THE SOUL OF REASON

The material presented here is taken from a working paper titled The Soul of Reason:  An Argument for a New Post-Modern Realism in Social Theory and Philosophy.  (D. H. Bowles 2020)

V.  We Are Not What We Think We Are

The story actually begins, for our purposes here, with Robert Wright, another science journalist comparable to Pollan, and a book written by him in 1994 called The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are–the New Science of Evolutionary Psychology.  You will notice right away, by the subtitling, that in this book Wright is reporting on ‘the new science of evolutionary psychology,’ which we have already introduced as the integrative academic field which emerged from the new Darwinian synthesis of Wilson, Dawkins, Tooby and Cosmides, Pinker, et al.  And, sure enough, in this book Wright goes to considerable lengths explaining to us just how the kin-based selection model has clearly produced a fundamentally selfish human nature–just get over it.  But in spite of this, conditioned by the conventional moral meme, Wright is also at considerable pain to construct and support an epistemologically-grounded argument for a groupish morality.  This, of course, proves difficult to accomplish without an underlying groupish moral ontology (comparable to the selfish one) to support it, and Wright’s effort here remains, ultimately, un-compelling.

But then, a funny thing happens on the way to the bank.  Wright’s position, like that of Wilson, appears to have . . . evolved.  In 2017, Wright produced a brand new best-seller with the provocative title Why Buddhism is True: the Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.  And in this book, we find that Wright has some truly remarkable things to say about the consciousness of self and what he calls the not-self.  He begins, early on, by referring to evolutionary psychology as “the study of how the human brain was designed–by natural selection–to mislead us, even enslave us.” (3)  And he follows this shortly thereafter, building on an allusion already established to the 1999 science fiction feature film The Matrix, with this:

As Morpheus says to Neo, “I can only show you the door.  You’re the one who has to walk through it.”  This book is an attempt to show people the door, give them some idea of what lies beyond it, and explain, from a scientific standpoint, why what lies beyond it has a stronger claim to being real than the world they’re familiar with.  (14)

It’s important for us to note at this juncture that Wright’s purposive claim here–to explain what lies “beyond the door” from a scientific standpoint–actually runs rather strongly counter to the prevailing modernist norms of western science.  This is because Wright’s argument–unapologetically–accords evidentiary value to his own subjective experience–to his own experience of altered states of consciousness achieved through meditative practice–and to the correlation of his own subjective experience with the reports of the subjective experiences of others.  It’s also worth noting that those who are involved with the systematic investigation of these states (and their numbers are increasing, these days) often refer to the object of their study as the phenomenology of altered states, where phenomenology is an explicit reference to schools of thought in both the philosophy of science and psychology that are expressly concerned with accounting for the subjective experience of consciousness.

The essence of what Wright has to report is his own subjective experience of the consciousness of self and not-self, and how this experience has made it possible for him to understand what others reporting on this experience are, in fact, talking about.  And one important thing he has learned is that, while characterizations of the experience of altered states such as “not-self” commonly sound unappealing–or even scary–to people, the actual experience itself is typically neither of those things.  In fact, it usually proves quite the contrary.[1]

Wright relates what we think of as “ordinary” (or “self”) consciousness to what research in neuroscience has identified as the default mode network or DMN:

To put this in more scientific-sounding terminology, I was beginning to observe [in myself] the workings of what psychologists call the default mode network.  This is a network in the brain that, according to brain-scan studies, is active when we’re doing nothing in particular–not talking to people, not focusing on our work or any other task, not playing a sport, or reading a book, or watching a movie. It’s the network along which our mind wanders . . . when it’s wandering.

          As for where the mind wanders . . . well, lots of places, obviously.  But studies have shown that these places are usually (typically) in the past or the future.  What you’re generally not doing when your mind is wandering is directly experiencing the present moment.

          In one sense, it’s not hard to quiet your default mode network:  just do something that requires concentration.  What’s hard is to escape the default mode network when you’re not doing much of anything . . . like sitting in a meditation hall with your eyes closed.

          When the default mode network subsides–when the mind stops wandering–it can be a good feeling.  There can be a sense of liberation from your chattering mind, a sense of peace, even deep peace.  (45-47)

In his concluding chapter, which he titles “Meditation and the Unseen Order,” Wright reflects on the moral implications of his experience.  And in doing so, he invokes William James’ 1902 classic study, Varieties of Religious Experience.  Wright observes that in this work, one of the central things that James sets out to accomplish is “to find a framework that would encompass all the forms of experience, eastern and western, that we call religious.”  What James concludes, Wright advises us, is this:  that, in the broadest sense, religion can be thought of as “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in adjusting ourselves thereto.”  Wright then proceeds to state his own conclusions in the following way:

Even naturalistic, ‘secular’ Buddhism does, I’d argue, posit a kind of “unseen order.”  As ‘enlightenment’ begins to dawn, reality–which had seemed all chopped up–turns out to possess an underlying continuity, a kind of infrastructure of connection.  Some people call it emptiness, others call it oneness, but all agree that it looks less sharply fragmented than it looked before they got the picture.  And, it appears, that what James called “our supreme good” does lie in harmoniously adjusting ourselves to this normally unseen order.

          There is a second kind of unseen order posited by Buddhist teaching.  A basic premise of Buddhism is that seeing the metaphysical truth–seeing the way things really are–in some sense also amounts to seeing the moral truth, the moral equivalence between our welfare and the welfare of others.  There is, in other words, a kind of structural alignment between metaphysical truth and moral truth.

          Then there’s the third leg of this alignment:  our personal well-being.  Happiness–the elimination, or at least lessening of suffering–tends to coincide with seeing the metaphysical truth and acting on the attending moral truth.

          It’s kind of amazing, when you think about it, that the world would be set up this way:  that the path you embark on to relieve yourself of suffering would, if pursued assiduously, lead you to become not just a happier person, but a person with a clearer view of both metaphysical and moral reality.  Yet that is the Buddhist claim, and there is substantial evidence in favor of it.  (262-63)

          There’s a lot to dislike about the world we’re born into.  It’s a world in which our natural way of seeing and being leads us to suffer and inflict suffering on others.  And it’s a world that, as we now know, was bound to be that way, given that life on this planet was created by natural selection.  Still, it appears to also be a world in which metaphysical truth, moral truth, and personal happiness can align, and also a world which, as you start to realize that alignment, appears more and more beautiful.  If so, this hidden order–an order that seems to lie at a level deeper than natural selection itself–is something to marvel at.  (266)

What Wright is describing here, of course, appears to offer just what we set out earlier to look for:  an ontological grounding in a generalized human capacity for not-self consciousness that will support a derived moral intuition (or ontology) of expansive (vs. parochial) community.  And it’s quite clear that Wright sees this experience of not-self as an antidote to the problem of competing parochial identities.  He calls it tribalism:  “ . . . the discord and even open conflict along religious, ethnic, national, and ideological lines. . . .  I consider this tribalism to be,” he says at the outset, “the biggest problem of our time. . . .” (18)

So our first approach here to providing an accounting of the reality and utility of altered states of consciousness is already a productive one, yielding what appears to be a plausible ontological candidate for a moral intuition of expansive (vs. parochial) community in the common experience of not-self consciousness, as described by Wright, that can be achieved through secular meditative practice.  But, as I also intimated at the end of the last section, this is still only the beginning of a full accounting.

Footnotes

[1] This is a calculated understatement.  Wright actually points out that the meditative experience of altered states–of not-self–can induce “powerful feelings of bliss or ecstasy.” (48)

VI.  The Divided Brain Thesis

Table of Contents

Conceptual Schematic of the Argument

Abstract

Download Working Paper (PDF)