Neural Buddhism?
David Brooks has been reading up on neuroscience:
The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as “The Origin of Species reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world.
And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.
Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.
Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.
Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.
This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.
...
In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.
Earlier on blog.bioethics.net:
+ David Brooks is ready for his outboard brain
-Greg Dahlmann
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I wrote about that this morning. Brooks clearly knows very little about Buddhism, and his attempt to reassure his audience that science, far from doing its proper job of demystifying the universe, is with mysticism "joining hands and reinforcing each other."
Brooks writes as if all of these discoveries about the emergence of mental models with practical, iterative neurophysical underpinnings is somehow "new," rather than something that's been known and written about since, oh, 1975. His column was completely unenlightening; I found it misleading and unworthy of the Times.
- by Elf M. Sternberg on May 14, 2008 at 6:18 PM | link
Didn't you used to have a buddhist blogger? It'd be interesting to get her take on this.
- by Pierre Aronnax on May 22, 2008 at 12:11 AM | link