Letters to the Editor
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Science is hard.
I'd rather sit on my ass for 12 years doing nothing than have to study and know what I was talking about. It's much easier to cloak my ignorance in psychobable and mysticism than to actually do something with my life.
And besides, BAW got to be a starfucker to some guy who was magically chosen to not have to do shit with his life, to have slaves cater to his every whim, and who gets most of his attention by starfucking Hollywood celebs who know this particular brand of bullshit is at least cheaper than Scientology.
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response to Ktwdawg
Few people would dispute that caffeine reliably prolongs the length of time spent awake and conscious. Few people would dispute that caffeine achieves its effects by blocking receptors for the chemical adenosine. Drugs like Xanax reliably decrease anxiety. Drugs like Xanax attach to a particular site on a particular set of receptors for the neurotransmitter GABA, and change the functioning of those receptors. Those receptors probably have something to do with the "state of consciousness" we call anxiety. The fact that there is even a single drug that affects consciousness through a known mechanism is pretty good support for materialism. There are lots of drugs with unknown mechanisms. That's not the point. If we understood exactly how these drug-protein interactions produced changes in consciousness, we would not be discussing this article because the "hard problem" would be solved. That said, can anyone provide equally good evidence for an immaterial component of consciousness that does not depend on the body? The fact that you were meditating and became convinced of such a position is not an argument.
Mattcoop made reference to Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" essay. My problem with that argument is this: if we fully understood how a bat's brain is organized to allow it to echolocate, nothing in neuroscience predicts that our own brains would be capable of operating in a way that produces the experience of echolocation that a bat has. Even if we grant the qualia argument, that does nothing to prove that any particular religious practice is the best way to study qualia.
Your "consciousness is the electrical field established between the hemispheres" idea is nice, but it's not consistent with the fact that epilepsy patients do not become unconscious after surgeries that cut the fibers connecting the two cerebral hemispheres, or surgeries that remove half of the brain entirely. Apparently 2500 year old meditative traditions are less effective than basic science textbooks for an understanding of how the brain works.
You quote me saying "I have no idea what that means" without quoting the statement by Wallace that prompted me to say that. If my statement was unjustified, I'd like someone to clarify what Wallace means by "individual continuum of consciousness," how one can observe or infer such a continuum, and how exactly it is conjoined with a fetus during development. If the mind is immaterial, how on Earth is it interacting with the material world, if not by physical mechanisms?
Why is it that the people who study quantum mechanics are rarely the same people invoking it as an explanation for things like consciousness, reincarnation, telepathy, etc.?
At last year's Society for Neuroscience meeting, the Dalai Lama himself said that if scientists developed a surgery that would create happiness without dulling the intellect in the same way that drugs can, he would be the first patient.
If scientific studies demonstrated that meditation effectively increases one's quality of life, and that this was because of purely physical processes in the brain, why would people feel threatened by that? It's not an impossible (or even unlikely) outcome, and it would be more empirical support than any other religious practice enjoys. People knew how to burn things before someone developed a theory of thermodynamics, and it makes sense to me that someone could develop a beneficial mental practice without a sophisticated understanding of neuroscience.
My basic problem is that Wallace is as anti-scientific as creationists, but he's being met with considerably less skepticism, for no discernable reason.
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Occam's Razor
I haven't read all the comments here, but so far no one has brought up Occam's Razor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor which states that "the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating, or 'shaving off,' those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. In short, when given two equally valid explanations for a phenomenon, one should embrace the less complicated formulation."
Wallace mentions that neuroscience makes an unverifiable claim that "mental states are nothing more than neural states". Yes, this is unverifiable, but scientists are rightly applying Occam's Razor here to shave off everything and make the simplest explanation possible. Wallace is being disingenuous when he doesn't recognize this heuristic in effect. Show us some reason *not* to believe that "mental states are nothing more than neural states" and scientists would change their minds.
That being said, it's valid to say that there is some amount of dogma in any scientific discipline, and this should not be forgotten. Perhaps an outsider like Wallace can change things. His questions are worth asking (and pondering), but are they scientific? Are they being posed in a way such that they can be verified (or negated)? It's possible, but I'm not yet convinced.
His questions are of a personal and subjective nature---exactly the stuff that scientists should avoid. However, this doesn't make them *bad* questions. We can and must understand the subjective nature of consciousness, and if he can pose them in a scientific manner, all the better.
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Bad scientist or bad Buddhist or both?
Buddhism is often defined as the study of how thoughts arise and their dissolution. It is an empirical investigation of the nature of the mind for the ultimate purpose of realizing a state of consciousness that allows for a specific type of transcendence. Whereas other religions seek salvation, Buddhism is all about a path to see reality the way it really is. This is what makes Buddhism seem so "scientific." Unfortunately, science cannot demonstrate the claims of Buddhist teachings on the nature of mind, because Buddhist conceptions of the nature of mind are a direct challenge to the materialist metaphysics that underly science itself.
Buddhist teachings on the nature of mind imply that a materialist or even intellectual approach to understanding the mind will never reveal the true nature of mind--that there is no unique, separate, continuous self. The concept of "non-self" is not just about consciousness per se; rather, non-self is about one's subjective experience of being a separate, continuous, entity. Some buddhists, particularly Mahayana Buddhists, which includes Tibetan Buddhists, take this concept even further. For them, non-self entails no separation between self and other. The fundamental nature of reality is non-dual. In this view, the distinction between the subject (the self-aware "me") and the object (everything out there or in anything in "my" own mind) is delusion. The experience of non-self is called emptiness, and it is not something that can be ascertained through reason. It is a state of mind that is fundamentally nonconceptual. You cannot be taught it; you can only be shown it.
Surely Wallace knows this. Yet he still keeps asking questions that suggest he doesn't get the teachings. For example, he thinks he can do a scientific study of reincarnation. From a materialist perspective, reincarnation involves some ghostly thing moving from body to body like some venereal disease. From the perspective of emptiness, however, there cannot be any "thing" moving from body to body. If Wallace understood this teaching, he would realize that the absence of evidence of reincarnation in fact is consistent with the view of non-self. (So is he trying to find evidence of reincarnation to refute the hypothesis of non-self? Hmmn.)
A more interesting scientific inquiry, from a Buddhist perspective, would be about how the brain creates this sense of a unique, separate, continuous "me." How is it that the brain gives rise to an illusion of a self that is the same self 20 years ago? How is it that we take in what we see, hear, touch, taste, and remember so as to build a sense of the world about us? These are some interesting questions that neuroscience can potentially explore, and it might even be useful in the Buddhist quest to realize non-self. Why doesn't Wallace explore these issues?
It is unclear whether Wallace is a bad Buddhist or a bad scientist. He gets the teachings wrong, and he asks silly questions. Maybe he is just on a journey in search of his mind. Perhaps he will find it in the brain, but I doubt it.