be only tenuously connected. In fact they are so tenuously connected that one wonder why he thinks they are or should be connected at all, except for his assumption (based on speculation) that they must have been in the past. Let's take a closer look.

Well, I won’t spoil any more of it for you; it's a great and instructive read, showing that different groups of people have very different ideas about how you should know who your kin are. And the fact that so many of these ideas are not based on degree of biological relatedness at all should be enough to sink the selfish gene theory.

Incidentally, the current North American craze for genealogy most likely relates not to remote human evolution but to (1) the fact that much more information is available, plus (2) the fact that the population is aging. Older people tend to be more interested in that kind of thing, and (3) After four or five generations, non-aboriginal North Americans are becoming more comfortable with the past their ancestors escaped. They can afford psychologically to find out more about it. They may even feel flattered or morally justified to learn of circumstances that were once a source of shame. Such is the veil that time draws over suffering ....

Now let me make two things clear here: I am not claiming that our evolutionary heritage has nothing to do with the way we view things. Indeed, it is quite easy to show the opposite. Humans, (unlike chimpanzees), are predominately right-handed. The fact that so many languages use "right" to mean good or clever (righteous, dexterous) and "left" to mean bad or awkward (gauche, sinister) is surely related. Similarly, "up" is generally a fortunate direction and "down" an unfortunate one - surely that relates to the fact that an upright stance is normal for humans.

So far, so obvious. But what happens when we seek to go beyond that? The key problems I see with evolutionary psychology, as generally practiced by - for example - Steve Pinker, are,

1. Speculation. As Rex notes, evo psycho explanations for human behaviour are usually speculation based on what we suppose life was like hundreds of thousands of years ago. And the practices for which we DO have documentation vary so widely that it is hard to place much confidence in the speculation.

2. Cherrypicking. Can anyone explain to me why, if selfish genes govern our behavior, so many men have had children with slave women and then treated those children with indifference, while doting on their legitimate offspring - irrespective of fitness? Oh yes, I am sure one speculation or other can be pulled out of a hat to rescue the selfish gene. But it would be more economical to assume that fatherhood is, in large part, a social idea and is not necessarily driven by a genetic imperative governed by natural selection.

3. Suspicious last-minute rescues. One theory has it that men play the field because their selfish genes want them to have as many children as possible in order to get themselves spread around. When I point out the obvious - that men who play the field usually do NOT want a whole pack of kids following them around - the reply is, "Well, that's modern. We’re in charge of evolution now. But back in the old days, ... " In other words, the times for which we do have information don't count, only the times for which we don't.

Of course, I am out of sympathy with the whole evolutionary psychology project because the underlying message is that people are not motivated by their culture but by their genes. I am on the side of the anthropologists (culture) on that one because I think the latter have more and better evidence. In other words, being human does not give us a specific culture (selected by our genes in order to spread themselves, in the evolutionary psychologist's view). It gives us the capacity to form a culture. Cultures may or may not contribute to survival or spreading genes. If they don't, they won't be around long, but we need not suppose that therefore the successful cultures were selected by anyone or anything for that express purpose. That's an attribution error.

In a longish section of The Spiritual Brain, Mario Beauregard and I look at these questions in relation to religion, and argue that the same thing applies there.

Recent book reviews: Steve Pinker's Stuff of Thought

Seth Lerer, in "The Edifice of Pinkerism" suggests that not since the 18th century has there been so much argument about the mind. He is, of course, reviewing Harvard cognitive psychologist Steve Pinker's latest, Stuff of Thought.

Wow. Stuff. I knew Pinker was a materialist, but does he mean stuff like ... stuff? The kind of stuff you give to the SallyAnn (puzzles you've done twice and clothes that never fit). Well, almost, according to Lerer. That is, he believes in "a theory of mind that holds that certain concepts or ways of thinking are hardwired into our brains at birth."

Well, hard wiring is the stuff that the electrician sneaks into a nearby dumpster after fixing the lighting system. So he must mean ... stuff.

But I still don't get it. Everything these guys talk about is simply "an idea in the minds of men." It becomes physical only when they act, and then mainly in the outcome. Before that, what is it, exactly? Not stuff.

Lerer comments:

Then again, there is a fair amount of sheer attention getting in the book, especially the long chapter on "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television." Mr. Pinker comes off as a comedian manqué, channeling George Carlin to make witty observations on why we can and cannot say things publicly. There's nothing more uncomfortable to a young student than a middle-aged college professor working at being cool, and there are times throughout this book when I just cringed at the Groucho Marxisms or the list of verbs for sexual activity. That this list in particular ends with the Yiddish "shtup" can only be explained by Mr. Pinker's belief that there is something inherently funny in the sonic concatenations of the shtetl.

Mr. Pinker, of course, is more than just a borscht-belt John Locke. He is the cognitive philosopher of our generation, and his work on language and mind has implications for anybody interested in human expression and experience.

Yes, but WHAT implications? Should I just start ignoring Pinker?

Language: Theodore Dalrymple takes on materialist cognitive scientist Steve Pinker

Materialist cognitive scientist Steve Pinker of Harvard, who was recently mixing it up with eminent bioethicist Leon Kass, also attracted the attention of highly literate retired prison psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple. In "No, Dr. Pinker, it's not just from nature," Dalrymple recalls that many of his patients from the prison culture simply did not fit the stereotype of the "human animal" as "hardwired for language", a stereotype that owes much to Pinker's work. On the contrary, he finds, not only is there no such hard wiring but the lack of it is both apparent and devastating:

With a very limited vocabulary, it is impossible to make, or at least to express, important distinctions and to examine any question with conceptual care. My patients often had no words to describe what they were feeling, except in the crudest possible way, with expostulations, exclamations, and physical displays of emotion. Often, by guesswork and my experience of other patients, I could put things into words for them, words that they grasped at eagerly. Everything was on the tip of their tongue, rarely or never reaching the stage of expression out loud. They struggled even to describe in a consecutive and logical fashion what had happened to them, at least without a great deal of prompting. Complex narrative and most abstractions were closed to them.

In their dealings with authority, they were at a huge disadvantage—a disaster, since so many of them depended upon various public bureaucracies for so many of their needs, from their housing and health care to their income and the education of their children. ...

He adds, a propos Pinker's insistence that there are no "better" or "worse" ways of expressing oneself:

I need hardly point out that Pinker doesn’t really believe anything of what he writes, at least if example is stronger evidence of belief than precept. Though artfully sown here and there with a demotic expression to prove that he is himself of the people, his own book is written, not surprisingly, in the kind of English that would please schoolmarms. I doubt very much whether it would have reached its 25th printing had he chosen to write it in the dialect of rural Louisiana, for example, or of the slums of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Even had he chosen to do so, he might have found the writing rather difficult. I should like to see him try to translate a sentence from his book that I have taken at random, “The point that the argument misses is that although natural selection involves incremental steps that enhance functioning, the enhancements do not have to be an existing module,” into the language of the Glasgow or Detroit slums.

I'm definitely in Dalrymple's camp here because, like him (though only in a volunteer capacity), I have often found myself writing letters to authorities on behalf of persons in difficulties. What has so often struck me is that some people only clearly grasped the nature of their problems after I had explained them clearly in a letter I was composing, to be sent to someone else.

No doubt Pinker is right in thinking that humans have a natural tendency to construct language of some type. But all language is not equally useful for everything. Put another way, words are tools. If the only tools I know how to use are big and heavy, I can't do fine work. And just as some jobs require fine tools, some missions require carefully chosen words. There is nothing "natural" about any of that. Our language is an artistic inheritance built up over centuries of use and refinement. For various reasons, as Dalrymple notes, some people never got most of the toolkit of their culture (not nature), and it shows.

Often, I helped my friends in difficulty most by teaching them words so that they could think their way through difficulties that they had been trying to feel their way through. Post-modernists would, of course, say that I was "imposing my uptight Anglo-Canadian culture", and to some extent that is true. To help people navigate a system dominated by Anglo-Canadians, I taught them the Anglo-Canadian words of power.

It is the case with all words of power that once you know them, you find that you can think clearly about things that were fuzzy before. You can reject the new thoughts if you want, but you cannot go back to a time before you knew them.

Anyway, enjoy Dalrymple's graceful and interesting essay.

David Berlinski on why we should not pay any attention to "evolutionary psychology"

I've been rereading agnostic mathematician David Berlinski's The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (for a review I am writing), and it was fun to read his sendup of Harvard materialist cognitive scientist Steve Pinker (who thinks that the brain is like a machine):

A successful evolutionary theory of the human mind would, after all, annihilate any claim we might make on behalf of human freedom. The psychical sciences do not trifle with determinism: It is the heart and soul of their method. Were boron salts at liberty to discard their identity, the claims of inorganic chemistry would seem considerably less pertinent than they do.

When Steven Pinker writes that "nature does not dictate what we should accept or how we should live our lives," he is expressing a belief - one obviously true - entirely at odds with his professional commitments.

If ordinary men and women are, like Pinker himself, perfectly free to tell their genes "to go jump in the lake," why pay the slightest attention to evolutionary psychology?

Why pay the slightest attention to Pinker?

Either the theory in which he has placed his confidence is wrong, or we are not free to tell our genes to do much of anything.

If the theory is wrong, which theory is right?

If no theory is right, how can "the idea that human minds are the product of evolution" be "unassailable fact"?

If this idea is not unassailable fact, why must we put aside "the idea that man was created in the image of God"?

These hypotheticals must now be allowed to discharge themselves in a number of categorical statements:

There is no reason to pay attention to Steven Pinker.

We do not have a serious scientific theory explaining the powers and properties of the human mind.

The claim that the human mind is the product of evolution is not unassailable fact. It is barely coherent.

The idea that man was created in the image of God remains what it has always been: And that is the instinctive default position of the human race. (pp. 178-179)

That's why you should never let a mathematician have a go at a materialist theory! Or if you do, don't expect to come back and find any of the structure standing.

Mario and I had a bit of fun with Pinker in The Spiritual Brain too, and he is easy to have fun with.

Here's the review:

Introduction:Berlinski, the devil, and the long spoon
Part One: Taking the measure of the new religion of science
Part Two: Materialism conflicts with evidence more than theism does
Part Three: Evolutionary psychology - the saints' legends of scientism
Part Four: The duty Berlinski never accepted

Materialist neuroscience: "The mind is what the brain does! ... ?"

Recently, materialist cognitive scientist Steve Pinker wrote a letter to Commentary magazine, excoriating an article by bioethicist Leon Kass,

This point, the foundation of my field, cognitive science, is one that I have made repeatedly, at length, and with all the expository power I can muster. The mind is not the brain but it is, as I say, “what the brain does” (Mr. Kass’s parsing overlooks the crucial word “does”). By this I mean the brain’s ability to manipulate information in ways that mirror logical, statistical, and other normative principles. As many philosophers have shown, this dissolves the apparent mystery that the brain is a physical object but can traffic in abstract ideas involving meaning and truth.

and making the point that

Mr. Kass is free to use the word “soul” to refer to the software of the brain, but he is mistaken if he thinks that this equation, free of any conception of divine provenance or survival after death, is compatible with the way the vast majority of people use the word. Nor is it clear how invoking a soul illuminates any intellectual problem beyond slapping a label on what we feel we do not understand.

The uselessness of soul-talk is particularly evident in the thriving science of consciousness, the study of “inner states” that Mr. Kass decrees to be impossible. ...

Kass replies,

In the course of my critique of reductionism, I accused Steven Pinker of arrogance and shallowness. I am tempted to say that his letter provides further evidence for the charge, especially as it progresses quickly from science (about which he knows a lot) to philosophy (about which he knows a dangerous little) to the Bible and religion (about which he knows less than the village atheist). But some substantive points should be made.

One of which is,

In my article, I took him to task for the following remarks:

The supposedly immaterial soul can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, turned on or off by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or a lack of oxygen. Centuries ago it was unwise to ground morality on the dogma that the earth sat at the center of the universe. It is just as unwise today to ground it on dogmas about souls endowed by God.

I am happy to learn that Mr. Pinker denies saying that the “mind is the brain”—he says instead that "it is what the brain does," a position deftly skewered in Brian Beckman's letter. But one can hardly be blamed for thinking the man a simple materialist. Someone who boasts, even for rhetorical effect, that “the supposedly immaterial soul can be bisected with a knife” simply does not see that thought and awareness, like all powers and activities of living things, are immaterial in their essence and therefore cannot be so carved.

Biran Beckman's letter? Regarding the notion that the mind is the software of the brain (implying that it is easily accommodated by materialism), reader Brian Beckman of Newcastle, Washington, notes,

Steven Pinker’s idea that “the mind is what the brain does” is about as useful as saying that “software is what your computer does.” Is your word processor nothing more than a pattern of electrons in transistors? How about the letter from a friend that you read on a computer screen? Much more than a ghost in the machine, software activates the machine; but it is, itself, a purely spiritual thing.

... Software is just the latest example of immaterial but very real things like songs, ideas, emotions, and human souls. It is particularly apt, though, for shocking adherents of scientism because it is embodied in that trophy of science, the computer.

It's good to see Commentary getting into this debate. Read the whole thing and enjoy!

Anyway, there's little doubt about what Steve Pinker thinks about the soul. Here's what he wrote for Time Magazine (January 19, 2007):

Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.

[ ... ]

And when the physiological activity of the brain ceases, as far as anyone can tell the person's consciousness goes out of existence. Attempts to contact the souls of the dead (a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago) turned up only cheap magic tricks, and near death experiences are not the eyewitness reports of a soul parting company from the body but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain.

[ ... ]

And when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Just remember the most famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11.

If there were such a thing as oral quotation marks, any time Steve Pinker used the word soul, it would be in oral quotation marks. Of course he is entitled to his opinion, but not to indignation when people take him at his word and doubt his account of reality.

US cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker defends freedom of expression in Canada

Well, of all people!

Regular blog readers will know that I have rarely been kind to Harvard cognitive scientist Pinker, either at The Mindful Hack or The Post-Darwinist (examples linked), or in The Spiritual Brain.

I find his hard core materialism juvenile - after all these years he still doesn't know that his show left town a while back, as Thomas Wolfe has noted.

All that said, P. M. Jaworski notes at The Shotgun Blog (civil rights lawyer Ezra Levant's online magazine) that Pinker recently said something in defense of intellectual freedom in Canada that makes a lot of sense to me:

I was aware of the Steyn/Maclean's case.

It’s truly shocking that a supposedly democratic government has arrogated to itself the power to censor speech because some judge or bureaucrat thinks it may “expose a person to contempt.” This could outlaw any criticism of a practice that is statistically more common in some groups than others, such as slavery, polygamy, child abuse, ritual torture, gay-bashing, and so on.

It allows haters to decide who gets to say what -- all they have to do is say, “So-and-so’s essay made me show contempt,” and So-and-so gets fined or jailed. And it opens the door to the government banning speech that upsets anyone, anywhere -- as all-important speech is bound to do.

This is an atrocity against the ideal of free speech, and will make Canada a laughing stock among lovers of democracy and enlightenment. (October 24, 2008)

Pinker gets a lot right here - the "human rights" commissions can be used to outlaw criticism of any practice that is "statistically more common in some groups than others."

But he is, alas, mistaken on two points:

1. The criticized practice does not need to be statistically common. Prosecution requires only that the "human rights" commissioner believes that the critic may “expose a person to contempt.” Statistically uncommon practices are more likely to do so.

2. Second, given that many countries have - or are contemplating - similar laws, we are kidding ourselves if we think that Canada - or American university campuses - are making themselves "a laughing stock" by enforcing censorship of opinion.

Many earnest, humourless people who know that they are "victims" or that they represent "victims" will only rest easy when they have permanently shut down all thought that gives them anxiety. As they are not likely to be free of anxiety any time soon, dislodging them will hardly be easy.

Hat tip: Five Feet of Fury

Photo credit: Rebecca Goldstein

Part Two: Who has enough faith to be a materialist?

One convenient aspect of materialism is that any doubt can be labeled "unscientific" in principle. That preempts a discussion of materialism's plausibility. Certainly, materialism is a faith that many intellectuals would never think of questioning. But the strength of their conviction neither shows that it is a correct account of reality nor provides evidence in its favor.

Suppose, for example, a healthy man donates a kidney for free to a dying stranger. The materialist may look for an analogy among moles, rats, mole rats, or chimpanzees, as the best way to understand the donor's motives. He believes that the donor's mind can be completely explained by the hypothesis that his brain was built up painstakingly in slow steps from the brains of creatures like these. Therefore, his mind is merely an illusion created by the workings of an overdeveloped brain, and his consciousness of his situation is actually irrelevant as an explanation of his actions.

This book argues that the fact that the human brain evolves does not show that the human mind can be dismissed in this way. Rather, the human brain can enable a human mind, whereas the mole brain cannot (with my apologies to the mole species). The brain, however, is not the mind; it is an organ suitable for connecting a mind to the rest of the universe. By analogy, Olympic swimming events require an Olympic class swimming pool. But the pool does not create the Olympic events; it makes them feasible at a given location. From the materialist perspective, our human mind's consciousness and free will are problems to be explained away. To see what this means, consider Harvard cognitive scientist Steve Pinker's comments on consciousness in a recent piece in Time magazine (January 19, 2007). Addressing two key problems that scientists face, he writes,

Although neither problem has been solved, neuroscientists agree on many features of both of them, and the feature they find least controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it "the astonishing hypothesis" – the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.

Given that Pinker admits that neither problem concerning consciousness is either solved or anywhere close to being solved, how can he be so sure that consciousness is merely "the activity of the brain", with the implication that he draws out, that there is no soul?

One convenient aspect of Pinker's materialism is that any doubt can be labeled "unscientific" in principle. That preempts a discussion of materialism's plausibility. Certainly, materialism is a faith that many intellectuals would never think of questioning. But the strength of their conviction neither shows that it is a correct account of reality nor provides evidence in its favor.

A good case can be made for the opposite view, as this book will demonstrate. Yes, this book - departing from a general trend in books on neuroscience aimed at the general public - does question materialism. Much more than that, it presents evidence that materialism is not true. You will see for yourself that the evidence for materialism is not nearly so good as Steve Pinker would like you to believe. You can only retain your faith in materialism by assuming - on faith - that any contrary evidence you read about must be wrong.

For example, as we will relate, a materialist readily believes - without any reliable evidence whatever - that great spiritual leaders suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy rather than that they have spiritual experiences that inspire others as well as themselves. Where spirituality is concerned, this experiential data is an embarrassment to narrow materialism. That is because a system like materialism is severely damaged by any evidence against it. Consequently, data that defy materialism are simply ignored by many scientists. For instance, materialists have conducted a running war against psi research (research on knowledge or action at a distance) for decades, because any evidence of psi's validity, no matter how minor, is fatal to their ideological system. Recently, for example, self-professed skeptics have attacked atheist neuroscience grad student Sam Harris for having proposed, in his book titled The End of Faith (2004), that psi research has validity. Harris is only following the evidence, as we shall see. But in doing so, he is clearly violating an important tenet of materialism: Materialist ideology trumps evidence.

Next: Part Three: The uses of non-materialist neuroscience

(From The Spiritual Brain)

Mind: We have minds whether we recognize them or not

A friend draws my attention to this video, in which Robert Wright interviews materialist psychologist Steven Pinker on consciousness and does a good job of bringing out Pinker's circular reference to materialism:

You can easily observe in this interview that Pinker can't see that his intellectual struggle with "sentience" [awareness-of-awareness, holistic awareness of self] is the result of an incompleteness in his material presuppositions.

This might apply: During meditation or deep prayer the mind shuts down sections of the brain to achieve the desired undistracted state. This argument relates to the cause-effect argument above. In this case the mind quiets the brain so that the brain is not sending distracting information to the mind ....

Also, while I am here, best wishes to Cindy Lou Bailey, who reported on Facebook: "Thanks for recommending the book, "Spiritual Brain". I got it on CD and have enjoyed it. I am now at Andrews University taking their Leadership Degree with a concentration in Neuroscience."

Hey, need any more help, we are only an e-mail address away.

2. Le cerveau n’est pas l’esprit

Mais les matérialistes pensent que la distinction que l’on fait entre son esprit, en tant qu’entité immatérielle, et son cerveau, en tant qu’organe corporel, n’a pas de véritable fondement. L’esprit est supposé être une simple illusion générée par les mécanismes du cerveau. Certains matérialistes pensent que nous ne devrions même pas utiliser une terminologie qui suggère que notre esprit existe. Dans ce livre, nous avons l’intention de montrer que votre esprit existe bel et bien, qu’il n’est pas identique à votre cerveau. Vos pensées et vos sentiments ne peuvent pas être écartés ou réduits à des décharges de synapses et d’autres phénomènes purement physiques. Dans un monde exclusivement matériel, le « pouvoir de la pensée » ou de « l’esprit sur la matière » sont des illusions, le but ou le sens n’existent pas, et il n’y a aucune place pour Dieu. Pourtant de nombreuses personnes vivent de telles expériences, et nous apportons des données suggérant que ces expériences sont réelles.

Par contraste, de nombreux matérialistes estiment désormais que des notions comme le sens ou le but ne correspondent pas à la réalité ; elles sont de simples adaptations favorables à la survie de l’être humain. En d’autres termes, elles n’ont pas d’existence au-delà de l’évolution de circuits neuronaux dans nos cerveaux. Ainsi que le co-découvreur du code génétique Francis Crick l’écrit dans L’hypothèse stupéfiante : «Après tout, nos cerveaux hautement développés n’ont pas évolué sous la pression de devoir découvrir des vérités scientifiques, mais seulement de nous permettre d’être assez intelligents pour survivre et laisser des descendants. » Mais les questions sur le sens et le but sont-elles de simples mécanismes de survie ? Si un tel dédain pour une vie intellectuelle qui couvre des milliers d’années semble si peu convaincant, c’est peut-être pour une bonne raison. Supposons, par exemple, qu’un homme en bonne santé donne en échange de rien un de ses reins à un étranger mourant. Le matérialiste va rechercher chez les taupes, les rats ou les chimpanzés une analogie qui sera le meilleur moyen de comprendre les motivations du donneur.

Il pense que l’état d’esprit du donneur peut être expliqué en totalité par l’hypothèse selon laquelle son cerveau a évolué lentement et avec difficultés à partir du cerveau de créatures comme celles-là. Par conséquent, son esprit n’est qu’une illusion créée par les mécanismes d’uncerveau surdéveloppé, et sa conscience de sa propre situation n’est finalement pas significative pour rendre compte de ses actions.

Ce livre prétend que même si le cerveau humain évolue, cela n’implique pas que l’on puisse écarter l’esprit humain de cette façon. Mais plutôt que le cerveau humain rend possible un esprit humain, là où le cerveau de la taupe ne le peut pas (avec mes excuses à l’espèce des taupes). Toutefois, le cerveau n’est pas l’esprit ; c’est un organe adapté pour connecter un esprit au reste de l’univers. Par analogie, l’épreuve de natation des Jeux olympiques requiert une piscine de niveau olympique. Mais la piscine ne crée pas l’événement olympique ; elle le rend possible en un endroit donné.

Selon la perspective matérialiste, notre conscience humaine et notre libre arbitre sont des problèmes qu’il faut « réduire ». Pour comprendre ce que cela veut dire, considérons ce commentaire sur la conscience par Steven Pinker, un chercheur en sciences cognitives d’Harvard, dans un article récent de Time magazine intitulé « Le mystère de la conscience » (19 janvier 2007). À propos des deux problèmes centraux auxquels les scientifiques sont confrontés, il écrit :

Bien qu’aucun des deux problèmes n’ait été résolu, les neuroscientifiques
s’accordent sur plusieurs de leurs caractéristiques, et celle qu’ils trouvent la
moins sujette à controverse est aussi celle que la plupart des non-spécialistes
trouvent la plus choquante. Francis Crick l’appelle « l’hypothèse stupéfiante »
– l’idée que nos pensées, nos sensations, nos joies et nos peines sont
uniquement des processus physiologiques dansles tissus du cerveau. La conscience
ne réside pas dans une âme éthérée qui utiliserait le cerveau comme un assistant
numérique personnel (PDA) ; la conscience est l’activité même du cerveau.

Puisque Pinker reconnaît qu’aucun des problèmes concernant la conscience n’est soit résolu, soit près de l’être, comment peut-il être si sûr que la conscience est simplement « l’activité du cerveau », impliquant qu’il n’y a pas d’âme ?

Un aspect pratique du matérialisme de Pinker est que le moindre doute peut être étiqueté « non scientifique » par principe, ce qui interdit par avance toute discussion sur la plausibilité du matérialisme. Le matérialisme est sans aucun doute une croyance que beaucoup d’intellectuels ne songeraient même pas à remettre en question. Mais la force de leur conviction n’implique pas qu’il s’agisse d’une description juste de la réalité, ni n’apporte de preuve en sa faveur. On peut donc argumenter en faveur de la conception opposée, ainsi que ce livre va le démontrer.

Prochaine : 3. Les approches non-matérialistes ont clairement démontré leur intérêt dans le domaine de la santé mentale.

Note: The English language version starts here.

Dangerous questions? Huh? Materialists have NO dangerous questions.

Today, I put up some stuff on why the mind obviously isn't merely the brain.

Meanwhile, materialist cognitive scientist Steven Pinker of Harvard has posed a whole bunch of "dangerous questions" in the Chicago Sun-Times.

What strikes me as remarkable is how UNdangerous his questions are. Anyway, I decided to list and answer his questions, as follows:

Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?

[From Denyse: Yes, of course. Get pregnant, have and raise a baby, and you will understand. But so? (If you cannot carry out this program, not to worry, you have just made my case. Thanks much. Read on.)]

Were the events in the Bible fictitious -- not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires?

[From Denyse: Well, Steve, do you have any INFORMATION about that? Thousands of archeologists and other scholars would love to hear your news. Otherwise, take a number and wait. Anyone can have a mere opinion about events described in the Bible.]

Has the state of the environment improved in the last 50 years?

[From Denyse: Improved for whom? For me, yes. I live in a much cleaner city, and a nicer neighbourhood, too. For people in coastal China ... probably not. But they eat more regularly, and that may be worth their while.]

Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage?

[From Denyse: How much damage victims suffer depends in large part on their culture. Is the victim considered "damaged goods"? Does the society offer tacit rewards for long-term unemployment or abnormal relationships? I was sexually assaulted several times when I was young but in every case managed to fight off my assailants with a ferocity that they clearly did not expect. Was I damaged? I don't know. I'd do it again today, only faster and more lethally. Is that evidence of damage or not?]

Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape?

[From Denyse: Yes. The Iroquois wiped out the Canadian Hurons (and the Canadian martyr priests along with them). Plains Indians ran thousands of buffalo off cliffs. But so? Europeans perpetrated the Holocaust. Who dare point a finger?]

Do men have an innate tendency to rape?

[From Denyse: If they do, they better keep it in check. Almost all societies have agreed not to tolerate it. Interesting, in view of the fact that feminists claim that men run everything ... In The Spiritual Brain , neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I recap evidence from his study showing that men can and do suppress sexual arousal when asked by an investigator to do so. There is no basis for the belief that they cannot do that.]

Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?

[From Denyse: No. The "crime rate" went down because (1) the population aged (old guys don't do second story jobs or stickups) and (2) the government started jailing more perps (guys in jail don't do second story jobs or stickups). Enron still happened, and destroyed the pensions of thousands - far worse than yer average street shakedown - but those are the crimes old guys commit. Most people - for some strange reason - don't think of that stuff as "crime."]

Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven?

[From Denyse: Only if you think "well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven" are terms that have no intrinsic meaning. ]

Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?

[From Denyse: No. Rapists get off on forcing themselves on the UNwilling. If all they wanted was a hooker, they could easily find one, unfortunately, irrespective of laws.]

Do African-American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men?

[From Denyse: So what if they do? See the question on rape above. An elderly mission priest told me years ago about the severe floggings that occasional rapists would receive in the African community he ministered to decades ago. I would think that a guy's t-level is his own business if he hasn't done anything he shouldn't. And in a multicultural society, I can't see the social value of making a policy issue out of ethnic/racial/class comparisons. Basically, here or there, you either observe the law or else.]

Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality?

[From Denyse: No, it isn't. People who believe otherwise (usually expressed as "It's just The Man throwing his weight around") form the usual population of prisons around the globe. The entire spiritual tradition of the human race is against that view, and for good reason.]

Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized?

[From Denyse: Only if your society has unlimited funds to pay for treatment facilities. Write and tell me which society that is, and I will recommend that our Canadian hard cases move there ASAP.]

Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease?

[From Denyse: Huh?]

Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability?

[From Denyse: Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give the surviving kids the option of euthanizing parents who face age-related defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability? Surely, in the interests of justice, the two bills should be passed together. That way, neither group would have the obvious advantage. (I pray that neither bill will be passed in Canada.)]

Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?

[From Denyse: Are home-raised children better than street children? Why do we even wonder about this? If love doesn't matter, what does?]

Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?

[From Denyse: No. The mortality from World War II was catastrophic. Human sacrifices at the pagan summer solstices and occasional burnings of heretics by monotheistic religions were nothing by comparison with the eugenic ambitions of the twentieth century, to get rid of whole nations deemed genetically inferior.]

Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?

[From Denyse: No. The damage done by undermining traditional legal systems in the Western world that have protected witnesses and suspects for many centuries would quickly exceed the benefit from the information gained from an occasional tormented suspect.]

Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe's nuclear waste?

[From Denyse: How much would cleaning up the mess cost? We need figures here. Without figures, it is not a reasonable question.]

Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people?

[From Denyse: Is average intelligence declining at all? Is this a trick question? The fact that lots of people enjoy watching Ann Coulter or Michael Moore does not prove that they are getting stupid. They may be getting something they shouldn't be getting, but that is a matter for their spiritual advisers. I think Coulter should wear more obvious clothes on TV and Moore should lose weight and grow up. But so?]

Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?

[From Denyse: If you want to avoid raising a criminal, would you rather a child be raised by Tony Soprano or by the family of "Daddy was an old time preacher man"? Is this another trick question? It must be .... Pinker must be running out of sensible questions altogether ... isn't he?]

Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?

[From Denyse: The lives of potential donors would NOT be saved, from what I hear from China. They execute lots of young adherents of Eastern and Western religions, and use organs for executed prisoners - and could probably underbid anybody. Here in Canada, we wait for a fatal accident and hope that the victim signed a wallet card. Not very enterprising, are we? But would you rather be in trouble here or there?]

Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children?

[From Denyse: Who wants to be responsible for the failures? Isn't nature's bounty enough to manage? Taxpayers underwrite the current sustainable number of failures because we assume that no one simply chose to produce failures as opposed to successes. What if they did?]

Pinker goes on, "Perhaps you can feel your blood pressure rise as you read these questions."

No, in my case. All this stuff is way, way past its stale date.


If you are into dangerous ideas and you are a materialist, you are nowhere. In reality, the only really dangerous idea nowadays is non-materialism .

Pinker is QUITE right to point out that "Writers who have raised ideas like these [listed above] have been vilified, censored, fired, threatened and in some cases physically assaulted." But that is principally because the vile doctrine of political correctness - the business arm of materialist social policy - currently has so much power.

People are only permitted to advocate a materialist doctrine that is obviously popular at any given time. If you want to help stop that, support The FIRE. (Anyone who knows of other similar groups, please write in and I will add them to this post. The FIRE isn't perfect but it does clean up a lot of sludge.)

But ultimately, you can't stop the effects of materialism if you do not think that the mind is real. And you need to know why and how it is real.

Evolutionary psychology: So they really DON'T believe all that rot?

In "On Second Thought ... Scientists are supposed to change their minds when evidence undercuts their views. Dream on" (January 3, 2009), Newsweek's Sharon Begley, co-author of The Mind and the Brain, spills the beans (as if we hadn't seen them spilled all over the floor a long time ago - but never mind):

The most fascinating backpedaling is by scientists who have long pushed
evolutionary psychology. This field holds that we all carry genes that led to reproductive success in the Stone Age, and that as a result men are genetically driven to be promiscuous and women to be coy, that men have a biological disposition to rape and to kill mates who cheat on them, and that every human behavior is "adaptive"—that is, helpful to reproduction. But as Harvard biologist Marc Hauser now concedes, evidence is "sorely missing" that language, morals and many other human behaviors exist because they help us mate and reproduce. And Steven
Pinker, one of evo-psych's most prominent popularizers, now admits that many human genes are changing more quickly than anyone imagined. If genes that affect brain function and therefore behavior are also evolving quickly, then we do not have the Stone Age brains that evo-psych supposes, and the field "may have to reconsider the simplifying assumption that biological evolution was pretty much over" 50,000 years ago, Pinker says. How has the view that reproduction is all, and that humans are just cavemen with better haircuts, hung on so long? "Even in science," says neuroscientist Roger Bingham of the University of California, San Diego, "a seductive story will sometimes … outpace the data." And withstand it, too.

Well, it's reassuring that some people are beginning to rethink this idiocy. As I have often pointed out, it's all part of what we know that ain't so. To the extent that anyone takes it seriously, it can do serious harm.

Look, let me be clear about this: There is stuff in brain science that really is so.

A blood clot could indeed kill or paralyse you. You could develop a tumour that is difficult to excise. Alzheimer is a late life illness you can fight off only by the most stringent measures, and even then you may lose the battle. But that is what's true, and no one can deny it.

The evolutionary pyschologists's "cave men with better haircuts" is just a time-waster in a world where serious neuroscience issues must be addressed.

Hat tip: Brains on Purpose.

Jerry "Headaches don't have themselves" Fodor on evolutionary psychology

Jerry Fodor, who points out that headaches do not have themselves, also weighs in on the trouble with "psychological Darwinism" (evolutionary psychology), here and why he, as a "new rationalist," does not accept it, in a review of materialist cognitive science books, such as Pinker's and Plotkin's, in the London Review of Books:

Plotkin says 'neo-Darwinian theory [is] the central theorem of all biology, including behavioural biology'; 'if behaviour is adaptive, then it must be the product of evolution.' Likewise Pinker: 'Natural selection is the only explanation we have of how complex life can evolve . . . [so] natural selection is indispensable to understanding the human mind.' One reply to this argument is to say that there is, after all, an alternative to natural selection as the source of adaptive complexity; you could get some by a miracle. But I'm not a Creationist, nor are any of my New Rationalist friends, as far as I know. Nor do we have to be, since there's another way out of the complexity argument. This is a long story, but here's the gist: it's common ground that the evolution of our behaviour was mediated by the evolution of our brains. So, what matters with regard to the question whether the mind is an adaptation is not how complex our behaviour is, but how much change you would have to make in an ape's brain to produce the cognitive structure of a human mind. And about this, exactly nothing is known. That' because nothing is known about how the structure of our minds depends on the structure of our brains. Nobody even knows which brain structures it is that our cognitive capacities depend on. Unlike our minds, our brains are, by any gross measure, very like those of apes. So it looks as though relatively small alterations of brain structure must have produced very large behavioural discontinuities in the transition from the ancestral apes to us. If that's right, then you don't have to assume that cognitive complexity is shaped by the gradual action of Darwinian selection on prehuman behavioural phenotypes.

A friend says, of Fodor, that he is a common-sense doubter of Darwinian materialism, like David Stove. For one thing, he makes quite clear, as Stove did, why one doesn't need to be a creationist of any type in order to dismiss the evo psycho nonsense to its most suitable venue - fluffy magazine articles on why you can't help cheating on your sweetie 'cause it's in your genes.

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

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

3. Les approches non-matérialistes ont clairement démontré leur intérêt dans le domaine de la santé mentale.

Oui, ce livre – qui s’écarte de la tendance générale des livres de neurosciences destinés au grand public – remet en question le matérialisme. Bien plus que cela, il présente des données suggérant que le matérialisme n’est pas vrai. Vous verrez par vous-même que les preuves en faveur du matérialisme ne sont pas aussi solides que Steven Pinker voudrait vous le faire croire. Votre croyance dans le matérialisme ne pourrait subsister qu’en supposant – sur la base de la foi – que toute preuve du contraire qui vous est fournie doit être fausse.

Par exemple, ainsi que nous le verrons, un matérialiste croit volontiers – sans aucune preuve fiable d’aucune sorte – que les grands leaders spirituels souffrent d’épilepsie du lobe temporal droit, et non qu’ils vivent des expériences spirituelles éclairantes pour les autres autant qu’eux-mêmes. Quand la spiritualité est concernée, ces données d’expériences sont gênantes pour un matérialisme étroit. Ceci car un système comme le matérialisme est gravement altéré par toute preuve apportée contre lui. En conséquence, les observations qui résistent au matérialisme sont simplement ignorées par de nombreux scientifiques. Par exemple, les matérialistes mènent depuis des décennies une guerre d’usure contre la recherche sur les phénomènes psi (connaissance ou action à distance, comme la perception extrasensorielle : télépathie, précognition ou télékinésie), car la moindre preuve en faveur de la validité du psi, même mineure, est fatale à leur système idéologique. Récemment par exemple, des sceptiques autoproclamés ont attaqué le chercheur athée Sam Harris pour avoir avancé, dans son livre intitulé The End of Faith (La Fin de la Foi, 2004), que la recherche psi a une certaine validité.

Harris ne fait que s’appuyer sur des données, comme nous le verrons. Mais en faisant cela il viole ostensiblement un tenant important du matérialisme : l’idéologie matérialiste va à l’encontre de
certaines données.

Mais d’autres défis sont lancés au matérialisme. Les matérialistes sont tenus de penser que leurs esprits ne sont qu’une illusion créée par les mécanismes du cerveau, et par conséquent que le libre arbitre n’existe pas en réalité et ne peut donc exercer un contrôle sur le moindre trouble.
Mais les approches non-matérialistes ont clairement démontré leur intérêt dans le domaine de la santé mentale. En voici quelques exemples qui sont présentés dans ce livre.

• Jeffrey Schwartz, un neuropsychiatre non matérialiste de l’UCLA (université de Californie de Los Angeles), traite les troubles obsessionnels compulsifs (TOC) – une maladie neuropsychiatrique caractérisée par des pensées pénibles, intrusives et non sollicitées – en amenant les patients à reprogrammer leur cerveau. Leurs esprits remodèlent donc leurs cerveaux. De la même façon, certains de mes collègues neuroscientifiques de l’université de Montréal et moi-même avons démontré, grâce aux techniques d’imagerie cérébrale, les éléments suivants :

• Les femmes et les jeunes filles peuvent exercer un contrôle volontaire sur l’intensité de leur réaction à des pensées tristes, bien que les jeunes filles aient eu plus de mal à y parvenir.

• Les hommes qui regardent des films érotiques sont tout à fait capables de contrôler leurs réactions, lorsqu’on leur demande de le faire.

• Les gens qui souffrent de phobies comme l’arachnophobie (peur des araignées) peuvent réorganiser leurs cerveaux de telle sorte qu’ils surmontent la peur.

Les preuves d’un contrôle de l’esprit sur le cerveau sont bel et bien contenues dans ces études. Le contrôle de « l’esprit sur la matière » est une réalité. Nous possédons le pouvoir de la volonté, une conscience et des émotions, et en combinant cela à un sens de la finalité et de la signification, nous pouvons engendrer le changement.

Il fut un temps où les explications matérialistes de la religion et de la spiritualité valaient au moins la peine d’être prises en considération. Par exemple, Sigmund Freud disait que les souvenirs infantiles d’une figure paternelle amenaient les personnes religieuses à croire en Dieu.L’explication de Freud n’a pas tenu car le christianisme est la seule grande religion qui insiste sur la paternité de Dieu. Bien que fausse, son idée n’était pas pour autant ridicule. Les relations avec le père, heureuses ou non, sont des expériences humaines complexes, qui comportent des analogies avec la religion. De même, l’anthropologue J.G. Frazer pensait que les religions modernes sont nées de cultes primitifs voués à la fertilité, qui ont été ensuite « spiritualisés ».

En réalité, les indices désignent plus précisément les expériences spirituelles comme la source des croyances et des rituels religieux qui sont apparus ensuite. Toutefois, l’idée de Frazer était loin d’être triviale. Elle résultait d’une étude longue et approfondie d’anciens systèmes de croyance. Mais les explications matérialistes de la religion et de la spiritualité sont récemment devenues hors de contrôle. Influencés par le préjugé matérialiste, les médias populaires se jettent sur les histoires de gène de la violence, gène de l’obésité, gène de la monogamie, gène de l’infidélité, et même désormais un gène de Dieu !

L’argument se présente ainsi : les psychologues évolutionnistes tentent d’expliquer la spiritualité humaine et la croyance en Dieu en suggérant que ceux parmi les hommes des cavernes qui croyaient en une réalité surnaturelle avaient plus de chances de transmettre leurs gènes que les autres. Les progrès en génétique et en neurosciences ont encouragé certains à rechercher très sérieusement un tel gène de Dieu, ou bien un point de Dieu, un module, un facteur, ou un « interrupteur » de Dieu dans le cerveau humain.

À l’époque où l’incroyable « casque de Dieu » (un casque de motoneige équipé de solénoïdes qui peuvent soi-disant stimuler les sujets pour vivre une expérience spirituelle), à Sudbury au Canada, a aimanté les journalistes scientifiques dans les années 1990 (la décennie du cerveau), le matérialisme s’apprêtait à franchir les limites du ridicule. Pourtant, ils continuent à rechercher un « interrupteur » de Dieu. Ces quelques digressions farfelues mises à part, on ne peut échapper au non-matérialisme de l’esprit humain. Par essence, il n’y a pas « d’interrupteur » de Dieu.

Ainsi que les études avec les soeurs carmélites l’ont démontré et que ce livre va le détailler, les expériences spirituelles sont complexes, tout comme nos expériences des relations humaines. Elles laissent des signatures dans de nombreux emplacements du cerveau. Ce fait est cohérent (bien que non démonstratif par lui-même) avec l’idée que la personne vivant une expérience spirituelle entre en contact avec une réalité extérieure à elle-même.

Il se trouve que le matérialisme est périmé. Il n’apporte aucune hypothèse utile pour comprendre l’esprit humain ou les expériences spirituelles, et il en est même très loin. Un peu au-delà se trouve un vaste domaine dans lequel le matérialisme ne peut entrer, et qu’il peut encore moins explorer. Mais la bonne nouvelle est qu’en l’absence de matérialisme, il existe des signes montrant que la spiritualité peut tout à fait être étudiée et explorée à l’aide des neurosciences modernes.

Les neurosciences non-matérialistes ne sont pas contraintes de rejeter, nier, justifier, ou de traiter comme des problèmes toutes les données qui contrarient le matérialisme. Cela est prometteur car les recherches actuelles viennent alimenter un corpus croissant de telles preuves. Trois exemples abordés dans ce livre sont : l’effet psi, les expériences de mort imminente (EMI ou NDE pour Near-Death Experiences), et l’effet placebo.

L’effet psi, tel qu’il est observé dans des phénomènes comme la perception extrasensorielle et la psychokinèse, est un effet de faible intensité, certes, mais les tentatives pour l’infirmer ont échoué. Les EMI sont également un thème de recherche plus présent ces dernières années, probablement parce que le développement de techniques de réanimation efficaces a permis la survie d’un plus grand nombre de personnes qui peuvent rapporter ces expériences. Grâce aux travaux de chercheurs tels que Pim van Lommel, Sam Parnia, Peter Fenwick et Bruce Greyson,
nous disposons désormais d’une base d’informations qui s’enrichit.

Les observations ne confirment pas une vision matérialiste de l’esprit et de la conscience, comme celle proposée par Pinker, qui a écrit dans Time : « Quand l’activité physiologique du cerveau cesse, tout ce que l’on peut dire est que la conscience de cette personne quitte l’existence. » La plupart d’entre nous n’ont pas vécu d’expériences inhabituelles comme l’effet psi ou une EMI, mais nous avons certainement tous déjà fait l’expérience de l’effet placebo : Ne vous est-il jamais arrivé d’aller chez un médecin pour faire établir un certificat médical disant que vous ne pouvez pas vous rendre au travail, à cause d’un mauvais rhume – et soudain, assis là dans la salle d’attente et feuilletant des magazines, vous commencez à vous sentir mieux ?

C’est une situation embarrassante, mais facile à expliquer : votre esprit génère des messages qui enclenchent les processus analgésiques ou de guérison dès lors que vous avez accepté d’entamer un chemin de guérison. Les neurosciences matérialistes ont longtemps considéré l’effet placebo comme étant un problème, mais c’est l’un des phénomènes les mieux démontrés en médecine. Pour les neurosciences non matérialistes au contraire, c’est un effet normal qui peut être d’un grand intérêt thérapeutique lorsqu’il est correctement utilisé.

Le matérialisme est semble-t-il incapable de répondre aux questions clés sur la nature de l’être humain et ses perspectives d’y répondre un jour de façon intelligible sont réduites. Il a toutefois convaincu des millions de personnes qu’elles ne devraient pas chercher à développer leur nature spirituelle puisqu’elles n’en ont aucune.

Certains pensent que la solution est de continuer à soutenir le matérialisme un peu plus fermement que par le passé. Ces dernières années, d’importants porte-paroles du matérialisme ont lancé une croisade « anti-Dieu » largement médiatisée et quelque peu étrange.

Les travaux antithéistes tels que Breaking the Spell : Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Briser le sort : la religion comme phénomène naturel, Daniel Dennett), The God Delusion, (L’Illusion de Dieu, Richard Dawkins), The Failed Hypothesis – How Science Shows that God Does Not
Exist, (La Fausse Hypothèse – comment la science montre que Dieu n’existe pas, Victor J. Stenger), God Is Not Great (Dieu n’est pas Grand, Christopher Hitchens), et Letters to a Christian Nation (Lettres à une nation chrétienne, Sam Harris) – aucun de ces ouvrages n’est pour l’instant disponible en français –, s’accompagnent de conférences telles qu’ « Au-delà de la croyance » du réseau Science Network, et de campagnes comme le «Youtube blasphemy challenge » (Le Défi du blasphème sur le site internet Youtube).

Il est remarquable de constater qu’il n’y a pas une seule idée nouvelle dans tout ce que ces gens ont à dire. Les philosophes du XVIIIe siècle l’avaient déjà dit avant eux avec autant, sinon moins, de succès. En outre, de récents travaux ont été assaisonnés de certaines propositions contestables de la psychologie évolutionniste – cette tentative de faire dériver la religion et la spiritualité de pratiques pouvant avoir permis à quelques-uns de nos ancêtres du pléistocène de transmettre leurs gènes.

Mais nos ancêtres du pléistocène sont morts depuis si longtemps que l’on ne peut apprendre grand-chose d’une discipline à laquelle il manque un sujet d’étude. On nous donne également de multiples garanties concernant la nature illusoire du cerveau, de la conscience, du libre arbitre, et l’inutilité voire le danger de la spiritualité.

Prochaine : 4. Comment pouvons-nous étudier scientifiquement la spiritualité ?

Note: The English language version starts here.

Atheism losing confidence, credibility?

Dinesh D'Souza, an all-in-one toolkit against atheism and/or nihilism, comments:

Contemporary atheism marches behind the banner of science. It is perhaps no surprise that several leading atheists—from biologist Richard Dawkins to cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker to physicist Victor Stenger—are also leading scientists. The central argument of these scientific atheists is that modern science has refuted traditional religious conceptions of a divine creator.

But of late atheism seems to be losing its scientific confidence. One sign of this is the public advertisements that are appearing in billboards from London to Washington DC. Dawkins helped pay for a London campaign to put signs on city buses saying, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Humanist groups in America have launched a similar campaign in the nation’s capital. “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake.” And in Colorado atheists are sporting billboards apparently inspired by John Lennon: “Imagine…no religion.”

Well, my Turkish journalist friend Mustafa Akyol - doubtless as bored as I am with all that stuff - has responded,

There is a God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life.

... we have to ask whether man is happier when he feels free from responsibility or when he takes on responsibilities that he willingly fulfills. I would place my bet on the latter. Therefore, I have to turn down the kind suggestion to "stop worrying and enjoy life" that atheists are spreading around. If I were an atheist, I would rather sit down, reflect about the meaninglessness and the inevitable tragic end of all my existence, and descend pessimistically into nihilism. I am rather happy because I am convinced that life has a meaning and death is not the end - and that there is a God.

Life is often a tragedy, but seldom a mere farce.

Music is an earworm. No wait, it is evolutionary cheesecake. Oh, wait, just a minute .... This just in ...

Driving back with friends from Ottawa to Toronto recently, I managed to catch this program where a CBC journalist interviewed humanist neurologist Oliver Sacks on the subject of music. Sacks disagrees with Harvard's Steve Pinker, who claims that music is evolutionary cheesecake but then he stops midway through the program and makes a big pitch for materialism that completely goes against everything else he has said. And of course music could just be an earworm after all ....

The only thing music cannot be, apparently, is a hint that there is more to life than nature red in tooth and claw.

Here's the interview. Funny, these people would pick the Year of Completely Ridiculous Darwin Hagiography to just fall apart intellectually. Some big changes are obviously happening.

Neuroscience and popular culture: How much are journalists to blame for pop science culture?

Don't blame journalists, says Jonah Lehrer here on the reporting of science. He makes some excellent points:

Scientists are almost never subjected to critical coverage in the mainstream media. Quick: name the last newspaper or magazine article that dared to criticize or skeptically analyze a piece of published research. If you had trouble thinking of an article, it's because it almost never happens. And this isn't because science is perfect. As a JAMA study reported last year, almost a third of medical studies published in the most prestigious journals are wrong. Flat out false. These are the same studies that get that get faithfully recited in our daily newspapers day after day. This gullible reporting stands in sharp contrast to the way scientists actually perceive things. When I talk to scientists, I'm always impressed by the way they criticize the research of their peers. To take a recent example: a few weeks ago I spent over an hour listening to a neuroeconomist elegantly dissect a very influential fMRI study. (Other scientists subsequently echoed his criticisms.) And yet this same study has been covered extensively in the press, with nary a hint of skepticism. The fact is, science journalists suffer from an excess of politeness. We are intimidated by all the acronyms, and forget to ask difficult questions. But this is our duty. Most researchers, after all, are funded by tax dollars. They have an obligation to explain their research to the public.

He recommends that we stop letting science journals control the flow of news. I agree, except that in areas like "evolutionary psychology," public funding usually means a licence to propound whatever you want, and call it science. Anyway, assuming we all agree that this situation is a disgrace - in the phrase of the old folk tale - who will put the bell on the cat?

Look, I am a science journalist myself, and I say yes, blame science journalists. Too many of us just do not even think to ask enough of the right questions about too many stories.

In fairness, when we do ask, as Lehrer implies, we run into problems. Recently, I offered a piece to a peer reviewed science journal, on why most people do not believe atheistic materialism, as it is represented in popular culture. That's my specific beat.

I warned the editor that I write like a journalist, not like an academic. My offer was accepted, but when I got the peer review, I was dismayed.

It was full of pettifogging demands for definitions of stuff no one needs defining in the context.

Like, for example, when Dean Hamer says that we are a bunch of chemicals running around in a bag or Steve Pinker explains how infanticide "helps" evolution – what’s not to understand? Hundreds of millions of people read this stuff in the popular press - and they understand. It is a series of overlapping circles whose core is materialist atheism.

I withdrew the paper and found another home for it. From that experience, I realized two things:

1. I could never write anything they would want.

2. They would never want anything I could write. (Even though I know stuff they don't.)

Meanwhile, I wrote the lead editor, and said, “If a story rolled through the science press saying that “Sex with dogs helps evolution, study finds”, would anyone really be surprised?”

Would anyone question it? Would anyone ask, is this really science?

That would be nice. But be still, my heart! That train she be a long time comin'.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

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

Edge Question: Which science concept would make everyone think better?

Here is the "Edge World Question Center", a leading materialist think tank, with 2011's Question:

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER

James Flynn has defined "shorthand abstractions" (or "SHA's") as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates ("market", "placebo", "random sample," "naturalistic fallacy," are a few of his examples). His idea is that the abstraction is available as a single cognitive chunk which can be used as an element in thinking and debate.

The Edge Question 2011

WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?

The term 'scientific"is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA. A "scientific concept" may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or "in a phrase") but has broad application to understanding the world.

[Thanks to Steven Pinker for suggesting this year's Edge Question and to Daniel Kahneman for advice on its presentation.]

164 contributors, many whose names you will recognize, participated.

Any thoughts of your own? Go here to comment.

Note: Interesting, how many key words from medicine easily come to mind, yet medicine has slowly been moving away from a materialist paradigm, as Mario Beauregard and I noted in The Spiritual Brain.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

An eloquent argument against (literally!) mindless pop culture

At Big Questions Online (July 9, 2010) David Bentley Hart reviewed Marilynne Robinson's new book Absence of Mind, a blockbuster slam at reductionism:

Robinson

The chief purpose of Absence of Mind — the published version of Marilynne Robinson’s splendid Terry Lectures, delivered at Yale in 2009 — is to raise a protest against all those modern, reductively materialist accounts of human consciousness that systematically exclude the testimony of subjectivity, of inner experience, from their understanding of the sources and impulses of the mind. Its targets are all the major schools of reductionism (Freudianism, Marxism, Darwinism), but also all the currently popular champions of the reductionist cause (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, E.O. Wilson, and so on). It is, in simple terms, a robust defense of the dignity and irreducible mystery of human conscience, personal identity, and self-awareness; and, as such, it is a stirring success.

[ ... ]

Robinson’s central argument is, I think it fair to say, more or less indisputable — or, at least, it should be. It may be fashionable in certain circles, and very desirable for ideological reasons, to insist that our normal experience of consciousness is in some sense an illusion, begotten by one or another set of pre-conscious, purely material forces, which have merely dissembled themselves as personal motives, transcendental aspirations, moral principles, altruism, and so on. And it may well be the case that the “discourses of suspicion” that make these claims have spread wide enough through popular culture to have become a kind of tacit cultural orthodoxy. But, as Robinson acutely observes, there is one great problem that bedevils all the magisterial reductionist approaches to the mind, whether they be sociobiological, neurobiological, psychological, economic, or what have you: simply enough, all of them consistently prove extravagantly inadequate to what any scrupulous, unprejudiced examination of the complexity of consciousness actually reveals.

[ ... ]

In the end, perhaps the most penetrating question Robinson asks in regard to all the modern schools of suspicion is, simply enough: why? That is, if purely material, purely selfish impulses underlie all those behaviors we mistake for selfless altruism or spiritual longing or magnanimity or self-outpouring love, why do they so utterly invert themselves in our conscious minds? Why do they dissimulate themselves as the very opposite of what they are? Let us assume that the conscious mind, with all of its ambiguities and mysteries and abyssal sense of identity, is nothing but the illusory and superficial epiphenomenon of some hidden, unitary, primordial, and amoral material impulse towards survival. Very well, then, but why would it have to hide this fact? Surely it would have no need to deceive itself so elaborately, or to conceal its own genetic interests from itself, unless it already possessed some kind of moral sensitivity to the shame of selfishness. What, then, is that moral self that is there “before” the Darwinian self, whose conscience must be appeased, needing to believe that it is moved by altruism or disinterested love?

There are any number of forced answers that can be and have been made to this question, but none of them is particularly compelling.

Uncommon Descent Contest Question 17: Why do evolutionary psychologists need to debunk compassion?

Well, it certainly sounds like debunking to me. According to the evolutionary psychologists, either compassion is a useful gene or it somehow spreads our selfish genes or it is an accidental "spandrel" in our makeup. Or whatever. It's not a choice, and it's not identification with another human being derived from the independent reality of a mind thinking today. Humans do it the way ants might do something else.

Evolutionary psychologists never feel the need to debunk rage or deceit, for example, so why compassion?

Here, I reference Robert ("Non-Zero") Wright's effort to explain the evolution of compassion. See also Clive Hayden here and Steve Pinker here.

Darwinists and materialists in general keep scratching this itch. Why? What is the threat? Also, how convincing are their claims that society will be better off if we accept their version?

So, for a free copy of The Spiritual Brain: a neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, Harper One 2007): Why do evolutionary psychologists need to debunk compassion? What's in it for them?

Here are the contest rules. Four hundred words or less. Winners receive a certificate verifying their win as well as the prize. Winners must provide me with a valid postal address, though it need not be theirs. A winner's name is never added to a mailing list. Have fun!

Here's Uncommon Descent Contest Question 17 at the site, so go there to enter in the Comments box.

(Note: For the record, compassion is not necessarily a virtue. The social worker who inappropriately identifies with an abusive mom, as opposed to the child she is employed by the government to protect, is showing misdirected compassion that can end in the child's death. Compassion must be allied with reason and virtue in order to count as reasonable or virtuous.)


Notes on compassion that may be of interest:

Psychology: Compassion is an emotion, not a virtue unless disciplined, prof says

The philosopher and his mother, a moral tale

Entrepreneur doctor honours promise

Desperate atheist rage

Is the altruism spot edging out the God spot in pop science?

The power of one: Compassion is strictly a one-to-one thing