Buddha on the brain
Ex-monk B. Alan Wallace explains what Buddhism can teach Western scientists, why reincarnation should be taken seriously and what it's like to study meditation with the Dalai Lama.
By Steve Paulson
Nov. 27, 2006 | The debate between science and religion typically gets stuck on the thorny question of God's existence. How do you reconcile an all-powerful God with the mechanistic slog of evolution? Can a rationalist do anything but sneer at the Bible's miracles? But what if another religion -- a nontheistic one -- offered a way out of this impasse? That's the promise that some people hold out for in Buddhism. The Dalai Lama himself is deeply invested in reconciling science and spirituality. He meets regularly with Western scientists, looking for links between Buddhism and the latest research in physics and neuroscience. In his book "The Universe in a Single Atom," he wrote, "If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."
B. Alan Wallace may be the American Buddhist most committed to finding connections between Buddhism and science. An ex-Buddhist monk who went on to get a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford, he once studied under the Dalai Lama, and has acted as one of the Tibetan leader's translators. Wallace, now president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, has written and edited many books, often challenging the conventions of modern science. "The sacred object of its reverence, awe and devotion is not God or spiritual enlightenment but the material universe," he writes. He accuses prominent scientists like E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins of practicing "a modern kind of nature religion."
In his new book, "Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge," Wallace takes on the loaded subject of consciousness. He argues that the long tradition of Buddhist meditation, with its rigorous investigation of the mind, has in effect pioneered a science of consciousness, and that it has much to teach Western scientists. "Subjectivity is the central taboo of scientific materialism," he writes. He considers the Buddhist examination of interior mental states far preferable to what he calls the Western "idolatry of the brain." And he says the modern obsession with brain chemistry has created a false sense of well-being: "It is natural then to view psychopharmaceutical and psychotropic drugs as primary sources of happiness and relief from suffering." Wallace also chastises cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists for assuming the mind is merely the product of the physical mechanics of the brain. And he talks openly about ideas that most scientists would consider laughable, including reincarnation and a transcendent consciousness.
In conversation, Wallace is a fast talker who laughs easily and often gets carried away with his enthusiasm. I spoke with him by phone about the Buddhist theory of consciousness, his critique of both science and Christianity, and why he thinks reincarnation should be studied by scientists.
Why do you think Buddhism has an important perspective to add to the science and religion debate?
Buddhism has a lot to add for a number of reasons. Some are simply historical. Especially since the time of Galileo, there has been a sense of unease, if not outright hot war, between religion and science in the West. And Buddhism is coming in as a complete outsider. It's not theistic, as is Christianity. At the same time, it's not just science, as is physics or biology. And there's another reason why Buddhism may bring a fresh perspective. While there's no question that Buddhism has very religious elements to it -- with monks and temples, rituals and prayers -- it does have a broad range of empirical methods for investigating the nature of the mind, for raising hypotheses and putting them to the test.
There's a common assumption that science and religion are entirely separate domains. Science covers the empirical realm of facts and theories about the observable world, while religion deals with ultimate meaning and moral value. But you don't accept that dichotomy, do you?
Not at all. In fact, most religious people don't. This is a notion that's been brought up by Stephen Jay Gould with his whole notion of "non-overlapping magisteria." But it's never been true. All of the great pioneers of the scientific revolution -- Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and on into the 19th century with Gregor Mendel -- they were all Christians. And their whole approach to science was deeply influenced by Christianity. Religion, whether we like it or not, is making many truth claims about the natural world as well as the transcendent world. And now that science is honing in on the nature of the mind and questions of free will, it is definitely invading the turf that used to belong to religion and philosophy.
Many people would acknowledge that Buddhism has some profound insights into the human mind -- why we get depressed, what makes us happy and how we become slaves to our attachments. But what does this have to do with science?
In Buddhism, the very root of suffering and all our mental distress -- what Buddhists call mental afflictions -- is ignorance. The path to liberation, or enlightenment, is knowledge. It's knowing reality as it is. So despite many differences in methodology, both science and Buddhism are after knowledge of the natural world. But what defines the natural world? In modern science, the natural world is often equated with the physical world, and mental phenomena and subjective experiences are regarded as emergent phenomena or simply functions of the brain. But there are many other domains of reality that the physical instruments of science have not yet been able to detect.
But science is as much about method as anything. The scientific method posits hypotheses and theories that can be tested. Is that something Buddhism does as well?
Not in the same way. I wouldn't want to overplay the case that Buddhism has always been a science, with clear hypotheses and complete skepticism. It's too much of a religion, and so there's a lot of vested interest in the Buddhist community not to challenge the statements made by the Buddha and other great patriarchs in the Buddhist tradition. So there are some fundamental differences. At the same time, science is not just science. This very notion that the mind must simply be an emergent property of the brain -- consisting only of physical phenomena and nothing more -- is not a testable hypothesis. Science is based upon a very profound metaphysical foundation. Can you test the statement that there is nothing else going on apart from physical phenomena and their emergent properties? The answer is no.
You're saying we don't know for sure that the physical functions of the brain -- the neural circuits, the electrochemical surges -- are what produce our rich inner lives, what we call the mind?
Cognitive science has plenty of hypotheses that are testable. For instance, is Alzheimer's related to a particular malfunctioning of the brain? More and more, scientists are able to identify the parts and functions of the brain that are necessary to generate specific mental states. So these are scientific issues. But now let's tap into what the philosopher David Chalmers has called "the hard problem" -- the relationship between the physical brain and consciousness. What is it about the brain -- this mass of chemicals and electromagnetic fields -- that enables it to generate any state of subjective experience? If your sole access to the mind is by way of physical phenomena, then you have no way of testing whether all dimensions of the mind are necessarily contingent upon the brain.
* * * * *
If you meet the Buddha in Salon
The author and Buddhist responds to readers who called him anti-science and challenged his belief in reincarnation.
By B. Alan Wallace
Dec. 9, 2006 | In November, I enjoyed a lively, cordial conversation with Steve Paulson based on my book, "Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge." After the interview, "Buddha on the Brain," appeared on Salon, quite a number of letter writers criticized me for things I never said or thought. They accused me of dismissing mathematics as "navel-gazing," suggested that I thought I was speaking for all Buddhists, and said I declared that scientists don't know how to study the neural correlates of mental processes. While I appreciated the dialogue, I wanted to respond to several of the critiques made in the letters.
I'd like to begin by expressing my deep respect for modern science, medicine and mathematics. My appreciation for these disciplines runs throughout all my written works, and it inspires my current collaboration on multiple research projects with cognitive scientists at five major universities. The scientific study of the mind began only around 1875, and scientific research into the neural correlates of consciousness began only about 15 years ago, so both are relatively new disciplines. But the way the cognitive sciences have evolved is markedly different than physics and biology.
Experimental physicists are trained for years to observe physical phenomena, and biologists are likewise trained to observe biological phenomena with the most sophisticated methods available. Cognitive scientists, in contrast, receive no formal training at all in directly observing mental phenomena. They do indeed excel at observing the neural causes and behavioral expressions of mental processes, but they have left introspection -- the only means by which mental events can be observed directly -- in the hands of untrained amateurs. Moreover, virtually all research on the mind has focused on the physical correlates of the mental processes of normal people, the mentally ill, and people with brain damage.
Buddhism, on the other hand, has no brain science or quantitative behavioral science, so it has much to learn from modern science. But it does have a 2,500-year history of developing and utilizing sophisticated means of observing the mind and developing highly refined states of consciousness by means of years of rigorous, sustained mental training. Such methods and refined states of consciousness have never been explored by science.
There is no question that specific neural events are necessary for the generation of specific mental processes in human beings and that states of consciousness influence the brain and behavior. This has been known for decades. But are mental phenomena themselves physical in nature? Those phenomena themselves (e.g., thoughts, mental images, dreams, etc.) cannot be detected by any of the instruments of technology, which are designed to measure all known types of physical entities. And when mental events are introspectively observed, they exhibit no physical properties such as mass, spatial location or spatial dimensions. Given all the scientific and introspective evidence to the contrary, why should we assume that they are physical? Even Christof Koch, who is on the cutting edge of research into the neural correlates of consciousness (which have not yet been identified), acknowledges, "The characters of brain states and of phenomenal states appear too different to be completely reducible to each other." So why not apply Occam's Razor and abandon all physicalist assumptions about the nature of mental phenomena and let our theories be based primarily on rigorous, direct observation of the broadest range of states of consciousness?
Are there dimensions of consciousness that are not dependent upon brain function? As long as the scientific study of consciousness is based entirely on neural activities and human behavior, that question cannot be answered. The scope of the physicalist methodologies guarantee that only physicalist conclusions can be drawn. But it's quite true that the burden of proof is on those who posit the existence of a brain-independent consciousness. Happily, reputable scientists at the University of Virginia, including Ian Stevenson, Jim Tucker and Bruce Greyson, are exploring evidence that may indicate the existence of such a dimension of consciousness. In so doing, they are living up to the ideal of scientific skepticism proposed by Richard Feynman: "Experimenters search most diligently, and with the greatest effort, in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong. In other words we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress."
Buddhism brings to the question a discipline of mental training in samadhi, or highly focused, inwardly directed attention, that can allegedly enable the practitioner to accurately recall past-life memories. This may require years of intensive, continuous training, but it would be fascinating to make such training available to a large group of subjects and then examine any reports of past-life recall in accordance with the highest standards of scientific rigor. It is not anti-scientific to pose such hypotheses or put them to the test of experience, but it is anti-scientific to dismiss them on dogmatic grounds. Given that there is no consensual scientific definition of consciousness, no scientific means of detecting it, and an incomplete scientific understanding of the necessary and sufficient causes of consciousness, it is unscientific to ignore methods of inquiry, especially those based on direct observation, regarding the nature and origins of consciousness.
Many cognitive scientists refuse even to evaluate such evidence on the grounds that there is no mechanism for the nature of such consciousness or its interaction with the brain and behavior. It might be helpful if they recalled that it was 228 years from the time that Newton explained the law of gravity until Einstein proposed an explanation (by way of the warping of space-time) for gravity; and it was 100 years from the time that Darwin proposed his theory of evolution until Crick and Watson discovered DNA, providing the basis for a mechanical explanation for genetic mutations.
As I commented in my conversation with Steve, contemporary scientific theories of the mind and consciousness are based almost entirely on 19th century physics and 20th century evolutionary biology and neurobiology. To fully understand the antiquated nature of the current demand that mental phenomena be understood according to a mechanistic model, we don't even need to look to the spookiness of quantum physics, with its nonlocality, probability waves, quantum entanglement, and other mysterious processes.
My point can be illustrated with a brief review of electromagnetism. James Clerk Maxwell presented his four equations describing electromagnetic phenomena in 1864. At that time it was well known that electric currents could be carried by a material medium such as a copper wire. As late as 1884, Lord Kelvin expressed the view of virtually all physicists that electromagnetic fields required a physical medium in space, known as the luminiferous ether, by which they could manifest their wave properties. "One thing we are sure of," he commented, "and that is the reality and substantiality of the luminiferous ether." Just three years later, the Michelson-Morley experiment provided the first strong evidence against the theory of such an ether, and this effectively undermined all mechanical explanations of electromagnetic fields in space. Such fields are not "real stuff" out there, and they can be described only in terms of mathematical abstractions. But they still interact with matter. Einstein concluded in 1938: "All assumptions concerning ether led nowhere!"
I suspect that over the coming decades we shall recognize that all assumptions that fields of consciousness must invariably be carried by a material medium likewise lead nowhere. Be that as it may, given the principle of the conservation of energy, how can anything nonphysical influence the material world? For starters, we should recall Richard Feynman's comment: "It is important to realize that in physics today we have no knowledge of what energy is." And the Heisenberg energy-time uncertainty principle demonstrates that violations of this conservation principle do occur, and they may have macroscopic effects in the material world.
As I make clear in my book "Contemplative Science," I make no pretense of speaking for all schools of Buddhism. In fact, I don't know anyone who does, so I assumed that no one would think I am trying to do so. Traditional Theravada Buddhist and Tibetan Buddhists do generally believe in reincarnation, while some Chan and Zen Buddhists do and others don't. The earliest records of the Buddha's teachings make it perfectly clear that he claimed to have achieved "direct knowledge" of his own and others' past lives; and many later contemplatives have allegedly replicated his findings. This is one of the hallmarks of the contemplative science that is found in Buddhism.
Whatever our beliefs may be, questions pertaining to the nature of consciousness and its possible continuity beyond this life are not merely intellectual or metaphysical. They have an enormous bearing on our understanding of human existence and the parameters of Nature as a whole. I am not encouraging anyone to accept Buddhist hypotheses simply out of faith, nor did the Buddha himself encourage such blind belief. But I am convinced that collaborative research among psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and contemplatives from multiple traditions may yield a much richer, more comprehensive understanding of consciousness than any one of those disciplines by itself.
Tags:
No comments:
Post a Comment