The Potential of the Spiritual

Re: The Potential of the Spiritual


Are you sure that most people think that? Most religious people maybe. But most of the philosophers I've met have come to realise that dualism (the view you've just described) doesn't make much sense.

If mind is separate from matter, how can it have any influence on matter? For example, how could my mind-feeling of anger cause my physical body to behave violently? It's all very well believing in spiritual things, but so much is left unexplained by the theory that the mind is some non-physical entity. Science tells us plenty about matter and physical stuff, but all dualists can say about spiritual stuff is so conveniently vague that it can't be proved right or wrong.

Going back to the anger/violence example. Rather than anger being something in my mind, which somehow causes my body to be violent, don't you think it more plausible that anger and other emotions are chemical processes in the brain? We know that certain areas of the brain do different things, and we know that there are specific areas of the brain associated with emotion. We know this because we can stimulate these parts of people's brains and observe changes in behaviour. I don't know whether this has actually been done, but we could in theory cause people to be violent by stimulating the anger centre of the brain.

It looks very much like emotion is a brain process. No need for a 'mind' or spiritual explanations. What do you think?

Interesting.

Coberst,

I think you will find that "dualistic spirituality" (involving mind/body dichotomy) lies mainly in the realm of conventional religion. Non-dualists (such as myself :wink: ) take a transcendent position on all dichotomies such as mind/body, observer/observed etc, from which "spirituality" is one possible aspect of successive (nested) transcendences. We might categorize such an aspect as "holistic consciousness", but bearing in mind that the problem with such a view of "spirituality" is that it tends to be ineffable.

fresco

Do you find the Atalantic article is off the mark regarding how many people hold the view I articulate?

No, but this refers only to the propensity to "religious spirituality" which Dawkins has called a cognitive virus. One path we might take with respect to a "transcendent position" is to deflate "cognition" itself as an epiphenomenon of the "general life processes" (See for example the Santiago Theory of Cognition") Within this paradigm "the individual" is merely one level of "dynamic life system" which cannot be "understood" without reference to some higher system such as "social group"(in the same way that a "bodily organ" cannot be fully understood without reference to its "bodily function").

agrote wrote:

If mind is separate from matter, how can it have any influence on matter? For example, how could my mind-feeling of anger cause my physical body to behave violently? It's all very well believing in spiritual things, but so much is left unexplained by the theory that the mind is some non-physical entity. Science tells us plenty about matter and physical stuff, but all dualists can say about spiritual stuff is so conveniently vague that it can't be proved right or wrong.


I feel that you might as well ask how can one person influence another or how can a person feel hot or cold, pleasure or pain.

Besides, how far are spiritual people from physicists? If we can imagine wormholes and 11 dimensions, why not the mind as an entity contained within the body but separate from the physical?

Because the spiritual is experienced, I believe that philosophy should provide a foundation for such an experience. This does not mean that what is spiritual is "true", but only that there should be a way to demonstrate how it can be experience-able. The fact that it can be experienced means that it should be capable of explanation. I tend towards a more "transcendent" view, as well. The flaws that enter logic through the dichotomies that it necessitates limit what can be logically said, but this does not mean that something can not be experienced beyond logic. Although there are statements beyond logic, they are still founded in it and are predictable by it, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, for example. Hegel also demonstrated similar problems with any given system.

Anyone vaguely familar with modern thought will be familar with the problems that have been leveled against pure logic and thought. Over the past few years, I personally have been moving more and more towards a view that most of these paradoxes arise from a misapplication of logic -- logic is not the complete answer. This is not an appeal to a God outside of the universe for a solution to our logic problems. Rather, there are inherent unknowns in the structure of 'reality' (I believe that Heidegger's quest for a pure ontology to be unachievable by analysis apart from a structural explanation of the logic that allows ontical things to exist.)

My question, "how could a non-physical mind influence a physical body?" is very different from the questions you've compared it to. Your question, "how can one person influence another?" is not a problem. I could give you a black eye by punching you in the face; you could make me happy by smiling at me, etc. If we had to, we could conduct experiments that would provide very strong evidence for my punch being the cause of your black eye, or your smile being the cause of my good mood.

But the same cannot be said for claims about the influence of a non-physical mind on the physical body. Because minds are supposedly non-physical, we can't really investigate them in the way that science investigates physical stuff. We can only guess at the nature of spiritual entities, and that seems to be exactly what spiritual people do. If my emotions are in my mind, then how could my anger cause me to punch you? How could something that is not made of matter have any causal influence on something made of matter (my body)? A lot of spiritual people will say, "I don't know. Spiritual things are just beyond our understanding." But then they are claiming to know that spiritual things are beyond our understanding! How can they know this? Isn't it just as plausible that spiritual things actually don't exist, and that's why we don't know anything about them?

Your question, "how can a person feel hot or cold?" can be answered by Physics. Look it up on Wikipedia. Your question, "how can a person feel pleasure or pain?" is a problem for you, Mr Dualist. How can some spiritual entity make us feel emotions?

Physics is completely different from Spirituality. Physicists use scientific methods to gain knowledge of physical things. Spiritualists don't do that. That's quite a big difference!

The difference between imagining wormholes and imagining a non-physical (and therefore non-spatial) entity, which is located in the body, is that there are mathematical/scientific reasons to believe in wormholes. How can something non-spatial have a spatial location, anyway? It's logically impossible. I don't know much about wormholes, but presumably like every well-respected scientific theory, scientific evidence points towards the existence of wormholes.

Maybe gravity is a better example. The difference between the theory of gravity and the theory that the mind is separate from the physical is that there are mathematical and empirical reasons to suppose gravity is real. If you can show me similar support for the theory of an unphysical mind, then fair enough. But you can't, and until you can, gravity is going to be a more plausible theory than dualism.

I hope that wasn't too long and rambling.

If mind is separate from matter, is the soul separate from the mind?

The idea contained in the mind/body dichotomy is mutual exclusivity. The soul is a religious belief and the soul 'lives' on after death. The soul and the body are like oil and water , they can be next to one another but they are not of the same 'substance or form' just as a rock is not of the same form and substance as is a fox.

I do not accept this dichotomy and wish to change such a view where possible but this dichotomy is so much a part of all humanity that it is a big job to change this view.

The words 'mind' and 'soul' are used interchangeably in the mind/body debate, usually. Someone could quite easily use the words to describe two different things, but in the mind/body debate people generally don't, as far as I know.

I have yet to read this obviously interesting thread, but I would like at this moment to address the issue of the mind//body dichotomy. I see no philosophical validity for dualism. I agree with Fresco in that regard. I DO, however, believe that subject-object, agent-action, self-other dichotomies, while philosophically and spiritually incorrect, are essential to human functioning. Without these useful "errors" our species might never have prevailed. This is particularly so for the illusion of the "ego".
But I think we should consider the mind-body (like the mental-material) distinction to be about a unit (as depicted in the Chinese ying-yang symbol).
It makes no sense, for me, to imagine a mind (mental experience) without a body (functioning brain/nervous system). We see that experience is affected by chemical alterations of the brain/nervous system.
But I am not arguing that there is really only body and that the ontological status of mind is epiphenomenal, a mere reflection of body.
Body, brain, nervous system, matter, etc. are thoughts I am writing about right now. One might say that the material world is no more than a set of mental constructions or conceptual experiences I am having right now. Mind needs body and body is a mental construct. What's the other relevant symbol? A cosmic snake swallowing it's own tail.

JLN,

Capra points out that "brain and nervous system" are not unique in being bodily structures concerned with the process of "cognition".
He points out that the "immune system" seems to function the same way but had hitherto not been recognized as such due to the usage of "battle metaphors" (Coberst will like that one !).
http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/articles/capra.htm

So to be more precise in my usage of the term "epiphemomenon" I should perhaps have applied this to "mental activity" rather than "cognition". Krishnamurti's view of "spirituality" arising out of the "cessation of thought" seems to make sense here.

Coberst reminds us that implicit in the mind/body dichotomy is mutual exclusivity. He is suggesting, I presume, what I described above, that this dichotomy--and perhaps all dichotomies-are actually bifurcations of unities. The mind-body dichotomy is thus an example of mutual inclusivity.

JL

This mind/body thing is just one of many ideas that permiate Western thought resulting from traditional Western philosophy. I think it is time for a vast over-haul of Western thought and I think that cognitive science offers just that opportunity.

Based on what I have read in the last several years I am convinced that we have inherited "significantly false philosophical views of what a person is".

Traditional Western views hold that:

*Our ability to reason is essentially isolated from our body.
*Objects in the world have distinct categories independent of our perception.
*Human reason is essentially unaffected by our biology.
*There is a Universal Reason that characterizes the objects in the world and the human essence is the ability to connect with this Universal Reason, this Universal Reason separates us from the other animals.
*Another error is that will, the ability to use reason to interact with the world, is radically free. Radically free will can over ride our biology.
*Traditional Western philosophers have embraced a human dualism consisting of a material and a spiritual component each distinct and different in kind. On one hand we have a material body but on the other hand a spirit mind. The spirit mind functions independent of the material body. Tradition says that Dick and Jane are bipartite creatures unlike all the other creatures in the world.
*Thought, especially theoretical thought, is characteristic of spirit with the associated matters of morality and other creative activities of mind.
*Human consciousness is free of biology and is self-determining.
*The human mind as spirit transcends the material world.

Little wonder why Darwin's theory is so difficult for so many Americans to comprehend and accept.


We have in our Western philosophy a traditional theory of faculty psychology wherein our reasoning is a faculty completely separate from the body. "Reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement." It is this capacity of autonomous reason that makes us different in kind from all other animals. I suspect that many fundamental aspects of philosophy and psychology are focused upon declaring, whenever possible, the separateness of our species from all other animals.

This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science. Cognitive science has in the last three decades developed considerable empirical evidence supporting Darwin and not supporting the traditional theories of philosophy and psychology regarding the autonomy of reason. Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.

The three major findings of cognitive science are:
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

"These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting [for traditional thinking] in two respects. First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real."

All living creatures categorize. All creatures, as a minimum, separate eat from no eat and friend from foe. As neural creatures tadpole and wo/man categorize. There are trillions of synaptic connections taking place in the least sophisticated of creatures and this multiple synapses must be organized in some way to facilitate passage through a small number of interconnections and thus categorization takes place. Great numbers of different synapses take place in an experience and these are subsumed in some fashion to provide the category eat or foe perhaps.

Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.

I think that cognitive science has developed a possible paradigm that will significantly change our Western views over time.
Quotes from "Philosophy in the Flesh".

Coberst,

Your "cognitive science" seems relatively "low level" in terms of the philosophical implications of systems theory. For example, focus on neural synapses as being concerned within a process of "categorization" tends to ignore (a) non-synaptic neural operations e.g. quantum operations in microtubules (b) non-neural "cognitive operations" e.g the auto-immune system and (c) that "categorization" is the essence of dualism.
In short, recent developments is systems theory have taken a Piagetian line with respect to "cognition" as being action or process. From such a position "thoughts"are nebulous. This is not a reductionist move because it highlights the pitfalls of assuming that any of our reductionist categories such as"neurones" are axiomatic.

fresco

Whoo! This is a first for me but I find myself to be speechless!

coberst,

Something to think about....a "cognitive scientist" looks at a "neural network" and asks "what is going on ?". As a former researcher in speech perception I remember at least two possible but very different answers:

1. This is network of "logic gates" involved in "categorization".
2. This is a "finite state machine" whose transient states are isomorphic to a "generative grammar".

These answers were attempts at "meaningful structuring" but have no more authority than "seeing faces in clouds". Now there are other attempts including Hameroff's "quantum consciousness" which tries to encapsulate probabalistic (fuzzy) logic and even allows for concepts like Sheldrakes "morphogenic fields" (non localized consciousness).

The point is that "the paradigm" dictates what "cognition" is.....i.e.the form of the picture in the cloud. The "systems paradigm" is the one that transcends this by allowing for "different pictures" with respect to different levels of analysis.