herwin's Journal: Monism

Over the years, I have been an ordained Presbyterian elder
and the equivalent in three other protestant denominations. I
am currently a Lay Administrant in the Church of England. That
doesn't mean I bother myself much with doctrine or theology, and
the clergy have learned to avoid asking me theological questions
that relate to neuroscience. They can find my answers uncomfortable...

I believe you can be religious and a scientist, and you don't
need to keep the two domains separate, but you will find
that you make some religious people uncomfortable, especially
the ones with strong (and hence experimentally testable) beliefs.

My personal research centers around understanding what might
be described as 'belief' in bats. Bats are wonderful research
subjects for questions in a number of areas: audition, echolocation,
flight control, and internal models of the world. Internal
models of the world? you ask. The evidence for this was
first reported by Moehres and Oettingen-Spielberg in 1949.

* Erstorientierung-when bats first encounter a novel situation.

* Wiederorientierung-when bats fly in a familiar space.

These phenomena were observed in the behavior of a bat that was
accustomed to roosting in a cage in a room. The researchers rotated
the cage and eventually removed it, and noted that the bat continued
to behave as if the cage were in its normal position until forced
to reorient. This suggests that a bat uses and maintains a world
model that is only modified if circumstances force it to.

Rawson and Griffin investigated this further (see Griffin,
Listening in the dark, the Acoustic Orientation of Bats and
Men, Yale, 1958, and Griffin, "Cognitive aspects of echolocation,"
in Nachtigall and Moore, ed., Animal Sonar: Processes and Performance,
Plenum Press, 1988). They asked whether the bats even cried
at all. Experiment involved placing and moving obstacles in a
flight room. Answer: the bat still cried, but seemed to ignore
the resulting returns. The point is that bats seem to use an internal
model of the world to control their behavior, and the model is
only updated when sensory input is markedly inconsistent with
the model--very much like human religious belief. So by understanding
how bats create and update their internal model, I might understand
better how humans do the same.

One of the most reliable experimental results of neuroscience
over the last 150 years is that the (separable) soul almost certainly
does not exist. The research project I'm involved in at the University
of Sunderland is actually relevant to this. We are working on
localizing higher mental phenomena to specific areas of
the brain and using that information to develop an architecture
for a biomimetic robot. The following site discusses the evidence
and the religious issues: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/no-soul.html.

Hence neuroscience suggests strongly that the brain generates
mental phenomena, rather than those phenomena being generated
by a separable soul controlling the brain. John Eccles did try
to develop a theory of mind based on a soul controlling the brain
by modulating vesicle release probabilities at presynaptic terminals,
but his theory ran into difficulties with experimental data (and
Occam's razor). An implication of the experimental data is that
at death, the mind (='soul') is also destroyed, so that a hope
for eternal life cannot be based on the survival of an indestructable
soul, but must instead be based on resurrection by God. This is
probably an uncomfortable conclusion for many, but it doesn't
stop me from going to church.