Buddha on the Brain

Steve Paulson did an interview with B. Alan Wallace. It's from November 2006, but who cares. Here's a snip:

Is that what Buddhism offers -- a rigorous methodology?

Yes. I'm not saying we should fuse religion with science. Rather, we should select very specific methodologies from Buddhism and other contemplative traditions where the ability to monitor the mind has been honed over thousands of years -- beginning with the training of attention and then using sophisticated methods for investigating the nature of the mind, feelings and the very nature of consciousness itself during the waking state, the dream state, even during deep sleep. Now, because of the great advances in transportation and communications, we have easy access to the Taoist tradition of China, the Sufi tradition of the Near East, the Buddhist tradition of Tibet and Southeast Asia. I'm convinced this would add much greater depth and breadth to the types of questions that are raised in modern cognitive science.

In science, you have a hypothesis that's tested, and it can be disproved. Does that happen in Buddhism?

On its home turf, frequently not. But I'm also waiting for a neuroscientist to tell me how the hypothesis that mental states are nothing more than neural states will be repudiated. I don't see that as a testable hypothesis. So there's a fair amount of dogma, not in science per se but in the minds of scientists. Likewise, there's plenty of dogma in the minds of Buddhists. But Buddhism at its best -- and we go right back to the teachings of the Buddha himself -- encourages a spirit of skepticism. He said, "Do not take my statements to be true simply out of reverence for me. But rather, put them to the test." Well, if you do that, you should be able to repudiate them as well as confirm them.

Well, let me ask you about that. I know there is a tradition, particularly among advanced contemplatives, that you have your meditative experience, and then you talk about it, you analyze it, and your peers critique it. Does that really happen? When someone comes out of meditation, would someone else say, "Sorry. You didn't do it right"?

Absolutely. You know, Buddhism, like any other tradition, is subject to degeneration. So if you and I headed off to India or Nepal or Tibet, we'd find plenty of Buddhist meditators who are simply going through rote ritual, who are just trying to come up with the right answers at the end of the book. But when Buddhism is really thriving, it's exactly what you described. You go into a three-year retreat, where you are meditating eight to 12 hours a day. You're training the mind. You're investigating the nature of the mind. But you're probably not doing that in entire isolation. You're in consultation with a mentor who's going to review your experience and help you deepen your experience. You'll be questioning your insights. So [your] relationship with your mentor is analogous to working on your Ph.D. with a mentor. If at any point your research becomes flaky or not up to snuff, the mentor is there to say, "No, that's a dead end. This is not good research." This happens frequently in the Buddhist contemplative tradition when it's really robust and healthy.

Read the whole interview at Salon.

Alan Wallace on the Paula Gordon Show

A revolution is upon us, says B. Alan Wallace, founder of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. We could all be extraordinary people with extraordinary hearts, minds and states of consciousness, as well as talents and skills.

The revolution's source? The exploration of consciousness and the mind, using direct, immediate, first-hand observation -- meditation. This is the serious meditation in the Sanskrit sense of "cultivation" -- not meditation's cute or trivial impersonators -- and the world's many wisdom cultures offer a wide variety.

What's between us and extraordinary? Being stuck in the modern, Dr. Wallace says, specifically modernity's obsession with all things external and our "imagination deficit disorder." That and our overwhelming lack of balance.

With this revolution comes, Dr. Wallace hopes, a new Renaissance. He sees enormous possibilities for an unprecedented fusion of the East and the West. How? Maintain the strengths, beauty, depth and acuity of modernity while tapping into the deep wisdom cultures of the world.

Read the rest of intro, and listen to an hour of audio (format Real Audio) divided in six conversations.

Reinventing the wheel

The advertisement for "Reinventing the Sacred" by Stuart Kauffman just came in from WIE. The intro seemed interesting enough:

"One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures. Because of this ceaseless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center of the Enlightenment, is but one of the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite our full humanity. We must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never fully know."

Then, however, I googled the title and found a video with Kauffman himself explaining the essentials of his view on the Sacred and what it is that needs to be reinvented. In short, Kauffman is another highly intelligent person who unfortunately can see only two major cultures in today's "First World" - namely, the ahteistic, agnostic, secularist humanist on one hand, and the rigid, fundamentalist, mythic-God worshipping believers on the other. For those of you fluent in integralese, that's the classic level/line fallacy, commited not long ago by the Four Horsemen (with a feable nuanced exception by Sam Harris, not to make much of). Kauffman too speaks of "faith and reason". So, it's back to square one with this attempt in reconciling the opposites which are not really that. There is potential, nonetheless, in Kauffman's point of view, to become influential in both camps and this then may well serve as an introduction to a truly transformative discussion with more integral ideas being included as necessary for building mutual trust. (Just speculating, of course.) Kauffman mentions Wittgenstein and Weinberg, but certainly won't mention Wilber and Wallace who have done more to bridge the Gap, known both as matter vs. mind and science vs. spirituality. First, however, I should read the book that won't let biology be reduced to physics (chapter 4) - of course Kauffman is a biologist - while wondering if ethics and even "the Sacred" can be somehow reduced to "biocomplexity."

There's a Ning network devoted to Reinventing the Sacred, where you'll find the aforementioned video and some discussion that you may want to join if you resonate.

And finally a quote from the book:

"Today the schism between faith and reason finds voice in the sometimes vehement disagreements between Christian or Islamic fundamentalists, who believe in the transcendent Creator God, and agnostic and atheist "secular humanists" who do not believe in the transcendent God. These divergent beliefs are profoundly held. Our senses of the sacred have been with us for thousands of years, at least from the presumptive earth goddess of Europe ten thousand years ago, through the Egyptian, Greek, Abrahamic, Aztec, Mayan, Incan, and Hindu Gods, Buddhism, Taoism, and other traditions. (...) Ways of life hand in the balance. This book hopes to address this schism in a new way."

Ok - Aztec, Mayan, Incan? But do read the pages made available at Amazon's Search Inside.

Why materialists cheat

The 2008 Shift Report: Changing the Story of Our Future, published by the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Among its many other compelling facts, here's a description of an experiment conducted by Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler of the University of British Columbia that investigated the ways in which believing, or disbelieving, in free will affects moral choices:

[W]hat one believes about free will has an important social consequence.... In the Vohs and Schooler study, [some] participants read passages from The Astonishing Hypothesis by Nobel laureate biologist Francis Crick, which promotes the idea that free will is an illusion: “Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.” Others read more neutral statements as a control condition. The results of the study showed that participants who read [Crick's] anti-free will statements were significantly more likely to cheat on several experimental tasks. If exposure to [anti-free will messages] increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then what does this same message, repeated by authoritative scientists and promoted by the media, do to societal behavior?

This came in from WIE. Download free Intro chapter at the Shift Report website.

Buddhism Made to Measure

From Donald Lopez at the Immanent Frame:

'...By the end of the nineteenth century, Methodist missionaries in Sri Lanka, Chinese revolutionaries in Shanghai, and Japanese reformers in Tokyo were all dismissing Buddhism as superstition and (in the case of the former) dismissing its followers as idolaters. A group of Buddhist elites, several of whom would visit the West, responded to these charges by claiming that Buddhism was not primitive, but instead was modern. Indeed, with its lack of a creator God and its mechanistic universe (driven by the engine of karma), it was the religion most suitable for the modern world. Some went so far as to say that Buddhism was not a religion at all, but rather a philosophy, even a science. In this way, viewed in light of the academic model of the day, which saw a movement from superstition to religion to science, Buddhism was able to leap from the beginning of the evolutionary chain to its end.

But the formation of Buddhist Modernism cannot be credited entirely to Asian Buddhists. Central to the process was the work of nineteenth-century European Orientalists. Although there were Buddhists almost everywhere else in Asia they found no Buddhists in India, the land of the Buddha’s birth; Buddhism had disappeared there by the fourteenth century. Instead, they found monuments (often in ruins), cave temples (overgrown by jungle), and statues (often broken). There were stone inscriptions to be deciphered, and there were Sanskrit manuscripts preserved in Nepal to the north and Pali manuscripts in Sri Lanka to the south. These were the materials from which European scholars would build their Buddhism.

What would come to be called “original Buddhism” or “primitive Buddhism,” became the domain of European and, later, American and then Japanese scholars. They would create a Buddha and a Buddhism unknown in Asia, one that may never have existed there before the late nineteenth century. Just as there was a quest for the historical Jesus, there was a quest for the historical Buddha, and European Orientalists felt they found him. Like Jesus, the Buddha wrote nothing and, unlike Jesus, nothing that he said was written down until four centuries (rather than four decades) after his death. This Buddhism then became a model against which the various contemporary Buddhisms of Asia were measured, and were generally found to be lacking, not only by Europeans, but eventually by Buddhist elites in Asia as well.

The Buddha was transformed from a stone idol into a man of flesh and blood, a man very much of modern times. Described by some as “the Luther of Asia,” he became famous for having spoken out against the corrupt priestcraft and the crippling caste system of “Brahmanism.” He also became something of a Romantic hero. In 1879, Edwin Arnold published a poem on the life of the Buddha, entitled The Light of Asia, that would become one of the most popular books of the Victorian period, and a favorite of Queen Victoria herself; Arnold was knighted for his work. The Buddha became an alternative Jesus, a Jesus who was not a Jew, but an Aryan. In a Europe obsessed with questions of race and questions of humanity, the Buddha was both racially superior and a savior for all humanity, an ancient kinsman, a modern hero. This Buddha was the product of a different Enlightenment...'

Precious points. Read the whole entry.

Matthieu Ricard on France 24

"30 years ago, Matthieu Ricard, the son of French philosopher Jean-François Revel, decided to convert to Buddhism and become a monk. He now lives in Nepal and is the French interpreter for the Dalai Lama, with whom he has built close ties."

Have a look at the interview touching briefly on politics, meditation, and scientific research.

Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist monk - Interview
Uploaded by FRANCE_24

Shamatha Project

Introductory remarks by Alan Wallace (profile at SBI, profile at Integral Naked) at the beginning of the Shamatha Project, arguably "the most sophisticated scientific study" of this type.



If you're interested in learning more, please listen to this series of podcasts on the Shamatha Project, giving a preliminary report of the findings.

Ken Wilber at Salon.com

An interview with Ken Wilber at Salon.com entitled "You are the river". Done by Steve Paulson, here's an excerpt:

Why has the scientific worldview dismissed this trans-personal dimension? For most intellectuals around the world, the secular scientific paradigm has triumphed.

It's understandable. Historically, if you look at these broad stages, the magical era tended to be 50,000 years ago, the mythic era emerged around 5,000 B.C., and the rational era -- secular humanism -- emerged in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an attempt to liberate myth and base truth claims on evidence, not just dogma. But when science threw out the church, they threw out the baby with the bath water.

You can't prove a higher stage to someone who's not at it. If you go to somebody at the mythic stage and try to prove to them something from the rational, scientific stage, it won't work. You go to a fundamentalist who doesn't believe in evolution, who believes the earth was created in six days, and you say, "What about the fossil record"? "Oh yes, the fossil record; God created that on the fifth day." You can't use any of the evidence from a higher stage and prove it to a lower stage. So someone who's at the rational stage has a very hard time seeing these trans-rational, trans-personal stages. The rational scientist looks at all the pre-rational stuff as nonsense -- fairies and ghosts and goblins -- and lumps it together with the trans-rational stuff and says, "That's non-rational. I don't want anything to do with it."

So where does God fit into this picture? Do you believe in God?

God is a perfect example of how these two types of religion treat ultimate reality. You asked, "Do you believe in God?" In exoteric religion, it's a matter of belief. Do you believe in the kind of God who rewards and punishes and will sit with you in some eternal heaven? But in the esoteric form of religion, God is a direct experience. Most contemplatives would call it "godhead." It's so different from the mythic conceptions of God -- the old man in the sky with a gray beard. The word "God" is much more misleading than it is accurate. So there's a whole series of terms that are used instead by the esoteric traditions -- super consciousness, Big Mind, Big Self. This ultimate reality is a direct union that is felt or recognized in a state of enlightenment or liberation. It's what the Sufis call the "supreme identity," the identity of the interior soul with the ultimate ground of being in a direct experiential state.

It does raise the question of whether God -- or ultimate reality -- has some independent existence, or whether this is just a mental state that our minds can conjure up.

That's right. One way we try to find out is by doing cross-cultural studies of individuals who've had the experience of the supreme identity and see if it shows similar characteristics. The most similar characteristic is it doesn't have characteristics. It's radically undefinable, radically free, radically empty. This formless ground of being is found in virtually all esoteric religions around the world. For the final test, take scientists with a Ph.D. who are studying brain patterns and put them in a contemplative state of the supreme identity and ask them whether they think that state is real or just a brain state. Nine out of 10 will say they think it's real. They think this experience discloses a reality that's independent of the human organism.

Do you see this ultimate reality as some sort of being or intelligence out there?

Well, if you look cross-culturally, what you'll find is that spirit or godhead can be looked at either through first-person, second-person or third-person perspectives. The third-person perspective is to see spirit as a grand "it." In other words, a vast web of life. Gaia in this third-person is the sum total of everything that exists. A second-person way of looking sees spirit as a "thou," as an actual intelligence that is present and is something you can, in a sense, have a conversation with, keeping in mind the ultimately unknowable nature of godhead. Many of the contemplative traditions go further and say you can approach spirit as a first person. So that spirit is "I." Or that would be Big Self.

Read the whole thing (link to print version).

Contemplative Science

This is from 2003 All in the Mind hosted by Natasha Mitchell. An excerpt from transcript:

Natasha Mitchell: Richard Davidson, let's come to some of the work that you've been doing which really is an extension of your many years of work looking at our expression of emotions and the role that emotions have in our well being and in our essential nature as humans. You have actually been putting monks and meditators under brain scans.

Richard Davidson: Yes, we've been doing two kinds of research on meditation, one is work with individuals who in fact are naïve to meditation, where we train them with a short term program of meditation based on certain Buddhist meditation practices and then look at changes that occur over a relatively short period of time, just over the course of several months. What's actually remarkable is that we find any changes over such a short period of time, but in fact, we've recently published an article showing significant changes in certain measures of both brain and immune function that were produced by this very short-term course of mindfulness meditation.

The second kind of work we've done is work with experts, people who have spent many years in contemplative practice who have really very finely honed their skills in these practices, and that work is still very much ongoing. And it really represents I think a radical experiment in cross cultural and trans-disciplinary science because here the Buddhist practitioner becomes not a subject but a collaborator, given their expertise in contemplative science in helping us to understand the nature of the data that we're collecting, helping us to design appropriate experiments to capture some of the specific qualities of mind that maybe produced. One particular domain of work that has I think been extremely influential is work on plasticity of the brain, which indicates that the brain really is the organ that is built to change in response to experience. That gives a solid foundation for asking how meditation might change the brain in ways that maybe helpful.

Natasha Mitchell: Let's come to some of your results with people that you trained up over a period of time in mindfulness meditation and part of that process will also be tapping into some of the incredible observations you've been making over the years about how emotions reside in the brain, and how there's a variation in how emotions work in the brain across the two hemispheres of the brain.

Richard Davidson: That's right, and so one of the questions that we were interested in examining at the outset was whether meditation might change a specific pattern of activation in the pre-frontal cortex which we have previously associated with different emotional dispositions.

We have evidence to suggest that individuals who exhibit at base line - just in their resting state so to speak - greater activation in certain regions of the left pre-frontal cortex, those individuals have a more positive dispositional mood, that is they are happier people and there's a whole constellation of characteristics that we've discovered which is associated with that pattern.

And what we wanted to see is whether a short intervention of meditation, in this case it was two month course, whether individuals would show a change over that period of time in this direction compared to a control group of people that were not engaged in this meditation.

Natasha Mitchell: And what did you find?

Richard Davidson: And what we found is that individuals who participated showed a significant increase in activation in left pre-frontal regions of their brain. That was associated with a reduction in the amount of anxiety that they reported. And we also found remarkably that there was a change in the immune system in these individuals, compared to individuals who were in our control group. We found that to be particularly remarkable.

Natasha Mitchell: It's extraordinary.

Richard Davidson: Given the brevity of the training, it suggests that meditation was producing systematic changes in both the brain and the body in directions that were positive.

Thanks to WH for heads up. Read the whole transcript.

Habits of Happiness

A video from TED. What is happiness, and how can we all get some? Buddhist monk, photographer and author Matthieu Ricard has devoted his life to these questions, and his answer is influenced by his faith as well as by his scientific turn of mind: We can train our minds in habits of happiness. Interwoven with his talk are stunning photographs of the Himalayas and of his spiritual community. Time 21 min. Enjoy!





*I posted previously a video of a lecture Matthieu Ricard held at Googletech (click here to watch).

The Science of Shamatha

An exquisite interview with B. Alan Wallace at Buddhist Geeks netcast. This is part 2 of the interview, for part 1 see here. This is a discussion

"...on the impact of the recently completed Shamatha Project. Dr. Wallace shares the astounding levels of concentration that were achieved during the 3-month retreats he led and tells us more about the achievement of shamatha. Find out how deep the students on this retreat went, and why nearly %20 of them decided to continue on with intensive retreat practice after it was over!

Dr. Wallace also discusses the potential impact that a study of this magnitude could have on the scientific community as well as the culture-at-large. Questions that the study aimed to answer included, "Is it possible to train attention?" & "Does meditation have an effect on ethics?". While the answers may be obvious to meditators, having them scientifically validated could have a major impact on the fields of education, mental health, and psychology."

Good stuff!

Scary shit indeed

A quote from Robb Smith's "Warning, scary shit ahead" post:

"At this point in the conference I was so depressed I thought of committing sepuku. We should assemble a credo on integral bioethics. Many of the problems that these scientists are trying to rectify derive from a sole reliance on artifact development (i.e., technology) to solve previous problems, a reiterative process that doesn't solve itself. Our technology development since the Enlightenment has far outstripped our ethical development. Most of the presenters at TED and the TED staff are continuing to look in the wrong places for comprehensive solutions to the questions they are posing, which is why the answers are partial, not integral, and in the most dangerous sense of the world: more purely right-hand empirical development will not change the game, only perpetuate it."

Read on.

Hidden Newton

Or, Newton the Alchemist. "Hidden" meaning "not known to general public", because there's a hidden Einstein, a hidden Schroedinger, a hidden Heisenberg, a hidden Planck... These hidden aspects of our great scientific geniuses are actually reflections of taboos long held by the modern scientific community at large since its inception and rise to power, taboos that were introduced to consolidate the "scientific outlook" and make it the rational way of seeing the universe and man's place in it. However, these same taboos became generative of a scientific shadow of shallowness and a dissociation of rationality from deeper aspects of human beingness, thus handing over the esoteric (hidden, profound) to the overtly religious (as if they knew what to do with it), and unleashing the scientistic impulse to assail and ultimately debauch both science and rationality.



As proposed (or made clear) in this BBC documentary, the alchemical Newton was hidden on purpose, and it's more than we can say about the arrogant narrow-mindedness of many contemporary scientific minds, who have been brought up and educated in the climate of "hidden identities", where they were assured and assuaged there's no such thing as a hidden (or interior, or unquantifiable) reality, for which the measurement and objective evaluation simply won't do, and were never asked nor encouraged to inquire into the nature of that which remains immeasurable. Thus, they learned early on to strategically postpone their own awareness, "We are ten years from answering the most difficult question, but answer it we will...", acting somewhat like mice from Adams' "H2G2" who knew the answer, but needed more time to "calculate the question".

Just as religion has accepted to impersonate its own caricature offered by science, so has science often reduced itself to a lame denial of interiority on one hand, and radical mystery on the other.

Resource: Quantum Questions, what else.

Hat tip to to WH.

Sheldrake on Dawkins

What goes around comes around, and so it is with Richard Dawkins, as well. Rupert Sheldrake writes about an interview Dawkins asked to make with him:

"Soon before Enemies of Reason was filmed, the production company, IWC Media, told me that Richard Dawkins wanted to visit me to discuss my research on unexplained abilities of people and animals. I was reluctant to take part, but the company’s representative assured me that “this documentary, at Channel 4’s insistence, will be an entirely more balanced affair than The Root of All Evil was.” She added, “We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiry”. So I agreed and we fixed a date. I was still not sure what to expect. Was Richard Dawkins going to be dogmatic, with a mental firewall that blocked out any evidence that went against his beliefs? Or would he be open-minded, and fun to talk to?"

Find out what went on. A mirror of this article is found at Skeptical Investigations.

And then there's the case of Mary Midgley, explained by Andrew Brown, involving again Richard Dawkins as the perp. A telling story.

Review of Alan Wallace's Hidden Dimensions

Quote from review by Nathan Senge at the Center for Buddhist Studies Weblog:

There is a quiet revolution afoot. The last century has witnessed Buddhists and quantum physicists quietly moving into perigee, however unwittingly until the last twenty years. In Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Cloth, 176 Pages), B. Alan Wallace gives an incisive portrayal of this merging of minds and argues that these two paths are not just complementary—they are intimately related...

In Astronomy we use a telescope to see distant starts. In a similar way, Buddhists use a mental telescope. Wallace calls this “quiescence”—it refers to a very specific form of introspection. Wallace explains:

“…[A]ny meditator who has not yet achieved it [quiescence] is technically regarded as a novice… Once one has achieved this exceptional level of attention balance, one should be able to effortlessly remain there, with the physical senses totally withdrawn, for at least four hours, with unwavering mindfulness and an extraordinary degree of vividness” (88).

Tall order. And perhaps seemingly impossible to the laymen. Nevertheless, someone untrained in metallurgy, geometry, and optics would be clueless in constructing a telescope. The analogy is sound.

According to Wallace, Buddhists advance a theory of an interdependent reality. This is often described in the context of the doctrines of Dependent Origination and Emptiness. Meditators trained in quiescence (remember the telescope?) probe the nature of mind and reality with a discriminating eye. Each constituent particle is shown to be relational and devoid of intrinsic existence. Wallace calls this realization "contemplative insight." Make no mistake—this is not nihilism. Nor is it an assertion of relativism. The absence Wallace describes is not no-thing, it is merely the lack of some-thing. And that something is the fiction of an independent reality. A something that has never existed, will never exist, but is nonetheless reified by most people. This tendency to reify is at the root of human suffering and is the target of the Buddhist philosophical project.

Read the whole piece.

Eagleton on Dawkins

"Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."

I really enjoyed Terry Eagleton's review of "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins for the London Review of Books. Two teasers here:

"What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right..."

"His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford. (I should point out that I use the term North Oxford in an ideological rather than geographical sense. Dawkins may be relieved to know that I don’t actually know where he lives.) There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others, are for the most part liberal platitudes. Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media chatter has it, it’s all down to religion."

And there's much more, of course, from Eagleton. Do read the whole piece.

Sheldrake on Dennett

He opens the book with the story of an ant climbing a blade of grass, falling down and climbing up again because "its brain has been commandeered by a tiny parasite, a lancet fluke, that needs to get itself into the stomach of a sheep or cow in order to complete its reproductive cycle." He asks, "Does anything like this ever happen to human beings? Yes indeed. We often find human beings . . . devoting their entire lives to furthering the interests of an idea that has lodged in their brains."

Sometimes Dennett is friendlier to his religious readers, and offers them lengthy justifications for his skeptical approach. He concedes that religion can serve a useful function by bringing out the best in a person. He also cites a series of studies that show that regular churchgoers tend to be healthier, have better morale and live longer than those who do not attend religious services.

Whatever the benefits of religions, Dennett believes that they arise entirely inside human minds. No spiritual realities exist outside us. He also takes it for granted that the mind "is the brain, or, more specifically, a system or organization within the brain that has evolved in much the same way as our immune system or respiratory system or digestive system has evolved . . . by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection." He assumes what he sets out to prove.

The central message of this book is that religion is a product of evolutionary psychology, based on aspects of human nature favoured by natural selection over many thousands of years. Dennett proposes a variety of theories: First, "sweet tooth" theories. We have evolved a receptor system for sweet things, and in a similar way we might have a "god centre" in our brains. Such a centre might depend on a "mystical gene" that was favoured by natural selection because people with it tended to survive better.

Second, religions might be memes that infect our brains. They are not necessarily parasitic, but could be symbiotic, conferring advantages on those who are infected.

Third, religion might be favoured in sexual selection by females. For example, women might have preferred men who demonstrated sensitivity to music and ceremony, thus spreading genes for religious behaviour within the population.

Fourth, religions may be cultural artifacts, like money. They could have evolved because they make social life more harmonious, secure and efficient. Or else they could have evolved because they enable an elite to prey upon the ill-informed and powerless.

Fifth, religions may be rather like pearls, beautiful byproducts that arose in response to irritants, which then captivated human beings for no good reason.

Read the whole review, it's fun. Hat tip to CJSmith.

What dogma?

CJ Smith has a post on anti-dogmatic dogmatism and/or dogmatic anti-dogmatism of the so-called new atheists and I think he has some great arguments. BTW, I agree with most if not all. Here's a snip:

The worry with the New Atheists, who are otherwise harmless and not particularly that deep in my book, is that they could veer towards illiberality. Dawkins most especially. Mostly they just come off as adolescent, maybe d–kheads a lot of the time. Which is fine; it’s a free country. They are not promoting communist gulags. They do practice psychological taunting, bordering on (mild) abuse I would say, de-humanizing and arrogant at times (Hitchens and Dawkins I’m thinking of now). Though they receive in truth far worse from so-called religious people, so that’s understandable if still not acceptable in my book.

And more:

What they miss is this–humans want their enslavement. Many humans that is. They want dogmas out of fear and if religion is destroyed then they will create atheists dogmas in order to fill in the gap. In other words, they are highly naive as to the depths of human evil. The evil they see as all outside implanted in us by parasitic religions. The truth often (sadly and more frighteningly) is that humans want and will create if needs be these parasites and inject themselves with them.

Read the whole piece.

Taboo versus Revolution

After recommending the video with Dean Radin from the GoogleTech Talks series, the next one I wish to draw your attention (if you haven't seen it already) is Alan B. Wallace's "Toward the First Revolution in the Mind Sciences", embedded below. After the first revolution in natural sciences, starting with Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and finally Isaac Newton; then the further revolution in physics with Planck and Einstein, which still is not over, with some key problems not being solved, i.e. the measurement problem - Wallace: "What is the role of the observer in the natural world? We don't know." And, of course, there are the quantum mechanics and general relativity, and neither is going away, but they remain not integrated. Then there's the revolution in life sciences, starting with Darwin, and later with Mendel, Crick and Watson. With William James, and his proposal to "rigorously observe mental phenomena", we may approach a third revolution, the one in mind sciences. Time 62 minutes.



A lot of background to this lecture is the infamous "taboo of subjectivity", explored by Wallace himself in "The Taboo of Subjectivity: Towards a New Science of Consciousness " and also "Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind". You may wish to listen to Alan Wallace in exchange with Ken Wilber at Integral Naked on the very subject of the taboo of inter/subjectivity (see here for info). Seems there are quite a few taboos in the present scientific culture at large, diminishing the formidable potential of real, deep science.

Taboo of Psychic Phenomena

I recommend the video of a lecture by Dean Radin "Science and the Taboo of Psi". Please go to youtube (link here), since the embed function was disabled for this one. Time 95 minutes. Here's another video with Radin, on the general prejudice and taboo concerning psychic phenomena, and the need to separate at least some of these from uneducated superstitions. "There's an invisible college that's beginning to evolve... I'm projecting that in 5 or 10 years the invisible college will grow so large, and the pressure will be so large, that the taboo will be addressed. Even at this point the taboo is so strong, that you're not even supposed to talk of taboo!" And further on, "In the beginning any new application... will be perceived as whacky. And then somebody will get a Nobel price and it's not whacky anymore. Which is not to say that all new ideas are equally valid, because some of the new ideas coming are indeed quite whacky. And it's only through the passage of time and the value of science, which is to continually confirm, that the idea is true or not, that we begin to get a sense of what is likely to be true versus what is likely to be a phantasy." Go ahead and enjoy! Time just over 20 minutes.



Thanks to ~C4 for heads up.

More on deluded Dawkins

CJ of Indistinct Union continues on Dawkins' Delusion:

On the dark side, the most obvious criticism is that the book is not so much an argument as a tirade. It’s like an adolescent smug temper tantrum. Dawkins refers on a number of occasions to “sophisticated theologians”–though (un?)remarkably he doesn’t cite any by name. Who are these ethereal beings lurking in the background of the text? Has he ever read any? And why would I trust his judgment–as opposed to experts on the subject–on who is and isn’t a sophisticated religious thinker?...

One day (God willing) we will societally actually get over these Boomers and their egos and their unique ability to see everything through the spectacle of the 1960s cultural wars. But not yet sadly.

Read the whole post.

The Delusion

CJ Smith of Indistinct Union writes:

"...Underneath what Dawkins has written, philosophically (and I would add spiritually), is a naked display of power. The problem isn’t science. The problem is scientism–that is science taken from its proper context and applied as an ideology to all other arenas of existence without question.

The “whole of life”, in other words, is simply the description of how it (life) causally comes about. Power equals a hypothesis, an experimental test, and validation via evidence. It is about isolated scientists observing the laws of nature (so-called) usually alone or at most in a cliquish elite, who are too often infected with a lust for control of life. This is why Dawkins doesn’t understand communal (2nd-person) forms of being-in-the-world, only 3rd and 1st person. He’s not really in dialogue with nature. He’s not in dialogue with too many humans either."

See the whole short piece.

Evolution by country

That evolution fares not very well in United States is no news, but look at some other countries. Sure, it's a relatively small sample to go by, but still... I'd give a higher estimate for Croatia (my homeland) and Austria, or for Lithuania and Latvia, and a lower one for Italy. Adults were asked to respond to the statement: "Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals." And the options were true, not sure, and false. I'm not sure most adult people even understand this simple statement correctly. In fact, most draw their understanding of evolution from a simplified representation offered in elementary education.

Have a look at the chart, and/or the full story.

War on Science

Just watched this documentary on TV. It's from BBC's "Horizon" series, and it's called "The War on Science", the subject being intelligent design on the rise in United States. Standardly good stuff from BBC, though without a sorely needed perspective that would recognize the fundamental historical cultural malady at the root of this "controversy" (which is actually nothing of sorts), namely materialistic reductionism as a shadow of the scientific revolution. Fundamentalist ignorance is insufficient to explain the whole issue in 21st century, just like darwinism is and will remain insufficient to explain awareness (or even just intelligence). But that's a story for another documentary.



My favorite here is Father Coyne (you may skip to minute 41), a vocal opponent of intelligent design, and former director of the Vatican Observatory. His comments are sufficient to complete what is said by Dawkins and Attenborough. Time 50 minutes. Enjoy!

For a more productive and more intelligent observation on the "science and spirituality dialogue" (versus "reason and faith debate"), see this piece by Francisco Varela at the Mind and Life website. I know, Buddhism is a religion without a Creator, but some Buddhist schools have their own creation narratives (NB: not all narratives are myths), and Buddhists are generally quite ready to improve it if necessary.

Artificial confusion

Quote from Guardian: "In a laboratory in Switzerland, a group of neuroscientists is developing a mammalian brain - in silicon. The researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in collaboration with IBM, have just completed the first phase of an ambitious project to reproduce a fully functioning brain on a supercomputer. By strange coincidence, their lab happens to lie on the same shores of Lake Geneva where Mary Shelley dreamt up her creation, Dr Frankenstein." Read the whole article.

The Four Riders

After watching the 2-part video "The Four Horsemen" (announced as Episode One of Discussions with Richard Dawkins as a DVD, all proceeds from sales of which will go to the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Security Trust) I can certainly recommend it to every reader of this blog. The videos are available for download at Dawkins' website, or to watch online at Google Video: Hour One and Hour Two.

My colleagues ~C4Chaos and William Harryman have given their brief comments on this video, Julian Walker endorses Sam Harris, and many atheist blogs have hailed the discussion. While I have enjoyed watching Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris give their respective views on several important topics, I'm also quite dissapointed (once again) with what they finally had to say in this "first-of-its-kind". Nothing new was expected, I know, but once you see them four together, the limitations of the so-called "new atheist" agenda become somewhat painful to watch. What these 'brights' have to say today has been said already much more eloquently by rationalists, naturalists, and atheists, 100 years or 1,000 years before them. Having been raised an atheist and humanist of 4th generation, I never found their claims particularly progressive in any sense. Instead, I felt they champion explicit scientism.

While differences are obvious, the fact they speak of "us" justifies looking at them together, without confounding or forgetting serious divergences between them. Harris makes Dawkins nervous, Dennett makes Hitchens impatient, while Hitchens scares everyone just a little bit. (I wonder who came up with the Four Horsemen analogy. Why not Four Nazgul? Just kidding.)

Anyway, I like Sam Harris best, even though I've been critical of the way he understands the benefits of meditation, as well as his idea of "killing Buddhism", see .pdf here (Harris: "Wisdom of Buddha is currently trapped within the religion of Buddhism" etc, etc). Basically, Harris should develop the ability to spot and avoid the dreaded level/line fallacy. But then, that would be Sam Harris 2.0, right?

More video: Here's a fun debate between Sam Harris and Rabbi David Wolpe. In a great moment, Harris says, "The antidote to bad science or scientific incompleteness is good science, and more science, not religion." Quickly, Rabbi Wolpe replies, "That's exactly the answer to bad religion, or poor religion, or failed religion." And off they go...

Also, in this article Meera Nanda is critical of the way Harris endorses Eastern practices. Just two quotes:

... Harris declares 'the end of faith' only to celebrate the beginning of a new age of spirituality. That such a prominent rationalist is prepared to reclaim spiritualism in the name of science matters. When spiritualism, or mysticism, claims the status of rational knowledge or science, it ends up transforming what is essentially an ecstatic emotional experience into a knowledge claim about the nature of reality. These issues are not just theoretical. In countries like India, where spiritualism enjoys the blessings of the highest religious authorities, metaphysical beliefs that follow from mystical experiences exert a great deal of social influence. While India has a fairly large and advanced scientific workforce, science has not succeeded in displacing the authority of metaphysical truths from the cultural sphere...

...Harris believes that spiritual experiences are knowledge experiences which can "uncover genuine facts about the world". He buys into the basic idea that what mystics 'see' in their minds actually has an ontological referent in the world outside their minds...

I don't think she understands correctly or precisely what Harris is or isn't endorsing, but that's another question - I still find her article useful to demonstrate how these matters are too complex for a rationalist, humanist, or even relativist platform. So much so, that on such platform you have to end up discarding something very, very essential to the grand human enterprise. Harris has done his best not to discard interiority, and not to discard deeper states of awareness, but he has failed to recognize higher structures, i.e. higher horizons that reconcile and integrate faith and reason in a marriage where everyone has to give up a little to gain so much more. Ken Wilber writes in his foreword to "The Marriage of Sense and Soul" (italics mine):

"... Fools rush in where angels fear to tread; therefore, the integration of science and religion is the theme of this book. If you are an orthodox religious believer, I would only ask that you relax into the argument and see where it takes you; I do not think you will be dismayed. The primary prerequisite I have placed on this discussion is that both science and religion must find the argument acceptable in their own terms. For this marriage to be genuine, it must have the free consent of both spouses. If you are an orthodox scientist, I would only suggest that, as you have a thousand times in the past when you were working on a problem, let curiosity and wonder bubble up, but in this case don't focus it on a specific solution. Simply let wonder fill your being until it takes you out of yourself and into the staggering mystery that is the existence of the world, a mystery that facts alone can never begin to fill. If Spirit does exist, it will lie in that direction, the direction of wonder, a direction that intersects the very heart of science itself. And you will find, in this adventure, that the scientific method will never be left behind in the search for an ultimate ground."

Well, amen.

NOTE: an interesting discussion has developed at my Zaadz blog where this article was cross-posted.

Deism vs Fidelism

~C4Chaos points out Michael Dowd as an integrally informed speaker, working to promote a synthesis of religion and science. Indeed, for a Christian public, Dowd is a promising voice of neo-deism (see a really nice entry at Wikipedia), though he doesn't identify as such, nor does he identify as integral (but then, some who do are not etc.). Deism is typically contrasted with fideism, where semantically religion and spirituality is identified or - more correctly - delimited in many Western cultures as "faith", as if religion and spirituality cannot be known by any other name. I believe Wilber is correct to point that the current conversation on science and religion "assumes that everybody knows what we are talking about when we talk about religion. While science is something that we can fairly well agree on the meaning of, religion or spirituality has a very broad range of meaning."

That broad range of meaning is definitely NOT given enough attention to warrant an informed debate (i.e. a debate on a level of perspective that would permit an integral proposition to even be considered). "Religion" is NEVER used by Dawkins, Dennett, and even Harris (who won't be called an "atheist", but is definitely atheistic) in a way that would allow or include something like Deism, and they don't qualify their usage of "religion" as a mythic, literalist, dogmatic, amber or lower religion, as opposed to higher levels. Well, that religion is easy prey for a rational or higher attack, but then one basically commits "LLF" (level-line fallacy, of which I've posted before) , and off it goes... Enjoy this promotional video for Dowd's book.




NOTE: Michael Dowd, in his own words, wrote Thank God for Evolution! with five different audiences in mind:

1) Those who embrace evolution but don’t have joy, peace, or a deep sense of meaning and purpose in their lives (i.e., those who don’t have a personal relationship with God).
2) Mainline Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Anabaptist believers.
3) Progressive, and Emerging Church Christians.
4) WWJD-type evangelical “Christ followers” (i.e., those committed to following Jesus “in His steps”).
5) Anyone and everyone struggling with their sinful or addictive nature.

And, he points that "Thank God for Evolution! is NOT intended for those whose walk with God is solidly embedded within a strict, literalist interpretation of scripture. But those who experience twinges of doubt when the book of Genesis is used line-by-line to explain the creation of this world are likely to experience this perspective not as a breath, but as a gust, of fresh air." This somewhat puts his work in perspective, especially when considering the more general science/religion "debate".

While Dowd offers a gust of fresh air, that is, a renewal within the Christian discourse into a spiritual perspective on evolution and an evolutionary view of spirituality itself, the debate around "new atheists" seems to be a v-memetic turf war, and - as it has become increasingly obvious - values are only one of many developmental lines, not to be naively confused with worldviews or even views in general. Dawkins probably sells most books among them, and his approach seems the most flattened (almost vulgar). What people espouse, what they embody, and how they differ significantly in various developmental streams - all this makes the whole issue much more complex than simply (rational) science vs. (mythic) religion.

The uniting human challenge

"...There is no question that linguistic thought is indispensable for us. It is, in large part, what makes us human. It is the fabric of almost all culture and every social relationship. Needless to say, it is the basis of all science. And it is surely responsible for much rudimentary cognition—for integrating beliefs, planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other mental capacities. Even talking to oneself out loud may occasionally serve a useful function.

From the point of view of our contemplative traditions, however—to boil them all down to a cartoon version, that ignores the rather esoteric disputes among them—our habitual identification with discursive thought, our failure moment to moment to recognize thoughts as thoughts, is a primary source of human suffering. And when a person breaks this spell, an extraordinary kind of relief is available.

But the problem with a contemplative claim of this sort is that you can’t borrow someone else’s contemplative tools to test it. The problem is that to test such a claim—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted we tend to be in the first place, we have to build our own contemplative tools. Imagine where astronomy would be if everyone had to build his own telescope before he could even begin to see if astronomy was a legitimate enterprise. It wouldn’t make the sky any less worthy of investigation, but it would make it immensely more difficult for us to establish astronomy as a science.

To judge the empirical claims of contemplatives, you have to build your own telescope. Judging their metaphysical claims is another matter: many of these can be dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy by merely thinking about them. But to judge whether certain experiences are possible—and if possible, desirable—we have to be able to use our attention in the requisite ways. We have to be able to break our identification with discursive thought, if only for a few moments. This can take a tremendous amount of work. And it is not work that our culture knows much about.

One problem with atheism as a category of thought, is that it seems more or less synonymous with not being interested in what someone like the Buddha or Jesus may have actually experienced. In fact, many atheists reject such experiences out of hand, as either impossible, or if possible, not worth wanting. Another common mistake is to imagine that such experiences are necessarily equivalent to states of mind with which many of us are already familiar—the feeling of scientific awe, or ordinary states of aesthetic appreciation, artistic inspiration, etc.

As someone who has made his own modest efforts in this area, let me assure you, that when a person goes into solitude and trains himself in meditation for 15 or 18 hours a day, for months or years at a time, in silence, doing nothing else—not talking, not reading, not writing—just making a sustained moment to moment effort to merely observe the contents of consciousness and to not get lost in thought, he experiences things that most scientists and artists are not likely to have experienced, unless they have made precisely the same efforts at introspection. And these experiences have a lot to say about the plasticity of the human mind and about the possibilities of human happiness.

So, apart from just commending these phenomena to your attention, I’d like to point out that, as atheists, our neglect of this area of human experience puts us at a rhetorical disadvantage. Because millions of people have had these experiences, and many millions more have had glimmers of them, and we, as atheists, ignore such phenomena, almost in principle, because of their religious associations—and yet these experiences often constitute the most important and transformative moments in a person’s life. Not recognizing that such experiences are possible or important can make us appear less wise even than our craziest religious opponents."

Also sprach Sam Harris, the whole lecture here. There's a video of Harris giving these and similar arguments (link).

Now, clearly there can be a contemporary mysticism that does distinguish between prerational and postrational views of mind and life. This same mysticism is able to explain its main tenets in broadly rational terms, and present the transrational insight in accessible philosophical language, aided by a judicious measure of paradox and pointing to direct experience attained to only through methodical application of a discipline such as meditation coupled with a study of perspectives on reality.

The problem seems not to be in theism (which is no warranty of anyone's prerationality), or in atheism (which is no warranty of anyone's rationality), but instead in theists' and atheists', in Harris' words, "not recognizing that such experiences are possible or important", because in that case indeed they become less wise than the craziest in the other party.

Theists and atheists, personalists and impersonalists, believers and skeptics, all are welcome to embrace what is their own full potential. Are they invited and actively encouraged to do so by their worldview? That seems to be the key issue, and the uniting human challenge.

Under the radar?

... So, let me make my somewhat seditious proposal explicit: We should not call ourselves "atheists." We should not call ourselves "secularists." We should not call ourselves "humanists," or "secular humanists," or "naturalists," or "skeptics," or "anti-theists," or "rationalists," or "freethinkers," or "brights." We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.

Sam Harris, from a talk given at the Atheist Alliance conference in Washington D.C. on September 28th, 2007. Read the whole text here.

Dalai Lama kisses Darwin

A substantial article by Denyse O'Leary.

Part One: Intelligent design east? The Dalai Lama kisses Darwin goodbye

Part Two: If you are a Buddhist, what would test your faith and what wouldn't?

Part Three: Why does the Dalai Lama reject Darwinism?

Part Four: Materialist neuroscientists vs. the Dalai Lama

Part Five: Other reviews of Single Atom: Materialists and non-materialists continue to lock horns

Wisdom at Mind and Reality

Professor Robert A.F. Thurman at the Mind and Reality Symposium, speaking eloquently on wisdom in Buddhism reading parts from his target essay. Time 27 minutes. Enjoy!

Wallace at Mind and Reality

First a short interview with B. Alan Wallace on the Mind and Reality conference (only 1o minutes), and then the keynote itself (1 hour 9 minutes). Highly recommended viewing. Enjoy!

Enemies of Reason: Part Two

I've posted recently about Part One of Dawkins' new documentary "Enemies of Reason". See that one first in the post. Here comes Part Two, and from Dawkins himself: "In this program I want to look how health has become a battleground between reason and superstition." Time 48 minutes Enjoy!

Monks in the lab

"Monks in the lab" is a story of human and scientific adventure. "Monks in the lab" enables viewers to explore the frontiers of scientific research, personal health and mind and spirit. Why is contemporary science interested in meditation? Why is meditation good for your health? Why are Buddhist monks allowing Western researchers to use technology to probe their brains and bodies?

Buddhists have been studying the human mind and spirit with no technological tools at all for 2500 years. They have developed meditation techniques that increase mindful attention and transform the emotions. But these techniques have been long unknown or ignored in the West.

But today’s scientific researchers have more and more to deal with the nagging and universal questions of the nature of the emotions and the mind. Buddhist experience and knowledge are of increasing interest. Just what are “emotions”? What do we mean by “mind”?

The scientists of the project “Mind and life” who are studying the meditative states are pioneers in their field. They try to understand the mechanisms by which the mind influences the body and explore the extraordinary plasticity of the brain.

Watch the video here. Time 53 minutes. Enjoy!

Script & director: Delphine Morel
camera: Jean-Jacques Mrejen
sound: Murielle Damain & Patrick Genet
editor: Variety Moszynski
with: Clifford Saron, René Feusi, Rabjam Rinpoché, Khyentse Yangsi Rinpoché, Matthieu Ricard, Monastère de Shechen, Nepal, Jonathan Cohen, Jason Chein, Brent Field, Leigh Nystrom, Paul Ekman, Erika Rosenberg, Margaret Kemeny, Alan Wallace, Richard Davidson, Antoine Lutz, Nancy Rawling, Yonten, Chokey Livingston, Gendrun Rinchen, Rigzin Samdrup, Tsultrin Tawa
co-production & commisioning editor: ARTE France, Hélène Coldefy & BOS: Babeth M. VanLoo
in cooperation with YLE 2

Angkor Wat like LA

"... The great medieval temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia was once at the centre of a sprawling urban settlement, according to a new, detailed map of the area. Using Nasa satellites, an international team have discovered at least 74 new temples and complex irrigation systems. ..."

From BBC News. Read the whole article.

Skepticism vs. Curiosity

B. Alan Wallace in interview at the Skeptiko.com, quote:

"…this is what bothers me about many of the so called skeptics… what they are doing is defending the status quo which doesn’t take a whole lot of guts. They are about as skeptical as Pat Robertson or Billy Graham. They too have a congregation behind them. They all agree; they’re skeptical of other religions, they’re skeptical of materialism, and so forth. I just don’t see much difference in the skepticism of a religious fundamentalist and a hard-core, committed, scientific materialist."

Skepticism may be a hideout for both fundamentalists and relativists, it only being a matter what one is skeptical about. In itself, it often means nothing, except a reluctance to really find out. Thanks to WH for heads up.

Listen to the interwiew. Time 54:05 Also available for download.

Global warming not a crisis (?!)

I'm a fan of Michael Crichton. He does TV, movies, books and he really uses his brain to arrive at conclusions that