God Redux

In a Times Op-Ed piece entitled “God, Darwin and My College Biology Class” (NYT, 9/27/14), David P. Barash, an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington makes the following assertion: “The more we know of evolution, the more unavoidable is the conclusion that living things, including human beings, are produced by a natural, totally amoral process, with no indication of a benevolent, controlling creator.” Adding benevolent to the mix complicates the argument. Let’s make it simple. Does science explain everything? For instance, Thomas Nagel, a professor of philosophy and law at NYU and an avowed atheist has asked how naturalism “can account for the appearance, through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry, of conscious beings like ourselves, capable of discovering those laws and understanding the universe that they govern.” (“A Philosopher Defends Religion,” The New York Review of Books, 9/22/12). The philosopher John Searle has remarked that free will and quanta are unanswered questions. Add to that the question of how something could be created out of nothing, an old favorite on the disenchantment talk circuit. Everyone wants certainty. Those who believe don’t like it that science diminishes or extinguishes God’s role. Those who hone to a rationalist and analytic view of the world quote the last proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one be silent.” But such certainties are neither spiritual nor scientific. Hamlet’s famous line, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” still points to the fact that we may have to leave open items on our teleological agendas.

Is God Data?

John Searle

Here is an interesting formulation that comes to unseat an implausible theory. In the course of demolishing Christof Koch’s, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist in The New York Review of Books (“Can Information Theory Explain Consciousness,” TNYRB, 1/10/13) the philosopher John Searle makes the following point. “mental phenomena can be ontologically subjective but still admit of a science that is epistemically objective. You can have an epistemically objective science of consciousness even though it is an ontologically subjective phenomenon.” Translation you can talk scientifically about what goes on inside the head. Searle describes Koch as a friend, but one wonders how their friendship will fare after this review? Searle is a monist who believes consciousness is a "biological phenomenon" that can be explained just as we do “digestion or photosynthesis.” Any modestly humanistic person, even one who believes in God, will buy Searle’s idea. God may exist, but we don’t have to take the Cartesian view that makes consciousness a product of a divine spirit. We know too much about the brain to have to need God. God isn’t a necessity. Still there is one unsettling aporia here and it relates to the advent of artificial intelligence, another subject Searle has written about. Let’s say consciousness can exist without the body, in a computer for example. Let’s say we have a cybernetic form of consciousness that has no relation to biology. Rejoice all you closet dualists. The information bits that Searle trashes, the “panpsychism" that Koch argues for, may show that what we know as mind can exist without the body. God (whatever he, she, it is), it turns out, may lie in the data.

The Compudrug Cocktail

The June 23^rd issue of The New York Review of Books ran an essay called “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why” by Marcia Angell. The essay is occasioned by three books: The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch; Anatomy of an Epidemic:  Magic, Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker; and Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry—A Doctor’s Revelations About a Profession in Crisis by Daniel Carlat. The same issue of the NYRB featured a piece by Sue Halpern entitled “Mind Control and the Internet,” which dealt with the following books: World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity Machines and the Internet by Michael Chorost; The Filter Bubble: What the Internet  is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser; and You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier. Angell’s essay deals with the controversy about antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil and Celexa, and antipsychotics like Zyprexa, addressing findings from double-blind placebo studies. The first in a two-part series, the essay is a thoughtful review of axons, dendrites and synapses, and the role of neurotransmitters like serotonin in bridging gaps between neurons. Psychotics were at one point thought to be suffering from a flood of serotonin, while those suffering from depression were thought to be experiencing a deficit. Thus, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor would prevent the secretion of serotonin by the synapse. One of the issues Angell brings up is how neurotransmitters are affected by the introduction of artificial substances into the brain, a process that becomes particularly important when a patient goes off of a medication. What is curious is how Angell’s essay on mental illness and the interior working of the brain and Halpern’s essay on computers and the mind are linked. A significant development of advanced computational theory is the increasing connection between computers and the brain—the brains of disabled people are now able to manipulate computer cursors and computers are able to access the brain. In discussing Lanier’s theories, Halpern remarks, “The ‘hive mind’ created through our electronic connections necessarily obviates the individual—indeed, that’s what makes it a collective consciousness.” On the other hand, computer programs of the future herald a world of utter subjectivity. “Among the many insidious consequences of this individualization is that by tailoring the information you receive to the algorithm’s perception of who you are, a perception that it constructs out of 57 variables, Google directs you to material that is most likely to reinforce your own worldview, ideology and assumptions,” Halpern comments. The subject that unites the two pieces is really consciousness, a theme taken up by John Searle in his review of Antonio Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain in the previous issue of the NYRB. One thing that becomes clear in all of these pieces is that the human brain is inadvertently being fought over by both computers and drugs. It’s a struggle of Darwinian proportions, with the evolution of the brain ultimately mitigating the outcome.