FOUR

A THREE-DIMENSIONAL SCIENCE OF MIND

IF GALILEO DESERVES to be called the father of modern physics and astronomy and Darwin the father of modern biology, no one is more worthy of the epithet father of modern psychology than William James. All three were great empiricists who challenged the reigning dogmas of their eras. Galileo challenged the widely accepted geocentric view of the earth and celestial phenomena. Darwin challenged the biblical view of human existence and the nature of all living organisms. And James challenged the neurocentric view of the mind, namely, that all possible mental processes and states of consciousness are strictly products of the brain and its interaction with the physical environment. Both Galileo and Darwin met with fierce resistance from the Christian Church, but their theories have prevailed. James too met with fierce resistance from materialists, and to the present day they have effectively stifled his most revolutionary ideas concerning the mind and consciousness. In each case, the battle has been between empiricism and dogmatism.

The seeds of the materialist doctrine’s domination of twentieth-century science—spanning both the physical world and the mind—were sown in the nineteenth century with the establishment of what the distinguished biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95), one of the founders of the journal Nature, called the “Church Scientific,” which had the explicit aim of achieving “domination over the whole realm of the intel lect.”¹ Members of this scientific establishment presented a united front committed to finding physical explanations for all natural phenomena, including the human mind and consciousness. Through the end of the nineteenth century, illustrious scientists such as James and Wallace publicly expressed their skepticism of scientific materialism and actively promoted alternative views in peer-reviewed scientific journals. But tolerance for views that deviated from the principles of scientific materialism waned during the twentieth century. Evidence that appeared to contradict the principles of materialism was not investigated but rather ridiculed and dismissed as unworthy of consideration: scientific heresy.

This shift bears a remarkable similarity to changes in the Christian Church in the fourth century. During its first two centuries, the Christian community comprised many groups of Jesus’s followers, often with little wealth, power, or influence. They held diverse beliefs and revered a wide range of over fifty gospels, many of them Gnostic, that were attributed to Jesus and his disciples.² This diversity was challenged in the fourth century, beginning in 325 c.e. with the Council of Nicaea, which was convened by the Roman Emperor Constantine I to unify Christian doctrine and scripture. Great wealth, power, and influence were stake, and over the rest of the fourth century, there was decreasing tolerance for departures from this unified doctrine.

At the birth of modern science in the seventeenth century, natural philosophers relied upon the authority of two sources: the book of divine revelation, the Bible; and the Book of Nature, God’s creation. During the first three centuries of the growth of science, like in early Christendom, members of the scientific community expressed a wide range of metaphysical views, including theism, deism, agnosticism, and atheism, and they also held diverse views about the nature of matter, energy, life, and consciousness. But in the twentieth century, science became fused as never before with the state; as in the union of the Christian Church with the Roman Empire, great wealth, power, and prestige were at stake. Those in power needed to determine which kinds of phenomena were to be designated as part of nature, and the Church Scientific emphatically insisted that only physical phenomena were to be included. Experience was still central to scientific inquiry, but only the experiences, or data, derived from objective scientific measurements. Nonscientific experiences—especially concerning anything that was not physical—were invalidated in principle, and claims of nonphysical discoveries in nature were deemed heretical, illogical, and delusional.

William James was one of the most eloquent dissenters against such intellectual tyranny, arguing instead for what he called “radical empiricism,” which he explains as follows:

I say “empiricism,” because it is contented to regard its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to modification in the course of future experience; and I say “radical,” because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and unlike so much of the half-way empiricism that is current under the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does not dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experience has got to square.³

With this radical outlook, James defined the new field of psychology as “the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and their conditions. The phenomena are such things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, and the like.”⁴ But by the time of his death, in 1910, many academic psychologists had abandoned studying mental experience for the objective study of behavior. The behaviorist branches of psychology began with two metaphysical assumptions: all mental phenomena are physical qualities of the body, and mental states and processes are influenced only via the brain and the physical environment.⁵ B. F. Skinner defined thinking as “behavior executed on such a small scale that it is not visible to others,” and he referred to knowing as a “very special form of behavior.”⁶

Methodologically, behaviorists focused their attention entirely on the objective, physical, quantitative effects of mental states and processes as exhibited by their behavioral and verbal expressions. Skinner declared in this respect:

To agree that what one feels or introspectively observes are conditions of one’s own body is a step in the right direction. It is a step toward an analysis both of seeing and of seeing that one sees in purely physical terms. After substituting brain for mind, we can then move on to substituting person for brain and recast the analysis in line with the observed facts. But what is felt or introspectively observed is not an important part of the physiology which fills the temporal gap in a historical analysis.⁷

Many valuable inferences about the mind have been gained over the past century from this kind of research, constituting one dimension or perspective for the scientific study of the mind. A second dimension in the scientific understanding of the mind has been provided by the study of neurons and the dynamic interactions between neurons and systems of neurons. Furthermore, due to the advances in technology over the past twenty years or so, there has been a powerful synergy between these two. Modern neuroimaging technology has revealed an array of close correlations between neural systems and subjective experience. Compelling empirical evidence has demonstrated the causal effects of neuronal activity on mental processes. Furthermore, studies of the placebo effect and neuroplasticity have shown the effects of subjective mental states on the brain and the rest of the body.⁸

What remains a mystery, however, is the exact nature of these mind-brain correlations, or interactions. Cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind have variously claimed that subjective mental experiences are equivalent to components of the brain, functions of the brain, or emergent properties of the brain, or that they are simply enabled and conditioned by the brain. One of the most prevalent claims is that the mind simply is the brain.⁹ Neuroscientist Cristof Koch avoids this: “I suspect that their relationship is more complex than traditionally envisioned. For now, it is best to keep an open mind on this matter and to concentrate on identifying the correlates of consciousness in the brain.”¹⁰ Even though he questions the metaphysical claim that the brain and mental activity are identical, methodologically, he adheres to the perspective of studying the mind indirectly by way of its neural correlates.

The fact that behaviorists commonly equate the mind with behavior while brain scientists equate the mind with the brain lends considerable support to William James’s observation about the relation between attention and our view of what is real:

The subjects adhered to become real subjects, the attributes adhered to real attributes, the existence adhered to real existence; whilst the sub jects disregarded become imaginary subjects, the attributes disregarded erroneous attributes, and the existence disregarded an existence in no man’s land, in the limbo “where footless fancies dwell.” . . . Habitually and practically we do not count these disregarded things as existents at all. . . . They are not even treated as appearances; they are treated as if they were mere waste, equivalent to nothing at all.¹¹

In short, “Our belief and attention are the same fact. For the moment, what we attend to is reality.”¹²

As long as the scientific study of the mind entails the metaphysical assumption that all possible states of consciousness are physical properties or components of the brain, and as long as research focuses solely on the behavioral expressions and neural correlates of mental phenomena, it follows that all scientific conclusions about the nature of the mind must be materialistic. Scientists attend solely to the physical causes and effects of subjective mental states, so only physical phenomena pertaining to the mind are considered to be real. As James noted, to a materialist, subjective experiences are inadmissible as scientific evidence.¹³

Despite the great advances made in demonstrating specific correlations between neuronal and mental activities, little if any progress has been made in clarifying the actual nature of mental phenomena themselves. What is it about neuronal processes, unlike so many other electrochemical events, that enables them to produce the whole range of subjective mental experiences?¹⁴ This question remains unanswered.

William James may have provided the means to bridge this explanatory gap by proposing a third perspective for the scientific study of the mind. Historically, the primary scientific way to understand natural phenomena was to observe them carefully over long periods of time. This was the key to the great breakthroughs of Galileo and Darwin, and James proposed that it is the way to fathom the nature of the mind as well: “Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always. The word introspection need hardly be defined—it means, of course, the looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover. Everyone agrees that we there discover states of consciousness.”¹⁵ Direct, rigorous, first-person observation of mental phenomena represents a third dimension to the science of the mind—one largely overlooked by cognitive scientists since James’s death.

There were many reasons the scientific community abandoned introspection as a central means of studying the mind. One was the fact that for introspection to serve as a reliable means of observing mental states and processes, one must be able to focus one’s attention with continuity and clarity. No means to do this were known. When observing celestial phenomena through a telescope, the lenses must be properly focused and the telescope must accurately track the relative movements of objects across the sky. But there are no objective technological means to observe mental phenomena appearing in the space of the mind. One must rely on first-person, introspective observation using stable, vivid attentional skills. William James recognized the enormous value of developing sustained voluntary attention, but he knew of no methods for doing so. During the century following his death, psychologists rarely challenged his assumption that attention is untrainable, and little progress was made in developing such methods.

In contrast, the contemplative traditions of the world, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity, have long known that attention can be extensively refined through mental training, and they have devised numerous techniques for doing so. Such traditional methods are now being validated scientifically. One widely practiced method for developing attention skills, taught in both Eastern and Western contemplative traditions, is mindfulness of breathing.¹⁶ In this practice, one gradually cultivates a deepening sense of relaxation, attentional stability, and vividness to the point that one can effortlessly sustain attention on the breath for many hours. Then one shifts the attention from the tactile sensations of the breath to a mental image. Eventually, the mind may become so concentrated that the physical senses are withdrawn and awareness is focused solely on the domain of mental experience.¹⁷

Through training, attentional imbalances of excitation (hyperactivity) and laxity (attention deficit) are remedied, and the faculty of directly observing mental events becomes increasingly reliable and sophisticated. Even though this faculty of mental perception is scarcely acknowledged in the modern cognitive sciences, it was well known to the ancient Greeks. They called it noetos, defined as the cognitive faculty that directly apprehends nonsensuous phenomena and discloses their intelligible meaning. By refining and using it, one may explore the mind through the practice of contemplation, the devotion of one’s full energy to revealing, clarifying, and ascertaining the reality to which one is attending.

Contemplatives around the world have developed sophisticated methods for observing discursive thoughts and mental images during waking consciousness, as well as methods for lucidly exploring dream appearances.¹⁸ While observing the mind, internal chitchat and mental imagery can be perceived in “real time,” at the very moment they arise. Desires and emotions can also be observed, but awareness of these subjective mental processes occurs in a kind of short-term, working memory; one recognizes such events a fraction of a second after they have occurred, using retrospective mindfulness of one’s state of consciousness. Another form of retrospective awareness is awareness of awareness itself, in which one ascertains the immediately preceding moment of awareness. In such practice, attention is withdrawn not only from the physical senses but also from everything that appears to mental awareness. One focuses in the present moment on the immediate experience of the luminosity and cognizance of awareness itself.¹⁹

For many reasons, modern psychology has not adopted the use of introspection for scientifically studying the mind, and some of them bear serious consideration. Among the qualms are assertions that introspective observations are:

•unstable and impossible to verify

•useful for understanding only meditative states, not ordinary or pathological mental states

•subject to contamination by theory

•subject to phenomenological illusion

•subject to concealment and misrepresentation by unconscious mental processes and motivations

•subject to distorting influence of observation on the observed mental processes

Because contemplatives have addressed these concerns by observing the mind using methods as yet unexplored by modern science, we now have an unprecedented opportunity to combine the first-person methods of contemplative inquiry with the third-person methods of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. For centuries, contemplatives have cross- checked the validity of their introspective insights by consulting with experienced mentors and by collaborating among themselves, sharing their first-person observations. Now such first-person experience can also be examined using the methods of behavioral, cognitive, and clinical psychology, as well as those of cognitive neuroscience. Just as contemplatives can offer the scientific community far more rigorous reports of first-person experience of the mind than the untrained amateurs commonly used as subjects, scientists can offer their techniques of objective measurement to test the validity of contemplatives’ subjective claims.

Such unprecedented collaboration between contemplatives and cognitive scientists may illuminate the mind-body problem in new ways, but only if the adoption of a true spirit of empiricism enables us to reject our metaphysical biases—both religious and scientific. When we observe behavioral expressions or neural correlates of mental phenomena, the mental phenomena themselves are invisible; and when we observe mental processes, such as thoughts and mental images, they display no physical qualities. The fact that mental states and processes are undetectable by any sort of physical measurement should cast some doubt on the assumption that they are physical. Nevertheless, most cognitive scientists assume that anything that causally interacts with the physical world must itself be physical. This was reasonable in nineteenth-century physics, but advances in twentieth-century physics provide grounds for skepticism.²⁰

In characteristically nondogmatic fashion, William James proposed three plausible theories to account for the correlations between mental and neural processes: 1) the brain produces thoughts, as an electric circuit produces light; 2) the brain enables, or permits, mental events, as the trigger of a crossbow releases an arrow by removing the obstacle that holds the string; and 3) the brain transmits thoughts, as a prism transmits light, refracting it into a spectrum of colors.²¹ Among these theories, the latter two include the possibility of the mind having a nonphysical nature, and therefore the possibility of continuity of an individual’s consciousness beyond death.

James leaned toward the third hypothesis, suggesting:

When finally a brain stops acting altogether, or decays, that special stream of consciousness which it subserved will vanish entirely from this natural world. But the sphere of being that supplied the consciousness would still be intact; and in that more real world with which, even whilst here, it was continuous, the consciousness might, in ways unknown to us, continue still.²²

If the brain simply permits or transmits mental events, acting as a conduit rather than a producer, he speculated that the stream of consciousness may be a different type of phenomenon than the brain, which interacts with the brain while we are alive; absorbs and retains the identity, personality, and memories constitutive in this interaction; and can continue without the brain.²³ Remarkably, empirical neuroscientific research thus far is compatible with all three hypotheses proposed by James, but the scientific community on the whole has chosen to consider only the first hypothesis—the only one consistent with the principles of scientific materialism. This was inevitable, for mainstream psychology and neuroscience have no methods for putting any of these three hypotheses to the test of experience.

Finding out which hypothesis is correct may require experientially probing the nature of mental processes and consciousness itself in addition to investigating the neural causes of mental processes and their behavioral expressions. This is not a strength of the modern cognitive sciences, but it is central to Buddhist contemplative inquiry into the nature and origins of the mind. By means of thousands of hours of observation, Buddhist contemplatives claim to have penetrated into ordinarily hidden dimensions of the mind that are more chaotic, where the order and structure of the human psyche are just beginning to emerge. Examination of the deep strata of mental processes reveals layers previously concealed within the subconscious. Finally, the mind comes to rest in its natural state: the ground from which both conscious and ordinarily subconscious events arise. This is true depth psychology, in which we observe deep “core samples” of the subconscious mind, cutting across many layers of accumulated conceptual structuring. The culmination of this meditative process is the experience of the substrate consciousness (Skt. alaya-vijñana), which is characterized by three essential traits: bliss, luminosity, and nonconceptuality. The quality of bliss does not arise in response to any sensory stimulus, for the physical senses are withdrawn, as if one were deeply asleep. Nor does it arise in dependence upon pleasant thoughts or mental images, for such mental activities have become dor mant. Rather, it appears to be an innate quality of the mind when it has settled in its natural state, beyond the disturbing influences of conscious and unconscious mental activity.²⁴

Tibetan contemplatives believe that the experience of the substrate consciousness yields insights into the birth and evolution of the human psyche. Drawing on an analogy from modern biology, the substrate consciousness may be portrayed as a kind of “stem consciousness.” Much as a stem cell differentiates itself in relation to specific biochemical environments, such as a brain or a liver, the substrate consciousness becomes differentiated with respect to a specific species. This is the earliest state of embryonic human consciousness, which gradually takes on the distinctive characteristics of a specific human psyche as it is conditioned and structured by a wide range of influences, from physiological to cultural. The substrate consciousness is not inherently human but is also the ground state of consciousness of all other sentient beings. It is from this dimension of awareness that the human mind emerges, so the substrate consciousness is prior to and more fundamental than the human conceptual duality of mind and matter. Both the mind and all experiences of matter are said to emerge from this luminous space, which is undifferentiated in terms of any distinct sense of subject and object. This hypothesis rejects Cartesian dualism, as explained earlier, as well as the belief that the universe is exclusively physical. Moreover, this hypothesis may be put to the test of experience, regardless of one’s ideological commitments and theoretical assumptions. In my book Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity, I have proposed two scientific experiments, the Alaya Project and the Jiva Project, that could test the Buddhist hypothesis.²⁵

William James’s hypothesis concerning the relation of consciousness to the brain heralds a shift from a neurocentric view to what may be called an “empiricocentric” view of the mind and consciousness. The repercussions for our understanding of nature may be at least as profound as the upheavals in the Copernican shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of the solar system. This is not regression to Cartesian dualism, but progress beyond materialistic monism to the open-ended pluralism advocated by James.²⁶ It is not an appeal to supernatural influences, but rather an expanded understanding of the natural world as a range of phenomena that do not all fit within the ever-evolving human concept of “physical.”²⁷

As a result of the domination of twentieth-century science by the metaphysical assumptions of scientific materialism, few cognitive scientists today dare to question the belief that the mind is simply a component or function of the brain. But James and Wallace, two of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century, were fearless in their open-minded investigations of empirical evidence that contradicted the principles of materialism.²⁸ Darwin was unable to formulate any cogent theory concerning the origins of life or of consciousness, and the concluding sentence of his Origin of Species speaks of life “originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.”²⁹ He took a “god-of-the-gaps” approach in appealing to supernatural intervention where science came up short. In contrast, Wallace’s biographer Michael Shermer comments: “In Wallace’s worldview, then, there is no supernatural. There is only the natural and unexplained phenomenon yet to be incorporated into the natural. It was one of Wallace’s career goals to be the scientist who brings more of the apparent supernatural into the natural.”³⁰

To highly experienced Buddhist contemplatives, the two-dimensional, physicalistic view of mind is about as plausible as the flat-earth view is to astronauts orbiting our planet. The scientific approach to fully exploring the three-dimensional nature of the mind and consciousness is clearly explained by Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman:

It is only through refined measurements and careful experimentation that we can have a wider vision. And then we see unexpected things: we see things that are far from what we would guess—far from what we could have imagined. . . . If science is to progress, what we need is the ability to experiment, honesty in reporting results—the results must be reported without somebody saying what they would like the results to have been. . . . One of the ways of stopping science would be only to do experiments in the region where you know the law. But experimenters search most diligently, and with the greatest effort, in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong. In other words, we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.³¹

James commented that the problems of philosophy are those that have not yet been solved by science.³² The mind-body problem, which remains in the domain of philosophical speculation, calls for an unprecedented expansion of the scientific method. Integrating scientific and contemplative modes of inquiry in the exploration of the mind and its origins may enable us finally to solve it. This will not occur as long as our starting assumptions about the mind are materialistic and our research methods observe only physical behavior and neural correlates of mental states and processes. In all branches of natural science, the most revolutionary insights are gained by directly and meticulously observing the phenomena under investigation. Observation of the mind itself is the strength of the contemplative traditions of the world, and the union of contemplative and scientific methods may yield a true contemplative science that revolutionizes our understanding.