Mind, Brain and the Search for God

Alasdair Coles

CiS conference, The King’s Centre, Osney Mead, Oxford

Body Soul / Mind

Material Immaterial

My starting position: Platonic dualism

EternalDecaying

Body Soul / Mind God

Material Immaterial Immaterial

My starting position: dualism

BodyMind

Material

Current consensus in neuroscience: reductive monism

Methodological reductionismVersus

Ontological reductionism

Out of body experiences

Blanke. Brain 2004; 127: 243

Cross-over trial of 36 volunteers

• psilocybin (30 mg/70 kg) (mushrooms 5HT2a,cR)

• methylphenidate hydrochloride (40 mg/70 kg)

All volunteers had some knowledge of religious activities…. Half on a daily basis

Assessed by 32-item questionnaire “Mysticism Scale”

Magic mushrooms and God

Griffiths Psychopharmacology (2006) 187:268–283

Drug 1 Drug 2

Test 1 Test 2

Acquired paedophilia

Acquired paedophilia

Burns JM, Swerdlow RH, Arch Neurol 2003.

Norman GeschwindBoston

“Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Personality”

In between seizures:• Hyposexuality• Hypergraphia• Hyper-religiosity

Waxman SG & Geschwind N. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1975;32:1580-6.

“You are all healthy people,

….but you have no idea what joy that joy is which we epileptics experience the second before a seizure...

I do not know whether this joy lasts for seconds or hours or months, but believe me, I would not exchange it for all the delights of this world.”

Dostoyevsky1821-1881

Mystical seizures

“All of our behaviour can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge.” - Sam Harris

“We feel we choose, but we don’t,” says Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London. “You may have thought you decided whether to have tea or coffee this morning, for example, but the decision may have been made long before you were aware of it.”

Our brains are in control not us

Soon… Haynes Nat Neurosci. 2008 May;11(5):543-5

The Haynes experiment….

Soon Nat Neurosci. 2008 May;11(5):543-5

Soon Nat Neurosci. 2008 May;11(5):543-5

NMDA receptor activated

Hippocampal activity

Finding Osney Mead

Long-term potentiation

Spatial navigation

Molecular event

Altered activity in specific pathway

Changed behaviour

Change in electrical activity

Altered network activity

Bottom-up reductionism

The effect of musical training on brain structure

Gärtner H, Brain morphometry shows effects of long-term musical practice in middle-aged keyboard players. Front Psychol. 2013 Sep 23;4:636

Professional musicians

Music teachers

NMDA receptor

hippocampus

behaviour

Long-term potentiation

Spatial navigation

Top-down processing as well as bottom-up

Sachin TendulkarVersusShoaib Akhtar400msec to plan and execute

Past deliberation embodied in automaticity

Character

Molecular event

Altered activity in specific pathway

Changed behaviour

Change in electrical activity

Altered network activity

Collision of bottom up and top-down:

the human predicament“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. ….. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”Romans 7

Body Soul / Mind God

Material Immaterial

My current position: non-reductionist physicalism

The importance of emergence

God in the Synapse in the Vatican garden

John Eccles and Karl PopperThe Self and its Brain1984

The chair and “nothing but”

“nothing but”

The chair and “nothing but”

“nothing but”

The chair and emergence

Old Testament (nepes)• “Life” itself, as in Gen 2:7 “man became a

living soul [being]”• No suggestion of immaterial separate soul• Little suggestion of afterlife

New Testament (psyche)• At the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the

dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: "Death has been swallowed up in victory." (1Co 15:51-54)

• Jesus replied, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise." (Luk 23:43)

Biblical position on soul

Life after death• may be as an immaterial soul before

the new body resurrected for a dualist• requires a resurrected body for a

physicalist. So where is the continuity?

Views of the body• A dualist may despise the flesh• A physicalist must respect the body

Pastoral consequences

• Many Christians are implicit dualists• This is problematic for neuroscientists• Monist accounts of brain tend to be reductionist

and exclude God • A non reductive physicalist leaves space for God

• Most behaviour is immediately determined by our biology

• Our behaviour may alter brain structure• There is a dynamic interaction between brain and

mind

Summary

Nancey Murphy andWarren S. Brown

Did My Neurons MakeMe Do It?: PhilosophicalAnd NeurobiologicalPerspectives On MoralResponsibility AndFree Will

2007.

Maguire EA Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2000 Apr 11;97(8):4398-403

Change in brain structure with use: London taxi drivers

Karen Armstrong

Aged 17, entered Catholic convent.7 years later: left. Tried to

teach. “Fainting episodes”. Went to “hell”.

Seven years later: diagnosed with epilepsy

Author of • Through the narrow gate• The spiral staircase• History of God

Karen Armstrong

“Certainly just before I have a grand mal fit I have a 'vision' of such peace, joy and significance that I can only call it God……….

What I can say, however, is that if my 'visions' have sometimes let me into 'Hell' they have also given me possible intimations of a Heaven which I would not have been without.”

The lesson of Ulysses ……