Sermon Given by Shelton Hendricks 2/24/2013 Soul Made Flesh Part of the title of my talk is taken from the title of a 2004 book by the science writer and blogger Carl Zimmer. The full title of the book is Soul Made Flesh--the Discovery of the Brain and How it Changed the World. As one reviewer, John Horgan, described the book it “brings to life…a point in science history, when a brave band of British anatomists revealed that our memories, visions, fears, dreams---our very souls—spring from a three-pound lump of flesh in our skulls.” These sixteenth and seventeenth Century scientists were not the first persons to postulate a material view of the universe, including human nature, such views have a long history in human thought, but they were the first to seriously identify the brain as the organ of mental and subjective life and begin a science that today is on the brink of gaining an understanding of how that organ generates those most elusive aspects of human nature, our sense of self, or as many would suggest our illusion of self and our subjective conscious experience of ourselves and the world around us. I believe we are on the threshold of achieving significant advances in our understanding of the human brain and at developing a full scientific description of the phenomena we call consciousness. On sign of this is that in his State of the Union address, President Obama cited brain research as an example of how the government should “invest in the best ideas.” The New York Times describes the initiative Obama is likely to propose as follows: “The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of neuroscientists and 1
nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain’s billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness.” Unraveling the problems of consciousness in the coming years is a challenge equal to or exceeding the moon missions of the 1960’s and the human genome project of more recent years. The second part of the title, “the joys of materialism” is an editorial addition of the Religious Services Committee based on my description of my topic. I could not ask for a better addition, and I will try to convey something of what I see as the “joys of materialism.” By-the-way the term materialism is not used here in its sense the joy of possessing things or having wealth but in the philosophical use of the term meaning a view that there is only a material or physical world and that neither philosophy or science need concern itself with spiritual, magical or other non-lawful processes. They simply don’t exist.
While my career has been in psychology and neuroscience issues of consciousness, free will, and identity were to me at best issues in the background. I was interested in such questions as how hormones present during development shape brain structure and how these structures mediate various behaviors. Trained in the 20th Century tradition of behaviorism, I generally considered consciousness to be, if not a useless term, a concept beyond the reach of at least present day science. But now I think an incorrect conclusion for several reasons. Science is concerned with the entirety of nature and to ignore something a salient and our subjective
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mental experience may constitute one of the great errors of some recent scientific thought. I should note, that there is good reason to exclude consciousness from science. The phenomenon fails to meet one of the primary requisites of the scientific method that being the requirement that scientific data be public and amenable to 3rd person inquiry. Our conscious lives are distinctly private and while much of human interaction including art, literature, and indeed religion are attempts to share our inner experience with one another, from an objective scientific perspective these experiences are not directly observable by any other than the person experiencing and that experience is far from objective, indeed it constitutes the very essence of subjectivity. But, there are ways around this problem and indeed ways of ignoring and just keep collecting data.
Many, if not most people, living in the developed world accept the notion that the universe is at least in part a lawful place and that science is a powerful method for gaining understanding of that universe, including the processes that generate life itself. But, many draw the line at the human mind. They decline to view the human mind, its subjective nature, our sense of personal identity, essentially our mental life, perhaps what one means by soul as natural phenomena, subject to the laws of Nature and thus amenable to scientific investigation and description. My professional interest in and study of consciousness came as the result of a series of unplanned and on the surface unrelated events in my professional life. In 3
the 1970’s when I was Chair of the UNO Department of Psychology we had as a tenured faculty member an individual who had despaired of what most research and academic psychologists would consider mainstream or scientific psychology. Whatever course he was assigned to teach, whether it be statistics or personality theory, the content would turn out to be meditation and things I then and perhaps would now describe as mysticism. Tenure is a wonderful thing in academia and one its functions is to protect unpopular ideas such as this individual espoused. However, it does not get courses taught. A solution was to create courses especially for this individual so students enrolling in them would at least know what they were getting into. This faculty member proposed two courses, one of them called he called Limits of Consciousness. After much argument and usual academic distress attendant anything slightly veering from the norm of current academic practice, these courses were approved by the department and the university and thus the UNO Psychology Department came to be one of the few departments of psychology in the nation at the time to have on its books a course with the word consciousness in its name. The courses were popular all through the 1970’s and early 80’s particularly among the counter culture youth who populated campuses in those years. Eventually that faculty member left and the course fell into disuse. Then one of my former students who was on the UNMC faculty at the time proposed that there was a developing science of consciousness and that he could teach a meaningful course with a strong neuroscience basis to it and requested that he be allowed to teach the course we had on our books. He did so and the course attracted a growing number of students. This individual unfortunately became ill and I started helping 4
with the class. He eventually died and, in part, as a tribute to him I was determined to keep the course going. In doing so, I found myself, having more fun teaching than at any time in my life and becoming intensely interested in the philosophical and scientific questions surrounding the problem consciousness. Here are a few observations from my experience of 10 years of teaching an ostensibly scientific course on consciousness.
1. Most people are dualist, i.e. they believe that they possess a body and a mind that are separate and distinct in nature, the latter typically described as spiritual or nonmaterial. In a survey I conduct at the beginning of each semester and approximately 85% of the students, mostly upper level undergraduates describe themselves as dualists. (Psychology graduate students almost all describe themselves as material monist, but then they are an odd lot) There is good reason for this perception…this is what our inner life seems to be.
2. A second point that has become clear to me is that if we are to understand consciousness we must study what it is, not what it seems to be, but which should include understanding why it seems to be what it subjectively is to us. The philosopher Daniel Dennett uses the metaphor or magic to make this point. He dismisses “real magic” (i.e. defying the laws of physics) as non-existent. He says we must try to understand consciousness like we would try to understand stage magic—the only magic that is real or that can actually be done. Only the most gullible would ask the question how does the magician saw the woman in half. 5
Rather we ask the question, how does it seem to us, or how did the magician make it appear that he sawed the woman in half. Part of the problem with understanding consciousness is that we assume magic and are asking the equivalent of, “how did he saw her in half� when of course no such thing happened.
3. A third point, something I fail to understand, is that given the massive evidence around us every day that physical manipulations of the brain are the most effective way to alter consciousness, we still persist in the view that consciousness is not essentially the product of said brain and nothing else. Brain injury, brain disease, drug effects, brain development, brain failure to develop, brain degeneration, brain death and many more all profoundly and directly affect our conscious lives, yet we persist in the notion that consciousness is something other than brain function. 4. Through the use of techniques from cognitive and sensory psychology and the use of modern neuroscience techniques, particularly brain function imaging there is a growing body of evidence that strongly supports the notion that specifiable brain functions precede reports of awareness, decision making, perceptions, and conscious intentions. So far, there is no evidence of conscious processes occurring prior to or affecting brain processes. These techniques become more powerful every year and particularly with focused federal funding answers there will be rapid growth in our knowledge in this area
There are still many challenges and unanswered questions regarding the neuroscience of consciousness. Not least of these is, exactly how cells functioning in 6
an organ might generate subjective awareness. Another puzzle is what is the purpose of consciousness. In biology that question is answered by how a characteristic might have provided adaptive advantage. If consciousness is biological processes, then like all biological functions it must have evolved. As amazing as it might seem, it is very hard to come up with functions for consciousness. In one sense, the behaviorist seem to have been right, to the extent that we can currently account for behavior, it never helps to invoke concepts of consciousness. It often seems like it is simply something that occurs as a function of the brain doing certain things almost like heat is emitted when an engine runs. Computers do much the same thing we do without apparent awareness or conscious processes, but the whole topic of conscious machines is another story into which I will not go at present.
To many this soulless and spiritless view of our world is considered to be a negative and for many unacceptable view. But I say there is the joy?
Well first there is the joy of perhaps knowing the truth. There is also the joy of the developing understanding of this wonderful organ we call the brain. This is more fascinating to me than any myth or parable and is likely to give more accurate insight into human nature.
There are other joys as well. One that has surprised me is that each time I taught the course on consciousness one or more students would tell me how liberating was 7
the insight of not having to contemplate gods, spirits and other mystic notions from their childhood. I see real joy in their faces and seeing these reactions have been among the most rewarding of my teaching experiences. They are of course a minority. Most of them maintain that dualism and in many cases their religion survives my assault of facts and ideas. But all of them leave the course with an increased sense of doubt as to their understanding of human nature and in to my perception they leave less dogmatic than when they started. That to me is the best a liberal education has to give. Materialism is a personal joy to me. I have not lived a particularly perfect or perhaps even happy life and I have made serious mistakes and I often find that I am not honest with myself. But, the lack of a spiritual world is not something I regret. I find spirituality to be one of the great problems of our world, if not the greatest. To me, spiritual concepts are short cuts. They ignore reality and look for something special; that I do not believe is there.
A comment one hears a lot these days is that “I am not religious but I am very spiritual.� If by spiritual one means that they believe in the immaterial or the magical than I simply think they are wrong. What I think a lot of people really mean by spiritual is love and awe and the power of human interaction. These feelings are results of brain functions. I also believe that social, artistic and intellectual pursuits can enhance these experiences. They accomplish this by changing the states of our brains just as drugs do. But they are not magic. This church does that for me. What
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I like about Unitarian Universalism and this church in particular is that it has allowed me to be religious without being spiritual. My religious response to this church is very materialistic. I love the beautiful space of this sanctuary. It is a special place for me for many reasons including that my daughter was married here and my wife memorialized here. I love the music and somehow music sounds better to me in this space than anywhere else. I find listening to an intelligent and well crafted sermon or reading to be fulfilling and enhanced by being in this space and it is often one of the high points of my week. I like the coffee. And, I like the people with their varying views, including those that are described deeply spiritual, whatever that means. I discovered while researching our church on the web that many people believe this building to be haunted. I won’t bore you with the ridiculous evidence that is offered to support that conclusion. This, and other kinds of spirituality are to me nonsense. We don’t need it. This is a wonderful place and it does not require ghosts to be so.
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