I am a theoretical physicist and currently Director of 
June 22, 2006
What the neuroscience community thinks about the mind/brain relationship
The idea that the mind is purely a product of the material in the brain has profound consequences for religious beliefs, which depend on the idea of the mind as an independent controlling force. The very concept of 'faith' implies an act of free will. So the person who believes in a god is pretty much forced to reject the idea that the mind is purely a creation of the brain. As the article Religion on the Brain (subscription required) in the May 26, 2006 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (Volume 52, Issue 38, Page A14) says:
Pope John Paul II struck a similar theme in a 1996 address focusing on science, in which he said theories of evolution that "consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person."
As I wrote yesterday, the flagging intelligent design creationism (IDC) movement seems to be hoping for some fresh energy to emerge from the work of psychiatric researcher Dr. Schwartz. Or at the very least they may be hoping that they can persuade the public that the mind does exist independently of the brain. But they are going to have a hard time getting traction for this idea within the neurobiology community. There seems to be a greater degree of unanimity among them about the material basis of the mind than there is among biologists about the sufficiency of natural selection.
Stephen F. Heinemann, president of the Society for Neuroscience and a professor in the molecular-neurobiology lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, in La Jolla, Calif., echoed many scientists' reactions when he said in an e-mail message, "I think the concept of the mind outside the brain is absurd."
But the ability of the neurobiology community to do their work unfettered by religious scrutiny may be coming to an end as increasing numbers of people become aware of the consequences of accepting the idea that the mind is purely a product of the brain. People might reject this idea (and be attracted to the work of Dr. Schwartz), not because they have examined and rejected the scientific evidence in support of it, but because it threatens their religious views. As I discussed in an earlier posting, people who want to preserve a belief system will accept almost any evidence, however slender or dubious, if it seems to provide them with an option of retaining it. As the article says:
Though Dr. Schwartz's theory has not won over many scientists, some neurobiologists worry that this kind of argument might resonate with the general public, for whom the concept of a soul, free will, and God seems to require something beyond the physical brain. "The truly radical and still maturing view in the neuroscience community that the mind is entirely the product of the brain presents the ultimate challenge to nearly all religions," wrote Kenneth S. Kosik, a professor of neuroscience research at the University of California at Santa Barbara, in a letter to the journal Nature in January.
. . .
Dr. Kosik argues that the topic of the mind has the potential to cause much more conflict between scientists and the general public than does the issue of evolution. Many people of faith can easily accept the tenets of Darwinian evolution, but it is much harder for them to swallow the assumption of a mind that arises solely from the brain, he says. That issue he calls a "potential eruption."
When researchers study the nature of consciousness, they find nothing that persuades them that the mind is anything but a product of the brain.
The reigning paradigm among researchers reduces every mental experience to the level of cross talk between neurons in our brains. From the perspective of mainstream science, the electrical and chemical communication among nerve cells gives rise to every thought, whether we are savoring a cup of coffee or contemplating the ineffable.
. . .
Mr. [Christof] Koch [a professor of cognitive and behavioral biology at the California Institute of Technology] collaborated for nearly two decades with the late Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA's structure, to produce a framework for understanding consciousness. The key, he says, is to look for the neural correlates of consciousness - the specific patterns of brain activity that correspond to particular conscious perceptions. Like Crick, Mr. Koch follows a strictly materialist paradigm that nerve interactions are responsible for mental states. In other words, he says, "no matter, never mind."Crick summed up the materialist theory in The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (Scribner, 1994). He described that hypothesis as the idea that "your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."
What many people may find 'astonishing' about Crick's hypothesis is that among neurobiologists it is anything but astonishing. It is simply taken for granted as the way things are. Is it surprising that religious believers find such a conclusion unsettling?
Next: What does "free will" mean at a microscopic level?
POST SCRIPT: Why invading Iraq was morally and legally wrong
Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation has written a powerful essay that lays out very clearly the case of why the US invasion and occupation of Iraq is morally and legally indefensible, and why it has inevitably led to the atrocities that we are seeing there now, where reports are increasingly emerging of civilians being killed by US forces. Hornberger writes "I do know one thing: killing Iraqi children and other such “collateral damage” has long been acceptable and even “worth it” to U.S. officials as part of their long-time foreign policy toward Iraq."
The article is well worth reading.
Comments
Just as a note: Cognitive scientists, and certainly cognitive neuroscientists, are pretty much forced to be materialists where the mind is concerned. There's no point in trying to investigate a thing scientifically if you believe it's made of something other than matter and energy. So while I agree with you, and with them, that the mind is purely material, I'm not sure that appealing to their authority is the proper kind of argument.
Incidentally, for this reason, I'm always surprised when I run across cognitive scientists who aren't atheists or agnostics willing to assume God's nonexistence during the day. I suppose nothing in materialism rules out a soul separate from the mind, but that to me is pretty nonintuitive.
Erin,
I was not appeaing to authority, actually. I was just pointing out how hard it is going to be for the IDC people to persuade the cognitive scientists that there is more than the brain.
I think your comment holds true in general. All researchers assert a methodological naturalism in their area of research, since research is impossible if one allows for arbitrary acts of god to intervene.
But for most people, that does not cause problems. For example, the fact that I do not allow for a god hypothesis to explain how the atomic nucleus holds together is not very disturbing. But to say that there is no non-material influence in the mind/brain is to immediately confront the question of god. This is why this is gong to be such a touchy subject.
As a Hindu I've never really believed in the primacy of humans (Hinduism doesn't really make much of a distinction) but the idea that there is a soul separate from the body is certainly central (lies at the heart of karma, reincarnation, etc). However, I'm a little confused about terminology.
Hinduism says that the mind and intellect are on the same level as the body - ie, your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations are all things separate from the soul, stuff you leave behind when you die (there's no concept of heaven, at least not in the Christian sense). I suppose you can say the soul is the difference between the inert, dead body and the live body. The body and mind are the equipment, the soul is the thing that makes it go.
I get the feeling in this discussion that we are attributing thoughts and emotions to a "mind" which is somehow at a higher level than the body? Perhaps you can define what you mean by "the mind"? What characteristics would the typical religious person attribute to the mind, versus the brain?
Wow, great question, Shruti!
My idea about the mind is the same as yours. It consists of that part of ourselves that is not material: our thoughts, feelings, consciousness in general.
The question is precisely as you raise: Is the mind "higher" than the material part that creates it, by which I mean does it drive the workings of the brain? Or is the mind-brain one entity. I would say the latter, and it seems to me that Hinduism says the same thing.
I must admit that I have a tough time with the concept of the soul. It is a far more religious concept than the mind. I have no idea what it is or even how to conceive of it. But I think the problem of the soul isthe same as that of thinking of the mind as somehow superior to the body, since it can exist independently of it, at least after death.
I linked the soul with the mind because the issue is whether the is *any* entity that exists independently of the brain and in some sense controls the brain, and whether we call it mind or brain does not minimize the problems of conceiving how it works.
Perhaps I should have kept the two concepts separate for greater clarity.
Mano: It's true that the mind is generally a touchy subject, from many angles. I think it runs deeper than God, even -- because it can turn upside down people's idea of what "self" is, and that can spook even the nonreligious. Look at the negative way some react to the idea of taking psychoactive drugs.
(Neuroscience can also be used to illuminate people's religious experiences; for instance, one of the researchers at my school studies the neural correlates of meditation (among other things). I guess I could imagine religious people reacting one of two ways to this sort of work -- either pointing to it as confirmation that their experiences are real, or scorning it because a physical basis takes away meaning... not sure.)
Shruti, what you say about Hinduism is very interesting to me, and makes me think that Hinduism is more compatible with cognitive science than Christianity is! My intuitive concepts of mind and soul are inseparable.
On the other hand, what you say seems to suggest that the mind still exists after death and that it just doesn't "go" anymore because the soul has left the building. But that's hard for me to wrap my brain around. My whole concept of the mind is that it's this thing that only *exists* because it "goes," and that if it stops going, it stops existing and can't be brought back. What do you think?
*For some reason I'm having trouble submitting this... it tells me, "Your comment was denied for questionable content." Hmmm....
That isn't how Hinduism views it. The mind and intellect are equipment, as is the body (where "mind" is is associated with "emotions" and "intellect" is associated with "thoughts".) From the perspective of a Hindu, reincarnation is what happens after you die. They are trying to be clear that whatever your sense of self is, it does NOT carry over from one life to the next. Depending on how strongly one identifies with the mind, this can make death seem very final indeed, which is perhaps why they counsel trying to not identify too much with these things.
Erin,
Sorry about the "questionable content." The software looks for and flags questionable words that might originate from spam and my guess is that "drugs" was the culprit here. But it seems to have cleared itself up and posted it without any intervention from me.
I am so excited that you're writing about this field. I'm an electrical engineer in grad school, but the focus of my research is entirely on neuroscience because I find it fascinating, and the problems are very much in the realm of circuit analysis and reverse engineering.
When I was a devout Christian, evolution was never a problem for me. It's pretty easy to just not be a literalist. But the philosophical questions that arise from studying the brain are much harder to reconcile. It was a lot of thought experiments down this line that caused me to stop believing in a soul. And there's something particularly profound about one's first experiment with live neurons where one can see that it really is just electricity. No magic required.
It was another incarnation of this odd quantum mechanics approach, by Roger Penrose which I read in highschool that cemented my desire to go into this field to prove it wrong. I'm optimistically hoping that after evolution, neuroscience will provide the next revolution in how we think about what we are. It may be fifty years away, but sooner or later someone's going to figure out what cortex actually computes, maybe even build one, and bring some very interesting questions into the public sphere.
Cindy,
I think you have chosen a very exciting field to study because this really is the new frontier. But be prepared for a stormy ride as it begins to sink in to the general public the deeper implications of understanding how the brain works.
I have been following the discussion on the Brain-Consciousness problem which I myself have been studying for some time. One essential feature of any model on brain and consciousness is that it must explain the experimental observations.
There have been mass of literature on the subject emanating from medical personnal, particularly from psychiatrists and surgeons. One subject on which a lot of literature is available is the phenomenon known as "Near Death Experiences" investigated` and reported by surgeons. There is also a fair bit of literature on the works of Ian Stevenson and Brian Weiss, both of whom are renouned professors of Psychiatry in the USA. These topics need to be addressed in any meaningful discussion on the Brain-Consciousness problem. - Granville