Death- beginning or end?

What are we to make of the near death experience? A review of "Evidence of the afterlife" by Dr. Jeffrey Long.

Apparently, it feels wonderful to die. Everyone has by now heard about near death experiences (NDEs), which comprise floating out-of-body experiences, approach to a white light or tunnel, a highlight reel of one's life, communing with others who are dead, and positive feelings all around. This book is built around a large compendium of first-person reports of such NDEs, and, as the title indicates, comes to a definitive conclusion about what they mean for one of the most durable hopes of humanity- the afterlife.

The book is build from a web site the author set up to solicit NDE reports from around the world. He has compiled over 1,000 reports, using a structured survey form, and has personally interviewed over 600 respondents.

The first thing to say is that these observations all seem true. These people are not lying, and accurately report what they experience. The experience is not only curious, and very positive, but also personally powerful, altering their view of life and death, and their personalities. They are often making reports many years after the fact, recalling phenomenally durable and affecting memories. Just that alone is amazing to hear about, and even to the most inveterate skeptic makes the whole process of death a bit less daunting.

One example with many of the typical elements:

I found myself floating up toward the ceiling. I could see everyone around the bed very plainly , even my own body. I thought how odd it was that they were upset about my body. I was fine and I wanted them to know that, but there seemed to be no way to let them know. It was as though there were a veil or a screen between me and the others in the room. 

I became aware of an opening, if I can call it that. It appeared to be elongated and dark, and I began to zoom through it. I was puzzled yet exhilarated. I came out of this tunnel into a real of soft, brilliant love and light. The love was everywhere. It surrounded me and seemed to soak through in my very being. At some point I was shown, or saw, the events of my life. They were in a kind of vast panorama. All of this is really just indescribable. People I knew who had died were there with me in the light- a friend who had died in college, my grandfather, and a great-aunt, among  others. They were happy, beaming. 

I didn't want to go back, but I was told that I had to by a man in light. I was being told that I had not completed what I had to do in life. 

I came back to my body with a sudden lurch.

On the other hand, Long handles these observations in a most unscientific way, hammering away on the "proofs" he has assembled for the interpretation that they are exactly what they seem- trips to that undescovered country, from whose bourn Shakespeare thought no traveller returns. His proofs are nine-fold:

1. In medical terms, the patient is dead or close to death when these experiences take place- no pulse, no EEG, no breathing. Squaring this with the complexity of the NDE experience is rather difficult.

2. Out of body experiences occur, typically a sense of floating high in the room, and observing what is going on, often in precise detail, even of activities going on in nearby rooms.

3. Even people who have been blind from birth can have visual experiences during an NDE.

4. Subjective consciousness is typically heightened during NDE- the person reports feeling exceptionally clear, and is later able to report quite a bit of detail. This while they would otherwise be going unconscious and losing bodily function, blood circulation, and EEG signals.

5. The flashing life review is accurate, even dredging up forgotten episodes.

6. 96% of the beings encountered in this experience have previously died, consistent with the idea that their final abode is being encountered.

7. Children as young as three have all the elements of these experiences that adults do.

8. People around the world have all the elements of these experiences as well.

9. Those who experience NDE frequently undergo deep changes in their attitudes and lives, including increased psychic abilities.

As you can imagine, some of these characteristics are less probative than others, and their value as evidence depends on what counter-model one uses for comparison. For instance, the ability of blind people to have visual experiences during an NDE (even though they do not typically have visual dreams, for instance) may derive from a brain experience that exists purely in consciousness, rather than requiring the sensory brain areas. One is eating the pure frosting, as it were, rather than the whole cake. Blind people have functional and physical maps of the world, so transposing them into pure experiential consciousness might make them seem visual, under unusual circumstances. Similar arguments apply to the moving nature of these experiences, and the sense of understanding everything (which often comes up in NDE narratives) which arise in LSD trips and other extreme hallucinations.

A great failing is that Long does not offer very coherent skeptical perspectives. My model of all this is that hearing may remain intact during these experiences and accounts for the ability to perceive quite accurately what is going on around the patient, during the out-of-body experience. This resembles our ability in dreams to incorporate auditory perception, though to a less accurate degree. Out-of-body experiences are more common than NDEs, happening during nightmares, drug experiences, etc., and do not seem to generally require a non-naturalistic explanation. Looking to Long's web site for NDEs by deaf people, there are a few, and none appear to offer the kinds of precisely observed out-of-body experiences that the others do, which would be consistent with such a hypothesis.

A second part of my model for NDE is that there is a great deal more to the brain than is detected by an EEG. EEG picks up surface brain waves, but the more important areas, at any rate more emotional and consciousness-forming parts, seem to lie deeper. One could imagine that loss of blood flow does not lead to a uniform shut-down of everything, but rather a flooding of some pain-relieving hormones, and concentration of remaining activity in some core areas.

Key areas for emotion (and memory) happen far from the surface of the brain.

Additionally, the executive cortical areas of the brain typically have the function of slowing down or modulating older areas, (the old Freudian super-ego/id system), so one can imagine that a catastrophic loss of blood flow might have just the NDE effects based in core brain areas plus persistent auditory function. Indeed, study of decapitated rats indicates that there really is quite a bit going on in the minute after blood flow stops, even under a naturalist paradigm.

At any rate, the NDE is a serious challenge to a naturalist world view. While one can offer some speculative models of how all this might be explained from brain activities, we are dealing with a lot of unknowns. We don't even know how consciousness arises in the brain, so determining how extremely unusual alternate states of consciousness happen is going to be heavily speculative for the time being.

The main issue, however, is that "soul" theories have many more problems than naturalistic ones do. The scope of soul theories has steadily contracted over time. No one expects to explain liver function by invoking the soul, or function of the heart. Those days are long gone. Our mental lives too are being progressively pinned down to physical events in the brain. Memory, for instance, depends on hippocampal function, and can be tracked to cortical engrams relayed from the hippocampus. What is left for a putative soul to do, once memories are stored physically, emotions happen via basal areas like the amygdala, and decisions are made in the neocortex? The whole concept makes less and less sense with time, as intuition gives way to reality-based analysis of what actually creates our minds and selves.

Lastly, whether the NDE is informed by some cultural programming as well as biological programming is quite a live issue. One subject related as follows:

"The review was measured in the beginning, but then the pictures came faster and faster, and it seemed like the movie reel was running out ... It went faster and faster, and then I heard myself, along with the entire universe in my head, screaming in crescendo, "Allah ho akbar!'"

Such a fate would surely be disconcerting, not only to me, but to many believers in the soul and afterlife.

• Islam's gravest sin. God: “I am as My servant thinks of Me.”
• Apparently, atheists are at fault.
• Finding gullible, on TV.
• Some notes on corruption, cooptation, and Washington sleazefests.
• Republican strategy of complete intransigence and destruction emerges. Why is anyone surprised?
• Why does this man want to be president? Krugman chimes in too.
• Tribute to Milton Friedman.
• Elvis Costello provides a playlist.
• What happened to Japan? Is this what we are facing?
• Economists lying for ideology.
• Local police get awfully trigger-happy around black people. 
• Is race less of a factor in this election? I would say it is more.. in a future blog.
• A little Oscar Peterson.
• Economics quote, from Mark Thoma, on the Ryan budget.

"If you think the middle class has it too good, too much security, taxes aren't high enough, not enough fear of unemployment, too much help for education, and so on, while the wealthy haven't been coddled enough in recent years, not enough tax cuts, too little upward redistribution of income, not enough bank bailouts, etc., etc., then the Republican proposals should make you happy."

Aristotle would be amazed

An exceedingly brief review of De Anima, or, On the Soul.

As an amateur philosopher, it behoves to do some spade work in the vineyards of the ancients. So I picked up an edition of Aristotle, and was intrigued.

First, it gradually becomes apparent that Aristotle has something different in mind than we do with the word "soul". He is an inveterate biologist, and is interested in that which animates the organism. So in his day the very basic question of what separates the quick from the dead was, as it were, a very live question. What is the function of breathing? What is the nature of sensation, which must also cease upon death? What characterizes all living things- breathing (no), locomotion (no), vision or other higher sensations (no), touch (maybe), need for food (yes).

His proto-Darwinian thought is incredibly tantalizing, though typically tangled up with theology.

"The acts in which it [life] manifests itself are reproduction and the use of food- reproduction, I say, because for any living thing that has reached is normal development and whch is unmutilated, and whose mode of generation is not spontaneous, the most natural act is the production of another like itself, an animal producing an animal, a plant a plant, in order that, as far as nature allows, it may partake in the eternal and divine. That is the goal towards which all things strive, that for the sake of which they do whatsoever their nature renders possible."

Theology nowadays has of course been driven off the field from many of these questions. Its soul is a shadow of its former self- some sticky residue of intuition that consciousness could not possibly come from the same mechanisms that so evidently perform all the other wonders of life.

At any rate, one can readily tell that Aristotle would be delighted beyond words to see the knowledge we have today, so long in coming after his labored speculations. Indeed, only in the last 250 years have we markedly advanced beyond the ancients in the necessary knowledge (principally chemistry and evolution) to answer most of his speculations.

And speculations they were ... and endless hairsplitting and repetition that is, frankly, painful to read. He is frequently conversing with Plato, that mystic philosopher, and so has to trot out various commonly held theories of the day.

"Thinking, loving, and hating are affections not of mind, but of that which has mind, so far as it has it. That is why, when this vehicle decays, memory and love cease; they are activities not of mind, but of the composite which has perished; mind is, no doubt, something more divine and impassible."

"Some hold that the soul is divisible, and that one part thinks, another desires. If, then, its nature admits of its being divided, waht can it be that holds the parts together? Surely not the body; on the contrary it seems rather to be the soul that holds the body together; at any rate when the soul departs the body disintegrates and decays. If, then, there is something else which makes the soul one, this unifying agency would have the best right to the name of soiuld, and we shall have to repeat for it the question: Is *it one or multipartite? If it is one, why not at once admit that 'the soul' is one? If it has parts, once more the questikon must be put: What holds *its parts together, and so ad infinitum?"

"Mind is itself thinkable in exactly the same way as its objects are. For (a) in the case of objects which involve no matter, what thinks and what is thought are identical. (b) In the case of those which contain matter each of the objects of thought is only potentially present. It follows that while *they will not have mind in them (for mind is a potentiality of them only in so far as they are capable of being disengaged from matter) mind may yet be thinkable." -translation by J. A. Smith 

This gives you an idea of the language, which clearly comes from a time before modern editing. In many places, one has a distinct sense of disjoint-ness; that something has been lost in the lengthy chain of transmission from the author. Someone may have fallen asleep! Yet, there is also a glimmer of sense here, in that the nature of the mind is open to some kind of analysis, even though Aristotle couches the idea in a pile of nonsense about thoughts and minds being identical when abstract, a sort of identity theory of computational simulation.

It is fascinating to experience a person from such a long-ago epoch, deploying his formidable intelligence on problems that were incredibly obdurate. And it is a scandal that his wooly speculations would be the standard of intellect for the next nearly 2000 years.

• Republican unworthiness to hold national office, continued.
• Unworthiness and vitriol, continued..
• Chronicle of addiction: "And the jungle drums start to pound."
• Free range continues his tale. "And wait until you hear this tale my friends because it is beyond Afghan crazy; it’s Pakistan crazy and the only level of crazy above that involves extraterrestrials."
• Labor exploitation in IT.
• US median family net worth dropped by almost half during this little depression.
• Robert Reich: income = spending; lack of income = depression.
• JP Morgan is a hedge fund, on the taxpayer's dime.
• Inequality's relation to the crisis. Trickle up leads to an unproductive rentier class.

"According to the pro-inequality theorists, these growing surpluses [of concentrated corporate and private wealth] should have led to a boom in productive investment. Instead, they ended up fuelling commodity speculation, financial engineering and hostile corporate raids, activity geared more to transferring existing rather than creating new wealth and reinforcing the shift towards greater inequality."

Introspection... happens in the brain!

Neuroscientists find some anatomical correlates of accurate self-knowledge.

One of the few remaining bastions of theism is the mystery of the mind. That, and the fundamental nature & origin of the universe, comprise the only serious mysteries from which theistic world views take more-or-less justified comfort. With respect to the latter, a recent scientific American article (& book) by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow takes a decidedly non-theistic view, while also claiming that there may be no final theory of everything, only a set of partially compatible theories. This would be like settling for the conflict between quantum mechanics and relativity+gravitation and saying "we're done now". I'm not sure how much sense that makes, since reality is unquestionably unitary and happily doing its intrinsic computations all the time at all scales. So they have to be compatible, and it is only our conceptual apparatus that has failed (so far) to devise a model that is as unified as that reality.

The ultimate problem is likely to be our complete inability to devise empirical tests for such ultimate models of reality, since we can't attain the energies of the early big bang, let alone the putatively timeless, space-less conditions that might have preceded it. Thus we might ironically find ourselves back in an intellectual world reminiscent of theology, another scholarly pursuit which imagines what could be without the benefit of experimental backing.

Sorry to digress, but these topics are closely tied for those unwilling to find meaning in this mundane disenchanted world, and among their fellow bio-people. And for whom mystery (i.e. lack of understanding) is the essential ingredient for meaning. Which is to say, provides the space into which can be poured projected meanings.

But back to the mind. That personal, magical place that makes the world appear, and throws in dreams for free. To scientists, it is a problem, but for theists, it is the rock of mystery, the self-evident communication portal to the "other side", and source of untapped magical powers (dianetics, prayer, etc.; see my soul posts.)

Unfortunately, as far as actually known, the mind is confined to the brain- which is exceedingly complicated, but also finite and accessible. Thus it can and is being progressively disenchanted by scientists doing their mundane thing. The current paper is one more tiny step on the long road to figuring out how the mind works, now looking at brain correlates of our ability to know how well we actually know what we think we know.

Introspection is one of those prized aspects of human-ness, developed into a high art/skill by the Buddhists, and generally recognized as a key to a better life, whether self-examined in the mode of Socrates, self-analyzed in the mode of Freud, or self-criticized in the mode of Mao(!). We assume that animals are less introspective. Language may be critical to this level of thought, but of course it is hard to tell.

It seems essential to have a way to gauge one's accuracy in all sorts of actions and thoughts, and on top of that to have that way be conscious, not just a form of unconscious training like learning tennis through physical practice. This paper looks at the question in the simplest terms, measuring accuracy of a simple visual task where people vary both in ability and in the meta-ability to know how good they are, to a significant degree. In part it was motivated by brain damage studies showing that a region called the prefrontal parietal network is necessary for this kind of introspection/metacognition.

"We hypothesized that individual difference in metacognitive ability would be reflected in the anatomy of brain regions responsible for this function, in line with similar associations between brain anatomy and performance in other cognitive domains."

Visual test by dim patches, one of which was made darker than the others. Test subjects were then asked their confidence in calling which set (one or two) and which patch (one to six) was that darker one.

The visual task was to compare two sequentially presented sets of "gabor" patches (Fig 1) and say whether one of the patches in one of the sets was darker than the other  patches. The task could easily be tuned in difficulty to make every subject perform at 70% accuracy. Then they asked the subjects to rate their confidence about each choice, from one to six. The figure below shows the ROC curve for each of the 36 participants, relating false positive rate (confidence level when wrong; horizontal) to the true positive rate (confidence level when right; vertical).

Individual ROC curves for all participants, showing how well (area under the curve) they introspected their own performance in visual identification.

As is customary with ROC curves, the curve bows up as the process is able to pick out signal from noise at a better than random rate. In this case, if all subjects got their confidence completely right at all times, the lines would shoot from zero to one at the origin and stay at one the whole way going right. That would lead to maximal area under the curve, (over the diagonal, which is random performance), which is the typical measure of signal-to-noise accuracy in many fields.

Ordered display of the graphs above, relating actual performance (blue) and introspected performance (red).

The researchers found extensive individual variation among their 36 test subjects, both in performance ability and metaperformance- the accuracy of their confidence levels. The graph below gives the latter data, displayed in order. The real question was then... can we correlate this variation with any anatomical aspect of the brain? They used MRI to look all over the brain at the volumes of gray matter, which are the neuronal cell bodies. And they also looked at the white matter connectivity, which uses a new form of MRI that allows users to trace myelinated pathways in the brain. This has been a powerful addition to the functional and anatomical MRI toolchest.

Example of the data available through white matter imaging, using diffusion tensor imaging, or brain "tractography".

Looking first at the gray matter, they see a few spots of correlating variation (red in the pictures below, mapped on inflated brains). It is quite remarkable that such a method could point so specifically to particular areas of the brain, since they just cranked the entire brains of all participants through a complex normalization, inflation, and statistical area comparison method. One would imagine that a more complex picture would emerge, especially in view of the modest nature of the underlying correlation, shown in B. The Aroc graph in B shows the real signal- correlation between test performance and portions of Brodman area 10. For comparison, the right graph (d') shows the correlation of the same areas not with the metacognition performance, but with actual visual performance, which serves as a negative control- no correlation.

Volumetric data, showing islands of grey matter mass correlation (red) and anti-correlation (blue) with introspective ability. Graphs show island correlation (Aroc) and control of actual visual ability (d').

Needless to say, this section of the Brodman area matches that previously suspected to play a role in this form of meta-cognition from other studies, including functional MRI, disturbance with transcranial magnetic fields, and brain lesions.

Lastly, they also probed white matter pathways, (with MRI "tractography"), and found what looks like an slightly more significant correlation between metacognition and an area in the corpus collosum which allows communication between the hemispheres. The identified area is specifically linked via wider brain wiring to the Brodman's area mentioned above. Unfortunately, the graph fails to offer error bars, so the significance of all this is somewhat murky. They do offer very significant P-values for their volumetry in the methods.

Tractography data, showing islands of correlation with introspective ability. Graphs show island correlation (Aroc) and control graph of actual visual ability correlation (d').

The authors conclude that they have found some robust correlation between volume variations in a few brain areas and mental performance variations in this intriguing task of metacognition, or introspection. They further conclude that based on the past studies with other types of alterations and interventions, these correlations amount to causation, indicating that more brain matter and connectivity in Brodman's area 10 generates better self-knowledge in this simple type of visual task. They have no idea whether these variations arise from genes, developmental training, or recent training, the latter of which open some prospect for positive education.

In any case, aside from being another close correlation between brain and mind, the work is one more interesting instance of variation in human mental abilities, which on its own puts me in some awe of our diversity. If humans are each different in their very perceptions and subjectivity, what does it mean to be human? One reason the soul hypothesis is so attractive is that it would validate a sort of species-ist uniformity to the human condition.. that at the core we are all identical in the most important way.

But if we aren't.. if everyone is fundamentally different, then there is no such thing as the human condition and we have to negotiate in the open about our various beings and needs, without being able to assume a lot about inalienable rights, creator-given essences, "natural" behaviors, etc.

• One human variant, with autism.
• The Ur-blogger.
• Skidelsky: "Tax persistent and excessive current account surpluses".
• Mortgage and finance fraud, bigger than ever. Can we dream about resolving it?
• The financial fraud documentary, Inside Job.
• Bill Mitchell quote of the week, from "Why budget deficits drive private profit":

"The point is that when the government runs a surplus it reduces profits via its squeeze on aggregate income. That is why all the business sector should be screaming at the fiscal austerity plans that are rampant at present."

...

"So the fact that the business groups often lead the charge against budget deficits reflects the triumph of ideology over good judgement and the triumph of ignorance over understanding. I just shake my head in wonderment when I see a business person railing against budget deficits."

Tempest in a nonspatial entity

Reply to Eric Reitan's defense of Goetz and Taliaferro

I've been honored by the attention of the author of the book "Is God a Delusion?", one of the many replies to Richard Dawkins and the new atheists. Eric Reitan is a philosopher and professor at Oklahoma State, and blogs at The piety that lies between, whose title is a reference to Plutarch, as well as to one founder of liberal theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher.

He expresses some appreciation and differences with my post on the spiritual atheist, on my post against theology, and most incisively, on my review of the book Naturalism by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro (G&T) which defends the idea of a supernatural soul. I'll reply to his points about this book here, to bring this discussion to a higher level, as it deserves.

I'll grant that I did not fathom all the jargon swirling within this book. I quoted three instances of what I believed to be egregious nonsense, and Reitan maintains that it is just when the jargon gets thickest that the work is most lucid. Seeing as he believes the purpose of the book is to "jar academics back to work", it should to be accessible to them- not just to specialists, but especially to the naturalists who wear the supposed blinders that predispose them against supernaturalism, such as myself, for instance.

I would not represent myself as a philosopher but as an educated layperson and scientist, capable of dealing with considerable thickets of jargon. I also labor under not having the book at hand, having borrowed it from the library (but will make some use of G&T's responses online). All the same, I think I can still say that G&T were egregiously unclear in an area that is, frankly, not rocket science.

To propose supernatural entities is to free oneself from any logical bounds: whether point-like or distributed, whether intuitive or counter-intuitive, there is no restriction at all on one's theorizing in this area, other than the points at which it contacts reality- the presumed interactions that the nonspatial entity (soul) has with our brains- causal, confined to one individual, confined in time, etc. I do not think one can point to any necessary condition of G&T's supernatural model that is not necessitated by empirical facts. Logic can not create bounds in this sphere- the nonspatial entity could be any size, any where, have any properties whatsoever, as long as it does not violate the empirically evident consciousness functions.

I could just as well propose that Peter Pan pushes around the earth's tectonic plates. There is no end of jargon I could devise to "clarify" how this might take place. But without engaging in the science at the reality-based end of this interaction, (as G&T do not do in the case of neuroscience), I would have no logical bounds on my models, and would be free to write another book about how I now think it is not Peter Pan after at all, but Poseidon who is responsible.

The basic point is that there is a reason to take the naturalist position- it eschews fantasy in deference to reality. That humans (especially children) are congenitally prone to jump to conclusions (or assumptions), including the wide-open field of supernatural conclusions, is no reason to give them philosophical credence. G&T in their web responses reiterate that "This commitment drives the naturalist’s world view and leads naturalists to question and deny the reality of how things appear to ordinary human beings." As mentioned in my original review, this is no philosophical justification for their premise, despite the smoothly expressed "reality" of this ordinary view. Ordinary human beings regard the sun as travelling through the sky and species as fixed types. Ordinary understanding does need to be explained (and corrected), but it is not a source of explanation, especially when conflicting so flagrantly with other logic and observation.

So the claim of doing "metaphysics" is not helpful in freeing the philosopher from dealing with reality. Either the system proposed agrees with reality, or it is an idea untethered from it. The test is empirical (defining "truthiness", to put it in lay terms), and every empirical indication we have is that when you chop off someone's head, their mind disappears promptly as well. Ditto for countless smaller interventions by drugs, lesions, strokes, electricity, etc. that affect aspects of consciousness.

Mathematics has a similar flexibility- one can make a mathematics of any assumptions one likes, and then strive to create a self-consistent system out of it. If that system is truly self-consistent (by way of proofs, etc.), then it stands a chance of describing aspects of the real world, since the real world is by necessity self-consistent. But that alone is no guarantee, the final test still being empirical. If the assumptions one gives oneself are completely free and without bound, however, then one is quite likely to end up in a morass of meaningless, or at any rate unnecessary, jargon and tangled thought, counting angels on the head of a pin.

Jargon aside, I think the first quote I pointed to from the book remains indefensible:

Hence, it does not seem the least bit implausible to say that a soul's thinking, choosing, experiencing pain, etc., are explainable in terms of its having the power to think and choose and exercising them, and its having the capacity to experience pain and its being actualized. (p.69).

Reitan calls the thinking behind this "neo-Aristotelian" and a "'causal ontology' that depends on a metaphysics of 'substances' with powers that derive from their 'natures'--thematically attuned to an older scholastic metaphysics". Why don't we use Aristotelian assumptions and scholastic metaphysics in modern thought outside of theology? Because they are completely vacuous. Why were the scholastics barren in their natural philosophy over hundreds of years? Because these assumptions don't productively work for anything having to do with outer reality, however closely they may cleave to psychological reality.

The basic point is that one can not just grant oneself assumptions. One has to examine, test, and judge one's assumptions at the deepest possible level. The naturalist shies from accepting a premise that is not reality-based and logic-based. The supernaturalist accepts "common understanding", causal open-ness, non-necessity of evidence, god, and other positions as starting points, each of which is philosophically impeachable. While this may count as just another pair of interpretive glasses in Reitan's book, there seems little reason to go down that path if the glasses are known to be mirrors instead of lenses. Putting on questionable or extravagant assumptions may be appropriate when exploring and teaching philosophical history, but it is no way to do philosophy.

For example, basic thermodynamics necessitates causal closure. The first law of thermodynamics about the conservation of energy is not just an assumption about reality, it is an observation that energy, in the forms of mass, energy, and information, can not be created from nothing and is interconvertable. There are no exceptions in the form of perpetual motion machines, etc. drawing data, energy, mass, etc. from outside reality (possibly excepting the origin of the universe itself, about which we are as yet profoundly ignorant). Thus to breezily propose causal open-ness and souls as supernatural entities that interact with brains, tell us what to do, etc. flies in the face of the most basic bedrock of physics, both theoretical and observed. The naturalist presupposition in this instance is not an option on the metaphysical smorgasbord, but a rather hard-won piece of empirical data.

Let me turn to some more specific notes Reitan provides on G&T:

For example, it is argued (by Sosa and others) that in order for A to causally influence B, A must first stand in a NONcausal relation with B that explains how and why A affects B as it does rather than something else (or nothing at all).

My understanding of this was that the non-causal relation was perhaps a term for a conceptual relation- one in our heads by which we make sense of the two entities in some narrative or model about their relationship which is causal in the real world. I may very well be wrong about this ... hard to tell. But it seems axiomatic that if there is a causal relation to physical objects, it should be empirically detectable, and that this would be the locus of investigation and controversy, not the armchair science that G&T offer. To reiterate, as far as the non-spatial, supernatural sphere of speculation goes, there are no intrinsic limits- the relations of A and B have no possible bounds or preconditions, interacting magically as far as we know.

[PS- After posting, I realized that I had mistaken this argument. Put concretely, two gears need to be physically close (noncausal relation) before they can induce movement in each other (causal relation). For the case of a nonspatial entity with no physical properties, one would be using purely fictive resources to describe these relations, especially if one failed to even attempt to account concretely for how the brain physically receives the signal. One might just as well resort to Star Trek tech-talk and claim that the soul and body interact over subspace (noncausal relation) by exchanging tachion pulses (causal relation).]

The passages you call gibberish all have the following in common: they presuppose their alternative metaphysical assumptions, in terms of causal powers rooted in a thing's nature. These alternative assumptions are in an important sense at odds with the assumptions that shape contemporary naturalism, assumptions which seek to understand things not in terms of a 'nature' conceived in Aristotelian terms (invoking the idea that a thing is a combination of FORM and MATTER, and that the nature of a thing is given by its FORM), but in terms of the interaction and organization of constituent physical parts--that is, reductionistically and spatio-temporally.

Right- I recognize that, but as above, it is worthwhile to analyze these assumptions at point blank, however deep and "embedded" they may be. Is thermodynamics correct? That is what naturalists assume, based not on scripture or common understanding, but on empiricism. Conversely, do we have reliable access to supernatural phenomena of any kind, or to things called "forms"? Not outside of our intuition, (aka "common understanding"), whose defects and predilections are all too obvious to the student of art, psychology, and comparative religion. Indeed the naturalistic world view and scientific method were primarily a psychological achievement, withdrawing the many projections elaborated in theology and prior philosophy and substituting for them critique by experiment and reason.

If you bring this latter metaphysic TO G&T's arguments, you are not merely begging the question but wearing a set of interpretive lenses which make it impossible to understand WHAT they are saying (and hence impossible to even begin the process of adequately assessing it).

I would be happy to grant that given all their assumptions, they make perfect, if extremely convoluted, sense. What their argument boils down to is that, given the assumption that we have souls and that super-nature exists, then we have souls with indeterminate properties and naturalism begins to look pretty silly. The argument is not at all whether their conclusions follow from their assumptions, but whether their assumptions make any sense, by the metric I hope we all share, which is congruence with reality, critically considered.

Here is a quote from web responses by G&T:

"We respectfully beg to differ. We never said that we posit the existence of the soul to fill an explanatory gap. Rather, we argued that there must be an explanatory gap in the physical world, given the existence of the soul and its choices to act. We are first convinced that the soul exists and makes libertarian choices for purposes and then go on to explain to our readers that the soul’s existence and causal activity implies that there must be a gap in the physical explanatory story."

I think it is pretty clear that they are going about this backwards. It is no surprise that if you posit souls, then the regular order of natural explanation leaves something to be desired. It is they who are not examining their assumptions, other than to lamely claim that they are following "common understandings".

The inescapable premise, it seems to me, is that science cannot discern whether there is more to reality than science can discern.

So, if we want to figure out what overarching metaphysics we should adopt, we need other considerations besides the scientific facts.

Here I have to disagree. The statement implies that reality can be defined in a way that exceeds "facts". But what would that difference be? G&T try to treat our common intuitions as facts of the highest order, from which we can conclude the existence of super-nature. But what of all the other facts that belie that same conclusion? Isn't this simply the privileging of one set of selected observations over a much more rigorous set of observations, based on their intimacy and affect?

In my view, their achievement lies in something else: reminding us that there is a research program here, and that a comprehensive worldview should be assessed not merely in terms of its 'fit' with science but with the totality of human experience, including the experience of ourselves as agents who act for reasons.

Indeed, this is where a truly scientific research program on human reasoning and volition will tell a great deal. My take on that research is that the intuitive ideas we have about will and authorship are being (or have already been) replaced by a paradigm that will explain them in a productive fashion- not explaining them away, but giving concrete accounts of their origin, mechanism, and role without impairing their subjective enjoyment. Thus one more long-cherished intuitive idea will go the way of so many before.

With that, I'll finish and return to the original topic of love and agree that the mystical religious experience generates in us love for the world, which is now so desperately needed. We needn't ask whether it loves us back- it might have a hard time doing so at this moment of ecological peril. In that respect the atheist may even agree with the doctrine of original sin- regarded as a perpetual duty we as conscious beings have to safeguard the unconscious source of our being from harm- especially including that harm caused by our own existence. Our consciousness is also our main hope, however- an expensive, hard-fought, rare, and precious achievement which may yet be of greater benefit to ourselves and our fellow creatures.

Head eraser

Scientists selectively erase memories from mice.

Memory is who we are, the essence of being human, the thread of individuality. Losing memory means losing the narrative of self, as happens in Alzheimer's. Memories can be evoked by associations of all kinds, especially by physical cues such as the famous madeleine. Where are memories stored? How are they stored? Are they material? Theists would refer to a "soul", and leave it at that, but scientists have pushed a bit further.

The going scientific model of memory is that it is a pattern of neural activity stored by enhancing the connections (synapses) between the most active neurons so that future nearby activations trigger re-activation of the same pattern. In other words, memories are stored in a distributed way in the mass of the brain, like holograms, and are reactivated when some approximation of the original activity takes place, such as when tasting a long-forgotten delicacy. Anatomically, there is also a complex short-term/long-term issue, where recent memories are stored in the hippocampus, before being transferred to the neocortex for long-term storage. Another system in the amygdala is both short- and long-term, rapidly storing emotionally laden memories such as fear responses, which are then virtually impossible to erase.

In molecular terms, memory storage involves strengthening the synapses between more-active neurons, essentially encoding past activity patterns by strengthening them and making them easier to activate. The best-known gene involved in this process encodes a transcription activator called CREB, for cyclic AMP response element binding protein. CREB binds to DNA and activates a variety of genes in response to the messenger molecule cAMP, which is generated inside activated neurons (in response to dopamine or serotonin stimulation, for instance), though it is used for many other signals in other cells. CREB appears to activate a bunch of genes that build up synapses near the sites of activation, making permanent what is marked temporarily by other activity-dependent molecules.

The current report in Science shows that if those few cells showing activated CREB during a training event are killed, then the memory is lost forever. The first trick is to use mice that are programmed with a diphtheria toxin receptor gene in a re-arrangable cassette. This cassette can be turned on by a DNA recombinase which is in turn activated by a CREB-inducible promoter sequence. Now they have mice whose memory/CREB-activated neurons specifically express a receptor for diphtheria and can be killed by applying diphtheria toxin, which the researchers do by injecting it directly into their amygdalas (which does not sound so easy, incidentally).

One control for the experiment is to treat other mice with another promoter-DNA recombinase setup not involving the CREB activator which in the end kills approximately the same number of cells in the amygdala (presumably randomly) after injection of diphtheria toxin. The experimenters then trained the mice to fear a sound, tested them for having learned it, (at which point select memory-involved cells in their brains would be expressing both CREB and the experimental diphtheria receptor), then injected the toxin, and assayed for both how many cells were killed, and how the mice now responded.

Where 50% of the mice had learned the response to start with, after the injection only 20% continued to respond- a significant erasure of memory. No difference was seen in the control mice with other neurons killed, or those not treated with toxin at all. The erasure persisted for 15 days, thus appearing to be permanent. The mice could also go on to learn and remember from later training experiences, showing that their memory systems were generally intact and relatively few cells had been deleted. Likewise, the experience did not erase earlier memories formed before the treatment with the CREB-DNA recombinase system that allowed actively learning cells to be deleted.

Fig 3. Bottom- Schematic of amygdala neurons after diphtheria toxin (DT) or saline (PBS). Blue, DNA-labeled neuronal nuclei; pink, neurons activated by memory; and white, ablated neurons. CREB-cre stands for CREB-activated DNA recombinase cre (introduced by vector injection), which recombines and activates the DT receptor gene.

What is the bottom line? That our memories (and thus conscious person-hood) are physically encoded in our brains. Hopefully this is another reason to take better care of them. It may be possible eventually to treat trauma victims in ways that impair their memories, or otherwise use this information in a beneficial way. I could certainly use better memory, or the ability to forget some things, like a certain film!

Notes on animal cruelty.. This type of research can be quite cruel to animals, and just because mice are small does not mean that they do not feel pain much as we do. Indeed we would not use them as models for this type of work if they didn't. So I'll note my hopes that the experimenters used anaesthesia properly at all stages of intervention (as claimed), minimized the aversive stimulus program, and euthanized humanely. In my experience in the lab, euthanization protocols leave a great deal to be desired. And would it be so difficult to train mice on a positive stimulus rather than always relying on the amygdala-fear system? Let's have a little compassion!

• Incidental link- Calvin does capitalism.
• Greenwald cries corruption at treasury and the white house.
• Moyers' stunning show on finance fraud with William Black.

Consciousness update

A recent scientific review lays out what is known about consciousness.

With convenient timeliness, Science magazine published a lengthy review of the state of consciousness research, within a standout issue devoted to behavioral genetics. Unfortunately, the review begins: "How consciousness arises from the brain remains unknown". Nevertheless the basic analytic approach of investigating variations in a phenomenon upon perturbation has yielded a wealth of clues about how the mind happens. I will use "mind" to denote the subjective experience which has been so difficult to explain scientifically and philosophically.

Minds turn off during deep sleep, then back on during dream sleep and during waking. They turn off again during the super-activation of epileptic seizures. The mental on state correlates with the complexity of brain wave (EEG) patterns, where deep sleep is characterized by a low complexity pattern (delta wave) of slow and regular on, off alternating at four cycles per second or less. This state also appears to be the default state of the cortex, when in a coma or when otherwise lacking the activating functions of the reticular activating system in the brain stem. Waking is a noisy condition with jumbled, higher-frequency waves (15 to 40 cycles per second- gamma waves), and then epilepsy is characterized by everything firing at once- again a low complexity state. Many variations on these states are achievable by drugs, whether professionally or recreationally applied. Many more variations appear after physical damage, such as from strokes, trauma, neurosurgery, etc.

It looks like brain waves are somewhat like the cloud of radio waves from radio stations, where signal complexity is a sign of information, and a repetitive test signal, or flat-lining, or hyperactive noise, are each degradations of that signal- a loss of information. If we knew how to decipher the signals, would we be able to peek into someone's mind? It is not at all clear that they would be decipherable in that way. The broadcast nature of brainwaves, while convenient for us to measure on the scalp, is not their real role- the EEG signal is merely a messy side-effect of activity in the many neurons going back and forth between specific locations in the brain.

It is in the rapid signaling between a large number of specific places where one would have to look for correlates of the mind. Indeed the leading theory regards complex waking gamma-wave states as reflections of transient coalitions of active brain regions, bound together in cleverly time-compressed neuronal gamma-pattern firing (the actual neuronal firings, not the waves we detect on the scalp). This is suggested by Gyorgy Buzsaki in his magisterial review of brain waves (especially Cycle 9: The gamma buzz: gluing by oscillations in the waking brain, which addresses the binding problem of consciousness). In this way, anatomical localization of activity, which is very well characterized by now, (another article in this issue uses fMRI scans of subject brains to peek into and predict speech and speaker identification to a remarkably accurate degree, based on location of brain activity ), could be melded together into what we experience as a unitary mind.

Anatomically, regions of the brain are involved in consciousness to various degrees. Small lesions in the thalamus can induce immediate coma, whereas frontal lobotomies have much less effect, and lesions in the cerebellum little to none. This review argues very plausibly that the middle region of the brain, comprising medial cortex on the outer brain, and thalamic core below it, serves as a sort of central nexus in terms of connectivity of the brain, and likewise has the most central role in consciousness. For instance, the visual processing system is arranged hierarchically from V1 to V5, where V1 is most closely connected to input from the retinas (firing with and representing simple features of the visual scene, such as light at a specific coordinate), and never contributes to consciousness directly, while the neurons in V5 represent complex aspects that do enter consciousness directly, like the identity of objects and faces. The orientation of the visual cortex places the V1 areas at the back of the head and V5 areas closest to the middle mind-relevant features mentioned above.

The review also promotes a rather vague theory about information and complexity, where data integration over large regions (roughly measured by brain waves), and discrimination between many alternative states, is the key measure of any process that can be called consciousness. For instance, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) can be used to directly activate brain regions. If this is done on someone deep in deep non-REM sleep, the result is a localized and brief low-frequency wave. In contrast, TMS on the waking brain stimulates complex wave responses that propagate far and wide through the rest of the brain, resounding for twice as much time. The paper does not relate what thoughts TMS induces in waking subjects, but other studies indicate that it induces flashes of light or other random perceptions depending on what region of the brain is being stimulated, similar to what is generated by migraines. So, though there are more and less relevant areas of the brain, consciousness still seems to be a distributed phenomenon, as indeed one might guess from the vast amount of information it subjectively integrates.

This is all of special interest to anesthesiologists, who are in charge of managing body control, pain, and consciousness. The review mentions many variations that can occur- patients that suddenly wake up during anesthesia, low doses of anesthetics that induce out-of-body experiences and depersonalization, low doses that generate amnesia and unresponsiveness despite consciousness still being present in some form. The immediate problem is that there are currently no perfect measures of consciousness per se, and anesthesiologists are naturally anxious to have one. What everyone is sure of, however, is that when brain waves cease entirely, the patient is dead- to the world, if not permanently.

Another clear conclusion is that consciousness is graded- that we can, under the influence of brain damage, exotic drugs, or just plain alcohol or sleepiness, experience vastly different amounts of consciousness. Indeed, we love exploring these altered states, consuming coffee, coca, chocolate, or riding in roller coasters for stimulation, while taking heroin, alcohol, barbiturates, or meditating for tranquilization (among many other options, like marijuana and LSD). Each of these variations are clearly connected to physical alterations in the brain. The graded-ness of consciousness has significant implications, especially for the moral status of other conscious beings. Obviously, animals such as dogs experience consciousness- perhaps not quite as exquisitely as we do, but richly nonetheless, especially in the smell department. Thus there is a graded order of beings that deserve our sensitive attention due to their consciousness, especially their capacity for conscious suffering. Conversely, human embryos are not conscious, and nor are fetuses up to some mid-stage in gestation (roughly five months), which informs our moral duties towards them as independent, conscious beings.

In view of all these detailed connections between mind, consciousness, and the brain, it should be exceedingly difficult to imagine that consciousness can exist in any form after death. Putting another nail in the coffin, as it were, will be a study that tests the hypothesis that out-of-body (or near-death) experiences reflect separation from the body. Operating rooms have been set up with upward-facing images on high shelves- items that would only be visible to someone floating above. Patients who have out-of-body experiences will then be asked about these, which will test whether their sensory selves are floating as they subjectively appear to, or whether they are strictly confined to the operating table- to what they can hear and what they have seen, either before or after the operation. We will see. My bet is that our sense of hearing is extremely sensitive and capable of painting a rich picture of what is going on outside, accounting for the various anecdotal accounts of uncanny perception while having out-of-body sensations, much like it does in half-asleep states.

---

All this presents a further question- if consciousness is eventually nailed down to brain functions, as it seems certain to be, does that present any philosophical problems, either for free will or for the efficacy of reason? For free will, how can we be truly free in our choices if our mind is strictly subject to material cause and effect? And similarly for reason, how can our reason be an impartial judge and guide if it arises from such an inherently compromised and contingent substrate as the brain?

In the first place, our free will is a good deal less free than we suppose, as advertisers and tobacco companies know so well. We are influenced all the time, thus the desperation of theists to maintain their influence. Secondly, our conscious ignorance of most influences (in addition to a big helping of randomness in the system) amounts to free will- a will that has no obvious origin and which makes decisions based on reason, or impulse, or whatever happens to come to mind. That can make psychological investigations threatening. If we expose reasons for our heretofore "free" actions, whether cast in the languages of complexes, archetypes, psychodynamics, parental influences, memes, consumerism, etc., we are less "free" insofar as these interpretations are true. Nothing has changed, but our view of ourselves is altered, and we may become more "self-conscious", which means ... more suspicious about our so-called free will.

This may be one of the deeper reasons for theist antipathy towards knowledge in general, which one might see as impairing our natural, reflexive engagement with the world (not to mention religious authority). Whether it is the knowledge given by the fruit of the tree of life, carnal knowledge, critical historical knowledge of their own texts, biological knowledge, or psychological self-knowledge, this hostility is quite remarkable. Scientologists take the prize in this last department for quite understandable reasons with their vitriolic campaign against psychology, while they simultaneously peddle their own pseudo-psychology of "clearing" and dianetics.

So is reason itself futile? If thoughts all have causes, many of them less than noble, let alone free of outside influence, how can reason operate at all? I think one can ask the same of a hand-held calculator. Does it provide reliable answers, despite its inner workings being fully understood? At best, human reason is a similarly general tool, which we can apply to any problem, and, given sufficient discipline, get robust answers from. Such is the case with mathematical proofs, where all steps can be written down, going their leisurely way from premises to conclusions. In more nebulous realms such as philosophy and ethics, each step is fraught with subjective interpretations, so the framework of reason is less in evidence, if it is present at all. It falls to critics to make that framework and its defects or successes as explicit as possible. The success of science has hinged on making its reasoning about the natural world as explicit and open as possible, thereby making useful critique possible, especially in the form of the acid tests of reality- experiment and evidence.

---

Incidental links:

• Related podcast on Hume and reason.
• Podcast on blind sight, phantom limbs, alien hands, body sense, mirror neurons, and extra senses, in a philosophical context.
• Death of HM, the man who had complete amnesia due to damage to his hippocampus.

Even more incidentally, we happen to be getting to the end of War and Peace, where, on the very last page, Leo Tolstoy makes essentially the same argument about free will as I make above (translation by Rosemary Edmonds):

As with astronomy the difficulty in the way of recognizing that the earth moves consisted in having to rid oneself of the immediate sensation that the earth was stationary accompanied by a similar sense of the planets' motion, so in history the obstacle in the way of recognizing the subjection of the individual to the laws of space and time and causality lies in the difficulty of renouncing one's personal impression of being independent of those laws. But as in astronomy the new view said: "True, we are not conscious of the movement of the earth but if we were to allow that it is stationary we should arrive at an absurdity, whereas if we admit motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws", likewise in history the new theory says: "True, we are not conscious of our dependence but if we are to allow that we are free we arrive at an absurdity, whereas by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time and on causality we arrive at laws."

More "gibberish"

I review samples of a review of my review of the book "Naturalism".

The correspondent (Darrell Lackey) who originally suggested that I read a book on philosophical naturalism was (not surprisingly) disappointed with my treatment of it, and sent an eight-page rebuttal of my review, which I will attempt to sample and respond to here. Doubtless I was far too prone to indulge in ridicule over reasoned analysis, my only defense being that I saw far more humor than reason in the book, which was stultifyingly boring.

Here is a quote from Crick:

“The Astonishing Hypothesis is the “You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice may have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can be truly called astonishing.” (Pg. 22)

Do you agree?

Yes, entirely- both with the hypothesis, and with the difficulty that many people have with it, though I personally do not have such problems. Crick was truly one of the greatest scientists of all time, a far better authority than the authors under discussion, I dare say. Here he was being dramatic to sell his book by this title.

... More importantly, you failed to even address the huge problems with such a view—or why you think there are no problems with such a view.

For instance, the authors write:
“Given the assault of strict naturalism on the very core of our natural view of ourselves, what is one to say about it? One argument against strict naturalism would be to maintain that the view is self-defeating: its proponents believe it is true, whereas if the view is true, then there ultimately is no such thing as believing it is true because there ultimately are no psychological events of any kind, period.” (Pg. 26)

Why didn’t you address this basic problem?

I did not address it because what they pose is absurd and not a problem. It is like saying that if we understand the microbial causes of disease, then we will no longer suffer from disease. Or better yet, only those who understand this principle will no longer suffer from such diseases! It appears to be an example of magical thinking.

In this case, the authors posit that those who believe in the naturalistic, mechanistic foundation of consciousness would not have any psychological events. I think that even you would find that hard to agree with. I certainly have never discounted psychological events, and nor does any scientist who studies the mind or brain. We have only posited that they are explicable in a mechanistic framework, along with everything else in the real world. You (and perhaps the authors) may be confused by the problem of mental causation, which is indeed an issue for dualist theories with soul-body interaction, but not for materialists.

Some materialists may have gotten carried away with reductionist rhetoric to the point of saying that thoughts are nothing but ... packs of active neurons ... just as one might say that photosynthesis is nothing but the transfer of a few electrons, or vision is nothing but a set of parallel computations by lots of connected neurons. That is (temporarily) mistaking the trees for the forest.

(from the book...)
"Hence, it does not seem the least bit implausible to say that a soul's thinking, choosing, experiencing pain, etc., are explainable in terms of its having the power to think and choose and exercising them, and its having the capacity to experience pain and its being actualized." (p.69).
...

If you don’t understand what is being communicated, just say so—don’t blame the authors—they are, after all, dealing with a very complex subject. If you think the areas being discussed in the above quotes could have been written better, then break it down for us in plain English and tell us where they are wrong. I do not see a single problem in the area of logic anywhere in the above quotes if understood in context. Why don’t you point the logic errors out for us?

I had not thought that the vacuity of this statement needed any explanation, actually. I guess it has long been a staple of theology to "explain" phenomena by positing "capacities" and "powers" that are delicately left unspecified and unplumbed. All I can say is that this mode of argument is totally empty. The only explanation that does any work is one with identifiable pieces that contribute logically to the phenomenon you are trying to explain. Not to mention that it also must have some connection with reality by way of empirical test.

(more from the book, same argument):
"In response, Sosa might claim that no Cartesian who (for the reasons cited in the previous paragraph) thinks he is a nonspatial entity can reasonably believe that he causally interacts with a certain physical body, without also having a knowledge of a noncausal pairing relation in which he stands to that body and that makes it causally accessible to him. It seems to us, however, that such a claim is not more obvious than the nonobvious claim that a spatial relation is a necessary condition of causal interaction between two entities." (p.64).

This statement typifies an idiosyncratic terminology with little point behind it. The authors were trying to figure out how souls can be associated with bodies while having no physical extent, or discernable connection (the pineal gland hypothesis having been discarded some time ago), or indeed discernable nature whatsoever. Here they are simply weaving fantasies- there is no evidence for non-causal pairing relations (which create causal accessibility, no less!) other than conceptual ones we ourselves imagine. There is also no evidence for non-spatial entities- the entire edifice of supernatural propositions is purely imaginary, whether the terms used are abstrusified like "non-spatial entities", or described forthrightly as souls, angels, or Santa Claus. Lastly, there is the reference to "obviousness", which, given the racked terminology, is an affront to the reader, doubly so given the kind of "plausibility" arguments tossed around elsewhere (noted above). If they knew what they were talking about, they could and would have been far clearer.

You forget that the process of choosing, of deliberating, are acts of a mental kind. I don’t think you understand what the authors are claiming. The authors are not saying that naturalists are unaware that thoughts, emotions, daydreams, fantasies, or what have you, exist in their minds. What the authors are pointing out is that according to the naturalist, in the area of the causal explanations of believing- such can never be linked to other mental events like apprehensions and other believings. It is a certain type of mental content/process that is being discussed here:

“In many (but not all) cases, believings (formation of beliefs) are causally explained by apprehending (being aware of) and believing mental contents such as (a) propositions and (b) the logical entailment relationships that obtain among them.” (Pg. 118)

Why didn’t you attempt to deal with their syllogism on page 119?

i. Every effect event is caused only by nonmental events (this is just a statement of the stronger principle endorsed by strict naturalism).

ii. Believing that strict naturalism is true is a mental effect event.

Therefore,
iii. Believing that strict naturalism is true is caused only by nonmental events.

First, the language here is poor- all this believing, entailment, and obtaining is murky, either purposefully or at any rate irremediably, since if they really knew what they were talking about, they would be clearer, as noted above.

Secondly, the first statement of the syllogism is their straw man, not mine. It is false. The nature of mental events is that they can cause each other, and can be stored and recalled at later times, creating a vast matrix of cause and effect relations from the development of the brain, through childhood, to the current thread of thought that one might have in one's head, which even you would appreciate is not a single mental event, but a continuous stream of them, buttressed by an even vaster flow of unconscious mental events. It is true that ultimately, mental events are traceable to outside causes such as sensory data and the genetic code that generates brain structure. But there is room for plenty of interior events twixt these outside causes and any particular mental event, such as a belief.

What strict naturalism means is that all mental events correspond to physical events, which have physical causes, which could all be determined (conceptually, at least) going back in time. I certainly have no problem with mental events. The author's statements to the contrary made no sense, as did so much of what they wrote- they seemed to be misreading the literature, or else be focusing on the poorest rhetorical arguments made by naturalists (if their foils even are naturalists.. see below).

And your own argument is even more murky- "... such can never be linked to other mental events ..." -what on earth does that mean? The whole point of neurobiology is to determine the linkage among mental/physical events, where signals come in through the eyes (to take one example), proceed to the back of the head visual areas, then progressively up the processing ladder of the visual system until they arrive as qualia in the as yet mysterious consciousness, and so forth. Linkage is what this is all about, and to assert that links can never be made- between two beliefs, or between two other mental events- flies in the face of evidence- from brain scanning, from strokes and other defects, etc.

(A quote from my prior review ...)
“Secondly, note the obeisance to "ordinary understanding", which is often mentioned as the author's touchstone. This is exactly what science and reason labors to improve upon. If we were to take ordinary understanding for our guide to understanding anything, be it the Earth's movement, the sun's power source, or the secret of heredity, we should be in a sorry and benighted state indeed.”

You are missing the authors’ greater point, which is that in this area of the mind and all those things that makes people feel they are different from a tad-pole, such as free-will, choosing, apprehending beauty, love, the good, the true, and the very sense of their difference from other biological life goes completely against a naturalist understanding of what it means to be human. You need to address why it is that our own view of ourselves is so “astonishingly” different than the philosophical explanation given by the naturalist. And remember, it is not a “scientific” explanation, but a philosophical one based upon an interpretation of the data—we need to know why it has to be interpreted your way, without citing your prior philosophical beliefs.

At last, you touch on an interesting question- why do we have this customary view? There is a straight evolutionary and practical explanation, which is that we (and all organisms) evolved to engage with the outside world, not with our inner world. Our senses are honed to accurately perceive our immediate physical and social surroundings in the interests of survival. There is little need to know how our internal operations are generated, other than having the vague sensations of pain and pleasure that indicate that things are going badly or well. When we eventually create complex (even conscious) robots, their high-level programs will doubtless have similar characteristics, concentrating on external interactions rather than wasting time on knowing whether chip register 24523 has communicated with memory register 89629.

So our sense of consciousness seems to us magical and perfect, even though a bit of experimentation can show that it is quite a hodgepodge of ignoring 95% of what goes on and splicing together the rest with appropriate time-shifts into a plausible video-experience. That is why TV works, for example, since our eye/brain processing is slow enough to see its jagged line-scanning as continuous motion. It is also why we sense a complete visual field, even though it actually has a big hole near the middle. Our sense of the world is smooth because, by practical / evolutionary argument, its operations must not get in the way of actually sensing the external world, however defective its mechanics are. It would be fatal to be spending time monitoring our senses (or, god forbid, our inner processing), rather than monitoring what is actually interesting ... the world.

There is no question that we are different from tadpoles- in scale, but not in kind. Tadpoles have likes and dislikes that guide their lives, and senses that accurately portray what is going on around them. It is not the most interesting life, perhaps, but they may indeed have senses of beauty as well as morals. They have a discriminating appreciation of mating partners, which in my book counts as a sense of beauty, and insofar as they have social lives, they restrict their behavior in order to socialize with others, thus expressing moral senses, where presumably it is frowned upon to eat each other, for instance.

(A quote from my prior review ...)
“And, of course there is the physical evidence of complete coincidence between minds and brains- the direct effects that strokes, surgery, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and drugs have on both coincidentally. Indeed it is ironic that these authors choose to attack naturalism on this weakest of fronts, where research is rapidly closing in on detailed brain/mind mechanisms. It is a classic "god of the gaps" approach to theism that stands little chance of surviving the decade, let alone the century.”

Again you miss exactly what aspect of mental activity the authors are speaking to, which is choice, apprehending and believing based upon other beliefs. No one is suggesting that the physical and spiritual can be divided in the way you are assuming here. It appears you were looking for a ridiculous argument like, “We think the soul is located in the left quadrant of the cerebral cortex.” This would be similar to talking about God as if such a being were just a really- really powerful human-like creature (Superman) living on a planet somewhere called heaven and if we just had our telescope turned to the right place, we could see God! We see here the same comic-book understanding of the soul.

The authors readily admit that this is a mystery (dualism, whether Cartesian or Non-Cartesian), but every honest scientist admits many mysteries to this universe and especially as to humans. So what? The authors point to a dualism posited by Kant, which simply located the soul as present “as a whole in [the] body as a whole in every part of it.” (Pg. 66) So, in fact, the areas the authors chose to attack naturalism are indeed their weakest, but they are each weak—only in different ways.

The activities of "choice, apprehending, and believing based upon other beliefs" are exactly the objects of current neuroscience. The effects of physical and chemical perturbations to the brain, which alter moral, economic, and other forms of choice, testify eloquently to their physical substrate. The mystery of dualism is belied by its complete poverty of either explanation or evidence, other than the personal sense of it, which is accounted for (though not explained) as I outlined above. So as with other mysteries that theists insist upon, such as god, miracles, and divine trinities ... they are more phantasms than mysteries. True scientific mysteries are characterized by problematic evidence, such as the equivalence of the speed of light in all directions, which stumped Newtonian models of physics. The problem of consciousness has only one piece of evidence indicating that materialism is insufficient- the way it feels/seems from the inside. All other evidence from neuroscience, logic, pharmacology, physiology, etc. converges in the opposite direction.

Indeed, a supernaturalist might claim that any evidence that arrives in this natural world is automatically skewed to naturalist forms of understanding and can not count- a sort of catch-22 that discounts any detectable phenomenon as evidence. Thankfully, that is not a problem for the naturalist.

I might even suggest that the whole book would have been better replaced by an exposition of the simple radio metaphor, where theists posit that even though a radio (brain) can be damaged in many ways to make us think that its programs arise from within itself, its signals actually come from outside, just as the brain might be getting signals from god, or the soul might be some kind of extra-mechanistic signalling device, etc.. Such a discussion would be been far more clear than what these authors offered. This could be addressed by a non-theist by the absence of any evidence for external signals or the design of the brain for their reception, or indeed for any signaling mode (other than magical) that might be relevant. (Unfortunately, all these arguments have a negative character and are not entirely compelling, since we do not have a complete mechanistic theory of how the brain works, yet.)

(Following my discussion of how consciousness follows, rather than leads, other brain activities)
Okay, let’s apply such a view to the process of your book review: So your review is just a non-purposeful, random, “caboose” like rambling, neither here nor there, of a person who believes that conscious will (which he would need for a review like this to even happen) is an “illusion.” Since you are not the “master of your own house” I can assume this review then is perhaps something you really don’t even believe…perhaps you wrote it in a ghost-like trance…you tried to force your fingers into typing the exact opposite, but to no avail. Now, we both know that is not what happened and yet, for you to make your case, you have to speak, act, and think as if the authors’ views are truer to reality than your own.

And you cite Freud? He is seen as an influential popular figure now (a celebrity), not in any serious scientific way.

Freud is still appreciated in just the way I cited- he established the idea and power of the unconscious, even if his detailed theories of its composition and modes of treatment are no longer followed. You understand the concept, I assume? The concept that most of what goes on in our heads is not known consciously? That our thoughts first incubate at various levels outside consciousness before arriving there in a blaze of either glory or shame? Whether one views it as a caboose or a conning tower, consciousness is a small part of what goes on in our heads, and clearly has to interact with many other processes in some way, sending or receiving data.

At any rate, the idea is not that my thoughts don't exist, or are random, but that consciousness is not where they take shape. Consciousness reports them, but does not form them. Surely that should be understandable to someone who believes that thoughts come from extra-terrestrial sources? The question is whether we can, by technical means, determine where they really do come from, or whether we renounce (and ignore, as the book did) the entire enterprise and go on spinning empty theories of "powers" or "capacities" to think/believe, imputed to nebulous "non-spatial" entities.

What you are forgetting is that yours is the argument from ignorance. You don’t know why or how, in a strictly natural sense, consciousness and the mind operate the way they do. You think it will be reduced to an entirely mapable physical construct one day, but until then you posit and argue from…ignorance. However the authors are suggesting that the soul is the “how” as to these dilemmas and since they do not start with your presupposition that the material is all there is- they are not making an argument from ignorance—but from experience, philosophy, theology, logic, science, and history. To admit that one possible solution is a mystery, not reducible, is not the same as arguing from ignorance. Your argument is: “I don’t know, but it has to be reducible to a physical-material cause…because I’m committed to philosophical naturalism.” Their argument is: “We think we know—it is the classical view (a soul-we are more than physical) of such matters—and it indeed is a mystery.” So is love, evil, the good, the true, and the beautiful. So is life. So what? To recognize such is hardly to argue from ignorance. In fact, it is to argue from wisdom.

Very well put. But consider how many other times the classical view of "more than physical" phenomena has actually been proven out. The answer is never. The second question is where the currently available evidence leads. There are endless cases of specific damage to the brain that result in specific defects in perception, action, morality, language, and other mental functions. Chopping off one's head also has a routinely definitive effect. There is simply no other plausible avenue to analyze mental functions than by studying the brain. No dis-embodied intelligence has ever been demonstrated, except by charlatans. And even our most fervent, drug-induced experiences of divinity are never corroborated the morning after in any concrete way, other than by the confabulation of miracles that seem so very scarce nowadays. There is no doubt that we can think and feel amazing things, just no evidence that they signify anything disembodied, whether consciousness or divinity.

(A quote from my prior review ...)
“Why do values need to be normative at all?”

Yes, that is exactly what Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and serial killers asked themselves. And why do ecological values need to be normative? And why should how we treat animals be normative? Of course, you want your values to be normative, you simply can’t tell us why and when you attempt to, we learn that there really are no such things as morals or values—there are only assertions of power.

No comment.

As noted by Fagerstrom: “Darwinism does not provide us with values about whether [a particular state of affairs] is a better or worse state of affairs. Period!” (Pg. 91)

One might respond that Naturalism is different than Darwinism. However that will not do. They both lead to a world where “better or worse” are meaningless. And if one responds, “Well, Darwinism or Naturalism might not provide values, but we can from our own imaginations,” he still has not told us why the values produced by the imaginations of the Nazis could not or should not be normative. Why should we resist those values? In fact, he has removed any way for us to talk about what “normative” would even mean

I never said that Naturalism per se is related to morals, actually. Morals come from our study of ourselves, our desires and needs, and whatever reason and foresight we can bring to bear on reconciling them all (especially with those of other people). Naturalists are typically also humanists, since they do not believe in extraterrestrial sources for human morals, or any of the other fabulous sources that have been prophesied over the years. Indeed, they do not believe in an end to history or a coming judgment, whether rapturous or apocalyptic- only that our future is in our own hands.

It is funny to hear theists prate that the origin of morals is in their authority, in their books and in their apparently not very omnipotent god. That they are the only valid judges of others- that anyone who disagrees with them has no basis to judge others, and moreover should be compared to Nazis. Have they no faith ... in their fellow man? Apparently not, even after such an election as we have just had! Religious leaders preached hate and fear in this election, especially against gay marriage in California. It should be deeply shameful.

What a disappointing review. You failed to grapple with this book in any significant way. Unlike the authors who addressed naturalism in a charitable, fair, and professional way, you chose the exact opposite route in your review. Very bad form.

What the authors were discussing in their book and the entire conversation around these things require, at a minimum, some background, some presumed familiarity with the philosophical, historical, theoretical, and scientific context to the areas under discussion. Most of us simply need to read more, take some classes, get out and talk to more people who differ and have different perspectives. But the greater issue is one of sensibility. Our wills, our emotions, our choices, our loves are involved in these matters. There is a mystery as to why one person might see a man smile as his son scores a touchdown and reflect, “There must be causal electrical pulses going from eye to brain to facial muscles happening” and a different person reflecting that, “The father sees perhaps himself again, or maybe what he wanted to be, in his son now, and he loves him so.” In other words, what do we believe is really happening at such a moment and what can it be reduced to? It is here, in the area of sensibility, aesthetics, and beauty where we see the greatest difference between the two of us (and Christians and Naturalists as a whole) and for which there is no quick or obvious remedy.

This is the conclusion, and what can one say? I found the book tedious, incoherent, and laughable. Scientific context? That was one area where the authors offered nothing.. the very field where souls should be investigated, in comparison or conjunction with real brain science, the authors offered pathetic, completely untethered arguments about whether the soul is point-like or extended, its "capacities", "powers", and the figurative ruminations of Paul of Tarsus. I was incredulous that anyone would have such low intellectual standards as to publish it.

There is indeed an issue of sensibility here, one that is critically important. This book was not about our "loves", it was about reason- reasons to believe in one or another model of reality, either naturalistic or supernatural, written in a putatively scholarly way in order to persuade the intellect, not the heart. On this count they failed miserably, not even trying to engage the leading intellectual findings about the actual brain, but focusing what fire they have on their fellow-philosopher Jaegwon Kim, who may not even be a naturalist.

I'd suggest that philosophers have had nothing interesting to say about the field of cognitive science for decades, if not centuries. This field, like others that have anything to do with the natural world, has been handed over to science for resolution based on actual data, (for instance to Francis Crick, as you cite above), as was the case with the natural philosophies of atoms, of ethers, of vitalism, of diseases, of celestial bodies, etc. At best, philosophers (like other philosophers of science) are following the science closely and considering what it means for the old questions they are familiar with and what it means for the lay person (John Searle and Oliver Sacks come to mind). At worst, they retreat into ancient formulations and abstruse terminology, playing games with each other that bear no reflection of current knowledge, and deserve prompt obscurity.

I suspect what you are trying to say is similar to the perennial notion that science drains wonder, beauty, and sacredness from the world and from ourselves. As a fan of Carl Jung, I certainly understand the attraction of holding things, experiences, and each other to be numinous and sacred. I just fail to see how these can be joined to a failed model of reality- one that simply is not true. Taking biology as my prime example, the truth of billions of years of painstaking evolution, ramification and suffering far outstrips the story of god whipping up the plants, fish, and beasts over a few days, and then scheduling everything for a do-over a couple thousand years later. The true story (as testified by every nature show) is far more likely to inspire dedication to the precious and beautiful life of this planet.