We have a number of threads about different approaches to cognitive science. These are all very useful for learning what's under the hood of our machine in respect of the "horse (emotions), cart (body), driver (brain) of our "Meat Sack," as Guardian refers to it. But these studies don't get to the crux of the matter: consciousness. And there is a reason they don't: corruption of science.
A very useful book on this topic is "The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness" by B. Alan Wallace. I'm going to excerpt the Introduction here so everyone can have a good idea of what it is about and where he plans to go with his topic. I find his views on what has happened to science very much in line with my own. The main difference is that I see what has happened to science as a consequence of ponerization; psychopathological individuals achieving influence and control within the scientific community and thereby poisoning the well for everyone else.
The No Man's Land of Consciousness
When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them. ~ Alfred North Whitehead
Among all the points of contact between science and religion, there is none more crucial and none more clouded in mystery and confusion than the views concerning the nature of consciousness. While many philosophers acknowledge that little or nothing is known about consciousness, many people today make strong, diverse claims concerning the human soul and consciousness based upon religious and scientific authority. Religious believers interpret consciousness in accordance with their respective creeds, the authority of which is not accepted by many scientists; and scientists base their views of consciousness on the metaphysical principles underlying scientific inquiry, the validity of which is questioned by many religious believers.
Despite centuries of modern philosophical and scientific research into the nature of the mind, at present there is no technology that can detect the presence or absence of any kind of consciousness, for scientists do not even know what exactly is to be measured. Strictly speaking, at present there is no scientific evidence even for the existence of consciousness! All the direct evidence we have consists of nonscientific, first-person accounts of being conscious. The root of the problem is more than a temporary inadequacy of the technology. It is rather that modern science does not even have a theoretical framework within which to conduct experimental research.' While science has enthralled first Euro-American society and now most of the world with its progress in illuminating the nature of the external, physical world, I shall argue that it has eclipsed earlier knowledge of the nature of the inner reality of consciousness. In this regard, we in the modern West are unknowingly living in a dark age. A central aim of this book is to unveil the ideological constraints that have long been impeding scientific research in the study of consciousness and other subjective mental states.
As an illustration of the standoff between science and Christianity, the dominant religion in the West, consider first the question of the origins of human consciousness. Many Christians firmly believe that a human fetus is endowed with a human soul or consciousness from the moment of conception. Many other people, relying on scientific understanding of human embryology, are equally convinced that at least during the first and perhaps the second trimester the fetus is not conscious. A limitation of both these views is that neither is based on compelling empirical evidence. Christians base their positions solely on the authority of their own tradition, but they are unable to demonstrate the validity of their views to anyone who does not share their faith. Augustine (354—430), a theologian whose thinking has had an enormous impact on both Roman Catholic and Protestant theology, declared that the problem of the origin of the human soul remained a mystery to him due to its "depth and obscurity." This subject, he claimed, had not been studied sufficiently by Christians to be able to decide the issue, or if it had, such writings had not come into his hands. While he suspected that individual souls are created under the influence of individual conditions present at the time of conception, he acknowledged that, as far as he knew, the truth of this hypothesis had not been demonstrated.2 Instead of seeking compelling empirical evidence concerning the origins of consciousness, the Christian tradition has drawn its conclusions around this issue on purely doctrinal grounds. But, according to Augustine, it is an error to mistake mere conjecture for knowledge.
It is as difficult to determine the basis of the scientific view. Modern science does not know any better than Augustine how or why consciousness originates, nor does it have any way of directly detecting the presence or absence of consciousness in a human fetus or even a human adult. In the absence of any compelling evidence, advocates of this view have simply formed an opinion and asserted that as their orthodox view. But there is little to distinguish religious ignorance from scientific ignorance.
We encounter a similar dilemma in terms of Christian and scientific views of the nature of consciousness during the course of human life. Christians commonly claim that each of us is endowed with free will, which makes us morally responsible for our actions. Acting as free agents, we make decisions, sometimes after a good deal of internal struggle, and we must take responsibility for the results of our choices and deeds. Many advocates of science, on the other hand, claim that all mental behavior is produced strictly by the brain's response to physical stimuli in accordance with the laws of nature. In this view, our subjective sense of making choices, intentionally pursuing our desires, and acting on the basis of our beliefs is illusory in the sense that our actions are in reality simply products of our brains in interaction with the environment.
Regarding this issue, which is central to the definition of the very nature of human existence, Christians again call on the authority of their tradition. Advocates of science, on the other hand, bolster their position by pointing to a growing body of neuroscientific knowledge of correlates between specific brain functions and specific mental processes. Neuroscientists have discovered that when certain functions of the brain are altered or inhibited, specific mental functions change or cease altogether. Such empirical evidence suggests that those mental functions are conditioned by their respective brain functions, but it does not rule out in principle the possibility of other, possibly nonphysical, factors influencing the mind. Thus, the scientific evidence alone does not compel us to believe that the brain is solely responsible for the creation of all conscious states.
As for the nature of death, most religions, including Christianity, assert the continuity of individual consciousness following this life, and the authority of sacred scriptures is invoked to substantiate this claim. Mainstream neuroscience, in contrast, insists that individual consciousness vanishes with the death of the body. However, given its ignorance of the origins and nature of consciousness and its inability to detect the presence or absence of consciousness in any organism, living or dead, neuroscience does not seem to be in a position to back up that conviction with empirical scientific evidence. It is remarkable that despite the many diverse branches of science that explore every aspect of the known universe, we still have no science of consciousness, only philosophical and religious beliefs. So I am left with the question: Can science provide an adequate view of the entire natural world that includes only objective phenomena, while excluding the subjective phenomenon of consciousness altogether?
In short, however deeply we may hold to our present religious or scientific convictions concerning such issues as free will and the possibility of an afterlife, there are large gaps in our knowledge about the one phenomenon that holds the key to these questions. That phenomenon is our own consciousness, about which the International Dictionary of Psychology asserts: "[consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it."3 This statement exemplifies much modern Western thinking on this topic; while the author of this statement acknowledges, at least implicitly, that he does not understand consciousness, he simultaneously declares that no one else does either and that it is impossible to understand. On the contrary, I would argue that consciousness is not impossible to specify, and much has been written about it that is eminently worth reading. By the term "consciousness" I mean simply the sheer events of sensory and mental awareness by which we perceive colors and shapes, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and mental events such as feelings, thoughts, and mental imagery. Thus, I am using the word "consciousness" to refer to the phenomenon of being conscious, not to the neural events that make this first-person experience possible.
While consciousness lies in the no man's land between religion and science, claimed by both yet understood by neither, it may also hold a key to the apparent conflict between these two great human institutions. This is a second theme that weaves itself throughout this work. To place our individual perspectives in context, it may be helpful to note that according to recent polls, between 70 percent and 90 percent of all Americans believe in a personal God, 80 percent believe in angels, and 40 percent believe that God has guided the evolution of life; while only 9 percent believe that God had no part in human development over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. Moreover, 40 percent of the American scientists polled acknowledge their belief in a personal God to whom they can pray, which is roughly the same percentage as in a poll taken a century ago.4 On the other hand, according to other recent polls, 10 percent of the German population still believes in a stable earth, and a third of all adults in the United States believe everything in the Bible to be literally true.5 This range of statistics indicates that a significant minority of people in the West simply dismiss scientific knowledge and another significant minority simply dismiss religious beliefs, but a majority of people in the modern West are caught up in the conflict between science and religion.
Those of us who find ourselves in this middle ground generally try to reconcile the domains of religion and science by separating them in various ways, and such attempts have been going on over the past four centuries. Since the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most scientists, beginning with Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, have sought to accommodate their scientific theories to the orthodox theologies of their times. Even in the nineteenth century, most British "men of science" still thought that there was no essential conflict between their science and those parts of the Christian faith that liberal Christians still regarded as essential.6
This way of thinking is in evidence among contemporary intellectuals, even those in the cognitive sciences, which often strike at the heart of religious belief. To take but one example, some professionals in this field have suggested that Christians can adopt modern scientific, physicalist theories of the mind and still hold to an orthodox Christian belief in eternal life. Their proposal is that Christians may accept the scriptural promise of life after death, even if people do not survive the total destruction of the body; for they can still look forward to everlasting life in the sense that ordinary death does not entail the final dissolution of the body. Presumably such thinkers are referring to the resurrection of the body when it is transformed at the time of Christ's return. This view, of course, does not allow for the existence of a soul that continues to exist independently of the body.7 Most Christians are understandably disinclined to accept this physicalist view of immortality, which they regard as incompatible with the Bible.
If we are to hold religious beliefs and to accept scientific progress, how are we to draw the line between the domains of these two views? One possibility is to look solely to religion to clarify the fundamental ends and value standards of human endeavors, and to look solely to science for genuine knowledge of the nature of reality.8 This solution appears to me inadequate, for the ideals and values of religion are based on religious statements about the nature of reality. Christian values, for example, are based on assertions of the truth of God's existence, the immortality of the soul, the power of prayer, and so on. Indeed, if one accepts the truth of the Christian worldview, Christian values and ideals must be accepted as a matter of course; but if that worldview is rejected, the Christian rationale for those values and ideals is undermined.
On the other hand, a thoroughly materialistic view of the universe based on science suggests quite a different set of values and ideals, with profound implications for dealing with the personal, societal, and environmental problems that beset us today. The attempt to embrace religious ideals while adhering to a thoroughly materialistic worldview is severely hampered from the outset. What we really believe to be true will invariably influence what we believe to be of value; conversely, all of us, including scientists, seek to understand those aspects of reality that we value. Thus, the scientific worldview has been generated by the kinds of values and ideals held by scientists. The mutual interdependence of values and beliefs is inescapable.
According to some thinkers, a more feasible way of demarcating science and religion is to grant science authority in terms of knowledge of the natural world and to appoint it the task of providing humanity with the technological means of mastering the forces of nature to ensure our physical survival and well-being. The proper arena of religion, they say, is the sacred world, with all the ideals and moral directives for human behavior that issue forth from that domain.9 This model is feasible if we believe the sacred world exists independently of, and has no influence in, the world of nature and human life. But the great majority of religious believers today believe that the object, or objects, of their religious devotion is very much present and active in nature and in the lives of human beings. Thus, according to those believers, the absolute demarcation between the sacred and the profane is untenable.
Another approach to this problem is to distinguish science from religion in terms not of their domains of authority but their methodologies. Following this line of thought, science may be identified by its methodology of depersonalizing phenomena. That is, science attempts to account for a given phenomenon independently of the particular subject who observes it. Religion, on the contrary, some argue, is based on experiences taken in their subjective and individual elements.10 As a result of the disparity between these two methodologies, by the nineteenth century the relation between science and religion had become one of radical dualism. Each of them was regarded as absolute and as utterly distinct as, according to the reigning psychology of that day, the two faculties of the soul—intellect and feeling— to which they respectively corresponded. But our intellect and feelings do not function autonomously; our thoughts are frequently charged with emotion, and our feelings arise in response to what we think to be true. To reify and alienate these facets of our inner life is to fragment each of us from within. We are persons whose bodies can be objectively studied according to the impersonal laws of physics but whose minds are subjectively experienced in ways science has not yet been able to fathom. In short, by radically separating science from religion, we are not merely segregating two human institutions; we are fragmenting ourselves as individuals and as a society in ways that lead to deep, unresolved conflicts in terms of our view of the world, our values, and our way of life."
To bring my own background into this discussion, this was the situation in which I found myself in the late 19605 as an undergraduate student of biology at the University of California. Through my childhood and youth, I had been raised in a devout, educated Christian family and was encouraged by my theologian father to pursue my interest in a career in science. The mainstream Protestant Christianity to which I had been exposed presented itself as an integrated and comprehensive worldview, value system, and way of life in accordance with the Bible; and this was advocated as the one true religion, the sole means to personal salvation. But I was clearly aware that other religions around the world and throughout history had long been making similar dogmatic claims that they were the one true faith. Whether one accepted Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or Buddhism as providing a uniquely true picture of reality and the one way to salvation seemed to me primarily an accidental matter of the time and place of one's birth. This was hardly a compelling reason for me to believe any of these exclusivist claims.
On the other hand, the scientific knowledge to which I had been exposed presented itself as an integrated and comprehensive worldview, which had its own implicit set of values and ideals for human life. Moreover, much of the secular education I received asserted that scientific progress had from the beginning been only impeded by religion and that religious beliefs had on the whole been discredited by scientific knowledge. Thus, any truly educated person, I was told, must see that scientific authority had displaced religious authority and that science alone provided a uniquely true picture of reality and alone should be relied on to solve the broad range of problems confronting humanity.
As a young man aspiring to a career in environmental studies, I found this exclusivist position of scientists just as unsatisfactory as similar claims of religious believers. Global pollution, rapid depletion of natural resources, the population explosion, the extinction of more and more species of plant and animal life, and the proliferation of nuclear, conventional, chemical, and biological weapons were just a few of the enormous problems for which purely scientific and technological solutions were obviously inadequate. These problems were created not simply by lack of scientific knowledge— indeed many of them would not have occurred without scientific knowledge— but by such human vices as greed, aggression, and shortsightedness. Even if scientists found effective ways to solve these problems, what was to persuade society to make the necessary sacrifices to implement them? How could the industrialized societies be persuaded to stop consuming the lion's share of the world's resources? And how could the developing nations of the world be persuaded not to desecrate the natural environment in emulation of the more affluent, technologically advanced nations? External environmental problems that imperil our very existence as a species appear to be the result of internal human problems, and if those internal issues are not addressed, no external solution can be effectively implemented.
While scientific knowledge alone seemed to me as a young man to be insufficient for dealing with global problems, I was also struck by its inadequacy for addressing my own personal aspirations and conflicts. It was obvious to me that one could be well educated, affluent, and living in good health in a comfortable environment and still be tense, anxious, and dissatisfied. Many people who find themselves in that situation simply fall into depression, for which modern medicine prescribes powerful drugs to alleviate their symptoms. But the scientific discipline of psychiatry has no formula or prescription for finding an inner sense of meaning, contentment, or fulfillment. I do not find it at all surprising that many people in the modern West turn in desperation to illegal drugs in their pursuit of happiness. Science has encouraged us to look outward for solutions to all our problems, social and personal, and illegal drugs are seen as just one more option.
To continue my own personal narrative, which underlies and motivates this book, at the age of twenty-one I became so disenchanted with all the options presented to me by both my religious and scientific education that I turned my back on my native society to seek out the wisdom of a civilization radically dissimilar to, and disengaged from, the modern West. This quest brought me to Dharamsala, India, the home of the Dalai Lama and a nucleus of Tibetan civilization in exile. While I had voluntarily exiled myself from my homeland in disillusionment with my native culture, the Tibetan refugees with whom I came to live had fled their beloved homeland in order to preserve their native culture.
In 1949, the Chinese communists had invaded Tibet, and in the ensuing decades, especially during the Cultural Revolution, they were responsible for the deaths of up to a million Tibetans and the genocidal destruction of Tibetan civilization. The heart of this culture is Tibetan Buddhism, and to this day it has been the special target of Chinese aggression. This indicates that at present the main ideological thrust of the Chinese mission in Tibet is not the imposition of a socialist economic system—which the Dalai Lama and many other Tibetans are happy to embrace—but a belief system that is profoundly at odds with the worldview of Tibetan Buddhism. That ide- ology is still being forcefully propagated in Tibet, long after the socialist ideals of Mao have been displaced by the capitalist ideals of unbridled industrial development and consumerism.
What then is this ideology? According to the current Chinese propaganda in Tibet, it is the doctrine that science presents the one true view of reality and the solutions to humanity's problems are all to be found in technology. Religion, this doctrine declares, is superstition, and it must be rooted out by whatever means necessary, including forcible indoctrination and violence. While it would be wonderful for the Tibetans to learn about science and technology—and the Dalai Lama himself is keenly interested in such knowledge and is strongly backing science education for the Tibetans in exile—the Chinese are intent on promoting a materialistic ideology more than on promoting science itself. Thus, I have found that when backed by political and military power without restraint by the ideals of democracy, the ideology of science can be just as intolerant and vicious in its suppression of competing worldviews as any traditional religion. Moreover, while Tibetans had for centuries maintained a sustainable economy and population in balance with their natural environment, since the Chinese invasion, Tibet has been largely denuded of its forests, its wildlife has been ravaged, and its cities have been polluted; its northern plateau is now used as a dumping site for nuclear waste. Instead of having the opportunity of a liberal education in modern science, the Tibetans have been hammered by the iron fist of a science-based ideology that has suppressed freedom of thought and led to the desecration of their homeland.
What immediately struck me about the Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala, despite the horrendous tragedies they had experienced, was their extraordinary good cheer, optimism, friendliness, and generosity. They had found freedom in exile, but they brought with them human qualities of wisdom and compassion that I valued above all else. I became so drawn to the integrated worldview, values, and way of life presented by the Tibetan scholars and contemplatives with whom I studied that for years I sought total immersion in this culture that was so far removed from my own. Here I found deep spiritual truths similar to those I believed to be embedded in Christianity, but I also encountered a highly intelligent matrix of rational theories and contemplative practices designed to put those theories to the empirical test.
At last I felt I had found a worldview that satisfied my longing for spiritual truths and values, integrated with rational theories and methods of inquiry into the nature and potentials of consciousness and its relation to the natural environment. Eventually, though, it became increasingly obvious to me that in abandoning my native culture and immersing myself in an alien one, I had fragmented myself further. So after fourteen years in exile from the mainstream of Western society, I chose to return to my homeland and to complete my undergraduate education at Amherst College, where I decided to focus my studies on the paradigm of modern science: physics. Thereafter, to further integrate my understanding of sci- ence and religion, I earned a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford University, where I studied comparative religion, psychology, and the philosophy of science.
A central concern of all my studies with the Tibetan and Western scholars has been a deep fascination with the nature and potentials of consciousness. This interest has been enormously enriched by my serving as an interpreter and participant in a series of conferences with the Dalai Lama and other Buddhist monks together with various groups of distinguished cognitive scientists, physicists, and philosophers. The first of these "Mind and Life" conferences took place in Dharamsala in 1987, and they have continued on a biannual basis since then. An extraordinary quality of these meetings has been the open-minded yet critical attitude of the Buddhists and the scientists, both eager to expand their horizons by learning of the methods of inquiry and the insights of the other. Published accounts of these meetings have been received with growing interest by people interested in crosscultural and interdisciplinary dialogue, especially concerning the nature of the mind.12 Such collaboration marks a stark contrast to the more traditional stances of scientists regarding religion as a mere obstacle to discovery and religious people regarding science as a threat to the validity of their creeds. Similar dialogues have been occurring among scientists, philosophers, and members of other religions as recorded in such journals as Science and Spirit and the Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Another promising trend in recent years has been the growing number of conferences and dialogues among representatives of the world's religions during which the participants seek to enrich their own spiritual practice by learning from the insights of other traditions.13 I have sought out such encounters myself, including participating in a meditation retreat with the Dalai Lama and a group of Christian contemplatives in Prato, Italy, during the spring of 1999. The rise of nonsectarian interest in the experiential dimensions of contemplative practice is a wonderful departure from the adversarial attitude that has plagued relations among religions for centuries.
These two recent trends have extremely few precedents in human history, and I believe they are the vanguards for devising a truly contemplative science that may shed light—for religious believers and scientists alike— on the nature, origins, and potentials of consciousness. This movement may form the basis for a noetic revolution in which we rediscover not only our early Western roots but our deep global roots, East and West, contemplative and scientific. Rather than regarding science as the one center of our universe, with all other modes of inquiry being peripheral to it, we are now in a position to recognize that other civilizations in the past and the present have their own valid modes of inquiry that may profoundly complement those of modern science. Whenever any institution monopolizes the epistemic authority for a civilization—with all the wealth, power, and prestige that that entails—it is bound to strongly resist anyone who seeks to break that monopoly. But the very health of science requires that it be challenged by ideas and empirical modes of inquiry that are alien to it.
The Scientific Revolution that marked the beginning of the modern era introduced a fresh skepticism regarding deeply cherished, unquestioned assumptions, and it introduced new methods for exploring the natural world. This is precisely the aim of this book, in which I argue for the importance of a plurality of methods and theories to break the domination of any one dogma that insists that the world must be conceived and explored only according to its dictates. This book stands in opposition to all dogmatisms— ranging from the religious to the scientistic—that insist on the acceptance of their doctrines as the sole means of understanding the world and solving human problems.
To understand the relation between science and religion, especially pertaining to the exploration of the nature of consciousness, it is crucial to identify the metaphysical doctrine that underlies and structures virtually all contemporary scientific research. The basic principles of this doctrine, commonly known as scientific materialism—namely, objectivism, monism, universalism, reductionism, the closure principle, and physicalism—are analogous to the axioms of Euclidean geometry. From the fourth century BCE until the nineteenth century, mathematicians commonly assumed that Euclid's axioms were self-evident, absolutely certain truths of the real, physical world; and this view seemed bolstered by the success of physical applications of these principles during the Scientific Revolution. But in 1813, Carl Friedrich Gauss devised a system of geometry that rejected one of Euclid's basic postulates, and in 1830 Janos Bolyai and Nikolay Lobachevsky proposed that none of those postulates are either true or false of the objective world— they are simply the rules of the game. During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, a variety of geometries were proposed; and mathematicians gradually came over to the view that Euclid's axioms were true for the world of Euclidean geometry but could no longer be construed as absolute truths of the objective, physical universe.
In this book I argue that the fundamental principles of scientific materialism, while true for the world of scientific materialism, are not necessarily true for reality as a whole. These principles have helped us understand a certain range of objective natural phenomena, particularly those described adequately by classical mechanics, and this has led many scientists to believe they are universally valid. But they have simultaneously obscured a wide range of subjective phenomena, including consciousness itself, and in this way dogmatic adherence to these assumptions has limited scientific research and impoverished our understanding of nature as a whole.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, most scientists implicitly accepted a type of mechanistic materialism that had been wonderfully successful in explaining thermodynamics; they therefore assumed it would also explain electromagnetism. They were simply unable to imagine that the world could contain anything that fell outside the domain of their view of the world. Science proved them wrong. In this book I argue that in an analogous way, rigorous inquiry into the nature of consciousness may upset many of the assumptions of scientific materialism, which has erroneously excluded the subjectively experienced mind from the domain of the natural world.
The rest of this book comprises three parts. In part I I distinguish four elements of the scientific tradition, namely science itself, the philosophical view of scientific realism, the metaphysical doctrine of scientific materialism, and the fundamentalist creed of scientism. After arguing that scientific materialism, unlike science, has taken on the role of a religion, with all its taboos and heresies, I then trace the historical development of this doctrine and its close ties to Christian theology. In part II I present an alternative matrix of theories and practices for exploring consciousness, drawing from the writings of Western scholars and contemplatives such as Augustine, William James, Hilary Putnam, and Robert Forman and Eastern scholars and contemplatives such as Buddhaghosa, Vasubandhu, Asaiiga, and Padmasambhava. The approach outlined in part II for a science of consciousness differs profoundly from the theories and methods of modern cognitive science, so in part III I discuss what I perceive to be the limitations and defects of the scientific study of the mind pursued within the metaphysical framework of scientific materialism. In my conclusion I present guidelines for a contemplative science of the mind that draws from both our global spiritual heritage and our scientific heritage. What is needed, I believe, is a discipline, embracing a range of modes of scientific inquiry into the nature of consciousness, that takes firsthand experience seriously and devises means of exploring it with scientific precision. Such a discipline has the potential to be profoundly contemplative as well as rigorously scientific, and I believe it is the most promising, pluralistic mode of inquiry for discovering deep truths concerning consciousness and its role in the natural world.
A very useful book on this topic is "The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness" by B. Alan Wallace. I'm going to excerpt the Introduction here so everyone can have a good idea of what it is about and where he plans to go with his topic. I find his views on what has happened to science very much in line with my own. The main difference is that I see what has happened to science as a consequence of ponerization; psychopathological individuals achieving influence and control within the scientific community and thereby poisoning the well for everyone else.
The No Man's Land of Consciousness
When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them. ~ Alfred North Whitehead
Among all the points of contact between science and religion, there is none more crucial and none more clouded in mystery and confusion than the views concerning the nature of consciousness. While many philosophers acknowledge that little or nothing is known about consciousness, many people today make strong, diverse claims concerning the human soul and consciousness based upon religious and scientific authority. Religious believers interpret consciousness in accordance with their respective creeds, the authority of which is not accepted by many scientists; and scientists base their views of consciousness on the metaphysical principles underlying scientific inquiry, the validity of which is questioned by many religious believers.
Despite centuries of modern philosophical and scientific research into the nature of the mind, at present there is no technology that can detect the presence or absence of any kind of consciousness, for scientists do not even know what exactly is to be measured. Strictly speaking, at present there is no scientific evidence even for the existence of consciousness! All the direct evidence we have consists of nonscientific, first-person accounts of being conscious. The root of the problem is more than a temporary inadequacy of the technology. It is rather that modern science does not even have a theoretical framework within which to conduct experimental research.' While science has enthralled first Euro-American society and now most of the world with its progress in illuminating the nature of the external, physical world, I shall argue that it has eclipsed earlier knowledge of the nature of the inner reality of consciousness. In this regard, we in the modern West are unknowingly living in a dark age. A central aim of this book is to unveil the ideological constraints that have long been impeding scientific research in the study of consciousness and other subjective mental states.
As an illustration of the standoff between science and Christianity, the dominant religion in the West, consider first the question of the origins of human consciousness. Many Christians firmly believe that a human fetus is endowed with a human soul or consciousness from the moment of conception. Many other people, relying on scientific understanding of human embryology, are equally convinced that at least during the first and perhaps the second trimester the fetus is not conscious. A limitation of both these views is that neither is based on compelling empirical evidence. Christians base their positions solely on the authority of their own tradition, but they are unable to demonstrate the validity of their views to anyone who does not share their faith. Augustine (354—430), a theologian whose thinking has had an enormous impact on both Roman Catholic and Protestant theology, declared that the problem of the origin of the human soul remained a mystery to him due to its "depth and obscurity." This subject, he claimed, had not been studied sufficiently by Christians to be able to decide the issue, or if it had, such writings had not come into his hands. While he suspected that individual souls are created under the influence of individual conditions present at the time of conception, he acknowledged that, as far as he knew, the truth of this hypothesis had not been demonstrated.2 Instead of seeking compelling empirical evidence concerning the origins of consciousness, the Christian tradition has drawn its conclusions around this issue on purely doctrinal grounds. But, according to Augustine, it is an error to mistake mere conjecture for knowledge.
It is as difficult to determine the basis of the scientific view. Modern science does not know any better than Augustine how or why consciousness originates, nor does it have any way of directly detecting the presence or absence of consciousness in a human fetus or even a human adult. In the absence of any compelling evidence, advocates of this view have simply formed an opinion and asserted that as their orthodox view. But there is little to distinguish religious ignorance from scientific ignorance.
We encounter a similar dilemma in terms of Christian and scientific views of the nature of consciousness during the course of human life. Christians commonly claim that each of us is endowed with free will, which makes us morally responsible for our actions. Acting as free agents, we make decisions, sometimes after a good deal of internal struggle, and we must take responsibility for the results of our choices and deeds. Many advocates of science, on the other hand, claim that all mental behavior is produced strictly by the brain's response to physical stimuli in accordance with the laws of nature. In this view, our subjective sense of making choices, intentionally pursuing our desires, and acting on the basis of our beliefs is illusory in the sense that our actions are in reality simply products of our brains in interaction with the environment.
Regarding this issue, which is central to the definition of the very nature of human existence, Christians again call on the authority of their tradition. Advocates of science, on the other hand, bolster their position by pointing to a growing body of neuroscientific knowledge of correlates between specific brain functions and specific mental processes. Neuroscientists have discovered that when certain functions of the brain are altered or inhibited, specific mental functions change or cease altogether. Such empirical evidence suggests that those mental functions are conditioned by their respective brain functions, but it does not rule out in principle the possibility of other, possibly nonphysical, factors influencing the mind. Thus, the scientific evidence alone does not compel us to believe that the brain is solely responsible for the creation of all conscious states.
As for the nature of death, most religions, including Christianity, assert the continuity of individual consciousness following this life, and the authority of sacred scriptures is invoked to substantiate this claim. Mainstream neuroscience, in contrast, insists that individual consciousness vanishes with the death of the body. However, given its ignorance of the origins and nature of consciousness and its inability to detect the presence or absence of consciousness in any organism, living or dead, neuroscience does not seem to be in a position to back up that conviction with empirical scientific evidence. It is remarkable that despite the many diverse branches of science that explore every aspect of the known universe, we still have no science of consciousness, only philosophical and religious beliefs. So I am left with the question: Can science provide an adequate view of the entire natural world that includes only objective phenomena, while excluding the subjective phenomenon of consciousness altogether?
In short, however deeply we may hold to our present religious or scientific convictions concerning such issues as free will and the possibility of an afterlife, there are large gaps in our knowledge about the one phenomenon that holds the key to these questions. That phenomenon is our own consciousness, about which the International Dictionary of Psychology asserts: "[consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it."3 This statement exemplifies much modern Western thinking on this topic; while the author of this statement acknowledges, at least implicitly, that he does not understand consciousness, he simultaneously declares that no one else does either and that it is impossible to understand. On the contrary, I would argue that consciousness is not impossible to specify, and much has been written about it that is eminently worth reading. By the term "consciousness" I mean simply the sheer events of sensory and mental awareness by which we perceive colors and shapes, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and mental events such as feelings, thoughts, and mental imagery. Thus, I am using the word "consciousness" to refer to the phenomenon of being conscious, not to the neural events that make this first-person experience possible.
While consciousness lies in the no man's land between religion and science, claimed by both yet understood by neither, it may also hold a key to the apparent conflict between these two great human institutions. This is a second theme that weaves itself throughout this work. To place our individual perspectives in context, it may be helpful to note that according to recent polls, between 70 percent and 90 percent of all Americans believe in a personal God, 80 percent believe in angels, and 40 percent believe that God has guided the evolution of life; while only 9 percent believe that God had no part in human development over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. Moreover, 40 percent of the American scientists polled acknowledge their belief in a personal God to whom they can pray, which is roughly the same percentage as in a poll taken a century ago.4 On the other hand, according to other recent polls, 10 percent of the German population still believes in a stable earth, and a third of all adults in the United States believe everything in the Bible to be literally true.5 This range of statistics indicates that a significant minority of people in the West simply dismiss scientific knowledge and another significant minority simply dismiss religious beliefs, but a majority of people in the modern West are caught up in the conflict between science and religion.
Those of us who find ourselves in this middle ground generally try to reconcile the domains of religion and science by separating them in various ways, and such attempts have been going on over the past four centuries. Since the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most scientists, beginning with Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, have sought to accommodate their scientific theories to the orthodox theologies of their times. Even in the nineteenth century, most British "men of science" still thought that there was no essential conflict between their science and those parts of the Christian faith that liberal Christians still regarded as essential.6
This way of thinking is in evidence among contemporary intellectuals, even those in the cognitive sciences, which often strike at the heart of religious belief. To take but one example, some professionals in this field have suggested that Christians can adopt modern scientific, physicalist theories of the mind and still hold to an orthodox Christian belief in eternal life. Their proposal is that Christians may accept the scriptural promise of life after death, even if people do not survive the total destruction of the body; for they can still look forward to everlasting life in the sense that ordinary death does not entail the final dissolution of the body. Presumably such thinkers are referring to the resurrection of the body when it is transformed at the time of Christ's return. This view, of course, does not allow for the existence of a soul that continues to exist independently of the body.7 Most Christians are understandably disinclined to accept this physicalist view of immortality, which they regard as incompatible with the Bible.
If we are to hold religious beliefs and to accept scientific progress, how are we to draw the line between the domains of these two views? One possibility is to look solely to religion to clarify the fundamental ends and value standards of human endeavors, and to look solely to science for genuine knowledge of the nature of reality.8 This solution appears to me inadequate, for the ideals and values of religion are based on religious statements about the nature of reality. Christian values, for example, are based on assertions of the truth of God's existence, the immortality of the soul, the power of prayer, and so on. Indeed, if one accepts the truth of the Christian worldview, Christian values and ideals must be accepted as a matter of course; but if that worldview is rejected, the Christian rationale for those values and ideals is undermined.
On the other hand, a thoroughly materialistic view of the universe based on science suggests quite a different set of values and ideals, with profound implications for dealing with the personal, societal, and environmental problems that beset us today. The attempt to embrace religious ideals while adhering to a thoroughly materialistic worldview is severely hampered from the outset. What we really believe to be true will invariably influence what we believe to be of value; conversely, all of us, including scientists, seek to understand those aspects of reality that we value. Thus, the scientific worldview has been generated by the kinds of values and ideals held by scientists. The mutual interdependence of values and beliefs is inescapable.
According to some thinkers, a more feasible way of demarcating science and religion is to grant science authority in terms of knowledge of the natural world and to appoint it the task of providing humanity with the technological means of mastering the forces of nature to ensure our physical survival and well-being. The proper arena of religion, they say, is the sacred world, with all the ideals and moral directives for human behavior that issue forth from that domain.9 This model is feasible if we believe the sacred world exists independently of, and has no influence in, the world of nature and human life. But the great majority of religious believers today believe that the object, or objects, of their religious devotion is very much present and active in nature and in the lives of human beings. Thus, according to those believers, the absolute demarcation between the sacred and the profane is untenable.
Another approach to this problem is to distinguish science from religion in terms not of their domains of authority but their methodologies. Following this line of thought, science may be identified by its methodology of depersonalizing phenomena. That is, science attempts to account for a given phenomenon independently of the particular subject who observes it. Religion, on the contrary, some argue, is based on experiences taken in their subjective and individual elements.10 As a result of the disparity between these two methodologies, by the nineteenth century the relation between science and religion had become one of radical dualism. Each of them was regarded as absolute and as utterly distinct as, according to the reigning psychology of that day, the two faculties of the soul—intellect and feeling— to which they respectively corresponded. But our intellect and feelings do not function autonomously; our thoughts are frequently charged with emotion, and our feelings arise in response to what we think to be true. To reify and alienate these facets of our inner life is to fragment each of us from within. We are persons whose bodies can be objectively studied according to the impersonal laws of physics but whose minds are subjectively experienced in ways science has not yet been able to fathom. In short, by radically separating science from religion, we are not merely segregating two human institutions; we are fragmenting ourselves as individuals and as a society in ways that lead to deep, unresolved conflicts in terms of our view of the world, our values, and our way of life."
To bring my own background into this discussion, this was the situation in which I found myself in the late 19605 as an undergraduate student of biology at the University of California. Through my childhood and youth, I had been raised in a devout, educated Christian family and was encouraged by my theologian father to pursue my interest in a career in science. The mainstream Protestant Christianity to which I had been exposed presented itself as an integrated and comprehensive worldview, value system, and way of life in accordance with the Bible; and this was advocated as the one true religion, the sole means to personal salvation. But I was clearly aware that other religions around the world and throughout history had long been making similar dogmatic claims that they were the one true faith. Whether one accepted Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or Buddhism as providing a uniquely true picture of reality and the one way to salvation seemed to me primarily an accidental matter of the time and place of one's birth. This was hardly a compelling reason for me to believe any of these exclusivist claims.
On the other hand, the scientific knowledge to which I had been exposed presented itself as an integrated and comprehensive worldview, which had its own implicit set of values and ideals for human life. Moreover, much of the secular education I received asserted that scientific progress had from the beginning been only impeded by religion and that religious beliefs had on the whole been discredited by scientific knowledge. Thus, any truly educated person, I was told, must see that scientific authority had displaced religious authority and that science alone provided a uniquely true picture of reality and alone should be relied on to solve the broad range of problems confronting humanity.
As a young man aspiring to a career in environmental studies, I found this exclusivist position of scientists just as unsatisfactory as similar claims of religious believers. Global pollution, rapid depletion of natural resources, the population explosion, the extinction of more and more species of plant and animal life, and the proliferation of nuclear, conventional, chemical, and biological weapons were just a few of the enormous problems for which purely scientific and technological solutions were obviously inadequate. These problems were created not simply by lack of scientific knowledge— indeed many of them would not have occurred without scientific knowledge— but by such human vices as greed, aggression, and shortsightedness. Even if scientists found effective ways to solve these problems, what was to persuade society to make the necessary sacrifices to implement them? How could the industrialized societies be persuaded to stop consuming the lion's share of the world's resources? And how could the developing nations of the world be persuaded not to desecrate the natural environment in emulation of the more affluent, technologically advanced nations? External environmental problems that imperil our very existence as a species appear to be the result of internal human problems, and if those internal issues are not addressed, no external solution can be effectively implemented.
While scientific knowledge alone seemed to me as a young man to be insufficient for dealing with global problems, I was also struck by its inadequacy for addressing my own personal aspirations and conflicts. It was obvious to me that one could be well educated, affluent, and living in good health in a comfortable environment and still be tense, anxious, and dissatisfied. Many people who find themselves in that situation simply fall into depression, for which modern medicine prescribes powerful drugs to alleviate their symptoms. But the scientific discipline of psychiatry has no formula or prescription for finding an inner sense of meaning, contentment, or fulfillment. I do not find it at all surprising that many people in the modern West turn in desperation to illegal drugs in their pursuit of happiness. Science has encouraged us to look outward for solutions to all our problems, social and personal, and illegal drugs are seen as just one more option.
To continue my own personal narrative, which underlies and motivates this book, at the age of twenty-one I became so disenchanted with all the options presented to me by both my religious and scientific education that I turned my back on my native society to seek out the wisdom of a civilization radically dissimilar to, and disengaged from, the modern West. This quest brought me to Dharamsala, India, the home of the Dalai Lama and a nucleus of Tibetan civilization in exile. While I had voluntarily exiled myself from my homeland in disillusionment with my native culture, the Tibetan refugees with whom I came to live had fled their beloved homeland in order to preserve their native culture.
In 1949, the Chinese communists had invaded Tibet, and in the ensuing decades, especially during the Cultural Revolution, they were responsible for the deaths of up to a million Tibetans and the genocidal destruction of Tibetan civilization. The heart of this culture is Tibetan Buddhism, and to this day it has been the special target of Chinese aggression. This indicates that at present the main ideological thrust of the Chinese mission in Tibet is not the imposition of a socialist economic system—which the Dalai Lama and many other Tibetans are happy to embrace—but a belief system that is profoundly at odds with the worldview of Tibetan Buddhism. That ide- ology is still being forcefully propagated in Tibet, long after the socialist ideals of Mao have been displaced by the capitalist ideals of unbridled industrial development and consumerism.
What then is this ideology? According to the current Chinese propaganda in Tibet, it is the doctrine that science presents the one true view of reality and the solutions to humanity's problems are all to be found in technology. Religion, this doctrine declares, is superstition, and it must be rooted out by whatever means necessary, including forcible indoctrination and violence. While it would be wonderful for the Tibetans to learn about science and technology—and the Dalai Lama himself is keenly interested in such knowledge and is strongly backing science education for the Tibetans in exile—the Chinese are intent on promoting a materialistic ideology more than on promoting science itself. Thus, I have found that when backed by political and military power without restraint by the ideals of democracy, the ideology of science can be just as intolerant and vicious in its suppression of competing worldviews as any traditional religion. Moreover, while Tibetans had for centuries maintained a sustainable economy and population in balance with their natural environment, since the Chinese invasion, Tibet has been largely denuded of its forests, its wildlife has been ravaged, and its cities have been polluted; its northern plateau is now used as a dumping site for nuclear waste. Instead of having the opportunity of a liberal education in modern science, the Tibetans have been hammered by the iron fist of a science-based ideology that has suppressed freedom of thought and led to the desecration of their homeland.
What immediately struck me about the Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala, despite the horrendous tragedies they had experienced, was their extraordinary good cheer, optimism, friendliness, and generosity. They had found freedom in exile, but they brought with them human qualities of wisdom and compassion that I valued above all else. I became so drawn to the integrated worldview, values, and way of life presented by the Tibetan scholars and contemplatives with whom I studied that for years I sought total immersion in this culture that was so far removed from my own. Here I found deep spiritual truths similar to those I believed to be embedded in Christianity, but I also encountered a highly intelligent matrix of rational theories and contemplative practices designed to put those theories to the empirical test.
At last I felt I had found a worldview that satisfied my longing for spiritual truths and values, integrated with rational theories and methods of inquiry into the nature and potentials of consciousness and its relation to the natural environment. Eventually, though, it became increasingly obvious to me that in abandoning my native culture and immersing myself in an alien one, I had fragmented myself further. So after fourteen years in exile from the mainstream of Western society, I chose to return to my homeland and to complete my undergraduate education at Amherst College, where I decided to focus my studies on the paradigm of modern science: physics. Thereafter, to further integrate my understanding of sci- ence and religion, I earned a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford University, where I studied comparative religion, psychology, and the philosophy of science.
A central concern of all my studies with the Tibetan and Western scholars has been a deep fascination with the nature and potentials of consciousness. This interest has been enormously enriched by my serving as an interpreter and participant in a series of conferences with the Dalai Lama and other Buddhist monks together with various groups of distinguished cognitive scientists, physicists, and philosophers. The first of these "Mind and Life" conferences took place in Dharamsala in 1987, and they have continued on a biannual basis since then. An extraordinary quality of these meetings has been the open-minded yet critical attitude of the Buddhists and the scientists, both eager to expand their horizons by learning of the methods of inquiry and the insights of the other. Published accounts of these meetings have been received with growing interest by people interested in crosscultural and interdisciplinary dialogue, especially concerning the nature of the mind.12 Such collaboration marks a stark contrast to the more traditional stances of scientists regarding religion as a mere obstacle to discovery and religious people regarding science as a threat to the validity of their creeds. Similar dialogues have been occurring among scientists, philosophers, and members of other religions as recorded in such journals as Science and Spirit and the Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Another promising trend in recent years has been the growing number of conferences and dialogues among representatives of the world's religions during which the participants seek to enrich their own spiritual practice by learning from the insights of other traditions.13 I have sought out such encounters myself, including participating in a meditation retreat with the Dalai Lama and a group of Christian contemplatives in Prato, Italy, during the spring of 1999. The rise of nonsectarian interest in the experiential dimensions of contemplative practice is a wonderful departure from the adversarial attitude that has plagued relations among religions for centuries.
These two recent trends have extremely few precedents in human history, and I believe they are the vanguards for devising a truly contemplative science that may shed light—for religious believers and scientists alike— on the nature, origins, and potentials of consciousness. This movement may form the basis for a noetic revolution in which we rediscover not only our early Western roots but our deep global roots, East and West, contemplative and scientific. Rather than regarding science as the one center of our universe, with all other modes of inquiry being peripheral to it, we are now in a position to recognize that other civilizations in the past and the present have their own valid modes of inquiry that may profoundly complement those of modern science. Whenever any institution monopolizes the epistemic authority for a civilization—with all the wealth, power, and prestige that that entails—it is bound to strongly resist anyone who seeks to break that monopoly. But the very health of science requires that it be challenged by ideas and empirical modes of inquiry that are alien to it.
The Scientific Revolution that marked the beginning of the modern era introduced a fresh skepticism regarding deeply cherished, unquestioned assumptions, and it introduced new methods for exploring the natural world. This is precisely the aim of this book, in which I argue for the importance of a plurality of methods and theories to break the domination of any one dogma that insists that the world must be conceived and explored only according to its dictates. This book stands in opposition to all dogmatisms— ranging from the religious to the scientistic—that insist on the acceptance of their doctrines as the sole means of understanding the world and solving human problems.
To understand the relation between science and religion, especially pertaining to the exploration of the nature of consciousness, it is crucial to identify the metaphysical doctrine that underlies and structures virtually all contemporary scientific research. The basic principles of this doctrine, commonly known as scientific materialism—namely, objectivism, monism, universalism, reductionism, the closure principle, and physicalism—are analogous to the axioms of Euclidean geometry. From the fourth century BCE until the nineteenth century, mathematicians commonly assumed that Euclid's axioms were self-evident, absolutely certain truths of the real, physical world; and this view seemed bolstered by the success of physical applications of these principles during the Scientific Revolution. But in 1813, Carl Friedrich Gauss devised a system of geometry that rejected one of Euclid's basic postulates, and in 1830 Janos Bolyai and Nikolay Lobachevsky proposed that none of those postulates are either true or false of the objective world— they are simply the rules of the game. During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, a variety of geometries were proposed; and mathematicians gradually came over to the view that Euclid's axioms were true for the world of Euclidean geometry but could no longer be construed as absolute truths of the objective, physical universe.
In this book I argue that the fundamental principles of scientific materialism, while true for the world of scientific materialism, are not necessarily true for reality as a whole. These principles have helped us understand a certain range of objective natural phenomena, particularly those described adequately by classical mechanics, and this has led many scientists to believe they are universally valid. But they have simultaneously obscured a wide range of subjective phenomena, including consciousness itself, and in this way dogmatic adherence to these assumptions has limited scientific research and impoverished our understanding of nature as a whole.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, most scientists implicitly accepted a type of mechanistic materialism that had been wonderfully successful in explaining thermodynamics; they therefore assumed it would also explain electromagnetism. They were simply unable to imagine that the world could contain anything that fell outside the domain of their view of the world. Science proved them wrong. In this book I argue that in an analogous way, rigorous inquiry into the nature of consciousness may upset many of the assumptions of scientific materialism, which has erroneously excluded the subjectively experienced mind from the domain of the natural world.
The rest of this book comprises three parts. In part I I distinguish four elements of the scientific tradition, namely science itself, the philosophical view of scientific realism, the metaphysical doctrine of scientific materialism, and the fundamentalist creed of scientism. After arguing that scientific materialism, unlike science, has taken on the role of a religion, with all its taboos and heresies, I then trace the historical development of this doctrine and its close ties to Christian theology. In part II I present an alternative matrix of theories and practices for exploring consciousness, drawing from the writings of Western scholars and contemplatives such as Augustine, William James, Hilary Putnam, and Robert Forman and Eastern scholars and contemplatives such as Buddhaghosa, Vasubandhu, Asaiiga, and Padmasambhava. The approach outlined in part II for a science of consciousness differs profoundly from the theories and methods of modern cognitive science, so in part III I discuss what I perceive to be the limitations and defects of the scientific study of the mind pursued within the metaphysical framework of scientific materialism. In my conclusion I present guidelines for a contemplative science of the mind that draws from both our global spiritual heritage and our scientific heritage. What is needed, I believe, is a discipline, embracing a range of modes of scientific inquiry into the nature of consciousness, that takes firsthand experience seriously and devises means of exploring it with scientific precision. Such a discipline has the potential to be profoundly contemplative as well as rigorously scientific, and I believe it is the most promising, pluralistic mode of inquiry for discovering deep truths concerning consciousness and its role in the natural world.
