Are God and Consciousness Moving Us Beyond Materialism?
Written by: Matthew Sabatine
Image credits belong to: Placidplace | Pixabay
“Much of man’s religious dogma and his moral and even legal codes is deeply influenced in the final analysis by mind-matter concepts. In fact, all the ultimate aims and values of mankind could be profoundly affected by a thoroughgoing rational insight into the mind-body relationship.”
See Rogersperry.org if hyperlinks do not work.
Those are the words of Roger Sperry in 1952 at the University of Chicago. Sperry was an American neuropsychologist who won a 1981 Nobel prize for his split-brain research.
I want to relay some insights I got from Sperry’s work titled Neurology and the Mind-Brain Problem. It appears that Sperry believed science and philosophy would be less bedeviled by the mind-body conundrum once we are able to understand the neural patterning of the perception of things such as color, time, size, etc. During his time, he realized that the many different qualities of mental experience could not be encapsulated in the composition of our chemistry. The many different dimensions and meanings of the inner life cannot be wholly based on how the electrochemical impulse speedily moves down a neural pathway. We cannot boil it down to excitation thresholds and the likelihood for which a neuron will fire an action potential or the sequential voltage changes across a membrane.
From page 311 of that same work, he states:
“At the core of all metaphysical problems stands the mind-brain relationship, real understanding of which could have vast influence on all ultimate aims and values of mankind. The logical, philosophic, and semantic approaches to the question, though employed intensively by some of the greatest human minds, have repeatedly failed to yield a satisfactory resolution of the problem. Hope for further progress is seen to lie in a scientific analysis of the neural correlates of psychic experience, and the present discussion has been restricted primarily to this essentially neurological problem.”
It was in 1952 when Sperry recognized that metaphysics is relevant to our minds, brains, and values. Today, there is still some denial that metaphysics, theology, and spirituality have any relevance to science and ultimate reality.
Fast forward to 1981 when Roger Sperry wrote in his book titled Science and Moral Priority—Merging Mind, Brain, and Human Values. He recognizes humanity’s time-honored battle over right versus wrong. What foundations and principles should be eventually attained among our different populations? How can we harmonize the world’s divergent faiths? What is the “highest good” or “ultimate value” in man’s search for existential meaning? (pg. 1)
As a Christian, I doubt that all of the world’s faiths can be honestly harmonized. But I find it interesting that he asked those questions 40 years ago and related them to his era’s conceptual progress in the topic of mind and brain. I think humanity is still begging for a reconciliation of the various faiths here in the 21st Century.
According to Sperry, people must change their value systems in a way that will enable humanity to tackle crises involving food, pollution, and the degradation of our cities. But how do we begin to restrain population growth without violating “centuries-old ethical and moral conventions”? (pg. 2)
What “actually is” versus what “ought-to-be” is untouchable by the scientific method, according to what Sperry states:
“The endless complexity of human values and their subjectivity, their relativity to changing aims and goals, and their frequent irrationality and anchorage in intuition and religious faith, among other difficulties, have seemed to hopelessly defy any rational or scientific approach.” (pg. 3)
For Sperry, new interpretations of the causes of conscious experience were inspired by the 20th Century cognitive revolution that coalesced the fields of psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, neuroscience, and philosophy. For Sperry, this dethroned materialism, which argues that nothing exists beyond matter, and all mental states and consciousness are outcomes of material interactions, implying that a spiritual realm cannot exist. This dethronement of materialism changed our discourse on human nature and moral values. This inspired the prioritization of knowing your innermost intimate makeup and inspired new perspectives on the possibility of an afterlife, the nature of values, the nature of opportunity and autonomy of action, and seeing things from a higher perspective that generate positive emotions. This generated implications that altered how we use our words to account for physical reality.
Roger Sperry seems to lament the rejection of mind and spirit in the Western and Communist worlds. Sperry seemingly witnessed an era’s departure from a dominant worldview that treated the words “conscious” or “mental” as taboo, and therefore, saw no professional worth in the incorporeality of what is directly known by the person exclusively holding his/her inner experience. He celebrates “the acceptance of conscious entities” as causal explanations during the 1960s and 1970s scientific discourses.
On page 4 he states:
“Until very recently science had been dominated in the Western and Communist worlds alike by the belief that man and his behavior, along with everything else, can be fully accounted for in terms that are strictly material without resorting to any kind of nonphysical force or agent. Among the latter were traditionally included all the intangibles of mind and spirit: mental images, sensations, thoughts and feelings, hopes, ideals, and all the other subjective phenomena that comprise the world of inner experience. So strong had been the dogmatic renunciation of conscious or mental forces as explanatory constructs in natural science up through the 1950s and into the early 1960s that one risked derision by even mentioning words such as ‘conscious’ or ‘mental’ at a serious scientific gathering.”
For Sperry, science could no longer deprive us of positive human qualities after it started to incorporate meaning and value into its business and allowed studies of what is tangible to become subservient to the intangibles of mind and consciousness.
Sperry reported that a 1980 Washington D.C. formal meeting of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders agreed that a change in value-belief systems was necessary for making a new theology that would foster “renewable energy sources” and improve the trajectory of world affairs.
Fast forward to today! We are continuing the conversation about materialism and reductionism in relation to mind, brain, and body.
A much more up-to-date conversation took place between two important professionals: 1) Iain McGilchrist, who is a psychiatrist and Johns Hopkins University neuroimaging researcher, and 2) Sharon Dirckx, who has a PhD in brain imaging and a career in Christian apologetics. You can find the YouTube video here.
Justin Brierley’s show called Unbelievable addressed this topic of mind, brain, and consciousness in relation to God, asking whether there is a master working behind the scenes.
Iain McGilchrist gained expertise while working alongside a colleague who spent 20 or 30 years at the bedside of people suffering with brain damage in the right hemisphere. When suffering with right hemisphere damage, the world is no longer intelligible as it would be while suffering with left hemisphere damage. The right hemisphere is adept at understanding figures of speech, humor, and stories. It identifies the uniqueness of it all. It understands the tangible form of the ideas, feelings, and qualities that are implicit within the message. The right hemisphere has a stronger connection with the body and the “emotional part of being” than the left hemisphere, which is designated with the task of literally interpreting and compartmentalizing things. The two hemispheres must work together for us to fully make sense of our lives.
But we are at a point in human history where the left hemisphere, which is designated for checking the details, is dominating over the right hemisphere, which is meant for seeing life’s picture more holistically and poetically.
According to McGilchrist, evolution has enabled all creatures to do two different things, simultaneously. A creature must be able to target his lunch enough to get it while also being attentive to his surroundings so that he does not become someone else’s lunch, too. Analyzing the pieces while holding the entire puzzle together involves an equilibrium that we all must maintain so everyone, together, can keep the world’s consistency. Perhaps this is why McGilchrist believes that “attention is a deeply moral act, because it changes the world and it changes you.”
The world is something that we face or confront. It is not “independent” of us, but we also do not “make it up.”
It is forbidden to leave the right hemisphere underused as you become preoccupied with the left hemisphere’s tasks of acquisition and manipulation. An underused right hemisphere will prevent us from dabbling in who we are, why we are here, and what kind of world we are living in.
McGilchrist looked at the history of the West based on our modern knowledge of the left-right hemispheres and discovered that Greece and Rome had a brilliant symbiotic and synergistic relationship between the two hemispheres. The right hemisphere is the master that dispatches the left hemisphere to do computation and gather information which it returns to the master, the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the emissary that does not understand the ultimate purpose or the grand scheme of things, but still completes the mission in deference to the master.
McGilchrist uses specific ominous adjectives to describe the fall of Greece and Rome:
“At the end of these societies, they became more and more bureaucratic, devitalized, categorical rather than subtle, and effectively the life, the magic, the imagination, and the spirit went out from the civilizations. And they collapsed.”
His observations of humanity’s thinking throughout the recent centuries and decades also include some ominous terms:
“We are moving into this world in which things are atomistic, static, certain, known, black and white in their nature, disembodied, abstract, categorical, and really only representations of reality.”
Such lifeless qualities can infiltrate us with presuppositions that prevent us from realizing how the world presents itself to us as an activity.
McGilchrist states:
“The representation is literally an attempt to make the presence known after the fact when it is no longer present.”
We use maps, theories, and abstractions to represent the world, but with ignorance to the fact that the world is never precisely as we represent it.
Justin Brierley questions Sharon Dirckx, who got an undergraduate degree in biochemistry and earned expertise in studying brain imaging and cocaine addiction. Being a Christian while doing these studies in her earlier years, Sharon is asked to give her perspective on people such as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett who appear professionally confident that we can explain all of this as a material process.
She states:
“We need to be very clear on what the science tells us and where we make a leap and start to make a worldview statement that the science doesn’t get you to. Science gets us to connection. There is a connection between the mind and the brain very clearly that we see, both in development and in the unborn. Inside child development there is a clear connection in degenerate disease states and what we see going on mentally. Of course, if you put a healthy volunteer in an MRI scanner and give them a task to do, you will see networks lighting up that correspond to that use of their mind, and so, clearly, mind and brain are connected…but the science does not say anything about the nature of that connection and that is where people move into a worldview perspective on it. The front page of the Scientific American in 2017 had a headline about looking at brain networks and how neurons create thoughts. Now that is not a scientific statement. There is nothing in any study that will get you to the conclusion that neurons create thoughts. And we need to be really clear on where we have made a leap out of scientific methodology and into philosophy.”
Iain McGilchrist comments that the brain is not guaranteed to make consciousness merely because there is a parallel between brain and consciousness. He proposes some alternatives. The brain could be a transmitter of consciousness like a receiver on a radio set that produces a program but is not the set.
McGilchrist adopts the viewpoint that…
“The brain permits a certain element of consciousness to be expressed. That is important because often things only come into being by being restricted or sculpted. William James makes a wonderful remark that it is because of his vocal cords inhibiting the outflow of air from his lungs that gives him a personal voice. The brain may be what other people have thought of as a sort of filtering device which allows aspects of consciousness, which is my consciousness that becomes apparent. But in any case, I think there is not much going for the idea that if matter really has no consciousness, then you cannot make the step from that to consciousness. Many philosophers have tried but none have succeeded.”
Brierley asks McGilchrist if he thinks that people are veering away from a naturalistic and reductionistic viewpoint on the mind.
McGilchrist’s response is that the word ‘religion’, with its connotations of simplistic black-and-white thinking, are hindering people’s freedom of understanding.
Finally, my favorite point of the whole discussion is made by McGilchrist while based in London:
“If you ask people in this country: ‘Do you follow a religion?’ I think about 11 or 12 percent would say ‘yes.’ But if you ask people: ‘Do you think there is more to the cosmos than what is contained in the reductionist, materialist position, about 95 percent of them would say ‘yes.’ That’s what I feel is there, and everywhere I go I find more young people are receptive to this idea, and I think it was Niels Bohr or Max Planck who said that science moves forward a funeral by funeral.”
In my opinion, if more people are discarding materialism and embracing other alternatives that could open them up to possibly believing in a spiritual realm or an afterlife, perhaps more people will be open-minded to accepting Christ.
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All information in this article is intended for educational/entertainment purposes only. This information should not be used as medical/therapeutic advice. Please seek a doctor/therapist for health advice.
Sources:
[2] "Science and Moral Priority" by Roger Sperry (rockefeller.edu)
[3] Cognitive revolution - Wikipedia
[5] Iain McGilchrist & Sharon Dirckx • Brain science, consciousness & God - YouTube