10.24.08

Brain wars?

Posted in General at 4:48 pm by nemo

Yesterday I got the two Jeffrey Schwartz’s mixed up (thanks to James for clarification). After that muddle is cleared up we can consider the original issue.
Myers sounds off on the brain wars, Your brain is the next battleground,
and the article cited, Creationists declare war over the brain
I didn’t know there was a brain war, but since enough lunatics think so, I guess it can’t be helped, or blamed on the Myers types. But I would note that the Myers style, here to call opponents in argument loons, is not a substitue for science. But that’s just the problem. Since noone can resolve the issue they must loudmouth the opponents to veil the lack of argument. The loudmouth ‘scientists’ want to do to neurology what they did to Darwinism, make it a hard paradigm defended by loudmouths, where no dissent is possible.
In fact, it won’t happen, because enough people know they don’t know here to think they could get away with the outrage perpetrated by Darwinists.
The relationship of mind and brain is simply not clear, and Myers’ statements are without a solid basis. The fact is, the more progress we make with neurology, the more mysterious the issue becomes.
I do agree with Myers (up to a point) that the book The Spiritual Brain suffered confusion, but no more, finally, than some putative book by scientists, The Material Brain.
The problem with those who think in terms of a ‘spiritual brain’ is pretty drastic, if the brain/mind is not a material unity, then….then you have a lot of work to do to find a alternative that can redefine our view of reality, and be consistent.
In fact, the task was done centuries ago, at least in principle, by the yogis of Samkhya, who thought in terms of universal materiality, but with a significant difference between different levels of that, etc… That’s not quite a viable approach either, perhaps, but it resolves the confusion created by misinterpreting ‘dualism’ as a ‘material/spiritual’ divide. In any case, that dualism won’t go away just because scientific reductionists want to reduce mind to brain. The sad truth is probably the ‘mysterian’ reality, as depicted, e.g. by John Horton of ‘end of science’ fame: we don’t know, and won’t ever know.
Here the viewpoint of Kant/Schopenhauer might help, as they delimit phenomenal and noumenal aspects of ‘self’.
The reason one can’t loon away dissenters on the ‘dualism’ issue of mind/brain is that too many things point ambiguously to the fact that the ‘self’ as a totality is more than a space-time entity. We can’t prove it, but we can see from various perspectives that the standard ‘material’ paradigm is probably too narrow.

What Schwartz is arguing for is dualism: the idea that the mind is not the product of the activity of the brain, but is somehow generated supernaturally, with the brain being nothing but the host or receiver for the emanations of an immaterial ‘soul’. Contrary to his claims, however, this is definitely not a popular view in the neuroscientific community — if anything, the trend is going far, far away from what he claims, with the evidence growing that the reductionist, materialist approach to the brain is the best way to understand how it works. It’s not breaking down. Just as evolutionary theory has been strengthened by advances in molecular biology, so too has the materialist view of the mind been strengthened by multidisciplinary approaches in neuroscience.

The article is reporting on a meeting of these DI-sponsored loons, and it really does sound like a delightful coterie of idiots. Denyse O’Leary was there, along with Mario Beauregard, who together authored what I consider the worst book of 2007, The Spiritual Brain, and so far I’ve read nothing as bad in 2008, so they may deserve a lifetime award. It’s a book that was practically unreadable in its incoherent style, and which was full of illogical claims built from fallacious premises and bad experiments. Schwartz provides more excellent examples of the nonsense these guys are propagating.

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