An unpublished letter sent to the Wheeling Sunday News-Register.

                                                                                                                                                                October 24, 2017

Editor Sunday News-Register:

                Many critics of the Affordable Care Act argue that nobody should have to pay for insurance to cover services they do not need, including maternity care. Most recently in a column published in the October 22 issue of the Sunday News-Register, Betsy McCaughey complained: “You have to pay for maternity care even if you’re too old to give birth.” She could have added that even a lot of young people will never need maternity care. McCaughey praises the current administration for rejecting the maternity provisions of the Obama era.

                The problem is that few people could afford health care without insurance and all insurance is premised on the fact that there must be more payers than users. Specifically, if only those who hope to have babies paid for maternity care, the cost of childbirth would be prohibitive for most families.

                If the financial base of maternity care is removed, we can expect that the rate of abortions, which has been steadily declining, will take a sharp upward turn. Why are pro-life groups, including the Conference of Catholic Bishops, not protesting against the attack on maternity care? If politicians and citizens who call themselves “pro-life” really care about the value of all human life, they will want to assure that all women of child-bearing age have maternity coverage.

Richard P. Mullin

160 Poplar Avenue, Unit 4

Wheeling, WV 26003

e-mail: Mullin160@comcast.net

Consciousness and the Challenge of Neuroscience

Consciousness and the challenge of neuroscience.

            The whole notion of consciousness as a reality independent of and higher than the brain has come under attack in recent years. Scientists and philosophers, most notably Daniel Dennett and Francis Crick have presented explanations reducing consciousness to brain molecules. As noted in an earlier post, Francis Crick in his 1994 book, the Astonishing Hypothesis, depicted consciousness and the very awareness of self as nothing but the activity of molecules. Daniel Dennett offered extended arguments for understanding both consciousness and freedom in physical terms In Consciousness Explained (1991), and Freedom Evolves (2003).  

            Christof Koch, a younger colleague of Francis Crick took on the project of fully explaining consciousness in physical reductionist terms. In his 2012 book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, Koch sets out to “describe a plausible quantitative theory of consciousness that explains why certain types of highly organized matter, in particular brains, can be conscious.” Koch argues that consciousness will ultimately be explained by the physical sciences, especially neuro-biology. But while he insists that consciousness cannot exist without matter, he rejects the notion that the reduction of consciousness to the activity of billions of tiny nerve cells excludes the possibility of meaning in the universe. 

            Koch grapples with the hard problem, a term used by David Chalmers, which refers to understanding why anybody can be conscious at all. He summarizes the great progress that neuroscience is making in connecting conscious states with neural events, but admits that all of the science is from a third person point of view. He poses the question that involves the hard problem from a reductionist’s perspective: “…how does nervous tissue acquire an interior first-person point of view?” Koch rejects the notion that the gap between brain’s mechanisms and consciousness is unbridgeable, dismissing such views as defeatist and a denigration of reason. His premise asserts that since science has been the best method for understanding the external world, it should also help us explain the interior world of consciousness.

            Koch contends that science can close the gap that still separates neurological understanding of the brain and actual first-person states of consciousness. Describing the advances that have been made in exploration of the brain he writes: “Neuroscience textbooks describe this organ in mind-numbing detail yet leave out what it means to be the owner of one.” Koch intends to make up for this “remarkable omission” by showing the link between the experiencing subject and the perspective of the brain scientist. His specific goal is to find what he and Francis Crick call the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) defined as “the minimal neural mechanisms jointly sufficient for any one specific conscious concept.”

It would seem that if he is successful, he will have refuted my thesis as explained in my opening post, namely that it is reasonable to believe that consciousness precedes matter. But even if Koch, or other researchers show how matter becomes conscious by developing a highly complex brain, and I am assuming that they will, it will show what a material being needs to be conscious, but not necessarily entail that all consciousness requires a material base. A full explanation of how matter becomes conscious leaves open the question of whether any conscious reality existed prior to matter becoming conscious.

When in Doubt, Start with William James

When in doubt, start with William James

            The vastness of literature on consciousness presents a problem of selection, especially a starting point. In this case, I will follow a personal maxim: “When in doubt, start with William James.”  In his Principles of Psychology (1890), James writes extensively about the meaning of consciousness. He points out that no one can deny that they have “states of consciousness,” although finding an adequate vocabulary to describe them poses enormous problems. Everyone who thinks about thought, including those in what was then the new science of psychology, can distinguish between the object of the thought and the thought itself. If they turn to reflective introspection, thinking about the thought itself, they can distinguish between the thought and the thinker. The thought is part of what James calls the empirical self, the “me.” But the thinker is the “I.” When I try to think of the thinker, I make it an object, part of the empirical me. While I cannot deny that there is a subjective thinker, its nature eludes me. For the sake of creating a naturalistic psychology, James defers the metaphysical question of what the thinker is, and limits himself to describing the most recent thought as the thinker. If I introspectively try to capture this thought, it is now a part of empirical me, which consists of all the thoughts of which I am aware. A new thought is now making this judgment. 

In his later works, James takes on the metaphysical question of consciousness.

The “Conclusions” to his 1909 work, A Pluralistic Universe, describes “religious experiences of a specific nature.” Significantly, James calls them “experiences,” rather than objects of faith or reason. These experiences reveal a range of happiness and power that supersedes our naturalistic thinking and “seem to show a world that is wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine.” He describes these experiences as a kind of life after death. Here James does not mean our biological death, but rather, “…death of hope death of strength…death of everything that paganism, naturalism, and legalism pin their faith on and tie their trust to.”  James contends that reasoning would never have inferred these experiences of a larger world revealing itself after the experience of despair.  But once they reveal themselves, anyone trying to develop a more complete philosophy must a take them into account. These experiences give individuals a sense that their own consciousness is continuous with a wider self from which the experience flows in. Describing an individual life as being “continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him,” James refers to “words which I have used elsewhere,” an allusion to the “Conclusions” of his 1901 Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

            In Varieties of Religious Experience James provides more insights on consciousness than this post can accommodate. The experiences that he describes in terms of expanded consciousness include unifying the divided soul, conversion, saintliness, and mysticism. In his chapter “Mysticism,” he expresses what he calls a truth that had earlier forced itself on his mind:

It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special types of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. 298.

Throughout the Varieties, James offers such experiential evidence that consciousness consists of much more than the awareness of any single human organism.

In the “Conclusions” he offers a way to interpret the larger consciousness. These experiences; conversion, saintliness, and mysticism, reveal a larger world from which our ordinary consciousness draws its significance. On the near side, it seems to be an extension of the conscious individual self. But it may extend further to include what religious believers call God. Based on the real impact that the larger consciousness has on human lives, often leading to heroic work and saintly behavior toward others, James infers that what seems to be a higher consciousness is in fact higher and greater than the individual, rather than something that the individual brain secretes.

            If James’s interpretation holds true, then consciousness is prior to matter, specifically prior to the matter of any individual brain. As the brain develops in human evolution and in the maturing of the individual, it becomes a vessel of what we call consciousness. In this interpretation, growth in consciousness, manifested in greater awareness, intelligence, and love, stands out as the goal of human life. From this point of view, whatever promotes the development of consciousness is good; whatever inhibits it is evil.

Consciousness, Freedom, and Evolution

Consciousness, Freedom, and Evolution

The subject of consciousness would overflow even a very large tome devoted to describing it. The purpose of this post must be limited to demonstrating consciousness as the exemplar of good in the universe. Part of the task consists of showing how consciousness develops in evolving species like our own, and how freedom flows from consciousness.

My reasoning about consciousness in the context of these post on the “justification of the good” rests on the assumption that the growth and development of consciousness stands out as a commonly accepted instance of something which is good. Anyone reading this paragraph will probably agree or they would not be reading this or anything else. While it is true that a person suffering clinical depression might prefer sleep to wakefulness, wish they had not been born, and become suicidal, they and anyone who loves them would clearly see their state as a tragic misfortune. Much of psychotherapy consists of enabling people to enjoy greater consciousness. The same can be said of most medical care and of almost all education.

Do we know what consciousness is?

           

A seemingly insurmountable problem faces us at the beginning of any conversation about consciousness, namely, trying to state clearly the very nature of consciousness. For starters, it is indefinable. Consciousness stands alone as a reality that does not belong to any genus and is not like anything else. But although we cannot define consciousness, we can describe it in the literal sense of the word “describe,” meaning that we can write about it. We can also talk about it and certainly think about it. We come to understand consciousness by contrast to unconsciousness as when we temporarily lose consciousness because of an accident or anesthesia. Other contrasts include sleeping and wakefulness, dreaming and awareness of our external surrounding, and boredom compared to full interest.

Further, we can look at conscious development both in the individual and in the species to show how consciousness moves from mere sensation, to perception, judgment, reasoning, and beyond. A problem presents itself in that all of these methods assume that we already know what consciousness is. The good news is that in fact we do know what consciousness is. Everyone who has ever thought of this question already knows what consciousness is. So the only task of this work is to articulate and interpret consciousness to show how it exemplifies the problem of the good. 

We can clarify our understanding of consciousness by comparing the poles of a spectrum from material to spiritual. If there is a totally non-consciousness being, what is it like?  Imagine a particle of matter as conceived in traditional Newtonian science. It appears to be dead, inert, moved and determined only by external forces, and impenetrable. By contrast, whether or not we believe that any non-material being exists, we can think of a pure spirit, in contrast to matter, as conscious, self-determined, and able to enter communion with other spiritual beings. We humans are obviously not pure spirits and we have much of Newtonian inertness about us. But if we have a degree of self-awareness, self-determination, and openness to community, then we are to that extent spiritual. An increase in spirituality as I use the term here, coincides with an increase in consciousness. 

            When we have moments of heightened awareness, we experience a more clear and intense knowledge of our world, a greater sense of freedom, and a feeling of oneness with people and perhaps things around us. Such heightened states may be generated from a wide and diverse range of human activity as reported by those who experience life-threatening emergencies, sports, music, contemplation of nature, and traditional religious meditation.  We can imagine that consciousness, freedom, and communion extend to infinity as all of our ordinary physical and psychological limitations lose their hold. Every spiritual tradition claims saints and mystics who actually experience unity with infinite being. More on the next post.

Creation and Chaos

Creation and Chaos

            The notion of God as a designer who controls every event in creation rules out the notion of evolution by natural selection; conversely the acceptance of evolution by natural selection rules out the possibility of belief in God the designer.  Religious thinkers who welcome the findings of evolution understand God differently from the theists and the atheists who think of God as a Designer. Theologian John Haught, for example, contends that the discoveries of Darwin open up the possibility of a richer notion of God than had ever been know before. Religious understanding, specifically the understanding of Christianity, does not portray God as an all-controlling designer, but as one who empties Himself to allow the world to be itself. As Haught sees it:

 God’s creative love constitutes the world as something ontologically distinct from God, and not as a simple extension of divine being. Consequently, the indeterminate natural occurrences that recent physics has uncovered at the most elementary levels of physical reality, the random events that biology finds at the level of life’s evolution, and the freedom that emerges with human existence are all features proper to any world that is permitted and even encouraged to be distinct from the creative love that underlies it.

In Christian belief and experience, God reveals Himself in the form of a poor man, of no political or economic consequence, who suffered death by execution on a cross. The trust in an incomprehensible God, in spite of unbearable sorrow also runs deep in the history of religious Jews from their early days of exile up through the Holocaust.  This notion, of course, has no appeal to those who do not accept it, but it shows that God as experienced in Christianity and Judaism bears no resemblance to the powerful but prissy god whom anti-evolutionists affirm, and atheists reject. God as experienced by religion is quite compatible with evolution by natural selection. As expressed by the renowned Jesuit paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1955) “Even to a mere biologist, the evolution of life resembles nothing so much as a way of the cross.”

            The key issue, as John Haught argues, is not whether the universe is the work of an Intelligent Designer, but whether the universe has purpose. The two questions are different although both sides often run them together as, “The world is either the product of Intelligent Design or it is pointless.” Advocates of Intelligent Design, invoke the complexity and beauty of design while atheists claim that the design is sporadic and explainable by randomness over vast periods. Haught’s rejection of design is similar to the argument of the atheists in that he contends that evolution does not look like the work of a designer. But Haught, rather than looking back for an original design, looks ahead to an evolving purpose. He further argues that the religions that sprang from Abraham consist primarily in hope for the future.

            The question of purposefulness in the universe cannot be answered by science. Scientists can and do express opinions on the issues of purpose, but in doing so they base their judgments on whatever factors cause a person to accept or reject faith in a purposeful universe. Haught compares the fatalism of some scientists to that of the Greek tragedies. Fate for the scientists as for the tragedians moves on with remorseless indifference to human aspirations and comes to a bad conclusion. Shakespeare’s Mac Beth expressed this powerfully on hearing of his wife’ death:

Life’s but a brief shadow; a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

Of course, the scientists who think of the universe as pointless may or may not feel their own life as tragic; they might be quite content with their “hour upon the stage.” But regardless of how scientists view life, their view is not part of their science. As Haught argues, science is not equipped to find the value of things. Such questions are metaphysical, and although metaphysics must be consistent with science, a metaphysics of promise is not less scientific than a metaphysics of despair.

            John Haught fully embraces the insights of science and especially those of Darwinian evolution. He contends that these scientific insights are not only compatible with the experience of biblical faith, but that they nourish a theology that is richer than pre-Darwinian religious thought. Scientists begin with the commitment to the belief that the world is to some extent intelligible and that truth is worth the hard work of science. These faith commitments of scientists do not prove anything about the ultimate nature of reality, but they are more compatible with a religious vision than with a materialistic one. Unlike the materialist interpretation of reality, the religious view sees the work of the scientist as part of a larger cosmic narrative characterized by a hopeful outcome.

             Haught shows the weakness of naïve theism as well as naïve atheism both of which find a world that grows from random events, as depicted by Darwin, incompatible with belief in God. These theists therefore argue that the events happen by design and the randomness is illusory; the atheists affirm the randomness and declare belief in a Creator to be the illusion. Haught grounds his view of creation in the religious insight that God’s love is self-emptying, which allows creation to develop on its own as something other than the Creator. As Haught writes:

An unrestrained display of infinite presence or “omnipotence” would leave no room for anything other than God, and so it would leave out any evolutionary self-transcendence on the part of the cosmos. It is a humble “retreat” on God’s part that allows the cosmos to stand on its own and then to evolve as a relatively autonomous reality distinct from its creative ground. In this sense, creation and its evolutionary unfolding would be less the consequence of an eternal divine “plan” than of a humble and loving “letting be.” 

The crucial meaning of Haught’s insights shows that a slowly evolving and chaotic universe does not necessarily lead to a materialist view of reality. Theists and atheist alike cannot get by with a simple choice of affirming or denying design.

            Haught’s process theology takes a different approach to the notion of God as designer. He maintains that the universe is allowed to grow as something independent of the Creator. He contrasts the understanding of God in process theology with the portrayal of god in naive theism and atheism:

A coercive deity---one that immature religiosity often wishes for and that our scientific skeptics invariably have in mind when they assert that Darwin has destroyed theism---would not allow for the otherness, autonomy, and self-coherence necessary for a world to be a world unto itself. 

A non-coercive creator allows not only human freedom, but also the pre-human spontaneity that allows for the formation of the universe and the evolution of life and of species. Haught concludes that God is the source not only of order, but also the instability and disorder that are necessary for novelty and for life itself.

While John Haught approaches the issue of evolution as a theologian with a deep understanding of science, Kenneth R. Miller approaches the same question as a cell biologist with a rich understanding of theology. In his book, Searching for Darwin’s God, Miller begins by demolishing the array of Creationists theories including Intelligent Design. These theories, while claiming the label of “scientific,” deny the validity of much well-established science, and they present a diminished notion of God. In chapters 3, 4 and 5, Miller shows that Creationists present God as: first, a charlatan who created the earth only ten thousand years ago, but through fakery, made it look older; second, as a magician who made living things appear out of thin air; and third, as a mechanic who tinkered together the intricacy of the living cell. Miller then demonstrates that the origin of life as well as of species can be accounted for by the scientific study based on Darwinian natural selection.   

            The conflict that still endures between some religious thinkers and some scientists

stems partly from the notion that religion can answer questions better left to science, for example, questions on the origin of life and origin of species. But the controversy is fueled by many evolutionists who contend that evolution makes mechanistic materialism triumphant to the point that any religious or spiritual ideas are superfluous and irrational. Those evolutionists hold in common with the creationists the premise that evolution and religion are mutually exclusive.