The Neurosciences of Religion: Meditation, Entheogens, Mysticism (página 2)

Partes: 1, 2

The Explanatory
Gap

It is hard to recognize ourselves – our subjective
experiences, thoughts, emotions, and daily activities – in
this neurological description of our brains. Normally we
have no conscious awareness of the cognitive modules and Rube
Goldberg machines in our head. Cognitive neuroscientists
and philosophers of mind refer to this the "Explanatory
Gap". Our physical descriptions of the way the brain works
at the level of neurons, brain anatomy, and neurological
processes bear no resemblance to our subjective experiences as
people with brains having complex mental and emotional
states. Nor is there any neurological definition of
consciousness. We have no device that can measure presence or
absence of consciousness. This is also referred to as the
"Hard Problem" in consciousness studies. We can study
brains and learn all kinds of interesting and practical things
about brains, their functions and dysfunctions, but this does not
get us near to understanding what subjective conscious experience
is or how the brain creates it. We know that a diseased or
damaged brain may lose function or consciousness, ultimately
resulting in death, but we do not know what consciousness per se
is at the level of the "neural code".

Some are optimistic that we are closing this Explanatory
Gap, that we will soon come to understand the "neural code" and
be able to translate the "machine language" of the brain into the
"software
applications" of human consciousness. Indeed, a lot of
progress has been made in understanding how the brain
functions. Scientists have probed, prodded, tested,
measured, dissected, and scanned lots and lots of brains, both
human and animal. Scientists have also developed a
remarkable pharmacology of new drugs to treat depression,
schizophrenia, and other disorders.

Progress in the neurosciences raises lots of other
interesting philosophical questions, which necessarily overlap
with religious and theological concerns. First, there is
the question of reductionism and how far it can go? If we
can reduce certain mental phenomena, say mystical experiences of
enlightenment, to neurological processes, does that mean that we
have adequately explained the experience and can dismiss
it? What happens if we invent ways to stimulate these peak
experiences at will? If the brain is a deterministic system, then
how can we talk about free will, moral
responsibility, and creative choice? If personality is
intrinsically linked to brain chemistry should we reject the
dualism between brain and mind, body and soul? In treating
mental illness should we "waste time" with talk therapy or simply
treat these illnesses with medications? Do the cognitive
neurosciences import assumed values and perspectives that are
more ideological than empirical? And what of bioethical
issues that arise in the context of neuromedicine? This is
just a short list and we are going to revisit some of these
questions below and in the discussion to follow. The Hard
Question remains: what is consciousness? Can we fill in the
Explanatory Gap between the neurosciences and subjective
experience? And what in particular is the nature of
religious experience from the perspective of the
neurosciences?

Science does not need to solve all of these
philosophical problems. That, I would argue, is not the job
of science, but rather the task of scientifically informed
philosophers and theologians. Science can and does continue
to plod along in its methodical manner. The neurosciences
move ahead by formulating small questions and then constructing
experiments to try to answer them. The neurological basis
of religious and spiritual experiences is certainly an
interesting question and it has recently been the subject of a
lot of fascinating research in laboratories and debate in the
academe and in the media. There are a number of ways to
tackle the question:

Disease and injury based studies
Surgical studies
Functional Imaging studies
Psychotropics drugs studies
Developmental studies

1) Disease and Injury Based Studies

As already mentioned, many insights about the brain are
derived from the study of brain disease and injury. For
instance, there may be a link between mental illness and
religiosity, for instance in the case of schizophrenia, in which
psychotic episodes often have religious content. Indeed,
for many decades the psychiatric community classified all
religious content as delusional or neurotic in its Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSMMD) (Larson 1993). That is happily no longer
the case. The psychiatric community has slowly come around
to recognizing that religious manifestations among patients may
be a sign of strength, a resource in healing, and not necessarily
pathological (Hufford 2005).

There is a lot of interest in the role of the frontal
lobes in religious experience. Traumatic injuries to the
frontal lobes have a profound effect on a person’s
personality, impulse control, and
complex thought processes. The seat of cognition, however,
does not work alone. It is part of a complex network, left,
right, inside out, and all around. V.S. Ramachandran, a
neuroscientist at UC San Diego, has focused on Left Temporal Lobe
epilepsy, which is frequently associated with religious visions
during seizures and a preoccupation with religious issues between
seizure episodes. Ramachandran speculates that Saint Paul,
Mohammad, and other prophets and sages were afflicted with Left
Temporal Lobe epilepsy (Ramachandran 1998). Ramachandran
notes that "God may be the ultimate confabulation of the Left
Hemisphere of the brain" (Ramachandran 2006).

There are other mental defects that manifest themselves
in otherwise mentally healthy individuals. For instance,
with Charles Bonnet Syndrome, people have complex visual
hallucinations of people, animals, or objects not actually
present. With Capgras’s Syndrome, otherwise mentally
healthy individuals have delusions that people around them have
been replaced by imposters.

Another, much more common mental disorder is known as
Sleep Paralysis or Agoraphobia. Probably many of you have
had the experience of waking up at night with an inability to
move and the strong sense of someone else in the room with
you. This is not a pleasant experience. The
presence-in-the-room is typically perceived to be a demon of some
sort and the experience is generally terrifying. This is
such a common experience that it has many names, folk stories,
and mythological explanations in diverse cultures around the
world. Neuroscientists now have an etiology for sleep
paralysis, but one could easily imagine how this experience or
others would help give rise to religious beliefs in demons,
ghosts, or the devil (Hufford 1982).

There is one other neurological disorder that is worth
mentioning. Synesthesia is a condition that might be thought of
as metaphoric thought on steroids. It typically involves
things like hearing sounds and seeing colors, reading numbers and
seeing colors, seeing colors and hearing sounds. Perhaps
one in a thousand humans have some form on synesthesia in varying
degrees. It is not necessarily unpleasant. Indeed,
far from being a disorder, it can be seen as a mental
strength. As we would expect, many creative artists have
synesthesia.

Synesthesia may be linked to a much more common mental
functions that all of us employ everyday, the ability to make and
use metaphors, of which religion is an important subset. A
metaphor is the combination of two unlike things to create a new
meaning. Shakespeare
writes that "time is a beggar" and now we have a new insight into
time. You may have noticed that I have used several
metaphors from the computer sciences to illuminate the
neurosciences – neural "code", neural "machine language",
mental "software", neural "networks", etc. Science also
uses metaphors. In some sense, all human language is
derived from metaphors (Ricoeur 1976). Religion can be thought of
as something like the metaphoric confabulations of synesthesia,
seeing nature and hearing the voice of God or the Buddha-nature
in all things (Ramachandran 1998).

2. Surgical Studies

Surgical studies are much more limited, because doctors
cannot ethically open up someone’s brain and start poking
around, say like fixing a car or a computer. The occasion
to do surgery on live humans is typically to remove a brain tumor
and these are risky operations. Because the brain has no
sensory nerves and cannot feel pain, brain surgery is typically
done on conscious humans, which means you can ask them questions
during the surgery. In the 1950s, Wilder Penfield, a
Canadian neurosurgeon, electrically stimulated different regions
of patients’ brains during surgery and asked patients to
describe any sensations. Stimulation of the right temporal
lobe caused patients to hear voices and see apparitions.
Around the same time, Robert Heath of Tulane University induced
intense pleasure in psychiatric patients with electrodes
implanted in the septum, a minute region just above the
hypothalamus. He also induced multiple orgasms in a female
patient by injecting the neurotransmitter acetylcholine directly
into her septal region. These kinds of studies would not be
allowed today by the Internal Review Boards at medical schools,
and rightly so, but they were certainly illuminating and
suggestive. Certainly, every neuroscience course and
textbook today still presents the work of Penfield and
Heath.

Based in part on these kinds of studies, Julian Jaynes
proposed a unique theory of religion in his 1976 book, The
Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind. Jaynes speculated that there were structural
changes in the human brain some 10,000 years ago. He
suggested that the bundle of nerves connecting the two
hemispheres of the brain, the corpus callosum, may not have been
as developed as it is today. In our ancestors’
brains, the left hemisphere, acting as the primary seat of
language and identity, would misattribute signals originating
from the right hemisphere to an external source, and thus
imagined ghosts or gods (Jaynes 1976).

Brain surgery research continues on nonhuman animals,
but alas lab rats, dogs, and monkeys cannot report to us on their
subjective experience. Nevertheless, we learn a lot about
how the brain functions, which is then correlated with human
brain function. We are also embarking upon a new era of
electrical implant machines to help patients with Parkinson or
other brain disorders, as well as brain implants to help
quadriplegics to control computers with their thoughts
alone. All of this will have implications for our
understanding of religious and spiritual phenomena, some of which
may have been best prefigured in science fiction
novels.

3. Functional Imaging Studies

New non-invasive technologies now allows us to look
inside the brains of humans without adverse risks to the
patient. Improvements in these technologies allow us
measure actual brain functions while performing limited tasks or
experiences and compare these states to some base-line
image. These are referred to as functional brain imaging
studies. The earliest form of such techniques was involved
using electroencephalographs of brain waves, as well as measures
of autonomic activities such as heart rate and blood pressure
changes, for instance, as used in early meditation studies.
You are probably familiar with the term "bio-feedback device,"
which were popular in the 1970s. This approach, however,
has been compared to trying to understand human speech by
listening to the sound of a sport stadium. The new
technology is much more powerful, but not without its
limitations. There are three new techniques for functional
brain imaging and each has different strengths and
weaknesses.

PET scans, or positron emission tomography, uses a
radioactive tracer injected into blood stream of the subject to
measure oxygen flow, glucose consumption, blood utilization, or
neurotransmitters in different regions of the brain. This
then indicates which areas of the brain are most active in any
given experience or activity. The injection provides a
freeze frame at a particular moment and then is followed by the
actual scan of the brain. The problem with PET scan is that
the tracers are only present for a few minutes, so the patient
needs to be already in the scanning device before the injection
occurs. Hospital scanning devices are not particularly
conducive to having profound mystical experiences.

Another category of imaging technology is fMRI, which
stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging. The
advantage of fMRI is that it does not involve injecting
radioactive tracers into the blood stream of the patient.
The disadvantage is that it involves placing the patient inside a
claustrophobia-inducing machine that makes loud banging noises,
only slight more tolerable than listening to a jackhammer.
Again, this is not an atmosphere particularly conducive to
contemplative practice or religious devotion.

The functional imaging technology most suited to the
kind of research proposed is SPECT scan, which stands for Single
Photon Emission Computed Tomography. This involves using a
longer lasting radioactive tracer. Typical research design
has the patients outfitted with an IV and a button so they can
self inject the tracer at what they subjectively consider to be
the peak experience in meditation or prayer. This can be
done in a comfortable room in the hospital near the SPECT scan
machine and can involve the use of ritual objects, incense,
chanting, prayer, etc. After the peak experience and the
tracer’s "snapshot" record of brain activity at the time of
injection, the subject can then be put into the scanning machine
to measure brain metabolism from the tracer "snapshot" some
minutes earlier.

Andrew Newberg and his deceased colleague Eugene
D’Aquili pioneered this research with religious
subjects. Their first study involved eight American
Buddhist trained in the Tibetan meditation and three Franciscan
nuns. They observed increased neural activity in the
prefrontal cortex and decreased activity in the posterior
superior parietal lobe. The latter is connected with the
ability to navigate the physical self in an external world.
They hypothesized that the decreased activity in posterior
superior parietal lobe was linked to the experience of
non-duality described by the subjects. They call this
experience "Absolute Unitary Being" (Newberg 1999; Newberg
2000). They maintain that "mystical experience is
biologically, observably, and scientifically ‘real’
rather than ‘wishful thinking’ (Newberg 2001) and go
on to speculate:

[We] saw evidence of a neurological process that has
evolved to allow humans to transcend material existence and
acknowledge and connect with a deeper, more spiritual part of
ourselves perceived of as an absolute, universal reality that
connects us to all others (Newberg 2001)

4. Pharmaceutical Interventions

Psychotropic or psychedelic drugs have long been part of
human religious practices in diverse parts of the world.
The authors of the Hindu Vedas received inspiration from the drug
soma, which is thought to be derived from psychedelic
mushrooms, psilocybin or fly agaric, perhaps in combination with
cannabis or other substances. The ancient Greek Eleusinian
Mysteries also involved the use of some kind of psychedelic
drug. Tribal shamans from Africa, Asia, and the
Americas use psychotropic drugs as part of their rituals.
The Native American Church in the United States won a Supreme
Count case to ensure their right to use peyote in their religious
observances. The urge for intoxication is not limited to
humans. Chimpanzees, elephants, parrots, and other species
ingest fermented fruit and other intoxicants. UCLA
psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel speculates that the desire for
intoxication is "the fourth drive" after hunger, thirst, and sex
(Siegel 1989). The suggestion in this line of research is
that perhaps religion is founded on this desire to get
high.

Ergot, a fungus that contaminates rye, wheat, and
barley, also has psychotropic properties and is probably used
intentionally as part of the Eleusinian Mysteries. It has
also caused many accidental poisonings in human history.
Ergot epidemics were known as St. Anthony’s Fire in the
Middle Ages and may be linked to incidents of mass hysteria and
hallucinations. The synthesis of LSD in 1942 by the Swiss
chemist Albert Hoffman was based on an Ergot
derivative.

In addition to LSD, modern science has synthesized a
great number of new psychotropic and psychedelic compounds.
Some prefer to use the term Entheogens, meaning "God-inducing",
to describe this class of chemicals, because of their ability to
induce intense mystical experiences. The most common and
quite potent drugs are:

Mescaline ––
3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine,
LSD — lysergic acid diethylamide,
DMT – 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine, and
MDMA
(3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine),commonly known as
Ecstasy

All of these chemicals bare some resemblance to
endogenous neurochemicals in the brain like dopabite,
norepinehrine, sorotoni, and opiates. DMT, a powerful
psychedelic drug can also be produced naturally in the human
brain. The ritual use of these drugs and others in
religious ceremonies is quite extensive. In the 1950s and
1960s, these drugs had been used to treat more than forty
thousand patients for a variety of illnesses and over one
thousand papers describing these treatments had been published in
peer review journals. But then came the excesses of Timothy
Lear and the hippies and the drugs became controlled substance,
their use illegal in most countries (Horgan 2003).

It is not clear what we learn about religion and
spirituality by using and studying these drugs. Are they a
shortcut to enlightenment or simply a drug-induced experience
with no greater significance? Are other kinds of religious
rituals and practice simply a different method for inducing these
kinds of experiences that basically harness the brain’s
capacity to hallucinate? It is worth noting that we do discover
some "form constants" in these drug-induced experiences, for
instance, the recurrence of mandala-like geometric patterns in
hallucinations (Horgan 2003).

Psychopharmacology is powerful stuff, so we should not
be too dismissive. A lot of drugs provide powerful relief
for clinical depression, schizophrenia, and other ailments.
Drug companies continue research and invent/discover new
compounds. The implications of new spiritual drugs are
intriguing and disconcerting.

One thought experiment proposed by my colleague Jeremy
Sherman involved an imagined compound, Darnitol, that would
disrupt the somatic nervous system, such that if you did not pay
attention to your breathing and consciously will your breathing,
you would soon die. This imagined drug would have no side
effects and would only last for a few hours. No longer
would a person need to spend years learning meditation techniques
in a monastery. A few hours with Darnitol and you would
achieve instant satori (or die) (Sherman 1999). Maybe
mysticism, enlightenment, whatever you want to call it, is just a
neurochemical state that can be induced by rigorous training in a
meditative tradition or a simple pill taken on a Sunday
afternoon.

5. Brain Development

It is important to remember that brains grow and evolve
throughout life, but especially in childhood. In the second
year of life, the brain of a human baby is only about fifty
percent developed. The maximum size of a brain is reached
in adolescence around the age of sixteen. Different parts of the
brain mature at different stages. There are periods of high
dendrite and synapse formation and other periods of pruning in
which the number of neurons and synaptic connections are
reduced. Some neuronal connections are enhanced through the
formation of lipid sheaths around the axions that speed and
strengthen neural transmissions. This process is known as
myelination, the conversion of gray matter neurons into white
matter neurons. Myelinated neural connections play a much
more important role in mental processes, than un-myelinated
neural connections.

Humans have a universal dispositions to learn language,
music, and religion, but the specific language, genre of music,
and religious tradition is a matter of the geography and culture
of birth. Note that all religions also use music and
language, so these connections may be more than incidental to the
development of brains and religions.

It may be that adolescence is a particularly important
time for the transmission of religion, that there is a
neurological disposition and evolved expectation that cultures
utilize. This can be seen in the prevalence of rites of
initiation. Seventy percent of the cultures studied by
anthropologists have some formal adolescent initiation
practice. Some are for males only. Some are for
females only. Some are for both. These rites of
passage generally involve separation from family and community,
seclusion, physical hardship, psychological stress,
deprivation of food or water or sleep, sometimes also torture and
body mutilation. These initiation rites precede marriage,
reproduction, and adult responsibilities and rights within the
social group (Alcorta 2006).

It may be that those cultures that do not have a formal
adolescent initiation ceremony do so at great risk to their
wellbeing and survival. Adolescents have a way of
initiating themselves in the manner of Lord of the Flies
or the Ragging rituals at Sri Lankan universities in the absence
of a formal adult initiation ritual. I think of the
contrast between Thai Buddhism and Sri Lankan Buddhism. In
Thailand, it is the expectation and a matter of aristocratic
honor that all pre-adolescent males spend a few years living and
schooling inside the monastery, before returning to
society. There is no similar practice in the Sri Lankan
Sangha, but conceivably it would be a useful practice to
institute here.

Problems and
Issues

There are a number of problems inherent in these
neuroscientific studies of religious and spiritual
phenomena. First and foremost, religion is a complex
neurocognitive experiences that include rituals, social groups,
and a variety of other dimensions that are not easily replicated
in a laboratory setting or isolated in individual human
minds. Nor is it clear that all religious experiences are
neurologically comparable. Talmudic studies, involving
reading, analysis of text, and lively debate, may not be the
least bit comparable to a Pentecostal experience of speaking in
tongues. The contemplative practices of a Sri Lankan
Buddhist may not be comparable to Hindu Bhakti devotions.
Practicing Hatha yoga asanas in India may not
be the same as Catholic self-flagellations at Good Friday
observances in the Philippines. Listening to Bach cantatas
at a Protestant Church in Berlin may not be the same as listening
to Gamelan music played at a village temple in Bali. None
of these phenomena are easily replicated in a laboratory.
Science necessarily tries to simplify in order to pursue
manageable research. Most of the neuroimaging studies focus
on some kind of meditative or contemplative practice, simply
because it would be hard to study anything else in a hospital
radiology department.

A fuller taxonomy of religious experience needs to be
developed, detailed, and correlated with different brain
states. Note that the list below are not necessarily
discrete experiences and can be combined in any number of ways in
actual religious persons:

Interpretative experiences: understanding some
event on circumstance to be religiously significant, as in
serendipity, synchronicity, good or bad fortune;
Quasi-sensory experiences: auditory or visual
experiences of the divine;
Revelatory experiences: receiving some insight
about ultimate reality;
Regenerative experiences: a healing or
catharsis in which problems or anxiety dissipate;
Ethical-moral experiences: grasped by moral
obligation to act in the face of suffering or
injustice;
Aesthetic experiences: an intense spiritual
experience of beauty in nature or art, music or
ritual;
Intellectual experiences: an intense
engagement in learning and problem-solving that takes on a
spiritual dimension, for instance, in the moment of discovery
or comprehension;
Ecstatic experiences: as in energetic
devotional prayer, particularly in group context;
Numinous experiences: an encounter with Spirit
that is Wholly-Other, being in the presence of God;
Oneness experiences: loss of distinction
between self and world, non-dual sense of unity with God and
the Universe.

Another problem in the neuroscientific study of
religious and spiritual phenomena is the tendency to draw
ontological conclusions from these studies, typically to either
validate or disprove some religious doctrine. This is
philosophically bogus; one cannot prove or disprove the existence
of God by studying someone’s brain. A neurological
correlation does not equal causation or ultimate
explanation. So what if Mohammad or Saint Paul had temporal
lobe epilepsy. If God wants to use that mechanism to
transmit His revelation, than so be it. Every thought we
have, including scientific thoughts, also have measurable brain
states. We can study the brain of a physicist while working
on equations with a SPECT scan. We would learn lots of
interesting things about the brain of a physicist, maybe
generalizable to all physicists, perhaps also to all equations,
but we would learn nothing about whether the physics was
true.

Lets use a playful analogy and imagine what the
neurosciences of sports might look like. There are a lot of
different sports and we cannot study them all, so we are going to
simplify by only looking at cricket (this being Sri Lanka).
Still cricket turns out to be really complicated, so we are going
to need to simplify some more. We are not going to pay
attention to the business of cricket, to the rules of the game,
to the social practices and enculturation of cricket as a sport
among the youth, to the fanatical fans here, or to the complicate
numerology of the sport. It is just too much, so what we
are going to focus on is the neurological correlates of
cricket. But whose cricket brain are we going to study,
that of one of the boys from the Sunday pickup game in my
village, or perhaps better, that of professional player of
cricket on the national team? We assume that a
neuroscientific study of a cricket exemplar will be more
revealing, so we select Sanath Jayasuriya of the Sri Lankan
National Team to be our subject for a neuro-imaging study of
cricket, assuming that this is generalizable in some way to all
cricket players, indeed to all sports. Before the big match
we outfit Sanath Jayasuriya with a remote control IV, so that we
can inject him with radioactive tracers in the midst of batting
one of his cut short shots during a big game. He swings the
bat and hits a big one, but unfortunately now we have to stop the
game, in order to whisk Jayasuriya away to the laboratory, and
put him into the SPECT scan.

Don’t worry the game can resume in a half an hour,
because we will have finished the scan and can begin our analysis
comparing his base-state brain with his cricket-state
brain. No doubt, we would learn something interesting about
Jayasuriya’s brain, but we would be nowhere near
understanding the phenomenon of cricket. We would not know
whether Jayasuriya’s brain was the same as other cricket
players’ brains or for that matter the brains of other
athletes playing other sports, say tennis, golf, or
baseball. It might be that brain scans of the fans watching
the match would reveal the same neurological correlates, given
the phenomenon of mirror neurons, but we would need to test
this.

From a strictly neuro-reductionist point of view, we
would not really know whether cricket was "real" or merely a
"subjective" experience. It seems like the object of
cricket is more concrete and objective than the objects of
religion, but is that really so. You can take the
neuroscientist to a cricket stadium and tell her behold, here is
cricket. As an outsider, she probably has not acquired an
appreciation of the game and will not understand the complicated
rules. The object of cricket is to have fun, you might
explain. Our neuroscientist would then have to ask "what is
fun"? Similarly I could also take the neuroscientist to the
monastery, the temple, the church, the synagogue, or the mosque,
and say behold here is religion. But she would still ask
what is the object of all this activity. God,
enlightenment, what’s that? There is no "objective"
reason, in either case, to divert so much time and energy,
passion and skill, into either activity, cricket or
religion. So the neuroscientist postulates that maybe it
has something to do with the brain states of cricket players and
fans or the brain states of the religious believers, as the case
may be?

Let’s push this reductio absurdum one step
farther. What is the objective reality of the brains of a
neuroscientist while they do neuroscience? The British geneticist
J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964) came to the same conclusion in
thinking about the brains of scientists in general:

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere
by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined
wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to
suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically,
but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no
reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order
to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which
I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is
not wholly conditioned by matter (Haldane [1927]
1932).

As Buddhist philosopher Alan Wallace points out in his
book The Taboo of Subjectivity, we still do not understand
the mind:

Despite centuries of modern philosophical and scientific
research into the nature of the mind, at present there is no
technology that can detect the presence or absence of any kind of
consciousness, for scientists do not even know what exactly is to
be measured. Strictly speaking, at present there is no
scientific evidence even for the existence of
consciousness! All the direct evidence we have consists
of nonscientific, first-person accounts of being conscious
(Wallace 2000).

First-person accounts of anything do not count as
adequate evidence in a court of law or in the sciences.
These need to be correlated and corroborated by other
evidence. The "I" cannot be trusted. Science leaves
us with something like the Buddhist doctrine of anatman or
no-self, but of course that is a subtle and paradoxical doctrine
in Buddhism. We have sawn off the branch on which we
sit. Perhaps we need to rethink science, and with it the
neurosciences, from the bottom-up.

The Emergence of
Mind

The problem is that science lacks an adequate
metaphysics for incorporating both mind and matter. Today,
an informed metaphysics and philosophy of science needs to go
beyond reductionism and materialism. We cannot really talk
about science anymore without discussing emergent properties of
phenomena and different levels of organization. The human
brain is only one example of emergence in nature, but an
extraordinary one to be sure. A single neuron may be
beautiful to the discerning eye of a neuroscientist, but it is
pretty stupid all by itself.

The concept of emergence says simply that the whole
is more than the sum of its parts. We can learn a lot
of interesting things about a brain cell by studying its parts
and its chemistry. A quick perusal of the typically heavy
undergraduate textbook on neurosciences should be adequate to
demonstrate just how much we have learned in the last century
through this kind of reductionist approach. That being
said, the neuron itself could not be predicted or adequately
described solely on basis of its constituent components.
Nor can a brain be adequately understood by listing its
parts. The human brain is an emergent phenomenon, both in
its ontogeny – developmental biology – and its
phylogeny – evolutionary biology.

Mind is also an emergent phenomenon. Mind cannot
exist without a functional brain, but you could never predict
consciousness on the basis of an exhaustive reductionistic
description of the brain. Nor does mind-brain really do
anything by itself. An isolated mind-brain would be a
terrible waste. To reach its potential, a mind-brain
requires an entire body, vocal chords, oppositional thumbs,
tools, languages, families, societies, cultures, and
nature.

It is not just "soft" concepts like mind-from-brain that
burst the reductionist dream of a mechanistic account of complex
phenomena. There are ample examples of emergent properties
throughout the sciences. From the surface tension of water
in a glass to superfluidity and superconductivity in a
physicist’s lab, the behavior of huge numbers of particles
cannot be deduced from the properties of a single atom or
molecule. In accepting the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1998,
Robert Laughlin notes:

The world is full of things for which one's
understanding, i.e. one's ability to predict what will happen in
an experiment, is degraded by taking the system apart, including
most delightfully the standard model of elementary particles
itself. I myself have come to suspect most of the important
outstanding problems in physics are emergent in nature, including
particularly quantum gravity (Laughlin 1998).

A Musical
Interlude

Let’s imagine a scientific study of music, in this
case of classical choral music. Our case study will be
Johann Sebastian Bach. We will examine in scientific detail
one of Bach’s Cantatas, BWV 99 – "Was Gott tut,
das ist wohlgetan".

Our first approach will be to carefully examine the
paper on which this cantata was written. We will study the
chemical composition of the paper and the ink in which the score
was written. We can also study the semiotic development of
the notation system used and the music theory behind it.
This is all relevant to the subject matter, but it is not likely
we will discover much of interest about Bach, his Cantata, or our
experience of listening to it.

Another approach will be to study the physics of
acoustics and the instrumentation. This Cantata calls for
string and wind instruments and of course a choir. This is
going to lead us into some interesting directions, including
question about how the human ear and vocal chords function, but
we are still not going to learn much about Bach or this
Cantata.

Another approach will be neurological. We will
place you under a fMRI or PET Scan to try to ascertain through
neuro-imaging analyses the effect of listening to this Cantata on
your brain. Technically, we are also going to have to do a
lot of comparative work here to other sound perception and music
perception studies, in order to isolate what is unique, if
anything at all, to listening to this particular Cantata, as
opposed to other sounds, musical pieces, and genres of
music. No doubt we might learn lots of interesting things,
at least about your brain, because it is not clear yet that
another subject, say a Chinese or Indonesian person unfamiliar
with the genre or even the tonal structure, would have the same
neurological experience when listening to this Bach
cantata.

Another approach would be to employ a mathematical
analysis of the music itself. With Bach, in particular,
there is clearly not only a musical genius composing, but also a
mathematical genius. So this might lead to some interesting
insights, including now computer programs that can generate
"original" scores in Bach’s style.

We could also take a historical approach, considering
Bach’s life and time, the musical influences, his
biography, his musical and perhaps mathematical genius.
This may be more instructive than studying the chemical
properties of the paper on which the Cantata was written or the
physics and physiology of acoustics. Here the level of
analysis better fits the topic, not that the physics and
physiology are wrong or uninteresting in
themselves.

A scientific study of the cantata would surely also
reflect on the philosophical, religious and theological
significance of this Cantata, compare it to the other 200
cantatas that Bach wrote for the liturgical calendar and wonder
about Bach’s own religious beliefs. What does it mean
to assert "Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan" – "what God
does is done well". How does the music reinforce the
message? What influence does Bach’s music and
theology have on us today. How do we feel when we listen to
this song or perform it?

Our scientific analysis of a single song by Bach can be
posed on many different levels, lead us in many different
directions, including into interpretative humanistic disciplines
not normally thought of as scientific. Furthermore, none of
these directions and levels of analysis necessarily conflict with
each other. The only problems arise when we insist on a
single, valid level of analysis to the exclusion of others.
For instance, a neuroscientist might insist that brain science is
the only valid level of understanding the phenomena of
Bach’s music.

In this discussion of a new science of music, we see
many intriguing parallels and problems common to the proposed new
sciences of religion.

The
Emergence of Transcendence

We need to employ the concepts of emergence in science
in order to go further in this inquiry. There is
ontological emergence in nature and with it different levels of
reality and different practices appropriate at each level.
Emergence should place philosophical limits on the claims of
social scientists to reductionistically explain away religion (or
for that matter any other complex human or natural
phenomena). A scientist might find correlations, say,
between the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (to
reference Max Weber),
but this does not mean causation. A scientist might also
establish a functional outcome, say Orthodox Jewish marriage
practices leading to maximal human fertility and reproduction,
but this does not exhaust the meaning of what it means to be an
Orthodox Jew, which might best be understood on a completely
different level of analysis. A scientist might establish
that activity in the right temporal lobes correspond to the
experience of the presence of God, but this does not mean that
they have located or explained the reality of God.

A robust understanding of emergence, and with it
different levels of analysis and interpretation, opens up a
possibility space within the mind and soul of the scientific
enterprise for religious notions of transcendence, the
God-by-whatever-Name mystery. Contemporary science is
actually more suggestive of some notion of transcendence than it
is of atheistic materialism, whatever that means. There is
a cultural lag in absorbing these insights on both sides of the
religion-science divide.

Caveat emptor – buyer beware. Just
because nature turns out to be super, fantastically super, does
not mean that it is supernatural. And while much of science
is also fantastically strange, this does not mean that every
supernatural belief and practice humans have or have had is
therefore true. Just because quantum mechanics is weird
does not mean that every weird idea that people come up with is
true, even if it is dressed up with the patina of quantum
mechanics. Just because there is ontological emergence of
novelty in the evolution of the universe does not mean every
novel notion that people invent is true. In the name of
religion and spirituality people also make the same mistake of
reducing all phenomena to a single analytic framework. The
concept of emergence creates a possibility space for a lot of
strange beliefs and practices – the i-Ching, the
Bible-code, Reike, the Book of Revelations, astrology – but
it does not mean that any of this stuff is, in fact, true.
Indeed, it can be patently false if interpreted at certain
levels, as Young Earth Creationists do when promoting an
alternative natural history of the planet based on uninformed
Biblical literalism and no serious understanding of
science. The Bible is not true; it is profound.

Dangers and
Opportunities

There is a lot of exciting research still to be done and
some brilliant people devoting themselves to this research.
There are enormous benefits to be realized on the road
ahead. For instance, all traditions recognize that there is
religious deviance, they just don’t agree on how to
classify it. Neuroscientific research may give us better
tools for distinguishing between pathological religious persons
and normal, healthy religious persons.

This discussion today has also already prompted a number
of observations about possible reforms that would strengthen Sri
Lankan Buddhism. I note also that many of the Western
neuroscientists who are inspired to study religious experiences
in the brain are themselves practicing Buddhists. There is
an appreciation among neuroscientists that Buddhists in
particular have been conducting consciousness research for over
2500 years and that Buddhism has something to teach the
scientists on this account.

There are also some dangers that we should
recognize. The neurosciences can be used ideologically to
denigrate religion, as was the case in the psychiatric community
in the early years of the profession. More worrisome is
that the neurosciences may provide insights that might make
religious euphoria easily obtained or religious brain-washing
easily manipulated. This danger applies not just to drugs, but
any full proof technique that can guarantee religious ecstasy or
obedience. The notion than someone might take a pill and
achieve eternal bliss without any side effects might well spell
the end of our species’ evolution and quite possibly our
extinction. It is not clear what we would do if everyone
were happy and euphoric all the time, one with the Universe, what
Newberg called Absolute Unitary Being. What would motivate
us to struggle and be creative? (Horgan 2003)

Sometimes getting what we want is really bad. I
take comfort, and of course some pain, in a faith that we will
never really understand the human mind-brain, certainly not in a
way that we can mechanistically control or easily transform to
some desired end. The mind-brain is just too complicated
with too many feedback loops to expect certain results (Grassie
2007). The mind-brain is an example of a complex
distributed system, extremely powerful and creative, but because
of its complexity, not something that can be understood and
controlled. In the end, we will be saved from ourselves by
our complexity, which does not mean that people won’t be
trying to discover or invent the fountain of youth and the key to
eternal happiness (Lanier 1999). I note that Buddhism
claims to be such a foolproof technique, but after over 2500
years, samsara continues. We have not all achieved
nibanna and are unlikely to do so. It is perhaps the
questing after rather than the actual achievement of
enlightenment that is most wholesome and transformative aspect of
religion. In that quest, there is no reason not to invite
science, including the neurosciences, along for the ride.
We have a lot to learn from each other.

In closing, it is worth recalling the words of William
James (1842-1910):

Let empiricism once become associated with religion, as
hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding, it has been
associated with irreligion, and I believe that a new era of
religion as well as philosophy will be ready to begin… I
fully believe that such an empiricism is a more natural ally than
dialectics ever were, or can be, of the religious life.
(1909/1977, 142)

Empirical research on religious and spiritual phenomena
is not only healthy for each of our traditions separately, it
will also help us better understand each other in an increasingly
globalized religious world. James writes that a science of
religion "can offer mediation between different believers, and
help to bring about consensus of opinion" (1902/1985, 456).
Instead of religion being something that divides us, more and
better religion can be something that unites us, here on the
Kandy-Peradeniya Road and throughout the world. The
neurosciences of religion certainly help us along that
road.

Enviado por:

Dr. Félix E. F. Larocca

Partes: 1, 2