What happens when you take the "science" out of "neuroscience"? Well, you get something quite akin to Dr. Mario Beauregard's theories on spirituality and the brain. Dr. Beauregard and his graduate student Vincent Paquette are studying the spiritual experiences of Carmelite nuns.
First, we had to convince the nuns that we were not trying to prove that their religious experiences did not actually occur, that they were delusions, or that a brain glitch explained them. Then we had to quiet both the hopes of professional atheists and the fears of clergy about the possibility that we were trying to reduce these experiences to some kind of "God switch" in the brain.
Many neuroscientists want to do just that. These scientists are materialists who believe that the physical world is the only reality. Absolutely everything else -- including thought, feeling, mind, and will -- can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena, leaving no room for the possibility that religious and spiritual experiences are anything but illusions.
This characterization is irritating on multiple levels: the assumption that there *is* "something else" than the physical world (this is science, people! Measurable facts only please)and the term "professional atheists" (are there "professional Christians"?) are rather annoying. It is all well and good to study *cough* "mystical states of consciousness," I suppose, although I'd personally rather have tax dollars funding other projects...but Beauregard completely mischaracterizes what he terms the "materialist view" that spiritual experiences do not exist. And look! He has now demonstrated that they *do* exist. Thing is, no materialist would argue against the existence of many kinds of mental and neurological states (delusional, mystical, whatever), it is the *source* of these experiences which is under debate. What's even more troubling is that Beauregard doesn't hesitate for a moment to pound into your head that his important research has illustrated a non-materialistic neural view and supported a mystical mental state, however does not mention, not one word, as to his methods, subjects, results, or significance.
What starts off as a press release/discussion for data (?) swiftly degenerates into a tired rant against the Usual Atheist Suspects, with the new twist of affecting a victimized stance. "Why are these mean atheists out to get poor scientists who like to think outside the box and push the envelope and blah blah blah?" Well, there IS a reason, although these types don't really like to hear it. This line of research is neither rigorous nor beneficial. It does not pretend to follow the scientific method for experiments. It sets out to test untestable hypotheses that can neither be proved wrong nor right and relies on unmeasurable anecdotal evidence. What remains that is science, then?
This is a time for exploration, not dogma.
This might be the only spot-on thing said in the article, however I think my interpretation might differ slightly from Beauregard's as to which "dogma" actually undermines scientific integrity.
I'd like to introduce Dr. Beauregard to the philosopher and man-about-France, Descartes. Unfortunately, Descartes has been dead quite a long time however writings on his theories of consciousness and neuroscience persist. Descartes lived in a time prior to modern medicine (early 1600s) and believed that the pineal gland in the brain secreted a mystical magical substance he termed 'animal spirits.' These animal spirits, which Descartes thought was a "very fine wind, or rather a very lively and pure flame," interacted with the brain in a sparkly and nondescript way, the end result being emotions, behavior, and soulfulness. Now Descartes was a brilliant dude, although quite silly about medicine and anatomy (he disregarded evidence at the time that was contrary to his theories, ie from Galen). I could go on about how Descartes was wrong about other things neuro, such as believing that the animal spirits flowed in hollow neurons, but thats not the point. The point is that a somewhat respectable neuroscientist is still hanging on to neurological ideas that were crackpottish even in the 17th century without having written a lot of otherwise interesting philosophy to redeem themselves.
Edit: PZ Myers concurs and takes it a few steps farther.
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Oh no! Don't tell me quantum neurogibberish has already appeared round here.
Hey, has anyone told these quantum quackers exactly the SCALE of quantum phenomena and the size of a neuron?
If you think that paper is replete with ridiculous posturing , just read some of the excerpts from his book "The Spiritual Brain," which can be found on his co-author's website: http://mindfulhack.blogspot.com/search/label/Introduction. Be forewarned of the stupid. Here's a money quote:
"As the studies with the Carmelite nuns have demonstrated and this book will detail, spiritual experiences are complex experiences, like our experiences of human relationships. They leave signatures in many parts of the brain. That fact is consistent with (though it does not by itself demonstrate) that the experiencer contacts a reality outside herself. The fact is, materialism is stalled. Not only does it have no useful hypotheses for the human mind or spiritual experiences, it is not close to developing any. Just beyond lies a great realm that cannot even be entered via materialism, let alone explored. But the good news is that, in the absence of materialism, there are hopeful signs that it can indeed be entered and explored with modern neuroscience. Non-materialist neuroscience is not compelled to reject, deny, explain away, or treat as problems all evidence that defies materialism. That is convenient because current research is turning up a growing body of such evidence. Three examples addressed in this book are the psi effect, near death experiences (NDEs), and the placebo effect."
That's right, the placebo affect proves the real you is floating somewhere out there in the ether!
Good grief! At least back when I was entertaining such notions I had the excuse of being whacked-out on LSD.
I wonder what Beauregard would conclude if his experimental subjects were acid-heads instead of nuns? That the kitchen is, like, a whole different room? And my hands are enormous, dude...
Great commentary. I enjoy your posts because you are willing to ask questions such as are there "professional Christians"? And I was going to provide a cynical answer in the affirmative with links to a bunch of creation science sites, but then I thought better of that. After all, they got all the free press they needed when Ali G asked "who left the floater in the toilet."
Professional Christians?
Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham, Ted Haggard, apparently John McCain (for now anyway), GW Bush, the Pope...
Um, Shelley, before you tell me that "consciousness" is a material thing, tell me what "consciousness" is. Preferably in a way that distinguishes "real consciousness" from whatever the behavior exhibited by Searle's "Chinese Room" would be.
This is not to imply that I don't believe all these things have a physical basis, but if we believe them scientifically, we ought to have a method of falsifying by experiment; seeing as we don't quite know what "consciousness" is, nor do we even agree whether or not it appears out of our genus, I'm not sure it makes sense to dismiss someone else's attempts to understand it.
Hi Shelley,
I think Beauregard's views are quite reasonable in the quoted section. He is talking about reassuring his participants who believe in a spiritual explanation for their experiences that his intent is not to 'disprove' their belief in the cause of these phenomena. Similarly, this sort of research is typically jumped upon as evidence by people who wish to disprove religious belief. He is noting that this study is equally as irrelevant to both of these intentions.
In fact, his research does not address these issues because it simply looks at neural correlates.
I think you are being a little disingenuous about his science. It has been published in peer-reviewed journals and is of accepted methods and reasonable conclusions. I don't think we have to reproduce our methods section every time we discuss a study for a general audience.
For example, this study is PMID 16872743. It is not significantly different from any other fMRI study done on any other altered state of consciousness.
However, I agree with you that his use of the term 'materialist' is prejorative and, it seems, used too broadly and incorrectly. It gives the piece a somewhat unpleasant (or, dare I say 'damning') tone, which doesn't help his argument.
As an aside, I think the study of mystical states is incredibly important. They occur commonly in people with epilepsy and psychosis, can be induced by certain meditative states (as Beauregard's study demonstrated), can occur during drug experiences, or spontaneously, and involve profoundly altered states of consciousness.
Mystical states therefore provide an important avenue for understanding consciousness. Vaitl et al's paper [pdf] on the 'Psychobiology of Altered States of Consciousness' is a good discussion of this area.
Hi Vaughn, thanks for stopping by. I understand your criticisms although I think you are being far too forgiving of Beauregard's work. After you mentioned the paper above, I went and checked it out. Thank you for pointing me that way. In addition to the things I said in my post, after looking through the paper I see that he actually tried to equate the activation patters during the recall of a 'spiritual experience' with the experience itself. That seems absurd as there is absolutely no guarantee that the same regions of the brain (memory storage/recall during a NORMAL brain state vs. the experience during an ALTERED brain state) are in any way related. I think i'll review this paper tomorrow in greater detail.
As I said in my post, there is nothing intrinsically incorrect about the investigation of strange mental phenomenon, as long as it is not based on untestable, anecdotal evidence and takes into account the proper controls. fMRI gets enough flack from studies which attempt to characterize *known* brain states let alone completely unknown phenomenon which relies on memory recall of the experience. From the paper:
"In our view, this does not represent a major problem since the phenomenological data indicate that the subjects actually experienced genuine mystical experiences during the Mystical condition. These mystical experiences felt
subjectively different than those used to self-induce a mystical state."
That is an assumption that I am not willing to accept at face value.
And no, it is not necessary to reproduce the methods section of a paper in a lay article however it does seem glaring to emphasize your results without giving a whiff of what you actually studied. At the very best, its rather insulting to the audience and at worst its deceptive.
By all means, we should explore mythical states.
As to whether the discussed research supports materialism vs. dualism, William of Ockham had a thing or two to say about that.
Charlie, in materialism, consciousness is just a descriptor of certain brain states. The issue with the research described is that it does not, in my opinion, reliably characterize even brain states to any reasonable degree, let alone second-tier attributions on top of physical processes. Perhaps a major failing of some philosophers (and some scientists) is the tendancy to discuss consciousness as some ephemeral thing, a layer on top of mental states. This is reinforced by the difficulty in studying "consciousness," mainly due to its broad and nonspecific definitions which vary highly from scientist to layperson to philosopher.
Just because we do not have a complete definition of all the neural correlates of consciousness doesn't mean that we never will, and certainly does not mean that we need to accept sub-par methodology in that pursuit.
As to being dismissive, that is fair, but for the reasons I've outlined as well as his own dismissive tone in response to the "attacks" and "hostility" of materialists.
I think you're begging the question, though, Shelley: "...in materialism, consciousness is just a descriptor of certain brain states." How do you know this? Can you define "consciousness" in a way that would let you know if, for example, the late and lamented Alex was really "conscious"? (And, just to be absolutely clear, I am convinced that Alex, and your gray whose name I regret to say I don't recall, and my cats, and the ASL apes, are all as clearly conscious as we are.) But is Searle's Chinese Room "conscious"? Is Turing's simulated person? Or Mr Data (for a geeky twist)?
Roger Penrose and John Searle would both claim "no", for various reasons. Penrose makes the claim that "consciousness" requires a "higher" kind of mental mechanism than a computation, and proposes a quantum explanation for it. Searle says we just wouldn't consider the "Chinese Room" to be conscious once we know how it works (but then, would we consider ourselves "conscious" if we knew how we work?)
But then there's the other side of this too: how should we tell a "real" mystical experience from something that seems like a mystical experience? I've had OOBEs, and they're pretty strange; on the other hand, I just read of a fairly simple procedure that can produce an OOBE in a conscious person. Which is "real"? If a "real" mystical experience causes different changes in the brain than an otherwise-induced mystical experience, how do we know we haven't just identified two similar experiences with purely materialist explanations?
The reason it may seem I am begging the question is that my answer is not satisfactory to many people. Hunger is a complex physical and emotional experience which may take a multitude of variations in severity and experience, but no one would argue that anything other than a simple deprivation of nutrients is at the root of the process. Materialists consider consciousness in the same vein, as specific and discrete mental states which, while we currently do not have the technology to measure and quantify, there is the goal that one day we may. However the term "consciousness" the way you are using it, and the way many people use it, is a term not of neural arousal patterns but of the subjective experience of self-awareness and complex environmental understanding. We're talking about the same thing, but I'm pointing to a star while you're pointing to the sky. Finding out how the galaxies formed will be more productive by studying discrete stars first and then expanding to systems--same with the brain, in my opinion. Understanding behavior and complex mental states will be best, and more accurately described, by parsing them into their integral components, in this case single cells, networks, nuclei, and systems.
As for Searle's Chinese room, many scientists believe the argument to be fundamentally flawed. Sure, Searle in the middle of the Chinese room, interpreting mere symbolic data, would have no understanding (or, as you and Searle would claim "consciousness") of the act they were performing. But how is Searle's role any different that the role that an individual neuron, accessing information, plays in a brain? Just as from the outside of the room, it would appear that a being was acting intelligently and consciously, outside of a person we cannot see all the millions of individual, completely unconscious and disassociated firings but the person is aware and conscious nonetheless. It is the integration of the many, many interactions of neurons though complex processing events gradually increasing in complexity which both removes us from the process and gives consciousness a mystical and spontaneous subjective perception.
But then there's the other side of this too: how should we tell a "real" mystical experience from something that seems like a mystical experience? \
This is an important point and another major flaw in this type of research as the only discriminating technique (thus far) is self-report, which is by nature anecdotal, subjective, and could be given to exaggeration.
This is an important point and another major flaw in this type of research as the only discriminating technique (thus far) is self-report, which is by nature anecdotal, subjective, and could be given to exaggeration.
I think this is the core of the problem: how to understand the neural basis of subjective mental states. Importantly, there is nothing inherently unscientific about studying these.
Beauregard has done a single study looking at the correlates of a particular subjective mental state. There is nothing inherently unscientific about this either.
It's a simple, broad brush, poorly controlled approach, but equivalent to almost any early study in a relatively new field.
The first neuroimaging study of psychosis was no different, but as 100 years of psychology has taught us, the trick is refine the research questions over time by developing valid, reliable measures with studies subjected to rigorous replication.
His personal views aside (and it seems his interpretation is what bothers you more than his data), what will make it of lasting valuable is how it stands up to replication - i.e. will it be reliable.
If we were to disregard any study that didn't justify clear, confident conclusions, science would move so slowly as to be useless and be so uncreative as to be irrelevant.
Don't let the mention of religion get your hackles up so you feel you can't accept the study for what it is - a simple study of an interesting yet poorly defined phenomenon. Seems a good starting point to me.
(P.S. Thanks for the blog! You write excellently).
Dunc:
I know a girl who scarfed down a "heroic dose" of dried mushrooms (which had been mixed with chocolate to make candy). After the walls had started to breathe, she said, the bottom dropped out of her mind and a single sentence, spoken with the force of something beyond words — the dream-stuff of meaning, of which ordinary words are merely shadows — rose to her consciousness.
"Nothing exists save atoms and the void," it said.
She says she appreciates the scientific method on a whole new level now.
While researching something I planned to write on Thomas Pynchon, I came across the story of "77K", who gained "enlightenment" in the truest sense — a visceral understanding of Maxwell's Equations and electromagnetism — in the midst of a really freaky 2,5-dimethoxy-4-bromoamphetamine trip.
Yikes. That hits too close to home...
Anyway
But by introducing Religion you are already starting from a point where anything is possible and unfalsifiable. At any point in the investigation you can say "God Did it". Why start an investigation with this built in flaw (or built in way out depending on how it is viewed)? Supernatural explanations that are inherently unfalsifiable do nothing but taint any scientific search for answers.
Supernatural explanations that are inherently unfalsifiable do nothing but taint any scientific search for answers.
This is exactly the wrong attitude to take. Most of the world has supernatural explanations for disease. You seem to be advocating a halt to all medical research because these beliefs 'taint' the science.
It is perfectly possible to separate someone's personal interpretation of an altered state of consciousness from its measurable correlates or consequences.
Epilepsy (the 'sacred disease') is still widely believed to be caused by spirits. This doesn't seem to have prevented some excellent scientific research into its neurophysiological cause and treatment.
I discussed the paper by Beauregard and Paquette (2006) last year, shortly after it appeared online: Neural Correlates of a Mystical Experience in Carmelite Nuns.
One of the first things I noted was your point about the difference between recall of, versus experience of, a mystical state:
...subjects were asked to remember and relive (eyes closed) the most intense mystical experience ever felt in their lives as a member of the Carmelite Order...
And this was because "God can't be summoned at will" (Beauregard & Paquette, 2006).
Plus, note some of the interesting similarities when comparing the Mystical state with the Control state, which was:
to remember and relive (eyes closed) the most intense state of union with another human ever felt in their lives while being affiliated with the Carmelite Order...
And here are those similarities (sorry for the long bloggy quote):
After the scan, the nuns rated the intensity of the subjective experience during the Control and Mystical conditions... So during the scan, the nuns felt equally intense about remembering "union with God" and "union with human." During the Mystical condition, the nuns reported feeling the presence of God, unconditional and infinite love, plenitude, and peace. They also reported feeling unconditional love during the Control condition.
Also interestingly, the caudate and anterior cingulate regions activated in both these conditions (and hence subtracted away in the direct comparison between them) are ALSO quite active when an amorous lover views a photo of his/her romantic partner (Bartels & Zeki, 2000; Aron et al., 2005; Fisher et al., 2005).
BUT it's not up to me to engage in reverse inference here...
And completely ignoring those explanations is the first step to finding a cure that works. Last time I checked, the exorcism of evil spirits did not have more success than the placebo effect.
"Roger Penrose and John Searle would both claim "no", for various reasons. Penrose makes the claim that "consciousness" requires a "higher" kind of mental mechanism than a computation, and proposes a quantum explanation for it. Searle says we just wouldn't consider the "Chinese Room" to be conscious once we know how it works (but then, would we consider ourselves "conscious" if we knew how we work?)"
Call me an interested amateur. There are two Big Problems with the universe: getting a grip on the exact nature of "consciousness" and understanding the nature of the "observer" in Quantum mechanics. The problems may or may not be related. Penrose's hypothesis is intellectually appealing in some regards. Neither problem has a neat solution right now.
It seems cog sci has already done a pretty tidy job of debunking spiritualism already, though; the notion of a little "mini-me" made of ectoplasm floating around in our brains. Where's the "soul" in split-hemisphere patients (or other kinds of brain damage)?
Indeed, it seems to me the "self" is a lot smaller than it used to be. Thomas Metzinger does a nice talk on this on YouTube.
Having said that, I can't say I'm fully in the scientific materialism camp. That seems a bit too nihilistic and pointless. Maybe we are all connected through quantum nonlocality or something hippy-dippy like that. I'll say one thing: I can empathize just a little with the peasants who were annoyed with Copernicus when he rearranged Outer Space!
Um-hmmm. And are the people promoting supernatural explanations the same people who are doing the productive medical research?
Penrose's quantum take on the mind is a bad solution to a non-problem. The issue he's trying to "solve" isn't actually troublesome; Goedel's Theorems don't say what he implies they do. (For starters, who in blazes said that a computer has to operate with a fixed formal system? See Scott Aaronson for more.) On top of that, his notion of quantum consciousness relies upon hypothetical features of an as-yet-unknown theory of quantum gravity. It's not the same thing as the quantum computation which physicists and engineers are already trying to do; it requires a Whole New Quantum.
On top of that, we can poke into the brain and observe it closely, without affecting how this "consciousness" whoosywhatsit goes about its business. We can do the decoherence calculations and show that, no, microtubules can't shield information pulses from "collapse".
Ultimately, you have to wonder why we need to reinvent quantum physics in order to make a warm and fuzzy nesting place for one phenomenon which has only been observed in an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the physical Universe. Isn't being made from starstuff enough?
Shelley,
What a wonderful topic.
Animal spirits emanating from the pineal gland,huh?
Are you familiar with DMT?
(Diemethyl Tryptamine)
a naturally occurring substance in
the human brain(washing through our senses
at birth and death)
in acacia, ayahausca, yopo,
bufo cane toads, magic mushrooms, etc....
this may be what Descartes was
refering to,that
primal wave of transcendant awakening
that the Buddha and Christ and
many others attained through
meditation and altered states....
Terence McKenna channeled his
Time wave theory of
THe End of Time (Dec. 22 2012)
through a remarkable breakthru
of consciousness, in which
suddenly he understood math
and physics and the laws of the universe.
Strangelly enough his end date for time
corresponded with the Pre-Columbian
Mayan end of the world date
of....december 22 2012
when according to
Daniel Pinchbeck, author of the new book
2012 the Return of Quetzalcoatl
our sun will be in the exact center
of the universe where supposedly there
is the mother of all black holes
and what will happen?
Sorry if I'm off topic
but somehow I think I'm on.
I like and trust those animal
spirits swirling around in my brain
and all the spirits of the departed
including my great-grand uncle
Serge Voronof who insists
that we CAN ATTAIN
IMMORTALITY.....
and by the way I am still up for
an interview,
although currently I am on a
greyhound bus bouncing across america....
Peace--
I think there are several hooks in here that are onto something. Shelley's point about hunger, and similarly her point about Searle's Chinese Room, have something underlying them: when we try to understand what happens when something becomes "conscious", we find ourselves chasing our own tails. Hunger is an extremely complicated process, and one that can be modified by our state of consciousness ... somehow. (If I'm caught up in programming and don't notice it's been hours since I last ate, have the nutritional and blood chemistry changes somehow not happened?) Similarly, Searle's Room leads us to wonder just what is that "consciousness" or "knowing" thing? As Shelley points out, if it's not essentially similar to what happens with neurons, then what is it?
(Personally, I think Searle's whole argument is a kind of hidden vitalism, a claim there is something different and effectively non-physical involved.)
Turing's famous test, interestingly, explicitly recognizes the problem, and redefines it: a computer passes the Turing Test if, after an arbitrarily long series of trials, you can't distinguish between a "real person" and a "simulation". If we can't distinguish, we have to conclude the simulation is just as "conscious" as the "real" person.
Penrose's notion supposes there must be some kind of "higher" process than computation, but that, interestingly enough, has deep problems. It inherently claims the existence of a kind of computation that can "compute" non-computable functions; computer science theory, though, suggests strongly that there is no such thing (see, eg, Wikipedia on the "Church Turing Thesis"), or that if there were there is no way we could test for its existence. Again, the core point here is that we need to have a way to distinguish between the hypotheses.
This isn't much of a surprise: after all, we see experimentation, falsification, as the key notion underlying the "scientific method." If we have two hypotheses, to determine which of them we more strongly accept, we need an experiment (in computability, an "effective procedure") that will, in a finite time, show one or the other to be false.
But now, consider a little gedankenexperiment: we have Star Trek's Mr Data. We know his brain is a mechanism, built by a person. By Searle's Room argument, we shouldn't think he is "conscious" ... but by Turing, he is indistinguishable from a "conscious" entity. "Conscious" or "not conscious": two hypotheses. To determine which of them holds scientifically, there would need to be an experiment that would make the distinction. And here's the kicker: if we can't propose one, we have to say that scientifically either hypothesis is equally valid.
So now, wrapping back around to the original topic: Shelley assumes it goes without saying that a "materialist" model is the right one, while Paquette at least includes the possibility of a non-materialist explanation. And I ask "what is the effective procedure, the experiment, which can distinguish between the two hypotheses?"
Without one, how can we say that either hypothesis is more "scientific"?
"there is nothing intrinsically incorrect about the investigation of strange mental phenomenon, as long as it is not based on untestable, anecdotal evidence and takes into account the proper controls."
As far as I'm aware, string theory is an untestable "science" which pretty much makes it numerology right? Does this mean that the people working on it should be ignored?
"consciousness" is a pretty big thing, especially when our narrow perception of dimensional reality has us at such a disadvantage.
I think the debate is flawed as materialists either define perceptions/sensations (like colors, sounds, emotions) as being electric and chemical phenomena (so they follow the assumption that the brain generates the mind), or because they do not admit that they do not understand how neurons produce feelings (colors, sounds, emotions).
It's like trying to understand how Windows XP works by analyzing the hardware (the electronic devices inside), and concluding that there is no software - "Windows XP is the microchip and the motherboard".
In order to conduct reliable studies, one needs to consider all possibilities, even the most stupid ones.
Well, if you take the materialist point of view, we're still in the most primitive stages; where you snip out a single resistor from a TV set (back when TVs still had individual resistors), and see wavy lines all over the screen, and publish a paper about how you have discovered the wavy line suppressor, and how by adding more of these resistors you can perhaps repair TVs which are currently being discarded as the picture has too many wavy lines.
Which does not provide credence to those who would suggest that since this line of logic is absurd, therefore there must be something to the argument that there are disembodied spirits inside the TV which become animated and act out what is forced upon them by external forces through the ether.
Qualia are deemed to be a challenge to explain in purely materialistic terms. As an example, when we bite into an apple, we can explain how the chemicals in the molecule are transduced by receptors in the tongue, which turn into an electrical signal recognized by the brain in the form of action potentials, which we ultimately label (perhaps through association with language processing regions of the brain) as "sweetness".
Except this doesn't explain the experience of sweetness itself (i.e., we probably can still experience sweetness independent of labelling it as such).
This would be equivalent to opening up a radio and identifying and explaining how the components inside of the radio make it possible to hear sound emanating from it. However, no one believes that there's literally a person sitting inside of a radio. Instead we know that the radio is ultimately a receiver picking up signals from various radio stations.
Similarly, the belief that qualia are generated (purely) internally could itself be an illusion. I suspect that various worldview systems (science, religion, philosophy, etc) amount to differing levels of theoretical explanations for various phenomena. In this instance, neuroscience is probably equivalent to determining how the parts of our "radio" (i.e., the brain) works. (Quantum) physics is probably the appropriate explanatory level for theorizing whether it's possible for consciousness to exist outside the brain.