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Mind, Brain and the Search for God Alasdair Coles CiS conference, The King’s Centre, Osney Mead, Oxford

Mind, Brain and the Search for God Alasdair Coles CiS conference, The King’s Centre, Osney Mead, Oxford. My starting position: Platonic dualism. Body. Soul / Mind. Material. Immaterial. Decaying. Eternal. My starting position: dualism. Body. Soul / Mind. God. Immaterial.

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Mind, Brain and the Search for God Alasdair Coles CiS conference, The King’s Centre, Osney Mead, Oxford

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  1. Mind, Brain and the Search for God Alasdair Coles CiS conference, The King’s Centre, Osney Mead, Oxford

  2. My starting position: Platonic dualism Body Soul / Mind Material Immaterial Decaying Eternal

  3. My starting position: dualism Body Soul / Mind God Immaterial Material Immaterial

  4. Current consensus in neuroscience: reductive monism Body Mind Methodological reductionism Versus Ontological reductionism Material

  5. Out of body experiences Blanke. Brain 2004; 127: 243

  6. Magic mushrooms and God • Cross-over trial of 36 volunteers • psilocybin (30 mg/70 kg) (mushrooms 5HT2a,cR) • methylphenidate hydrochloride (40 mg/70 kg) • All volunteers had some knowledge of religious activities…. Half on a daily basis • Assessed by 32-item questionnaire “Mysticism Scale” Drug 1 Drug 2 Test 1 Test 2 Griffiths Psychopharmacology (2006) 187:268–283

  7. Acquired paedophilia

  8. Acquired paedophilia Burns JM, SwerdlowRH, Arch Neurol 2003.

  9. Norman Geschwind • Boston • “Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Personality” • In between seizures: • Hyposexuality • Hypergraphia • Hyper-religiosity Waxman SG & Geschwind N. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1975;32:1580-6.

  10. Mystical seizures “You are all healthy people, ….but you have no idea what joy that joy is which we epileptics experience the second before a seizure... I do not know whether this joy lasts for seconds or hours or months, but believe me, I would not exchange it for all the delights of this world.” Dostoyevsky 1821-1881

  11. Our brains are in control not us “All of our behaviour can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge.” - Sam Harris “We feel we choose, but we don’t,” says Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London. “You may have thought you decided whether to have tea or coffee this morning, for example, but the decision may have been made long before you were aware of it.”

  12. The Haynes experiment…. Soon… Haynes Nat Neurosci. 2008 May;11(5):543-5

  13. Soon Nat Neurosci. 2008 May;11(5):543-5

  14. Soon Nat Neurosci. 2008 May;11(5):543-5

  15. Bottom-up reductionism Finding Osney Mead Changed behaviour Altered network activity Spatial navigation Altered activity in specific pathway Hippocampal activity Change in electrical activity Long-term potentiation Molecular event NMDA receptor activated

  16. The effect of musical training on brain structure Professional musicians Music teachers Gärtner H, Brain morphometry shows effects of long-term musical practice in middle-aged keyboard players. Front Psychol. 2013 Sep 23;4:636

  17. Top-down processing as well as bottom-up behaviour Spatial navigation hippocampus Long-term potentiation NMDA receptor

  18. Past deliberation embodied in automaticity SachinTendulkar Versus ShoaibAkhtar 400msec to plan and execute

  19. Character Changed behaviour Altered network activity Altered activity in specific pathway Change in electrical activity Molecular event

  20. Collision of bottom up and top-down: the human predicament • “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. ….. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” • Romans 7

  21. My current position: non-reductionist physicalism Body God Soul / Mind Immaterial Material The importance of emergence

  22. God in the Synapse in the Vatican garden John Eccles and Karl Popper The Self and its Brain 1984

  23. The chair and “nothing but”

  24. “nothing but”

  25. The chair and “nothing but”

  26. “nothing but”

  27. The chair and emergence

  28. Biblical position on soul • Old Testament (nepes) • “Life” itself, as in Gen 2:7 “man became a living soul [being]” • No suggestion of immaterial separate soul • Little suggestion of afterlife • New Testament (psyche) • At the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: "Death has been swallowed up in victory." (1Co 15:51-54) • Jesus replied, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise." (Luk 23:43)

  29. Pastoral consequences • Life after death • may be as an immaterial soul before the new body resurrected for a dualist • requires a resurrected body for a physicalist. So where is the continuity? • Views of the body • A dualist may despise the flesh • A physicalist must respect the body

  30. Summary • Many Christians are implicit dualists • This is problematic for neuroscientists • Monist accounts of brain tend to be reductionist and exclude God • A non reductive physicalist leaves space for God • Most behaviour is immediately determined by our biology • Our behaviour may alter brain structure • There is a dynamic interaction between brain and mind

  31. Nancey Murphy and Warren S. Brown Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical And Neurobiological Perspectives On Moral Responsibility And Free Will 2007.

  32. Change in brain structure with use: London taxi drivers Maguire EA Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2000 Apr 11;97(8):4398-403

  33. Karen Armstrong • Aged 17, • entered Catholic convent. • 7 years later: left. Tried to teach. “Fainting episodes”. Went to “hell”. • Seven years later: diagnosed with epilepsy • Author of • Through the narrow gate • The spiral staircase • History of God

  34. Karen Armstrong • “Certainly just before I have a grand mal fit I have a 'vision' of such peace, joy and significance that I can only call it God………. • What I can say, however, is that if my 'visions' have sometimes let me into 'Hell' they have also given me possible intimations of a Heaven which I would not have been without.”

  35. The lesson of Ulysses ……

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