RESTORING MEANING TO THE UNIVERSE
THE MARGINALIZATION OF MIND AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MEANING
When the founders of the Church Scientific codified the Book of Nature so that it included nothing beyond matter, energy, space, time, and their emergent properties and functions, something central to human existence was omitted: consciousness, along with the whole range of sensory and mental subjective experience. With the rise of behaviorism in the early twentieth century, consciousness was categorically dismissed. John B. Watson, on purely dogmatic grounds, argued that since mental processes cannot be scientifically measured, “psychology must discard all reference to consciousness.”1 He heralded the domination of scientific materialism over the whole realm of the mind, saying that behaviorists had swept aside “medieval conceptions” and dropped from their scientific vocabulary “all subjective terms such as sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose, and even thinking and emotion as they were subjectively defined.”2 B. F. Skinner concluded in 1953 that the mind and ideas are nonexistent superstitions invented for the sole purpose of providing spurious explanations for human behavior. He added that since mental events are asserted to lack physical dimensions, this was another reason to reject them.3 Here was the ultimate triumph of dogmatic, a priori metaphysical beliefs repudiating the indubitable first-person experience of the mind.
Most psychologists have long abandoned such absurd claims, but the repercussions of this mind-numbing dogma still ripple through the medical and scientific establishments. Religious people throughout the world have long recognized the healing power of faith and have often utilized it to the utmost. Through the 1940s, when American doctors had no effective treatment for certain ailments, they commonly handed out sugar pills in various shapes and colors in a deliberate attempt to elicit healing effects triggered by their patients’ faith. However, according to behaviorism, which dominated American and British psychology for more than fifty years, there could be no therapeutic effects from a nonexistent mind or its ideas!
In 1955, Henry K. Beecher published a groundbreaking scientific paper, “The Powerful Placebo,” in which he reported that a patient’s symptoms can be alleviated by an otherwise ineffective treatment, as long as the individual expects or believes that it will work.4 But according to scientific materialism, especially as advocated by the behaviorists, subjective mental states such as expectancy and belief—if they exist at all—should not have any power to change the body for better or worse. So Beecher camouflaged his discovery by calling this the “placebo effect,” which implies that the physical substance of the placebo actually brings about the physiological effect. This terminological sleight of hand has fooled many scientists as well as the general public. For example, Arthur K. Shapiro writes, “A placebo is defined as any therapeutic procedure . . . [that is] objectively without specific activity for the condition being treated. . . . The placebo effect is defined as the changes produced by a placebo.”5 The sheer absurdity of attributing a placebo effect to the placebo itself has eluded many highly educated people.
For years, scientists tried to discredit the placebo effect—more accurately called the subject-expectancy effect—by denying its existence altogether, suggesting that it was nothing more than an illusory, subjective experience. They insisted that it occurred only for psychosomatic problems and was transitory at best. But scientific research has shown the falsity of such dogmatic claims. Science writer Sandra Blakeslee says that “placebos can work wonders. Like ‘real drugs,’ they can cause side effects like itching, diarrhea, and nausea. They can lead to changes in pulse rate, blood pressure, electrical skin resistance, gastric function, penis engorgement, hair growth, and skin conditions.”6 Despite the metaphysical beliefs of scientific materialism, such mind-produced effects, along with the misnomer “the placebo effect,” are here to stay. The placebo effect has often been regarded as a nuisance, particularly in clinical research—an intrusive presence that distorts results. But psychiatrist David Spiegel concludes, “It’s not simply mind over matter, but it is clear that mind matters.”7
Dr. Howard Fields, a neuroscientist at the University of California at San Francisco who studies placebo effects, cautions, “We are misled by dualism or the idea that mind and body are separate.” A thought, he explains, is a set of neurons firing that, through complex brain wiring, can activate emotional centers, pain pathways, memories, the autonomic nervous system, and other parts of the nervous system involved in producing physical sensations.8 Fields has reviewed the analgesic effect of placebo manipulations in clinical trials and laboratory settings.9 He suggests that some subjects are “responders” who exhibit a large-magnitude reaction while other “nonresponders” do not, producing the average effects seen in clinical studies. Both classical conditioning and subject expectancy can contribute to an analgesic effect; when these factors are in opposition, “available evidence suggests that expectancy is the more powerful factor.” Brain imaging studies give direct evidence that “effective placebo manipulations trigger the release of endogenous opioid peptides that act on the same receptors as synthetic opioid drugs such as morphine.” One brain imaging study concludes that “the placebo analgesic effect is dependent on complex cognitive information processing, including analysis of threat in a given context, expectations of treatment outcome, and desire for relief,” and suggests that certain brain regions constitute a “network that uses cognitive cues to activate the endogenous opioid system.”10
Even if the thought “this will lower my blood pressure” is nothing more than a set of neurons firing, no one has even begun to explain how this physical process could activate the neural pathways and subsequent physiological responses to actually lower the blood pressure. One might try to explain this away by assuming that the placebo response is generalized, but this clarifies nothing regarding the specific effects that have been attributed to the placebo in various contexts.
The foremost researcher of the placebo effect today is Fabrizio Benedetti, author of numerous papers on the topic as well as the book Placebo Effects: Understanding the Mechanisms in Health and Disease.11 In his review of this fine work, Howard A. Brody writes, “He avoids adopting the superficial mind-body dualism implicit in the claim that placebo effects have achieved a new level of reality now that they can be seen on brain scans. Benedetti understands the subjective aspects of placebo effects and how objective findings can help to explain them.”12 Benedetti’s research has indeed been remarkable. He has found that placebo responses are genuine psychobiological events attributable to the overall psychosocial context, and that these effects can be robust in both laboratory and clinical settings. There is evidence that placebo effects do occur in clinical practice, even if no placebo is given. For example, an injection of morphine in full view of the patient is more effective than a hidden, unexpected one; furthermore, the pain resumes more slowly when the patient is unaware that the morphine has been interrupted.13 Multiple mechanisms have been identified, including conditioning and cognitive factors like expectation, desire, and reward. Benedetti writes:
It is now clear that the term placebo effect is too restrictive and, in fact, many placebo-related effects have recently been investigated. A placebo effect differs from a placebo-like effect in that the former follows the administration of a placebo, whereas in the latter no placebo is administered. However, in both cases, the psychosocial context around the treatment plays a key role.14
Despite the remarkable research successes in identifying the circumstances under which placebo effects occur and the brain correlates associated with them, as psychiatrist Daniel Carlat comments, “Nobody knows exactly how the mysterious placebo effect works, but it is clear that it has impacts on the brain that can be seen as clearly as medication effects.”15 Moreover, I have found no evidence that scientific researchers have seriously grappled with the mystery of how a mere idea, expectation, desire, or belief—within a certain psychosocial context, such as a doctor’s office—can trigger the precise physiological changes in the brain and body that produce the expected result. Anthropologist Daniel E. Moerman suggests in Meaning, Medicine, and the “Placebo Effect” that a first step should be to refer to this result with a name that isn’t self-contradictory.16 A placebo, he explains, is inert: it has no therapeutic causal effect. A more appropriate name for the placebo effect is the “meaning response.” He and his colleague Wayne B. Jonas explain: “We define the meaning response as the physiologic or psychological effects of meaning in the origins or treatment of illness; meaning responses elicited after the use of inert or sham treatment can be called the ‘placebo effect’ when they are desirable and the ‘nocebo effect’ when they are undesirable.”17 I wrote to him, asking whether any scientist has presented a cogent hypothesis as to how thoughts, beliefs, and expectations can bring about such changes in the brain, and he responded that he now avoids using the words “mind” and “body” and has stopped thinking about how they interact. He added that he knows of no one who has successfully grappled with this mind-body problem, and concluded, “I tend to prefer after so many years to evade or avoid the issue, seeing it as the old dualist dilemma simply rephrased. There is much we do not know, and perhaps we will never know.”18
Twentieth-century cognitive science has been dominated by the metaphysical assumptions of scientific materialism, with its insistence that all natural phenomena are physical entities or emergent properties and functions of such entities. This implies that the mind and consciousness are either equivalent to the brain or emergent properties or functions of the brain. But a century of research in the cognitive sciences has not shed much light on how the brain produces or even influences subjective experience; nor has it made significant progress in explaining how mental processes, including the placebo effect, influence the body. The name itself obscures the fact that there is a mystery to this effect. Cognitive scientists are presently stuck between a “rock”—discredited Cartesian dualism, in which both the mind and the body are reified as ontologically different substances, and a “hard place”—materialistic monism, in which all of subjective experience is reduced to brain functions. There seems to be no way backward and no way forward. This conundrum calls for a fundamental reassessment of the unquestioned assumption that the body and mind inherently exist, independently of our ways of experiencing and conceiving of them.
REDISCOVERING MEANING IN HUMAN EXISTENCE
Prior to the twentieth-century domination of the realm of the intellect by the Church Scientific, William James approached the mind-body problem in an extraordinarily objective fashion and concluded that even if thought is a function of the brain, this relationship could hold in one of three ways: “My thesis is now this: that, when we think of the law that thought is a function of the brain, we are not required to think of productive function only; we are entitled also to consider permissive or transmissive function. And this the ordinary psycho-physiologist leaves out of his account.”19
During the century since James’s death in 1910, behaviorists first sought to deny the very existence of thoughts; when the causal efficacy of thoughts could no longer be ignored, the neuroscientific community simply assumed that they were equivalent to brain functions. None of James’s three hypotheses has been put to the test of empirical research. Instead, scientists have simply declared their faith that the brain produces thoughts and that thoughts themselves are equivalent to brain states. The reality is that there is no empirical evidence to compel the belief that the brain produces thoughts rather than simply enabling or transmitting them. Nevertheless, this uncorroborated assumption so thoroughly saturates scientific and popular literature on the brain that it is widely accepted as a scientific fact. Evidence to the contrary is commonly ignored by the scientific community, funding is rarely granted to investigate such evidence, and those intrepid scientists who do so often find their reputations damaged and their findings dismissed without peer review.
James’s summary of scientific closed-mindedness in this regard at the end of the nineteenth century holds equally true a century later:
When the brain-activities change in one way, consciousness changes in another; when the currents pour through the occipital lobes, consciousness sees things; when through the lower frontal region, consciousness says things to itself; when they stop, she goes to sleep, etc. In strict science, we can only write down the bare fact of concomitance; and all talk about either production or transmission, as the mode of taking place, is pure superadded hypothesis, and metaphysical hypothesis at that, for we can frame no more notion of the details on the one alternative than on the other. Ask for any indication of the exact process either of transmission or production, and Science confesses her imagination to be bankrupt. She has, so far, not the least glimmer of a conjecture or suggestion,—not even a bad verbal metaphor or pun to offer. Ignoramus, ignorabimus [we do not know and will not know], is what most physiologists, in the words of one of their number, will say here.20
One tragic outcome of such scientific dogmatism is to alienate human beings from our own minds. Virtually all contemporary literature on the brain, both scientific and popular, attributes all the functions of the mind to neural processes. Collections of neurons are widely assumed to perceive, feel, think, remember, and perform all other functions previously attributed to human subjects. Human beings cannot consciously circulate their blood, digest their food, or influence a host of complex functions of their internal organs. These unconscious processes are fully accountable as physical processes in the body’s systems. But the situation is completely different regarding mental processes. We do know how to consciously perform a wide range of mental acts such as knowing, thinking, remembering, expecting, and communicating. Nevertheless, scientists attribute all these mental processes solely to physical processes in the brain, just as digestion is attributed solely to physical processes in the gastrointestinal tract. No longer seen as conscious agents who are intimately and actively involved in our own mental lives, we are conceptualized as passive bystanders, fabricating our rationalizing narratives while objective brain processes generate every mental phenomenon. As a result of this semantic sleight of hand—much like the ploy of calling the subject-expectancy effect a “placebo effect”—subjective experiences are treated as mere illusions, while their “underlying brain mechanisms” are credited with perceiving, knowing, and responding to reality.
The belief that configurations of neurons are themselves conscious is based on the assumption that information is objectively present in the brain, which processes it like a biological computer. But philosopher John Searle rightly counters, “The information in the computer is in the eye of the beholder, it is not intrinsic to the computational system. . . . The electrical state transitions of a computer are symbol manipulations only relative to the attachment of a symbolic interpretation by some designer, programmer or user.”21 There is no information in computers unless a conscious agent assigns it, and the same is true of the brain. While people do create and manipulate information using computers, no conscious agent designed the brain or assigns information to its processes. There is no information in the brain, only that which neuroscientists concep tually impute upon it. Physicist George F. R. Ellis explains that units of information “exist as nonmaterial effective entities, created and maintained through social interaction and teaching. . . . Thus while they may be represented and understood in individual brains, their existence is not contained in any individual brain and they certainly are not equivalent to brain states. Rather the latter serve as just one of many possible forms of embodiment of these features.”22
The rise of modern science in the early seventeenth century rescued European intellectuals from the dogmas of medieval scholasticism; four centuries later, modern science requires rescue from the dogma of scientific materialism. Galileo’s response to the sacrosanct tenets of academia in his day was to carefully observe celestial and terrestrial phenomena with an open mind, without insisting, like so many of his peers did, that all observations must fit the doctrines of scholasticism. This bold move triggered the first revolution in the physical sciences and the birth of modern science as a whole. In a similar fashion, William James proposed that the key to challenging the dualistic and monistic dogmas of his era was to take a radically empirical approach to the scientific study of the mind.
The Cartesian mind-body dualism that is so widely rejected by cognitive scientists today asserts that the mind is a substantial entity, or primal stuff, out of which thoughts are made, and that this is utterly distinct from some other primal stuff out of which material objects are made. No one has ever presented a cogent theory describing how two such reified entities might causally interact; consequently, materialists simply reduce the mind to a function or emergent property of matter. This hypothesis has the advantage of explaining how the mind and brain can interact, but it utterly fails to explain how subjective experience emerges from and influences the brain.
James rejected the underlying assumptions of both dualism and monism, denying that either mind or matter is a primal substance out of which subjective and objective phenomena emerge.23 Following the methodology of radical empiricism, he proposed that “pure experience” is more fundamental than either of the human conceptual constructs of mind and matter. He explains: “The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that.”24 The classic dualisms of object and subject, of physical entities and their mental representations, are purely functional distinctions, not ontological categories. Rather than assuming that mind and matter are absolutely real and distinct or that only matter is real, James hypothesized that both are constructs emerging out of pure experience, which precedes the reifications of subject and object, mind and matter.
The Ven. Weragoda Sarada Maha Thero, Chief Monk of the Singapore Buddhist Meditation Centre and Chief Prelate of Singapore, has proposed a similar hypothesis concerning the mind-matter controversy, based on the phenomenological approach in the teachings of the Buddha, who declares that all we can know is experience by way of the five physical senses and mental consciousness.25 Ven. Sarada explains that the Pali terms “nama and rupa, commonly translated as ‘mind’ and ‘body,’ are not two ‘entities’ that coexist in relation to each other.”
They are only two ways of looking at the single “activity” called “experience.” Nama (naming) is “experience” seen subjectively as “the mental process of identifying an object.” Rupa (appearance) is “experience” seen objectively as an “entity” that is perceived and conceived through the mental process of identification. Mano [also translated as “mind”] refers to thought or the mental process of conceptualization, which integrates and makes meaning out of the different percepts brought in through the different senses. This meaningful total “experience” is . . . viewed subjectively as “identification of an entity” (nama) and objectively as “the entity identified” (rupa).26
The placebo effect remains unexplained within the context of scientific materialism, which offers no way of grappling with the concept of meaning or its effect on physical processes. There is no indication that a materialistic explanation is on the horizon; however, the mystery surrounding the mind’s influence on the body vanishes under the hypotheses of William James as well as those of Buddhism. According to Buddhism, the flow of experience includes both the arising of appearances, made possible by the “luminous” aspect of consciousness, and the cognizance of those appearances, by way of the “cognizant” aspect of consciousness. This flow of experience may then be regarded as a continuum of three elements: objective appearances arising, knowledge of their na ture, and a subject who knows. When treating illness, in addition to the brute force of physical, pharmaceutical, or surgical interventions, the transference of meaningful information may prove therapeutic. Physical interventions commonly include detrimental side effects, which are far less prevalent with information-based interventions, such as talk therapy and cultivation of positive subject expectancy. The Buddhist hypothesis suggests that meaningful information, rather than the brain, is primary, and as a result of the transference of meaningful information, the corresponding physiological mechanisms are activated to achieve the desired or expected outcome. This would lead us to predict a strong correlation between subject-expectancy responsiveness and susceptibility to hypnotic suggestion. Subjects who are adept at lucid dreaming and consciously transforming dream experiences may also show strong subject-expectancy responses in clinical and research settings. Opportunities for unprecedented research abound.
Among William James’s three hypotheses regarding mind-brain interactions, he favored the transmission theory, according to which the brain transmits consciousness like a prism transmits light, refracting it into a spectrum of colors. James cites an extensive defense of the transmission theory by philosopher F. C. S. Schiller (1864–1937), who claims that materialism “puts the cart before the horse. . . . Matter is not that which produces consciousness, but that which limits it and confines its intensity within certain limits.”27 This theory, James argued, has greater explanatory power than the production theory, which was commonly accepted by the scientific establishment of his time, as it is today. Specifically, while both the transmission theory and the production theory provide intelligible frameworks for explaining the mind-brain correlations revealed by neuroscientists, only the transmission theory accounts for paranormal phenomena that are ignored or dismissed by materialists. These include phenomena of precognition, remote viewing, and out-of-body experiences, for which the body of rigorous empirical evidence increases steadily.28 None of these phenomena should be possible according to the production theory, which is why their existence is categorically rejected by those who are invested in the dogmas of scientific materialism.
The production theory asserts that the brain produces sensations and mental images, out of which the higher forms of thought and knowledge are framed. James acknowledged that the brain does indeed enable such sensations and images to be experienced under normal circumstances. But the production theory cannot account for extrasensory modes of perception or certain near-death experiences. According to James’s transmission theory, though, appearances that are perceived without reliance on the physical senses “don’t have to be ‘produced,’—they exist ready-made in the transcendental world, and all that is needed is an abnormal lowering of the brain-threshold to let them through.”29
James proposed that consciousness exists on two levels, relative and absolute, with the former emerging as the mind studied by psychologists and the latter being a transcendent dimension of consciousness from which all individual streams of consciousness emerge at conception and to which they return at death. But this two-tiered theory fails to account for empirical evidence suggesting the continuity of individual streams of consciousness carrying over from one lifetime to another, transferring specific psychological and physiological characteristics from the former life to the next. Such evidence has been presented by Ian Stevenson (1918–2007) at the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia.30 This evidence has received little scientific review and has not stimulated research that might overcome perceived limitations or flaws in the studies conducted by Stevenson and his colleagues. Although some skeptics have criticized Stevenson’s results in detail, they have generally simply dismissed his findings.31 Stevenson himself admitted that “the evidence is not flawless and it certainly does not compel such a belief. Even the best of it is open to alternative interpretations, and one can only censure those who say there is no evidence whatever.”32 Stevenson’s colleague Jim Tucker continues his work at the University of Virginia, and he responds to criticisms of their results in his book Life Before Life, which begins with a cogent evaluation of alternative interpretations of their findings. On the basis of the evidence and rational argument, he concludes that the theory of reincarnation best accounts for the data.33
REDISCOVERING MEANING IN EXISTENCE AS A WHOLE
The standard view of cosmogony holds that for billions of years after the Big Bang, the cosmos included only inanimate, unconscious configurations of matter, energy, space, and time. Eventually, primitive life forms emerged out of complex formations of inanimate matter and energy, and as beings developed increasingly sophisticated nervous systems, consciousness emerged out of complex configurations of neural activity. By seeming coincidence, the entire universe as scientists view it evolved in just the same historical sequence as did modern science: first came Galileo’s great revolution in the physical sciences, then came Darwin’s great revolution in the life sciences, and finally came the mind sciences, growing out of the previously developed disciplines of physics, chemistry, and biology. If the scientists’ “materiocentric” view of the evolution of the universe is correct, then the “empiricocentric” hypothesis presented by William James and Buddhist tradition, entailing the primacy of experience, from which the constructs of mind and matter are derived, is untenable.
Many cosmologists continue to believe that the Big Bang constituted the sudden, spontaneous appearance of space-time from nothing, but no one knows for sure. Some biologists believe that life might have appeared in an equally amazing and sudden phase transition; alternatively, it might have emerged from a long sequence of transitional states extended over millions of years. Nobody knows. And biologists and psychologists remain equally in the dark regarding the necessary conditions for the emergence of consciousness in the universe. Astrophysicist Paul C. W. Davies comments, “A complete theory of the interactions of particles and forces would tell us little, for example, about the origin of life or the nature of consciousness.”34 Classical physics is based on the assumption that matter and energy exist prior to and independent of observation, while information is a derivative phenomenon, emerging from measurements of the real, physical world. While this assumption goes unchallenged and only investigations based on this assumption are deemed credible, the origins of the universe, life, and consciousness remain mysteries.
From the perspective of quantum physics, in contrast, this model is inverted. Physicists Časlav Brukner and Anton Zeilinger explain:
In quantum physics the notion of the total information of the system emerges as a primary concept, independent of the particular complete set of complementary experimental procedures the observer might choose, and a property becomes a secondary concept, a specific representation of the information of the system that is created spontaneously in the measurement itself.35
According to John Wheeler, for a measurement to take place, a true observation of the physical world must impart meaningful information, signifying a transition from the realm of mindless stuff to the realm of knowledge. Rather than thinking of the universe as matter in motion, he proposed that one could regard it as information being processed. This requires the existence of an observer who processes such information, from which the construct of matter is conceived.
According to quantum physics, information lies at the core of the universe, which requires for its existence the participation of an observer who acquires and records information. At a macrocosmic level, the universe is fundamentally an information-processing system, from which the appearance of matter emerges at a higher level of reality. At the microcosmic level, each conscious observer is an information-processing and replicating system. In both cases, it is semantic information that is crucial. Our theories concerning the nature and evolution of the universe are mental constructions based on information produced by observations. In quantum physics, the materiocentric view of the universe has been supplanted by an empiricocentric view; this shift is at least as far-reaching in its consequences as the shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of humanity’s place in the cosmos.
If the information-processing model of the individual body-mind is correct, the subject-expectancy effect makes perfect sense for the first time: the power of expectation activates the information-processing system of a human being, which then triggers the appropriate, complex electrochemical processes in the body that bring about the expected change. Brukner and Zeilinger caution that this hypothesis “does not imply that reality is no more than a pure subjective human construct.”
From our observations we are able to build up objects with a set of properties that do not change under variations of modes of observation or description. These are “invariants” with respect to these variations. Predictions based on any such specific invariants may then be checked by anyone, and as a result we may arrive at an intersubjective agreement about the model, thus lending a sense of independent reality to the mentally constructed objects.36
The classical vision of the history of the universe is so deeply embedded in the modern psyche that the startling implications of quantum physics for all aspects of reality are hard to accept. Surely the universe physically evolved for billions of years before humans appeared and began to make measurements and formulate theories about the past. This implies that human beings have no significant role in the universe we inhabit. The materialist view of the cosmos—from which humans are fundamentally alienated—inevitably leads to the conclusion drawn by physicist Steven Weinberg in his book The First Three Minutes: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”37 But that universe, which purportedly exists independently of all systems of measurement, exists nowhere but in the imaginations of the scientists who conceive it. It’s their brainchild, but they have to live with it only as long as they believe it’s real.
From the perspective of quantum physics, the past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present. Our decisions about what to observe or measure and how to interpret our data play fundamental roles in determining what kind of a universe emerges in our experience as being objectively real. This is the “strange loop,” as Wheeler called it, in which the physical world gives rise to observers, who in turn conceive of the physical world in which they emerged.38 On a macroscopic scale, this implies a shift from a materiocentric to an empiricocentric view of the universe, and on a microcosmic scale, this requires a comparable shift from a neurocentric to an empiricocentric view of human existence. In the antiquated materialistic perspective on human existence and reality as a whole, the word “meaning” has no significance, whereas in this view, meaning is fundamental. At long last, centuries after the “disenchantment of nature,” meaning is restored to the universe, in which humans and all other sentient beings play a vital, participatory role. We are home at last.