I’ve maintained that religion and spirituality are inversely correlated with high-functioning intelligence.  (previous article, Religion Rots Your Brain And We Must Say So) There are plenty of notable exceptions such as Francis Collins, current director of the National Institute of Health (NIH). My answer to this is that such individuals have to work even harder to keep the critical thinking part of their brain separated from the part that holds scientifically untenable beliefs. Collins believes he has a personal relationship with the mythical character of Jesus Christ, and that God had a hand in guiding every stage of evolution. I think it’s pretty strange to have someone with those strongly held beliefs managing a $30 billion/year science budget, and I’m not the only one.
Yesterday I also became aware of scientist Robert Lanza, MD, a high achiever–even a genius–by any standard. Lanza is currently Chief Scientific Officer of Advanced Cell Technology(ACT) and Adjunct at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine. For some inexplicable reason, Lanza has decided to break scientific protocol and engage in wild speculation about the spiritual and philosophical implications of quantum theory that would never pass scientific scrutiny. His book on the subject is called Biocentrism. His beliefs are so far outside the mainstream of his field, he’s managed to earn both the praise of Deepak Chopra and the scorn of Daniel Dennett and other “real” brain scientists. Lanza is also promoting a kind of new-age fundamentalism in the garb of (pseudo) science:
Judgment Day is Coming: Science Suggests Judgment is Inescapable
Will kind people be rewarded for their good deeds? Will the wicked be punished? Yes, according to a new interpretation of recent experiments. Although our science is too primitive for us to fully comprehend, there is a direct and proportional price to pay for any act of cruelty or injustice.
Science suggests that there are consequences to our actions that transcend our ordinary, classical way of thinking. Emerson, it turns out, was right: “Every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.”
I remember fishing on a warm summer night. Now and then I could feel the vibrations along the line linking me with the life prowling about the bottom. At length I pulled some bass, squeaking and gasping into the air. It was a puzzle to feel a tug, and to be conscious in that precise moment of a part of me, which, as it were, was not a part of me, but scale and fin, circling the hook, slow to strike.
Surely this is what Spinoza, the great philosopher, meant when he contended that consciousness cannot exist simply in space and time, and at the same time is aware of the interrelations of all parts of space and time. In order to have knowledge of a pout or a pickerel, I must have somehow been identical with them.
[...]
This may not unsettle you, except perhaps on a warm moonlit night with a fish gasping for life at the end of your rod. I knew then, at that moment, that Pagel’s conclusion was right. Only it wasn’t my consciousness that was the only one, it was ours. According to biocentrism, our individual separateness is an illusion. Remember the words of Omar, who “never called the One two,” and of the old Hindu poem: “Know in thyself and All one self-same soul; banish the dream that sunders part from whole.”
There was no doubt; that consciousness which was behind the youth I once was, was also behind the mind of every animal and person existing in space and time. “There are,” wrote Loren Eiseley, noted anthropologist, “very few youths today who will pause, coming from a biology class, to finger a yellow flower or poke in friendly fashion at a sunning turtle on the edge of the campus pond, and who are capable of saying to themselves, ‘We are all one − all melted together.’”
Yes, I thought, we are all one. I let the fish go. With a thrash of the tail, I disappeared into the pond. [emphasis added]
Physorg is now reporting that this sense of “oneness with everything” that underlies so much new-age mumbo-jumbo has been correlated by experiments with damage to the right posterior parietal region of the brain.
Selective brain damage modulates human spirituality
Although it is well established that all behaviors and experiences, spiritual or otherwise, must originate in the brain, true empirical exploration of the neural underpinnings of spirituality has been challenging. However, recent advances in neuroscience have started to make the complex mental processes associated with religion and spirituality more accessible.“Neuroimaging studies have linked activity within a large network in the brain that connects the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortexes with spiritual experiences, but information on the causative link between such a network and spirituality is lacking,” explains lead study author, Dr. Cosimo Urgesi from the University of Udine in Italy.
Dr. Urgesi and colleagues were interested in making a direct link between brain activity and spirituality. They focused specifically on the personality trait called self-transcendence (ST), which is thought to be a measure of spiritual feeling, thinking, and behaviors in humans. ST reflects a decreased sense of self and an ability to identify one’s self as an integral part of the universe as a whole.
The researchers combined analysis of ST scores obtained from brain tumor patients before and after they had surgery to remove their tumor, with advanced techniques for mapping the exact location of the brain lesions after surgery. “This approach allowed us to explore the possible changes of ST induced by specific brain lesions and the causative role played by frontal, temporal, and parietal structures in supporting interindividual differences in ST,” says researcher Dr. Franco Fabbro from the University of Udine.
The group found that selective damage to the left and right posterior parietal regions induced a specific increase in ST. “Our symptom-lesion mapping study is the first demonstration of a causative link between brain functioning and ST,” offers Dr. Urgesi. “Damage to posterior parietal areas induced unusually fast changes of a stable personality dimension related to transcendental self-referential awareness. Thus, dysfunctional parietal neural activity may underpin altered spiritual and religious attitudes and behaviors.”
These results may even lead to new strategies for treating some forms of mental illness. “If a stable personality trait like ST can undergo fast changes as a consequence of brain lesions, it would indicate that at least some personality dimensions may be modified by influencing neural activity in specific areas,” suggests Dr. Salvatore M. Aglioti from Sapienza University of Rome. “Perhaps novel approaches aimed at modulating neural activity might ultimately pave the way to new treatments of personality disorders.”
Since my mother was a world-famous “spiritual” performer who claimed to speak for a pantheon of disembodied spirits, and who was also diagnosed with lifelong epilepsy, eventually dying last year of Alzheimer’s disease, this article is incredibly relevant and explanatory for me. This really was all in her brain, and there was nothing whatsoever she could do about it.
But getting back to Lanza–who just might have similar brain damage–I would respond that the very essence of life is individuality. The very goal of life is self-actualization. We are not all one with everything. And our self-awareness is not transferable–at least not with current technology. Of course it is good to feel empathetic, and to recognize that we are all made of the same basic particles. But I am not you, you are not a fish, a bicycle is not the same as a multi-barrel machine gun. It is making such distinctions, and keeping categories and identity straight that is one of the main goals of human knowledge.
An existential understanding is also vital for life, that we neither promote false hopes, nor fail to apprehend our limitations. Having a realistic assessment of self-other-world, is vital to our outlook and mental health. Now we see it’s also dependent on having a healthy physical brain.
If Lanza really thinks he is onto a new “theory of everything” that will render space-time putty in our hands, make us all one, and make death obsolete, he should be willing to subject that science to the same scrutiny and incremental discipline as every other scientist who came before him. Otherwise, he’s neither promoting self-awareness nor science. His public work so far has shown a reckless disregard for his intellectual debt to others, abdication of his responsibility not to pollute the integrity of the scientific method in public discourse, and above all a stark failure to know his rightful place on the mountain of ideas.
An article forwarded to me by a friend brings up the old New-Age argument, this time dolled up in pseudoscientific garb.
Comes Robert Lanza, MD, a biologist, proposing to rip up the scientific frame in favor of his pet theory, “biocentrism.” He proposes that one day we will discover that time and space are both products of consciousness, and will be able to move through them at will:
Sometime in the future science will be able to create realities that we can’t even begin to imagine. As we evolve, we’ll be able to construct other information systems that correspond to other realities, universes based on logic completely different from ours and not based on space and time.
Immanuel Kant declared in 1781 that space and time were real, but only indeed as properties of the mind. These algorithms are not only the key to consciousness, but why space and time − indeed the properties of matter itself - are relative to the observer. But a new theory called biocentrism suggests that space and time may not be the only tools that can be used to construct reality. At present, our destiny is to live and die in the everyday world of up and down. But what if, for example, we changed the algorithms so that instead of time being linear, it was 3-dimensional like space? Consciousness would move through the multiverse. We’d be able to walk through time just like we walk through space. And after creeping along for 4 billion years, life would finally figure out how to escape from its corporeal cage. Our destiny would lie in realities that exist outside of the known physical universe.
Go read the whole article. It really doesn’t get any better. Just another breathless fantasy to help us escape from the reality that we have short lives, over which we have very limited control, and we must spend them on a small insignificant planet, and we die all-too-soon.
I find the article extremely vague and unconvincing–bordering on intellectually offensive. If this is true, let Dr. Lanza define the parameters of his new world so we can all take advantage of expanded awareness and “travel through time in three dimensions.” Until then, it’s just another fantasy conjecture by a “frame ripper” which distracts the gullible and muddies the waters of what we do actually know. It’s so nice that he’s laid it all out for us in one small essay, and destroyed our quaint little scientific understanding.
He’s as wrong as non-scientists about the implications of quantum theory. People think that it is conscious observation that changes the behavior of particles. This is wrong in two ways:
1) Even if thinking could affect the position of particles, any real-world object has so many particles that the effects of any number of conscious real-world observers would null out. For example, one gram of carbon has 12 x 602,214,150,000,000,000,000,000 carbon atoms (Avogadro’s number).
2) It is bombarding a particle with another particle or wave that changes its position or velocity. This is what Heisenberg meant when he said “observe.” It doesn’t mean consciously “look at.” It means “bounce another particle off of,” stealing or adding energy or momentum.
Lanza’s also wrong about dreams. Simply, they are simulations our brains create, very similar to the ones we create while awake. When we walk into a room, we mostly see a simulation of the room. The human visual system can only take in a very small amount of detail at once (from the tiny area of the retina called the fovea), which is why we often don’t notice small changes in our surroundings if they happen slowly.
So here we have someone who might as well be illiterate about both quantum theory and the nature of dreams proposing a new theory of time. Biocentrism? Huh?? He might as well be that medieval town crier (previous article) talking about how in the future announcements and music would travel thousands of miles through thin air. I wouldn’t have bought airtime from him, or invested in his radio station, would you?
There is an underlying reality, governed by energy and particle interaction, however incomplete may be our perception of it. That reality, even when we stop believing in it–as Philip K. Dick wrote–doesn’t go away.
Lanza is proposing basically solipsism, an old philosophical saw. If we create our own realities, why don’t we live in a perfect world of our own choosing? Why don’t all the men have harems and the women Prince Charmings? Why don’t we all live in castles like kings? Why do children in the Third World not get a say about whether they are killed by malaria or crushed by faulty and flimsy construction every time there’s an earthquake? Why don’t their minds create a better reality for them? Are we really to blame their faulty thoughts for their horrible predicament?
So much of this philosophical bollocks rests on a misunderstanding of the subjective-objective divide. In a subjective sense, we do create our own ‘realities’ and we can move through time and visit the past in our memories. But let’s not confuse that with the universe that is, and would continue to exist even if all consciousness and life on Earth were snuffed out by a giant solar flare. That universe is the one I’m interested in learning about (with all the people still in it, naturally). And it doesn’t care one whit about the fantastic mental contrivances of Robert Lanza, MD.
To really get where this is all headed, it’s interesting to note Deepak Chopra had the following to say: “Lanza’s insights into the nature of consciousness [are] original and exciting†and that “his theory of biocentrism is consistent with the most ancient wisdom traditions of the world which says that consciousness conceives, governs, and becomes a physical world. It is the ground of our Being in which both subjective and objective reality come into existence.”
Granted, it might have been more beneficial for me to be paying attention in class, but I’ve always thought that the RichardDawkins.net website was pretty darn educational (it is the website of an educational foundation, after all). They have podcasts about evolutionary science, links to stimulating articles, a banner asking non-believers to donate to Haiti. Today when I tried to access RichardDawkins.net today from my school’s Internet network I got a message that said that the website was blocked.
Observe (click to embiggen)
Perhaps it was an honest mistake… I’ve very politely e-mailed the peeps who do this stuff so maybe they will unblock it. If not, I shall update here.
Update: Somewhat unrelated, but I just thought I’d share the mission listed in my school district’s twitter page.
To inspire every student to think, to learn, to achieve, to care
Far as I can tell RD.net does three of the four.
Update: So the school unblocked it (yay!). The e-mail I got was that the site was categorized as “social opinion” which ordinarily wouldn’t have been blocked for the high school but apparently the network was accidentally set on the elementary school filter which does block social opinion.
So…
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.He was born on Samos, and studied at the Academy in Athens, so there are a couple of options on that one.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.He was born on Samos, and studied at the Academy in Athens, so there are a couple of options on that one.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
This was a short clip on the blocks to listening from the Martin Luther King Day workshop I presented at the Dae Yen Sa International Buddhist Temple in New Hartford, CT. I really enjoyed doing this workshop and was happy it was well attended. Anyway, I would love to hear your feedback on this clip and my style of presenting. I learn from the feedback.
Another clip:
I enjoyed reading this post over at G-A-Y and particularly liked this statement from Jeremy Hooper who I have much respect for because of his nonviolent way of confronting the religious right. I think there is valuable wisdom in this quote!
As active participants of this [civil rights] movement, we can and should challenge tactics, strategies, rhetoric, and leadership. Both ours and our opposition’s. However, there’s no reason to turn it personal. As people who come with all of the trappings that are laid upon us as humans, we’ll naturally have our own interpersonal whatnots with each other. But for the sake of the movement, we should strive to disconnect the two. The message is what matters.
~Jeremy Hooper.
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