I hadn’t planned for this topic to take over my blog this week, but it happens. Judging by the comments there is significant interest in the issue of consciousness, and Kastrup and I are just getting to the real nub of the argument. So here is another installment – a reply to Kastrup’s latest offering. First, however, some background.

Materialism, Dualism, and Idealism

Philosophers of mind, such as David Chalmers, now recognize three general approaches to the question – what is consciousness? Materialism is the view that the mind is what the brain does. This is often stated as the mind is caused by the brain. Some commenters took exception to this phrase, saying it implies a dualist position, that the mind is its own thing,  but I disagree. The brain is the physical substance, while the mind or consciousness is a process that emerges from the brain. A dead or deeply comatose brain has no mind, so they are manifestly not the same thing. Language here is a bit imprecise, but I think the phrase – the brain causes the mind – is an acceptable short hand for the materialist position.

Dualism is the position that consciousness is something separate from the brain and not entirely caused by it. It may be a separate property of the universe (property dualism) or be something beyond the confines of our material universe. Whatever it is, it does not reduce to the firing of neurons in the brain, which cannot, in the opinion of dualists, explain subjective experience.

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Yesterday I wrote a reply to a science blogger, Bernardo Kastrup, who wrote a critique of an earlier blog post of mine. He has now written a reply to my reply. I find these blog discussions very useful – each side can take their time to compose their argument and we can usually get down to the key issues.  They can also be fun.

Kastrup begins, unfortunately, with a bit of whining.

While I appreciate his having taken the time to reply, I am also somewhat surprised by the sheer amount of space he dedicates to ad homenen attacks on me, which dilutes his argument and the quality of the debate.

Sure, I got a bit snarky in my reply, but I will point out that my criticisms were all valid. Also my two sharpest barbs were direct quotes from Kastrup against me. It’s bad form, in my opinion, to open up a debate with personal attacks and then whine when you get the exact same thing back.  But fine – let’s get past that and focus on the substance of the discussion. His next point, however, is also about form. He writes:

This is correct. So let me take the opportunity to be explicit: I only read the post that was forwarded to me, and my comments were based on that alone. If Novella’s position in other posts was more nuanced, I’ve missed that, since I do not know Novella’s work.

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It has been a while since I wrote about dualism – the notion that the mind is something more than the functioning of the brain. Previously I had a blog duel about dualism with creationist neurosurgeon, Michael Egnor. Now someone else has jumped into that discussion: blogger, author, and computer engineer Bernardo Kastrup has taken me on directly. The result is a confused and poorly argued piece all too typical of metaphysical apologists.

Kastrup’s major malfunction is to create a straw man of my position and then proceed to argue against that. He so blatantly misrepresents my position, in fact, that I have to wonder if he has serious problems with reading comprehension or is just so blinkered by his ideology that he cannot think straight (of course, these options are not mutually exclusive). I further think that he probably just read one blog post in the long chain of my posts about dualism and so did not make a sufficient effort to actually understand my position.

Kastrup is responding specifically to this blog post by me, a response to one by Egnor. Kastrups begins with this summary:

I found it to contain a mildly interesting but otherwise trite, superficial, and fallacious argument. Novella’s main point seems to be that correlation suffices to establish causation. He claims that Egnor denies that neuroscience has found sufficient correlation between brain states and mind states because subjective mind states cannot be measured.

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The subculture of pseudoscientific ghost hunting continues to evolve. Have you heard of a “ghost box?” It seems all you have to do is put the word “ghost” in front of something and it becomes technical jargon for ghost hunters, and also a great example of begging the question. A cold spot in a house is therefore “ghost cold.” An electromagnetic field (EMF) detector becomes a “ghost detector.” And now a radio scanner has been rebranded as a “ghost box.” Of course no one has ever established that any of these phenomena have anything to do with ghosts, so they are putting the cart several miles ahead of the horse.

A more scientific and intellectually honest approach would be to declare such phenomena as anomalous (although I don’t think that they are). Ghost cold would more properly be termed anomalous cold, or a regional cold anomaly, or something like that. One hypothesis for the alleged cold anomaly would be some sort of supernatural entity (call it a ghost) that acts as a heat sink generating cold spots. First, however, researchers should endeavor to find a mundane explanation for the cold. In fact before declaring it an anomaly they should thoroughly rule out any possible explanation. Only when that has been adequately done would they have a tentative anomaly.

It would then be reasonable to generate a hypothesis as to what is causing the anomalous cold, but such hypotheses are only useful if they lead to testable predictions. If the regional cold anomaly phenomenon is the result of “ghosts”, then what might we predict from that and how can we test it? I don’t know of any way to definitively test it, as ghosts are not a well-defined phenomenon, but perhaps there are some preliminary tests that could be done. For example, is there at least a correlation between cold spots and experiences often interpreted as ghosts or hauntings? Perhaps cold spots are just as likely in homes without other such “ghost phenomena.” Such a correlation would not prove the ghost hypothesis, of course, but it would at least be a start, and the lack of correlation would seriously jeopardize the hypothesis.

Ghost hunters, however, skip over all of this scientific methodology and reasoning and simply declare cold spots “ghost cold” and then use them as evidence for ghosts. They are then puzzled when scientists and skeptics don’t accept what they consider to be compelling evidence for ghosts, but what is really compelling evidence for the complete lack of scientific understanding on the part of ghost hunters.

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A series of psychological studies recently published in Science explores the relationship between analytic thought and religious belief. The studies raise a lot of issues, including how to interpret such studies, but first let me simply convey the results.

In the first experiment researchers Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan assessed subjects with a standard measure of analytical thought – problems in which the initial intuitive answer is incorrect and must be overridden by deeper analysis. Try to solve them yourself, they are:

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
If it takes 5 machines 5 min to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake,
how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

You can look at the original paper for the answers. The researchers found that giving the analytic (and correct) answer to the questions above negatively correlated with three related measures of religious belief – instrinsic religiosity, intuitive religiosity, an belief in supernatural agents.

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Last week I wrote about earthing – the claim that being in contact with the earth (especially using products you can buy for this purpose) helps to balance your electrons and improve health.  Earthing fits into a category of pseudoscientific nonsense I called “just make shit up.” This seems to be a deep and constantly growing category, limited only by human imagination, ego, and greed. The existence of claims such as this is an excellent example for why we need the rigors and methods of science – without them to ground us to reality, there is no limit to the nonsense humans will believe.

Recently I was asked about another member of this category – coherent breathing. I bet you didn’t realize that you could use training in how to breath optimally. You probably naively assumed that the elaborate autonomic, respiratory, and circulatory systems that evolved over millions of years would have already optimized something as basic to life and physiology as breathing. You lazily just let your brainstem drive your respiration based on things like blood CO2 and oxygen levels, and let your autonomic nervous system regulate your heart rate and blood pressure. Why bother making a conscious effort to control your breathing when it will happen all by itself without any effort on your part.

Well, if you are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a seminar you can learn how to synchronize your breathing with your heart rate. What will this accomplish, you may ask? Absolutely nothing – but it will make money for the guys running the seminar.

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I am often asked, and wonder myself, if there are significant hard-wired and genetically determined brain differences between skeptics and new agers or conspiracy theorists (or name your favorite flavor of true believer). It can certainly feel this way when you are knee deep in a cyber-debate with someone with a radically different world-view than yourself. Obviously there is no simple answer to this question. Biological brain effects are filtered through culture, education, and personal experience, which in turn have an effect on the wiring of the brain (the brain has memory and learns from experience). Further, genetically determined hard-wiring, to the extent that this exists, is extremely complex, with many factors affecting each other.

While it may be difficult to tease out the contribution of genetic hard-wiring to things like belief in fairies, I think it remains an open question and it is not implausible that there is a significant contribution in some cases. Perhaps to some extent the conflict between skeptics and true believers is really a competition between different  versions of human brain wiring. Perhaps we will need to just accept this neurodiversity (its existence, if not its effect on our culture).

While this is a fascinating question, at the same time I feel there is a tendency in popular culture, especially among journalists and (ironically) some purveyors of dubious products and services, to reframe many phenomena with specific reference to the brain. Old fashioned learning is now “training your brain,” for example. While this is technically true, it makes it seem like a new, targeted, reductionist technology when in fact it’s just practice and learning.

A recent study explored one small aspect of the question of brain function and spirituality – researchers asked themselves if those healers and gurus who claim to be able to see a human aura are really synaesthetes, people with a hyperrobust connection among different brain regions that make them smell color, taste sound, feel numbers, or otherwise experience one sensation or experience with an overlay of another sensation. There is a form of synaethesia in which people experience the faces of those familiar to them as having a specific color.

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There are times when an article packs in logical fallacies so densely that I just can’t help deconstructing it. Another feature that often lures me in is a blatant self-contradiction that the author seems to be oblivious to. HuffPo Canada has recently published an article by “investigative journalist” Isla Traquair that does both. The articles emerges from her health consumer series that she is filming. The result is a confused, conflicting, and profoundly naive article that makes me wonder how much investigation she could have done.

Let’s go through and count the logical fallacies and contradictions. She wonders:

What exactly makes a medical treatment accepted and trusted by mainstream society? Does it make a difference if a practitioner wears a white coat and gets employed through the health service? Do they need a certificate and letters after their name? Or do we trust someone who has learnt ancient teachings using the laws and patterns of nature?

She begins by begging the question about what creates medical authority, and in so doing creates a straw man (a nice double). She cites some of the superficial trappings of legitimacy (formal recognition, degrees, and the standard uniform of the trade), as if this is what people trust about mainstream medicine. She could have asked – is it the years of training and education, the culture of science and self-criticism, the mountain of hard-won evidence, or perhaps the layers of regulation?

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Have you heard of earthing? This is just one of many pseudosciences that fits into the “just make shit up” category. From the earthing website, we learn this about its history:

In 1998, a retired cable TV executive named Clint Ober sat on a park bench in Sedona, Arizona. As he watched the passing parade of tourists, it occurred to him that almost everybody—him included—wore synthetic plastic or rubber soled shoes. He wondered if such footwear, which had increasingly replaced leather since the 1960s, could impact health.

This follows the typical guru narrative – an individual makes a single observation or hits upon an idea, which is then presented as if it’s a breakthrough scientific discovery. From this one notion that rubber soles have replaced leather soles in recent years, Ober makes up his pseudoscience of earthing. Science-babble gobbledygook follows:

The research that followed has produced fascinating evidence demonstrating that Earthing generates a powerful and positive shift in the electrical state of the body and restores natural self-healing and self-regulating mechanisms.

We know that Earthing allows a transfer of electrons (the Earth’s natural, subtle energy) into the body. We know that inflammation is caused by free radicals and that free radicals are neutralized with electrons from any source. Electrons are the source of the neutralizing power of antioxidants.

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There is an ongoing scientific discussion about the safety of long term cell phone use. The primary question  is whether or not long term exposure to non-ionizing radiation can increase the risk of brain cancer. There are further questions about whether or not such radiation can cause any health problems or symptoms.

As with any complex area of scientific research, perhaps the best way to evaluate the question is to put together a panel of experts to review all the existing evidence and then come up with a consensus opinion about that evidence. This is no guarantee of being right – the primary issue that tends to come up with such expert panels is that they were systematically biased toward one side of the debate. But assuming no major asymmetry in the constitution of an expert panel, they are an excellent way to evaluate the current state of the evidence on a specific question. Even better, of course, is when multiple independent panels all agree.

Recently an expert panel for the UK’s Health Protection Agency (HPA) reviewed the evidence for cell phone safety concluded that there is no clear evidence for any harm. This is good news. Their findings are similar to other reviews of the evidence, although often there is a difference in emphasis. For example, last year the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) reviewed the same evidence and concluded that:

 ”the evidence, while still accumulating, is strong enough to support a conclusion and the 2B classification. The conclusion means that there could be some risk, and therefore we need to keep a close watch for a link between cell phones and cancer risk.”

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