Over at The American Scene, Ross Douthat argues that scientists should try treating our spiritual experiences of the divine as literal events. In other words, the crazy people who see God might not be crazy:
Atheistically-inclined scientists and philosophers have all manner of complicated theories about how religious experience and beliefs sprang up in homo sapiens - maybe it's a useful mutation, maybe it's an accidental byproduct of a useful mutation, etc. Some of these theories feel like so much hand-waving, but some are at least plausible. On the other hand, the eye exists because of interactions with light, and the eardrum because of interactions with sound waves; romantic love may be "biochemically no different from eating large amounts of chocolate," as Al Pacino's devil would have us believe, but both the chocolate and the woman of your dreams are still realities, not just the product of your firing neurons. As soon as homo sapiens developed consciousness, we became conscious of (what seems to be) a numinous reality interwoven with our own; it's just possible, surely, that we started experiencing the numinous because it happens to be real.
This argument is fatally flawed. Douthat claims that our perception of God might be no more imaginary than our perception of light, or space, or chocolate; it's "possible" that both are just neural responses to "realities". What Douthat fails to consider is that all of our perceptions require an awful lot of hallucination and imagination. If God is as real as our conscious sense of vision, then he isn't very real. The brain invents "realities" all the time. As every neuroscientist knows, our perception is as much in here as out there.
Take the simple act of sight. Whenever we open our eyes, the brain automatically engages in an act of astonishing imagination, as it transforms the residues of light into a world of form and space that we can understand. How does this happen? Nobody really knows, but it seems to be largely dependent upon "top-down processing," a term that describes the way cortical brain layers project down and influence (corrupt, some might say) our actual sensation. After the inputs of the eye enter the brain, they are immediately sent along two separate pathways, one of which is fast and one of which is slow. The fast pathway quickly transmits a coarse and blurry picture to our pre-frontal cortex, a brain region involved in conscious thought. Meanwhile, the slow pathway takes a meandering route through the visual cortex, which begins meticulously analyzing and refining the lines of light. The slow image arrives in the pre-frontal cortex about 50 milliseconds after the fast image.
Why does our mind see everything twice? Because our visual cortex needs help. After the pre-frontal cortex receives its imprecise picture, the "top" of our brain quickly decides what the "bottom" has seen, and begins doctoring the sensory data. Form is imposed onto the formless rubble of the V1; the outside world is forced to conform to our expectations. If these interpretations are removed, our reality becomes unrecognizable. Visual form breaks down. The light just isn't enough.
When vision is seen from the perspective of our brain, it's easy to understand why people hallucinate burning bushes, or the face of Jesus in some burnt toast. These hallucinations aren't proof that God is real; they are proof that our vision isn't real, that the top of our brain is constantly telling the bottom what it should see. So yes, the numinous does exist. But the numinous isn't God, and doesn't require the divine. The numinous is just how we see.
Comments
Deanne Laney.
Posted by: Mustafa Mond, FCD | November 22, 2006 11:03 AM
So then it would be literally correct to describe Ross Douthat as naive?
Anyway, this has got to be the silliest argument for religion and theism I've ever seen outside of Pascal's Wager. The whole fundamental basis of it is trivially false. Has this guy never seen an optical illusion in his entire life?
Posted by: Joshua | November 22, 2006 11:26 AM
You do realise that your debunking is self-defeating? The same organ is responsible for deducing that "our perceptions require an awful lot of hallucination and imagination" as the one claiming that "we started experiencing the numinous because it happens to be real". One can't be sure that the observations and logic underpinning your debunking isn't just as delusional as Douhat's cognition.
The axioms seem elementary:
1)Irrespective of what is and isn't "out there", each one of us is exclusively locked up within a singular 'sensorium'
2)Any framework to deal with this phenomena is applied within i.e. each person, based on how he & she categorizes mental activity, develops a worldview.
3)Science has a prejudice towards that which is consensually reported, but this cannot be itself scientifically supported one way or the another, since all participants in the debate exist as first-persons, and the belief that the only "real" things are those which most of us report is a personal prejudice, which can't be falsified.
Posted by: Gyan | November 22, 2006 1:59 PM
Douthat says:
Oh yes. We started experiencing that, and actually "a lot of that". How many gods is it now? Think all over the world, not just your locale, not just your religion.
Why are so many of the pro-religion arguments in a pro-monotheism form nowadays? Pretty much everything we hear seems to apply equally well to christianity as well as to islam. But, I know that they are not muslim. There's got to be something else that explains the rest of their decision process.
Posted by: Koray | November 22, 2006 3:29 PM
Thanks for your comments. Gyan: I agree that everybody is trapped in their own subjective bubble. But the beauty of neuroscience is that it allows us to see the anatomy underyling our subjectivity. (I disagree that science can't escape our "personal prejudices". If it couldn't, then planes wouldn't fly, and cell-phones wouldn't shrink.) When Hubel and Weisel recorded from neurons in the V1, or neuroscientist map the responsive fields of cells in the V4, they are able to see how we see. While this won't solve the question of qualia or demystify the nature of experience, it does provide us with a specific understanding of just how "creative" our senses actually are.
Posted by: Jonah | November 22, 2006 5:25 PM
What I see here, and in too many scientists' public statements, is *unnecessarily* antagonistic disputation.
True. There are many people, paid or paranoid, who would stomp you for daring to disagree with what they have ordered to believe. There are also many who would prefer to avoid the topic, so they can get back to harvesting the crops or planting the kids or whatever. The latter may indeed be stupid or defective; however, they don't usually feel need to respond to the implication, unless you shout or whisper it at their backs as they turn away.
We have enough enemies among the paid and the paranoid. There is no need to recruit the insulted as well.
Posted by: Greg | November 23, 2006 8:28 AM
Greg, I certainly didn't intend to insult anybody. Elsewhere on this blog I've defended a view that science has very real and practical limits, and that when we venture beyond those limits all we have is art and religion. (I personally find more meaning in good art, but others prefer church.) But Douthat was gingerly putting forth a hypothesis about the reality of divine visions that is contradicted by a lot of solid neuroscience. I was just trying to point that out. There are many reasons to believe in God, but this isn't one of them.
Posted by: Jonah | November 23, 2006 9:53 AM
Hi, Jonah, I think your view about the limits of science is pretty close to what Douthat says. Although I guess from those short descriptions that Douthat says we experience something other, while you are more likely to say we perceive effects for which we cannot identify causes. However, the specifics of those positions are not relevant here.
You quote Douthat saying, "we became conscious of (what seems to be) a numinous reality interwoven with our own". He does not say that we see it. In fact, he mentions seeing, earlier, as a more common sensation : "the eye exists because of interactions with light". I understood him, by listed both separately, to imply the numinous is perceived by consciousness, not by seeing. Again, I don't think specific details are pertinent.
Then you argue, "If God is as real as our conscious sense of vision, then he isn't very real." You seem ready to dismiss the reality of God without dismissing the reality of vision. And by incorrectly claiming that belief is based on vision.
Then, you describe the two stage process of vision. First, thank you for that. I have never encountered this before. It appears to be a direct physical example of the teachings of the Buddha, that our perceptions and knowledge and our naming-habit interfere with understanding. I copied it to my notes immediately and I expect to discuss and meditate on it deeply. Some Buddhists dismiss the reality of vision along with God.
Second, more pertinent, you have described a plausible basis for illusion. But you called it hallucination. Out there, illusion is an error or trick, while hallucination is illness or bad chemicals.
Finally, you also conflate a perception of God with illusions of burning bushes (which might more likely be hallucination) and of faces in toast. Your examples are stated disparagingly. Douthat does not equate the numinous with visual effects. Many theists, probably most, even the crudest fundamentalists, claim to see more of God than trivial illusions.
You dragged Douthat in here. You claimed to address him. But you have not. At least not the bit of Douthat which you show.
You have presented a neat little piece of science.
You have used it to clobber a strawman, a misrepresention of unimportant details in some theists' beliefs. You imply that all theists are stupid enough to be taken in. You have said theists hallucinate.
I believe that you do not _intend_ to insult. I am glad you saw that distinction, too. I think, though, that you do insult.
The choice of words. The trivialization of belief.
I guess that the folks who write in ScienceBlogs have encountered more than their fair share of paid political hostility, and trivial beliefs too.
It is an old, old trick. You can read in the Iliad, warriors insulting each other in hopes of provoking an eruption of unthinking rage. The early Romans used to provoke angry uprisings whenever they need more slaves or an excuse to invade. Cops push protestors around until somebody pushes back or can be said to do so.
It is unlikely that your local neighbourhood Paster is so sophisticated. The people who publish his sermonizing points are. The people who comb these blogs looking for phrases ripped out of context are. The professional political operators are.
They can no longer simply order the flock to believe. Especially, since they have had to retreat to literalism and arbitrary interpretations. Simultaneously! Science works. Too many of the flock would realize it, if they ever got a good look. Hence, the fence.
However, the skulls and radiation trefoils are not enough to stop adventurers from climbing up to peer over. They need condescending insults and howls of aggrieved innocence from this side.
Posted by: Greg | November 24, 2006 3:22 AM
But the beauty of neuroscience is that it allows us to see the anatomy underyling our subjectivity.
. . .
When Hubel and Weisel recorded from neurons in the V1, or neuroscientist map the responsive fields of cells in the V4, they are able to see how we see.
Nope. All they did was correlate two threads of activity: the purported or reported subjective experience with their own visual subjective experience of neuronal activity. They got no closer to how we see.
(I disagree that science can't escape our "personal prejudices". If it couldn't, then planes wouldn't fly, and cell-phones wouldn't shrink.)
You're begging the question. You can never escape your personal prejudices since you always and only inhabit your personality.
Posted by: Gyan | November 24, 2006 3:30 PM
Sure, Gyan. But you, and Jonah too, have merely defined "prejudice" to be something which cannot be evaded, and "how" as a question which cannot be answered.
Despite both, science is astonishingly successful at repeatedly providing the things that most people think they want... "most people" including those who preach that those things are bad.
Posted by: Greg | November 24, 2006 7:48 PM
Is seeing Jesus in burnt toast a numinous experience? The argument you make, Jonah, is the same style that many use who take a narrow definition of God or narrow definition of spiritual experience and say, "See it's meaningless. It adds nothing to my understanding."
Only such an argument ignores what people actually do get out of a belief in God or in more mysterious spiritual experiences. Seeing Jesus in toast certainly sounds like everyday human imagination to me. And it's true that our brains see what they see not so much because of the light reaching any given spot on the retina, but because of how our cognition and memory aids our perception. So toast can look like Jesus to someone so inclined, even if the Jesus I know will never be in toast. For me, he's barely in those portraits that someone drew as portraits of Jesus, since I doubt Jesus was so white or tall. Such is culture. But none of that is what I mean by spiritual.
To me "spiritual" has to be something completely non-physical, beyond a thought if a thought is in fact no more than some pattern of neuronal firing, but rather something not of our four-dimensional universe, however the spiritual might connect with the physical. Physics has not shown some spiritual fudge factor necessary to understand physical processes. I believe that. Biological evolution and cultural evolution may have created a God-shaped void in our brain, but if it's only physical processes that did that and physical processes that fill that void with an illusion of God, then we'll understand that soon enough. It may take 500 years to do all the neuroscience, but it will be understood.
The more interesting thing is if there truly are spiritual things as well as biological and cultural. Both Eastern and Western traditions pretend that everything physical is really spiritual in some way, but maybe they were wrong. Maybe biology and culture did set up this God-shaped void in our brain as evolutionary psychologists say, with our desire for inside information, for active help with our lives, for love in this life and beyond and for goodness. Are there only natural processes to fill that void? One reason to wonder about that comes from considering spiritual experiences, not Jesus in toast, but Paul on the road to Damascus. Atheists or others who wish to discount the latter can do so. They can call Paul's experience epilepsy, imagination, or psychosis. The science for each of those is patchy enough that someone who wants to force Paul's experience into one such category can pretend to do so. There is no proof for God. There is no proof for a spiritual side to reality, whether one is looking for nonphysical dimensions or some other nonphysical form.
For some of us, though, there are experiences that defy natural explanation. There was a paper by UCLA neurologists in the nineties that concluded it was unlikely Paul's spiritual experiences were epileptic while those of other historical figures like Dostoyevsky very likely were. It's subjective. I can say I like their science better than anyone dumb enough to say Paul had epilepsy, but that's subjective, too.
It's subjective to look at the other possibilities, too, both because neuroscience is so incomplete and because the experience itself is not perfectly known. One might guess that there probably weren't scales over Paul's eyes, that that was metaphor. There are plenty of things to guess at, but there's also what's clear from the big picture. This was a life-changing experience. It continued as further experiences described as living in the Spirit or the Spirit living within. Yet here was a man who could lead others in a way that psychotics can't.
In saying that it is these profound spiritual experiences that can teach us something, if we want them to, I suppose I'm disagreeing with Douthat, who seems to be saying something like God is everywhere in the physical world, which I don't find to be the case. In fact, in my experience of stories of spiritual experiences in others and firsthand experience in myself, I suspect there's a bias toward seeing experiences as perceptual when they are in fact cognitive. I've experienced the presence of God in a variety of ways. One time there was some sunlight streaming into a room which suddenly became the presence of God who had a sentence to tell me. Maybe the light brightened. Maybe there was no perceptual change at all to explain why my mind suddenly believed God to be there in the light. The dramatic part was all cognitive, but how does one describe that? How does one describe a cascade of images and ideas that hit in a second to illustrate God's point? I can say that it was more like what people describe as their life flashing before their eyes than the much slower flight of ideas that manics have. It doesn't matter. Anyone who wants to say I'm just nuts can do so.
But such experiences have made me wonder just the opposite of what Douthat is saying. I doubt there was ever a burning bush that wasn't consumed by the fire. It's just a lot easier to describe God's presence that way than in some way that's purely cognitive. Something happened. It was sort of like a burning bush, but different. That sounds like something indescribable to me, I suspect because it wasn't mostly perceptual. Yet who's willing to look at the reality of spiritual experineces long enough to consider such things? People who want to say there's nothing there do so quickly. People who want to say traditional beliefs describe these phenomena just right also do so quickly. The only one who listens well is God. Learning that is one of the most profound spiritual experiences of them all. But God seems just to do that with individuals. That must mean something.
Posted by: DavidD | November 25, 2006 4:14 AM
Sure, Gyan. But you, and Jonah too, have merely defined "prejudice" to be something which cannot be evaded, and "how" as a question which cannot be answered.
The point is that it is possible to posit such a definition because the other definitions are narrower and treat as objective that which is subjective. Anything that requires consensus to be treated as objective, is, in fact, subjective.
Posted by: Gyan | November 26, 2006 6:26 PM
True enough, but I wasn't challenging your preference of truth theories. I accused you of claiming to prove a point by defining it to be so.
Now you are saying that you want it to be so and that I should obey your whim. That works only if I am stupid, or if you have bigger guns and more thugs than I.
Posted by: Greg | November 29, 2006 2:48 PM
Now you are saying that you want it to be so and that I should obey your whim.
No, but you do seem to be saying that you don't want it to be so. Define 'proof' in a non-subjective manner.
Posted by: Gyan | December 4, 2006 8:51 PM
Wow I was wondering if god really did exist until I read this. Now I really believe, THANKS! Im sorry I did not present this in a more intelectual way but What I have seen here with my eyes has me convinced that Scientist are full of themselves and full of crap!
Posted by: MAX | October 22, 2007 7:13 PM