May 13, 2008
Brooks on Neural Buddhism
Robert Boyle once described the natural world as "brute and stupid." This view gained prominence in institutions like the Royal Society, helping to disenchant the world, meaning the non-scientific question whether there are values in the world (out there) or not was usurped by science in favor of the latter. This criticism of science's ostensible overreach has been made by not simply philosophers. Lawrence Krauss, for example, has recently embraced something like this view. (This issue is separate from the question of the existence of god or gods.) It seems to be part of the zeitgeist, having now made it even to the hands of David Brooks who contorts it in his David Brooksian way, in the NYT:
This new wave of research [on the neural instantiation of transcendent experiences] will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.
If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.
First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.
In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 11:44 AM | Permalink
Comments
Is there a single shred of evidence that something called "souls" or "God" actually exists anywhere but in the human imagination? When there is, it will be time to reopen the debate.
Posted by: Jared | May 13, 2008 12:06:28 PM
Brooks demonstrates an astounding lack of understanding of not only neuroscience, but scientific explanation in general.
He writes:
"Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development."
He has somehow confused high level cognitive explanations as being contradictory to materialism. As Babbage would say, it is difficult to apprehend the confusion of ideas which would produce such thoughts.
Explaining the function and composition of high level brain processes like love or other "squishy things" as Brooks said, does not equate to a spiritual or non materialistic explanation. Rather, it means that even the terms used by spiritualists to argue for religious explanations have material meaning, and fall into the same explanatory framework as everything else.
Posted by: J | May 13, 2008 12:22:25 PM
In my master's thesis at UC Santa Barbara, I argued that nudges toward conclusions like "neural Buddhism" should be viewed not as unassailable scientific determinations but as another step in the lineages of religious thought. I deal directly with a number of the figures that Brooks mentions here, especially Andrew Newberg.
It is available in unpublished draft form on my website. A simplified version is currently available in the May/June issue of Science & Spirit magazine as well.
Posted by: Nathan | May 13, 2008 12:28:47 PM
While I was reading this Brooks's column I couldn't shake off the feeling that he was subtly (yet visibly enough to get the credit for it) trying to predict the rise and most likely dominance of China through its "science" - which will only strengthen its position due to being in the right place at the right time (and with the right set of values).
My bottom line: he wasn't really trying to tackle religion vs science debate as such, he was exploring the possibility of alternate frameworks of values for future scientific work.
Posted by: Z-lot | May 13, 2008 1:07:44 PM
Boyle himself, like many of the heroes of the scientific revolution, was actually very mystically inclined, and saw experimental science as of interest principally to the extent that it could edify one morally and bring one closer to God. See his text, The Christian Virtuoso, if you don't believe me.
David Brooks is definitely riding the caboose of this tired old train. I hope a true Buddhist will take him to task for using this label so vaguely and irrelevantly.
Posted by: Justin Smith | May 13, 2008 3:48:47 PM
Jared's comment seems a bit odd to me - human imagination and perception are precisely what we are dealing with here.
Even if there is no "real" God, there is a demonstrable state of human epiphany and religious experience which is real, and which may or may not be a negative (read pathological) state to experience.
That said, the debate needs to happen, because we've only got what our brains are wired to deal with, and as evidenced by history, we are wired to deal with religion as a force.
Individuals may or may not transcend that, but I don't know that we can even assume that we would be able to get past that mental framework as a species.
Posted by: reader | May 13, 2008 3:55:45 PM
You certainly know more than I do about this period Justin, but it seems to me that a lot of Cambridge neo-Platonists accepted this view of matter, and saw the issue of whether matter was devoid of intrinsic value as separate from issues of God and religion. Cudworth's hylozoism is of course a notable exception. I doubt that the distribution of views of the intrinsic value of matter among born-agains is very different from that of atheists. It seems that question of religion and mysticism are quite different from the questions of matter's intrinsic value, with an atheist quite able to hold that matter has intrinsic value and a believer able to hold that it does not.
The Boyle hook is more just about noting the zeitgeist and not strictly related to the op-ed. Brooks is of course just muddled and muddling. But it does seem to me that this resurgence of very disparate but related trends--moral realism, wonder, enchantment, etc.--some of which refer to sociological phenomena, others to ontology and yet others to psychology, is not exactly a tired train, and certainly merits interest at least as a different phenomenon.
Posted by: Robin | May 13, 2008 4:18:44 PM
Correction: for the period I meant Hobbes' alleged hylozoism, not Cudworth's, the latter having accused the former.
I'm not well-versed enough the understand the ostensible elective affinity between views of matter as suffused with life and/or value and atheism, so I'll stay away from that one, just to say a view of matter as brute as stupid and belief in God are no way at odds.
Posted by: Robin | May 13, 2008 6:14:15 PM
Sam Harris has a chapter in *The End of Faith* on this topic. Contrary to Brooks, Harris is both perfectly atheistic and a "neural Buddhist", at least in the sense of viewing meditation, for example, as the cultivation of a particular mental state. I think his discussion has been a bit misunderstood by the more devoutly unfaithful, like PZ Meyers. The question of the extent to which we can cultivate a certain state of mind and emotion, and how we might do that, is perfectly empirical. The question of what we *call* an ideal version of such a state is pointless.
Posted by: Ken C. | May 13, 2008 7:49:50 PM
Buddhist definition of a proctologist:
a dentist who has chosen the Wrong Path.
Posted by: aguy109 | May 14, 2008 2:20:53 AM
In the end (literally or figuratively) there may be some voids that can't be crossed. Call our spring-boards what you want, science, religion, neural Buddhism, atheism -we move in our realm tip-toeing or bashing our way "ahead" while what lies beyond may be as ever-receding as the horizon.
Not that I think we should ever stop trying to figure it out, since great advantages (especially in science) accrue in doing so -not to mention that we can't help ourselves; but I think Roshi Bob get's close to our general predicament in his 7th Analect:
God is all. God is nothing. For hopeless conceptualists such as ourselves this is hard to believe, but that’s the way it was in that golden age before language and theology.
Of the “nothingness” of God, nothing of course can be said. So nothing meaningful has ever been said about it, though many have tried (John Cage and Lao Tze in particular).
COMMENTARY:
The mind, it seems, compelled to negotiate chaos on stepping stones of nouns, verbs, and other symbols, has not been geared to articulate this void. So, cavorting in the mundane we choose to avoid it (no pun intended), or, out of desperate need to chase our tail, invent religions. This amounts to the same thing. ”Which just about says it all …or nothing.
Posted by: J | May 14, 2008 11:37:18 AM
So sorry, in copying I left out a paragraph:
Of the “nothingness” of God, nothing of course can be said. So nothing meaningful has ever been said about it, though many have tried (John Cage and Lao Tze in particular).
But of God's "allness" we have detailed scriptures of every persuasion, degree, and logical color to glut the market.
Posted by: Jim | May 14, 2008 1:53:07 PM
The existence of complex multicellular life on earth since the planet cooled 3 billion years ago has pretty much been explained by Darwin. The existence of planets and stars and gallaxies since the big bang has been explained by comsmologists.The real mystery, which we may not ever figure out, is how and perhaps why the Big Bang occurred, whether it happened only once or can recur and whether this is the only universe or there are many other universes in different dimensions. "God" is merely a childish superstition, as Einstein wrote in a letter. And I don't see Buddhists or Taoists offereing any convincing answers to these questions, either. Science has achieved so much, and may, in time, solve these ultimate questions.
Posted by: Jared | May 14, 2008 2:15:40 PM
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