On “Neural Buddhists”

In today’s New York Times, Op-ed columnist David Brooks writes about "The Neural Buddhists," which likely would include yours truly, but I’m pretty sure you won’t catch me using the term. I’ve been calling myself a quasi-Buddhist for a while, which is a term not nearly as descriptive as Brooks’. I say quasi because I have no interest in the rituals or in the texts as anything other than literature. I’m in it for the ethics (and because its focus is not the worship of a god), which just happen to be as close to what I believe as anything that could be called a "religion" will ever get.

Brooks says he’s trying to "anticipate which way the debate is headed," but the debate about god, spirituality and consciousness has been moving for quite a bit of time in the direction he is anticipating. Brooks writes:

[M]y 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 end up challenging faith in the Bible.

But with The Four Horsemen (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris) and their books about religion and god, it appears to me that the challenging the faith in the Bible part has been dealt with handily. (YouTube has both parts of The Four’s conversations, if you’re interested.)

As for "undermining faith in God," that’s inaccurate. What the scientists at the Mind and Life Institute, which Brooks never mentions, or even those within the Transcendental Meditation camp  have been studying for years (decades in the case of the TM people) is that there are levels of consciousness that humans can attain by doing certain things (like meditating) that produce the same or similar chemical and electrical reactions in the brain as people who are in what religious people might call states of ecstasy. In other words, what some call God is more accurately a real state that is occurring in their brain that they have created. Cognitive scientists aren’t undermining faith in any god, they’re merely explaining that the feelings associated with god might not come from outside us. Perhaps when he mentions Andrew Newberg this is what he means to say, but he never actually says it (unless this is what he means when he writes: "God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments [of transcending boundaries], the unknowable total of all there is").

In addition, these scientists also study the effects of meditation on brain function and have found it to increase hemispheric coherence, help with pain control, aid in concentration, improve learning, and of course improve mood and control/aid in the processing of emotions. Regular meditation actually alters the way the brain is wired just like regular exercise will alter the health of your body as well as physically modify it.

What I don’t understand is why Brooks doesn’t mention Sam Harris. Brooks writes:

The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

Harris has already gone in that direction (minus the "sacred"), as have the organizations mentioned above. If I were to anticipate the direction the debate is headed, I would say look to Marc Hauser, whom Brooks does mention, and the nature of moral judgment (and also Steven Pinker). Here is where we might find that religion and god are not as necessary as we have been conditioned to think (but we experience them as necessary, as evidenced by the fact that they won’t go away). Then maybe we can finally dispense with piffle such as: God put animals on the Earth for humans to use.