Science, brain, mind & metaphysics

I'm reading a book that argues aggressively against the validity of the field of neurophilosophy. Excerpts from the introduction:

"The name 'neurophilosophy' itself, and the hyphenated expression 'mind/brain', are both part of the propaganda, intended to suggest the closest, intimate connection between neuroscience and philosophy....

"It is not physiology which drives this philosophical orthodoxy, but metaphysics, the idea that the findings of the sciences are now providing answers to the questions raised by metaphysics, providing a definitive statement as to what there really (ultimately) is....

"Opposition to the idea that science can be the fulfillment of metaphysics does not involve in any way opposition to science. If the objectives of metaphysics are spurious, then they cannot be fulfilled by science any more than they can be by metaphysics. The error which promotes the orthodoxy is, in an important respect, very simple and basic: it is to suppose that 'what anything is' is identical (in the very strongest sense) with 'what it is made of'."

- from Brain, Mind, and Human Behavior in Contemporary Cognitive Science: Critical Assessments of the Philosophy of Psychology (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007) by Jeff Coulter of Boston University and Wes Sharrock of the University of Manchester

Books I'm reviewing for real publications

I'm reviewing The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (And How to do Them), by NPR's Peter Sagal, for DoubleThink, the quarterly magazine published by America's Future Foundation in D.C. The review should appear in the Winter 2008 edition. You can visit the magazine's Web page at http://www.affdoublethink.com/. AFF also has an online-only publication called Brainwash, which you can find at http://www.affbrainwash.com/.

I'm also reviewing a slightly denser book: Brain, Mind, and Human Behavior in Contemporary Cognitive Science: Critical Assessments of the Philosophy of Psychology, by Jeff Coulter and Wes Sharrock. This review will appear in the March 2008 edition of Appraisal: The Journal of the Society for Post-Critical and Personalist Studies. You can visit the SPCPS Web site at http://www.spcps.org.uk/.

Meanwhile, at LiturgicalCredo.com, I will soon post a book review of Praying with Beads: Daily Prayers for the Christian Year by Nan Lewis Doerr and Virginia Stem Owens.

New Proverb

A full stomach comes before an eager mind;
An empty stomach can overwhelm a hungry heart.

- Colin Burch

The knowing heart?

The other day I had a brief conversation with a doctor who specializes in neuro-feedback. He said Western folks live out their heads, while Eastern folks live out of their hearts. When we try too hard to do something, he said, we usually don’t do it so well. In a zen-like fashion, corresponding with neuro-feedback therapy (or at least theory), when we’re not straining to do something, we usually have more success doing it.

It occurred to me later that, even in the West, we have a thread of understanding that places the heart at the center of our essential nature. Historically, the West has not been completely wedded to the left hemisphere of the brain.

Several years ago, I found a passage from Thomas de Quincey that tried to describe the heart’s role. In The Poetry of Pope, de Quincey wrote, “The scriptures themselves never condescended to deal by suggestion or co-operation with the mere discursive understanding; when speaking of man in his intellectual capacity, the Scriptures speak not of the understanding, but of ‘the understanding heart’ – making the heart, i.e., the great intuitive (or non-discursive) organ, to be the interchangeable formula for man in his highest state of capacity for the infinite.”

Can we know with our hearts? I’ve been trying to define “heart” in the sense that de Quincey uses it, and so far I haven’t been able to construct an adequate definition from my research of theological and philosophical ideas. In the meantime, it’s interesting to see how some thinkers didn’t believe the left-hemisphere empiricism could say everything important to being human.

Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher living in the 1600s, looked out into the darkness beyond the outposts of his rational faculties and said, “It is reason’s last step to realize that there are millions of things beyond reason.”

Michael Polanyi, the Hungarian chemist-turned-philosopher, wrote in his book The Tacit Dimension, “We know more than we can tell and we can know nothing without relying upon those things which we may not be able to tell.”

Something is going on in us that is valuable yet not centered in the left hemisphere of our brains. This opens a whole can of worms regarding intuition, mind-brain issues, spirituality, and the nature of the “heart” as de Quincey uses it.

The Mind-Brain problem gets an EEG

Despite my old-school, Christian-Platonic presuppositions about the mind and soul, I'm realizing just how much we are predisposed (not predetermined) to certain traits due to the wiring in our brains.

And yet there is hope for some of the problems through neurofeedback.

My daughter, like both of her parents to some extent, has met the diagnostic criteria for having attention-deficit disorder (ADHD) and probably its incumbent dyslexia.

We gave neurofeedback a try. Our daughter improved dramatically in matters of mood as well as attention. My wife was also going to neurofeedback sessions, but her assessment, not to get myself in trouble, hasn't meant as much as my observations of my daughter. My daughter is 6, and six-year-olds don't have agendas and presuppositions in clinical settings. Adults will either be skeptical or wholesale believers or something in between, and their beliefs will impact their assessments of their clinical experiences. A child is less self-conscious of her behavior, and in my daughter's case, her moods and abilities to concentrate improved.

The idea behind neurofeedback is that people will self-correct the unproductive concentrations of electrical currents in the brain. My own recent, personal experience with neurofeedback went like this. I had a wire clipped to each ear lobe, and another wire stuck on my head. I looked at a TV screen that displayed a race car on a race track, like a video game. When my attention was relaxed and focused on the screen, the car began to move. The more focused, the faster the car moved around the track. When I was distracted, or became self-conscious, or my thoughts turned inward, the car stopped.

University researchers in Germany have recently added to the research that suggests neurofeedback is highly effective in addressing ADHD. This apparently was the first study of neurofeedback in which the researchers tracked progress with electroencephalographic brain imaging (EEG). Read about their findings here:
http://au.health.yahoo.com/061123/3/zj94.html

Perhaps neurofeedback will increasingly become the cure for the kid about whom it has been said: "He's got a good mind. Why doesn't he use it?" Maybe many kids just need a little help in moving more of their brains' electrical activity into their frontal lobes.

Hearts & philosophies

The philosopher Charles S. Peirce wrote, "Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his Nobel Lecture on Literature, wrote, "It is in vain to affirm that which the heart does not confirm."

So what do we make of our hearts?

Blaise Pascal so famously said the following, it's almost cliche to bring it up: "The heart has reasons that Reason cannot know."

The evangelical apologist Ravi Zacharias wants to reverse Pascal's flow: "What I believe in my heart must make sense in my mind," Zacharias once said.

The problem here might just be the idea of a flow between heart and mind. What if the human being was intended to be an integrated whole, not an assembly of competing parts?