David Brooks had a great column in the New York Times yesterday, called The Neural Buddhists. I wrote him a long email about it, which he will probably never read, but I was thinking the whole time that I would post it here. Some of you who have been around for awhile may find something familiar here and there, but usually, every time I write something it comes out a little differently.
Hi David,
Great column, many good points, but I think you’ve miscalculated on a few. You said, “The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred.” Those people will come to see, eventually, that the feeling that something is sacred is just like all their other feelings: the product of neurochemicals and neural connections. Anyone can have the feeling that anything is sacred with the right combination, and sooner or later, everyone will realize that their particular “sacred” is a product of their particular history.
I also think there’s a problem with your statement, “In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other.” As you said earlier in the column, “You put a magnetic helmet around their heads and they will begin to think they are having a spiritual epiphany.” Science can explain mystical feelings, but I don’t think that constitutes reinforcement. There are many unsolved mysteries in science, but as more solutions are found, the less room there will be for the mystical.
When you said, “Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment,” I think you overlooked the fact that social living has been a very successful way of ensuring the survival of genes. Fairness, empathy, etc., are phenomena that are necessary to the functioning of society, and no less susceptible to the explanations of science and evolution than anything else–the genes are still in charge.
Finally, I think that the biggest problem we face in reconciling science and our beliefs was seriously understated when you wrote, “First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships.” True enough, as it is, but unraveling those relationships in a way that makes sense of our conscious experience is a puzzle within a conundrum.
As I write this, I have no idea how my brain is coming up with these words and phrases instead of others, or why I’m writing at all. Of course my brain can produce rationalizations for my behavior, verbal and otherwise, and there might even be some approximate relationship to “reality,” but the number of possible connections the brain makes in producing any one moment of experience is incalculable. There is no way we could be conscious of all its processes, as you know from your reading list (he recommends some authors in the column), so how do we regard ourselves in our ignorance?
I’ve been considering this for years, and the best my brain has come up with so far is that “I” am its best guess at the optimal way of presenting itself socially. My experience of the world–sights, sounds, tastes, etc.–are the raw materials it uses in producing the public version of itself. All my thoughts are trial balloons for possible presentation. My feelings of control are part of the social requirements for a participating organism.
Obviously, there’s a lot left unsaid, but I hope I’ve conveyed the difficulty of comprehending the “dynamic process of relationships” as they appear in everyday life. As Marvin Minsky says in The Emotion Machine, “I suspect that we use words like “Me” and “I” to keep us from thinking about what we are!”
It’s a sticky wicket.
Maximum Sticky