Letters to the Editor
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I wish I could live in Santa Barbara and worry about how Buddhism is portrayed
Instead of some stuffy suburb, worrying about how I will pay my mortgage and whether my kids are safe at school.
That's not an insult to you, Mr. Wallace. Good for you that you have been able to attain such a high level of income....errrrrr, consciousness. Best of luck with that.
Now I'll get back to my boring life in the physical plane.
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Well...
It can be debated whether or not Buddhists are more 'trained' in observing mental phenomena. That is, I can believe that they are trained in attuning themselves to a particular mental state and observing some types of mental phenomena, but I would be hesitant to say that this can speak for the mental phenomena of people in general, reliant as Buddhism is on some type of orthodoxy and pre-conceived belief system. Why assume that Buddhists are the only ones capable of introspection? Have you read Dostoyevsky, for example? There are insights about specific mental processes in Notes from Underground that it would take scientists millenia to reach. But the reason neither of these are helpful in scientific research is that we haven't found a way to quantify, isolate, and study them, at least not yet.
As for the argument for doing away with physicalism, you bring up many of the same issues that have been raised in the endless physicalism vs. dualism debate in the field of the philosophy of mind. But there are just as extensive arguments and counterarguments ad infinitum. This is not the place to go into it too deeply, but for example, the fact that brain states and phenomenal states "appear different" could just be a characteristic of our perception, not the states themselves. Also, as proposed by Daniel Dennett (and also kind of by Quine and U.T. Place), 'phenomenal states' themselves could be a misconception. That is, you're talking about it as if when someone sees a green traffic light, there is actually something 'green' occuring within their mind, whether physical or disembodied. But all of the things we call phenomenal states could just be different permutations of one big mental state - call it 'consciousness' - that is created by our neural processes. And anyway, your claim that dreams and thoughts cannot be detected is not entirely correct. Neural imaging is constantly becoming more and more refined (see the recent findings on the neural states of religious people 'speaking in tongues'), and different sorts of dreams produce different sorts of images. I think it's entirely feasible that it could reach a micro-level of refinement where we could actually pinpoint distinct neural images for distinct 'mental states'.
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Science versus the Believer
In the first article, B. Allan Wallace failed the litmus of basic science by demanding the scientific establishment prove a negative without presenting evidence for his own hypothesis. He has apparently decided to backpedal from his earlier assertions that the scientific establishment (whom he now accuses of a strawman ideology called "physicalism") must prove that consciousness isn't caused by non-physical means. He's retreated to safer waters, saying only that every subjective conscious experience hasn't yet been correlated to a particular brain state and we should therefore be open-minded about looking for answers outside the brain. This is equivalent to claiming we should look for the cause of global warming outside the solar system merely because every temperature spike hasn't yet been attributed to a terrestrial activity. I'm afraid this is still spurious reasoning; the burden of proof lies with Mr. Wallace to present evidence for his hypothesis. Once again it would seem the Buddhist has a lot to learn from the scientific method.
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What it means for science to be objective
It means the subject/object split can be justified.
This is true for a person reading the dial of a machine that measures radioactivity. The person's opinions about the measurement aren't going to have much power to sway the measurement.
This is not true for a person "measuring" his or her own mental state by thinking about it.
The subject/object split cannot be made in that case, therefore you simply can't do science that way.
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phenomena
Scientists do measure phenomena, but there are neither “mental” nor “physical” phenomena, only phenomena. In fact, it is difficult to imagine more absurd notions than those of a physical world or of “matter”. If I place my hand on the desk, it doesn’t meld into the desk. Is that because the desk is “matter”? If severed and left on the desk for a million years, they would meld. In both cases, an observer would only experience phenomena, or process, not “matter”. Since there is no material or physical world, there seems little reason to fret over its interaction with "mind", which we construct as non-material.
For some phenomena we have come to greater agreement regarding how to measure and name them than for others. Certain useful ways of interacting with phenomena become privileged as “science”. Some phenomena are experienced as having greater variability than others, depending partly on perspective, perception, scale, and time frame. I can interact with my experiences of a thermometer, a tape measure, an analytical balance, the utterances, behaviors and expressions of a person, or the phenomena we call “inner experience”, all at different times and places, I can collect data, and go from there. There is, of course, no such “thing” as “gravity” or “matter” or a “mental state”, but we use those symbols to work and integrate with the phenomena we interact with and organize. All are indistinguishable in their metaphysical and ontological status, if not in the degree of attention, organization, and valuation we have given them.
We confuse ourselves immensely with our constructions.
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Blinding the Buddha with Science?
B. Alan Wallace raised a number of intriguing hypotheses in his second article, most of which were buried in some remarkable misunderstandings and sly attacks on the cognitive science community. He wrote: "Cognitive scientists ... receive no formal training at all in directly observing mental phenomena. They do indeed excel at observing the neural causes and behavioral expressions of mental processes, but they have left introspection -- the only means by which mental events can be observed directly -- in the hands of untrained amateurs." Several false assumptions here.
First: that introspection is indeed the only tool. Not so; how about NMR and PET scans, which indeed were used to examine Tibetan Buddhist monks' claimed ability to express compassion at will? New tools allow us to see the electrical surges in the brain directly. We don't know what they mean yet, but it is direct observation nonetheless. Some researchers have been able to trace two different types of fears (learned and instinctive) in rats right down to specific neuronal pathways. Mr. Wallace may be unaware of this work, but it is a direct physical substrate for emotion and indeed a form of consciousness, since learning is clearly a cognitive phenomenon.
Second: that introspection is a technique for direct observation of mental processes. Bosh. That's an unproved hypothesis, not a fact. Given the long-known multiple layers of cognitive processing, it is more likely that introspection is completely isolated from most mental events (including unconscious mentation or even lower centers that control physicality), though it may be helpful for some. The example he uses, of developing the ability "accurately recall past-life memories" fails to note the more likely hypothesis of False Memory Syndrome, though I agree that there is no reason not to test this hypothesis -- of course, currently there is no reason TO test this hypothesis, as there are no recorded cases of past-life recall that stand up to close scrutiny yet. Show me someone who goes from speaking modern English to ancient Mayan or Egyptian by past-life recall, and I'll support an effort to study that person with every tool at hand!
Third: As an authority on nonconscious motivation, I've spent the past twenty-odd years looking at expressed thoughts through the "projective" tool known as the Picture Story Exercise (a.k.a. the TAT) and other forms of spontaneous verbal expression. You may argue that this is "behavioral expression" rather than direct observation of mental phenomena, but I rather doubt even the most profound student of Buddhism can watch thoughts occur. If one is going to use physics metaphors, how about this one: the observer interacts with the observed. You can't watch yourself think objectively. Our brains aren't hooked up that way. To claim that this is possible is to assume (rather than propose) that states of consciousness exist beyond a physical substrate. That's circular reasoning: science doesn't study this sort of thinking, but Buddhism does, so we'll use this state of consciousness, which we assume to be independent of the brain, to study whether it is independent of the brain! What?
Despite his statement of "deepest respect" for science, he has merely hidden his disdain for it under subtle words. At the core, he wants cognitive science to accept that it is unable to approach this study at all without guidance from outside science. He says flatly "Such methods and refined states of consciousness have never been explored by science." Nonsense! Meditation, drug-induced states of consciousness, hypnotism, and other altered states have been studied for over a century. Freud studied the "oceanic feeling" of religion, Jung proposed various approaches, and let's not forget Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (now Baba Ram Dass -- a Buddhist) were Harvard psychologists! And claiming that Buddhism has a "discipline of mental training in samadhi, or highly focused, inwardly directed attention" does NOT mean it is in any way scientific, or even compatible with the scientific method. Lots of things are disciplined that are not scientifically rigorous.
As for whether it is "antiscientific" to dismiss some of these theories on "dogmatic grounds," that assumes that this is what people are doing. Martin Gardner made it clear: science is not obligated to investigate every theory that exists; the farther out a theory is, the more extraordinary the evidence required to prove it. Science is under no obligation to tackle this until more compelling evidence is offered by the people proposing it.
Contrary to how this letter may read, I am by no means closed to the idea of such studies. But as a psychologist and researcher I resent being accused of being a closed-minded dogmatist by implication, simply because I have my doubts about introspection as an effective tool. Let's study introspection as a phenomenon, absolutely -- but let's not assume what it does before we do.