Swimming the Sacred River

From NPR:

A person’s moral judgments can be changed almost instantly by delivering a magnetic pulse to an area of the brain near the right ear…

That is a finding reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study, by neuroscientist Liane Young and colleagues, showed that manipulating a specific part of the brain (the right temporoparietal junction) with a magnet can change how someone morally judges a situation. Mature humans have the inborn sense to “know” that a person who intends harm, even when no harm is done, is more “bad” than someone who accidentally causes harm without intention. In this experiment, the pulse literally switched this mechanism in normal human participants, so that when judging a story, they found greater fault with the person who did unintentional harm.

Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene told NPR, “Moral judgment is just a brain process… That’s precisely why it’s possible for these researchers to influence it using electromagnetic pulses on the surface of the brain… If something as complex as morality has a mechanical explanation, it will be hard to argue that people have, or need, a soul.”

This is quite an astounding thing. It certainly puts a large dent in the claim that morality derives from a non-brain source, such as God or a soul. Of course, evolutionary psychology is making great strides in explaining how morality developed via natural selection, but it is this kind of experiment that illustrates evolutionary theories so vividly. As with every other branch of study, science continues to naturalize the brain and human functioning; we are moral creatures because we have evolved to be.

This is also a bit frightening. The study suggests that our moral reasoning is something not completely under our conscious control. This makes perfect sense, since it can be reasonably argued that nothing about being human is completely under conscious control. But there is something about moral judgment that strikes deeper. Our ability to think in terms of right and wrong, and then to act on those judgments even when it involves self-sacrifice, is one of our core traits that allows us to think of ourselves as noble. As being more than “mere animals”. Our brains have developed the useful cognitive illusion that everything we think and do is grounded in free choice. Obviously this is not the case, even when it comes to fundamental ideas about morality.

None of this lessens our obligation to act as moral agents. What it does do is demand that we inquire further in order to gain more insight into how we work. It also means that we will be well-served to think clearly and critically about our own personal ethics, and not to take any moral assumption as a given. And, you know, not to stand too close to big magnets…

The following comment was written in response to a theist named Bridget from the last Dawkins post [here is her original comment]. I wanted to present this on its own page since I think it begins to address some core issues in Sacred River.

Where does the evil and good come from?

“Evil” and “Good” aren’t substances or states, but moral judgments on behaviors and ideas. All judgments are products of the human mind grounded in the evolutionary necessity of primates to live together in a reasonably harmonious way. We are beginning to find the basic building blocks of human ethics, which are related to such issues as fairness, resource/mate protection, incest avoidance, and reciprocal altruism (to name a few).

As in language, the moral building blocks have evolved into complex structures that are now largely culture-based. These structures form in every group (churches, schools, workplaces, clubs, and even whole cities and nations), and the majority of them are implicit, meaning they are unspoken mandates and rules of thumb that guide how group members behave and interact. When someone violates a rule, everyone knows it, even when that rule isn’t written down. Humans are simply wired this way.

Although the underlying purpose of morality is logical—the creation of social rules that allow humans to live together in groups—individual morals or moral sets are not always rational or even beneficial. At one time, for example, slavery was considered perfectly acceptable by many Americans and was even justified with the Bible. Many people would now consider slavery to be an unambiguous evil.

This is why there is a movement to push morals into a principle-based system rather than attempting a set of absolute rules. For example, increasing fairness and decreasing suffering are “good” principles, but what those look like will change along with a changing society, just as the acceptability of slavery changed with the Civil War. This is but one benefit of a non-theistic perspective—we can approach goodness from a reasonable and compassionate place rather than by attempting to fulfill rigid decrees, regardless of their relevance or logic.

Where does the “self” come from? And please don’t say the self is a set of neuronal connections…that is ridiculous and has not been proven.

The experience of self does indeed stem from complex neural nets in the brain, although the total self certainly includes the whole body. This might seem ridiculous to you, but there is a great deal of empirical evidence for it (and no evidence to the contrary). True, we learn more about the creation of self all the time as we learn more about the brain, but it isn’t the mystery you are making it out to be.

What we call the self is constructed from many psycho-neurological mechanisms, including temperament, emotions, personality (a la the Big Five), subjective perception and awareness, motivations and bodily needs, working memory and long-term memory, worldview and heuristic sets (e.g. social roles), and what you would call thinking. The self is an emergent phenomena that arises from the integration of all these functions, each of which are borne in the brain and derive from a combination of genetics and experience, and shifts according to environmental priming (a great example of this is an experiment with Chinese-Americans: one group was shown American symbols and the other Chinese symbols: each group then interpreted a single image, with the first group preferring a Western concept of individualism, with the other preferring an Eastern communal perspective. So based on how they were primed, different “selves” came to the fore).

To learn more, I strongly recommend “The Developing Mind” by Dan Siegel.

I’m afraid you might be falling for what our ancient ancestors fell for: the assumption that anything we don’t fully understand in nature must be due to a supernatural agent. It’s as if to say that if something in nature is amazing and beyond our comprehension, it couldn’t have “just happened”. But why not? There is no reason to think that anything in nature required an external agent, and the more we learn about the universe, the more we must conclude that indeed no agent could have caused any of it. Nature is self-sufficient; that is part of its majesty.

I want to expand briefly on an idea from my last essay—the idea that science is the new occult. At one time, those we might now call occultists were those who were trying to explore the mysteries of nature. They wanted to discover that which was “hidden” (i.e. occult). For many of them, things like non-corporeal intelligences and super-terrestrial planes were not “supernatural”, but accepted explanations for natural processes. Those folks really wanted to know how things worked, and they did the best they could with the knowledge and technology they had on hand.

What used to be “occultists” are now called “scientists”. The essential shift happened with the humanistic discovery that gods and spirits are not necessary to explain the workings of the world. Similarly, the examination of humans moved away from souls and towards biology, sociology, and psychology. And as the scientific method improved, it was discovered that the universe was a vastly more complex and amazing place than any occultist could have predicted. And as science started peering into the very large, the very distant, and the very small, humans were truly exploring hidden domains utterly beyond the reach of normal modes of perception.

The world is a confusing place in many ways. It is a dangerous one, too. It makes perfect sense that the evolutionary process would promote curiosity and the ability to discover and understand—by learning about the workings of the world, our ability to survive and even dominate nature increased exponentially. Eventually, our curiosity led to the creation of science, a highly effective, if imperfect tool for figuring out what things are, what they do, and how they do it.

A popular refrain states that science cannot answer all questions. That is undoubtedly true. Embedded within the universe are processes and events that will be forever beyond our ability to analyze, predict, or understand.

The part of us that desires to know things seduces us into thinking that there is a deeper level of reality that can be grasped by a special tuning process of the mind. After all, the brain is the only real mediator of experience (and therefore of all knowledge), so it must be possible to manipulate that tool to perceive and grasp this hidden reality that sits beyond the keen eye of scientific examination. An extension of this perspective argues that some people in the past have indeed achieved this and developed translation systems that allow every day people to have access to this hidden wisdom—astrology, tarot, gematria, Cabala, goat entrails, tea leaves, entheogenic ritual, bibliomancy, augury, palmistry, scrying, Ouija, runecasting, and any other number of countless methods.

What is divine? What things are sacred and what makes them so has been debated since the notion was invented. For many religions, even up to this day, sacredness has been seen as a kind of extension of a transcendent personality. In this general perspective, God, say, is inherently sacred (being God and all) and anything that God does, creates, or influences becomes itself holy. Of course, this orientation requires a dualism, where some things are sacred and some things are not. The not-sacred things/events/actions can range, depending on who you ask, from the blandly mundane to the wickedly profane, depending on those things’ relation with the source of sacredness.

In some (not all) immanent systems of thought, the divine can be seen as something injected into or living within the stuff of the universe. In these cases, even though there is a strong relationship between matter and the divine, the two are nevertheless separate “substances”. It is even possible to see sacredness as a kind of material property.

To our knowledge, humans are unique in that we have intentionality. We possess both self-awareness and the ability to make choices within a range of action possibilities. It is a gift of the most recent addition to our big brains, the neocortex, the outer rind of neurons that, among other things, allows for judgment, reasoning, and language. We take all this for granted, of course, but it is truly astounding—math, art, science, music, architecture, poetry, engineering, sports—these are all unique to homo sapiens.

Religion

Another major product of our neocortex is religion. It is arguable that religion was really just the earliest form of natural science, using available data and human reason to explain and predict various phenomena, such as seasonal changes or various illnesses. It has been a long strange trip from that point to modern religion. Although some religious movements still try to explain the physical world (such as the many Christians who use the Bible to determine the age of the Earth), most have moved into the more abstract domains, such as morality, transcendence, and the afterlife.

While my posts thus far have focused on a philosophical framework for spirituality, it is important to understand that such constructs are not the meat of a religious life. Ultimately, what makes a path spiritual or religious is the experience of it as such. As Jennifer Dornan (2004) writes, “the symbols and abstract ideas of a religion do not have the social force of belief unless there is some performative, experiential aspect to provide meaning and import to those symbols.” At the same time, such experiences have little intrinsic meaning until interpreted in the light of some established philosophy or ideology, and this dynamic dance is the engine behind the countless number of religious systems in the world. With this in mind, let’s begin to explore the world of religious experience.

Thus far, we’ve developed a spiritual scaffolding that includes religious naturalism, allegoricalism, and progressivism. This results in a movement blueprint that denies supernatural explanations of reality and instead recognizes a sacredness in the natural world as it is, including humankind’s place within it. At the same time, there is value in wonder and reverence, and these can be realized through religious objects, such as texts, ceremonies, and icons, even while knowing that these objects are merely symbols. Finally, there is the optimism in the possibility of a better future, both for individuals and society, resulting in the impetus to improve, grow, and mature.