Data and the Divine
Scientific data confirming spiritual experience? It certainly is intriguing to hear that modern science may be catching up with discoveries familiar within the Perennial Philosophy for millennia. But we should be careful not to conclude that we can now turn to science to validate or explain spiritual experience itself.
In a recent NewYork Times article, His Holiness the Dalai Lama wrote that there are practical ways for individuals to curb dangerous impulses--"impulses that collectively can lead to war and mass violence.""You don't need a drug or an injection," he said. "You don't have to become a Buddhist, or adopt any particular religious faith. Everybody has the potential to lead a peaceful, meaningful life."
He cited as evidence not only his own lifelong spiritual practice, but also the work of scientists he has dialogued with for more than fifteen years. For example, he referred to neuroscientist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, who uses imaging devices to monitor the brain during meditation. Davidson's results confirm what Buddhists have believed for many centuries: Spiritual practices such as meditation can lead to a reduction in destructive emotions. "Mindfulness meditation strengthens the neurological circuits that calm a part of the brain that acts as a trigger for fear and anger," is how His Holiness summarized Davidson's research.
Reading the New York Times report, I was reminded of the controversial work of a couple of other brain researchers whose claims for science go far beyond what His Holiness acknowledges. They say their data provide scientific evidence for spiritual experiences and the presence of the divine. Here's a summary of their experiment:
A meditator sits alone in a room, wired to monitor his blood and brainwaves. A couple of scientists wait patiently in another room for a signal. Eventually, it all comes together when the meditator tugs on a piece of kite string
trailing between the two rooms: "I'm peaking, I'm peaking." The scientists hit a button on their state-of-the-art brain-monitoring device, and take a photograph of God.
A Photograph Of God?
This experiment by neuroscientists Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili highlights the key challenge for a neuroscientific approach to studying meditation (or any other state of consciousness): On one hand, sits the meditator with his or her subjective experience; on the other, various instruments for measuring blood flow, heart rate, and brain activity are connected to the meditator. The link between all this objective hi-tech paraphernalia and the subject's experience is a decidedly low-tech piece of string. Its purpose: to signal to the scientists the moment when the meditator hits a peak experience. The subject's tugging on the twine tells the researchers "Now!" and they record whatever the instruments are registering at that precise instant.
The length of string symbolizes the awkward experimental dilemma facing consciousness researchers: No matter how hi-tech the machines and instrumentation, these can never directly measure subjective experience. The best such machines can do is measure physiological correlates of consciousness. And the rub is that for these correlates to have any meaning, the researchers must rely on some subjective report from the meditating subject. In this case, the "report" is indicated by the meditator tugging on a piece of cotton twine. No amount of probing and monitoring will ever yield direct information about consciousness-- although it does, of course, deliver substantial data about what goes on in the subject's brain and nervous system and other bodily functions whenever the subject reports a particular mental state.
Not even the report is a direct line to consciousness. Like the piece of twine, all reports are necessarily objective-- they involve the transmission of signals via some physical medium (whether words carried on air vibrations, electrical activity through circuits of wires and transistors, or electronic images on a screen). The experimental data, therefore, are not even second-hand; they are third-hand, two removes from the actual experience itself. First, the experience, then the report, and only then the measurement of the physiological correlates.
And since it always remains possible that the subject could be mistaken or even deliberately misleading in his or her report, we can never be sure just exactly what the physiological measurements actually correlate with. We have no "consciousness meter" for detecting the presence of consciousness--just a piece of twine, or some other third-hand piece of low- or hi-tech instrumentation, to indicate "I'm peaking, I'm peaking."
Detecting and measuring consciousness is precisely what researchers cannot achieve, and they need to be careful not to confuse measuring the correlates of consciousness with the actual experience itself. Scientists can no more take a picture of consciousness than they can take a photograph of God. The "photograph" that Newberg and his colleagues report in their book Why God Won't Go Away is in actual fact an image taken with a state-of-the-art SPECT camera (single photon emission computer tomography). Unfortunately, even with such technology, "solid science" cannot verify the presence of mystical experience, or any experience whatsoever.
This confusion between correlates and experience can be the Achilles' heel of consciousness research. Although Newberg presents intriguing brain science focused on the issue of religious experience, his key claim that science now has solid research data to support the reality of spiritual experiences is misleading.
He starts from the assumption--shared by a great number of neuroscientists and philosophers--that the brain creates the mind. He wants to persuade us that brains are hardwired for minds that can experience the transcendent and the divine. Brains are hardwired for God!
Hardwired For God?
But the hypothesis that God is hardwired in the human brain raises the critical question whether God is merely an experience generated in the brain's neural pathways, or whether the brain has evolved to detect a genuinely divine presence greater than the brain. According to Newberg, "There's no other way for God to get into your head except through the brain's neural pathways."
We have, here, his core thesis. And then comes the deeper question:
Are these unitary experiences merely the result of neurological function--which would reduce mystical experience to a flurry of neural blips and flashes--or are they genuine experiences [that] the brain is able to perceive? Could it be that the brain has evolved the ability to transcend material existence, and experience a higher plane of being that actually exists?
In the final chapters of Why God Won't Go Away, the authors emphasize they do not intend to imply that God exists only in the brain's electrochemical events. Although it is beyond the scope of science to prove or disprove God, they say their research inclines them to believe that religious experiences in the brain are representative of a genuinely real spiritual presence beyond the brain.
They reason as follows: Every experience we ever have must pass through the brain and nervous system. This is as true for an everyday experience such as seeing a tree outside your window as it is for a mystical experience of God. Now, we accept that the tree really exists "out there," and not only in our brains and minds. We must accept this, otherwise all of our experiences, including the whole of science, would be nothing more than private illusion. But since there is no intrinsic neurological difference between an experience of a tree or an experience of God in the brain, we have no rational justification for believing the tree to have a reality independent of our brain while doubting the independent existence of God.
Philosophically, the authors are on sound ground with this conclusion. However, while they offer what seems to be scientific support for the reality of spiritual experiences, they in fact undermine their conclusion by the metaphysical assumptions of materialism that lurk behind their data-- specifically, the idea that mind exists only as a product of the brain. Yes, God can "get into your head" only through the brain's neural pathways. And yes, "God cannot exist as a concept . . . anyplace else but in your mind." But no, neither experiences of God, nor any experiences whatsoever, "are made real" only "through the processing powers of the brain" and the "cognitive functions of the mind" produced by the brain.
The hypothesis that God is hardwired in the human brain raises the critical question whether God is merely an experience generated in the brain's neural pathways or whether the brain has evolved to detect a genuinely divine presence greater than the brain.
This materialist position assumes that 1) brain produces mind, and 2) mind is found only in the brain and/or nervous system. Both of these assumptions, often unquestioned in neuroscience, are highly questionable and deeply problematic philosophically. As the authors acknowledge: Neither science nor philosophy can satisfactorily answer how objective neurons and brains could produce subjective minds. The best that contemporary materialists can offer is the miracle of emergence--getting the wine of consciousness from the water of the brain, as philosopher Colin McGinn put it. Exactly how this "miracle" occurs--or even could occur--is left unexplained, and instead we are left with little more than faith in what we may call "promissory materialism."
Without an adequate explanation of how brains could give rise to minds, we have no solid ground for assuming that minds exist only in brains. If they do exist in brains--and we can be sure they do--then it is at least plausible and coherent to assume that minds exist in association with whatever brains are made of (that is, neurons). But then the same line of argument applies to neurons, too. In short, since the matter of the brain's cells is no different from the matter of other cells in the body (not the cells' architecture or functions, but their constituent matter), then we may assume mind or consciousness is there, too. And so on, all the way down to the cells' molecules and atoms, and beyond. God, as an experienced reality, then, certainly exists in the mind; but this mind may be anywhere in the body (or even beyond it). God, or spirit, or universal consciousness may manifest anywhere--not only in human brains, but in all living cells, in all nonliving molecules and atoms, anywhere in the whole natural cosmos. Of course, if we wish to entertain ideas of the divine, and not merely experience its presence, then the tangled neural pathways of human brains appear to do the job very well.
In the end, our brains may harbor the secret of why the idea of God won't go away. But, if the great sages and mystics are correct, then the idea of God may actually get in the way of direct spiritual experience. The divine, it seems, speaks to us beyond any hardwiring. In the silence of meditation, we may reach a state of consciousness suffused with serenity and calmness, and this may indeed "strengthen the neurological circuits" to reduce destructive emotions. We should be grateful for any scientific insight that helps us understand the intricate workings of the brain. But no amount of neuroscientific understanding could ever substitute for actual, direct experience. Data are not the divine.
Notes & References
Newberg, A., D'Aquili, E., & Rause, V. (2001), Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. New York: Ballantine Books.
Tenzin Gyatso, "The Monk in the Lab," New York Times, April 26, 2003.
This article is adapted from "Hardwired for God?" by Christian de Quincey, Cerebrum,Vol. 3 (3), Summer 2001, www.dana.org
Dr. Christian de Quincey is a professor of philosophy at John F. Kennedy University, where he teaches Consciousness Studies. He is also Managing Editor of IONS Review, a 40,000 membership magazine from the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and an international speaker on consciousness, cosmology, spirituality, and cognitive science at conferences and workshops in the United States and Europe.
His work on consciousness has appeared in both popular and academic journals, including Journal of Consciousness Studies, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, ReVision, Network, Noetic Sciences Review, Connections, Cerebrum, and Somatics. He is author of Radical Nature: Consciousness All The Way Down, a novel, Deep Spirit, and co-author, with Willis Harman, of The Scientific Exploration of Consciousness. Before moving into academia, he worked as a high-tech marketing communications consultant in Silicon Valley, and before that was a professional journalist for national newspapers including The Irish Times, the London Sunday Times, and the science journal Nature.
He served as guest faculty on the University of Arizona's pioneering on-line degree course "Dialogues In Consciousness," and served as a member of the advisory committee for the University Arizona's new Center for Consciousness Studies; on the program committee for the University of Arizona's "Spirituality, Health, & Healing" conference; on the program committee for Dublin University's conference on "Cognitive Science"; and was a keynote speaker at the 1999 "Consciousness and the Original Spirit of Science" conference, Olympia, Greece. He has a doctorate in Philosophy and Religion, and a masters degree in Consciousness Studies.
"As a professor of philosophy and consciousness studies, I have spent decades teaching and guiding people through the mystery of consciousness. My success as a teacher and writer in this field grows out of my dedication to making difficult issues simple and clear-even for those with no background. My main interest is to find common ground between various worldviews."
Christian de Quincey can be contacted at: The Institute of Noetic Sciences, 101 San Antonio Road, Petaluma, CA 94952-9524. Email: cdeq@noetic.org.
Samples of his writings on consciousness and cosmology are available on his website: www.deepspirit.com.
