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Body: Spirit or Machine?

abracad, · Categories: externally authored, healing, science and spirituality

by Philip Mereton - Author, The Heaven at the End of Science: An Argument for a New Worldview of Hope

Govinda said: "But what you call thing, is it something real, something intrinsic? Is it not only the illusion of Maya, only image and appearance? Your stone, your tree, are they real?"

"This does not trouble me much," said Siddhartha.  "If they are illusion, then I also am illusion and so they are always of the same nature as myself."

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

The body is a machine, right?   Richard Dawkins tells us we are nothing but survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to reproduce our genes.  He must be right.

Modern science says the physical world can ultimately be reduced to tiny particles, which must mean our bodies as well.  Who are we to question science?

Modern medicine is based upon the notion that sick internal feelings result from some disarrangement or injury to bodily parts, whether limbs, bones, organs, cells, or genes.  The only way to cure sickness is to treat the body.  Who argues with a doctor?

In the human genome project, biologists have uncovered the human genetic map, the parts diagram for this grand machine we call the body.  Why spend all that time on this $3 billion science project if it is based upon the wrong theory?  Right?

But there are problems with this body-as-machine model that need to be examined.  To begin with, many of us may not believe we are "nothing but a machine," or "robot vehicles."  We have seen machines and robots; they look different than we do.  Isn't there something about emotions − such as love, inspiration, hope, and fear − that cannot be reduced to molecules?  So, as occupiers of these bodies, many of us may dispute the notion that we are nothing but "survival machines."

Then we turn to the problem with reductionism, the thought that the natural world and our bodies can be reduced to a complex interplay of material particles.   Interestingly, contrary to this conclusion, modern science has known for almost a century now that at the root of what we call matter are not particles, but rather quantum waves, energy packets, probability equations; in short, something that is not actually a "thing."  As Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum theory, said, "atoms are things."  Noted astrophysicist, Sir James Jeans, famously observed in the early 20th century that, in light of the findings of physics, the universe began to look "more like a great thought than a great machine."   Since the DNA molecules that make up genes are necessarily composed of "quantum waves," the truth of the matter is that reductionism at best can reduce the human body down to quantum waves, not things.   Furthermore, many scientists interpreting the theoretical implications of quantum theory have concluded that a quantum world, which means our world made of quantum waves, cannot exist without a consciousness to "collapse the wave function."  (See Bernard Haisch's book, The Purpose-Guided Universe, and references therein.)   So if the DNA molecule is ultimately composed of quantum waves (which cannot be disputed) and human consciousness is necessary for the quantum world to exist, then consciousness must necessarily have some role to play with the body.   Strange? Possibly, but that's where scientific theory is heading.

Moving to modern medicine we find another serious problem with the body-as-machine model.  When modern medicine seeks to cure a bodily ailment, such as a skin rash, it immediately looks to treat the ailment from the external body inward to the feeling of discomfort.  It believes the source of the ailment results from some injury to bodily parts, much like the loss of braking power in a car results from worn brake pads

Modern drugs thus attempt to alter or repair a deficiency or imbalance of bodily functions through the ingestion of a chemical pill.   If, indeed, the body were nothing but a machine, then indeed this mechanical method of making repairs would be the treatment of choice.  We repair machines by finding the broken part and fixing it.

Now the problem here is that even though modern medicine states that a healthy mind cannot heal the body, its own medical findings reveal the opposite: the mind plays a significant role in how well a healing method works. Perhaps the best example is the "powerful placebo." (H.K. Beecher, "The Powerful Placebo," Journal of the American Medical Association, 1602 (1955))

Placebos, in contrast to drugs of modern medicine, are "make-believe" or sham medical treatments with no scientific basis.  In pill form,  they have no active ingredient; although they may have the appearance of a prescription drug, they are usually nothing more than milk sugar.  (See Adolf Grunbaum, "Explication and Implications of the Placebo Concept," in Placebo: Theory, Research, and Mechanisms ed. Leonard White, Bernard Tursky, and Gary Schwartz at 9 (Guilford Press 1985)).

This fake medicine, however, has been found not only to heal the body, but to work at times nearly as effectively as scientific treatments. One series of studies covering over 1000 patients showed 35% reported significant relief from a variety of ailments after treatment with a placebo. (H. Beecher, "Surgery as Placebo.")   In another study of over 14,000 patients with illnesses from headaches to multiple sclerosis, 40% reported relief from placebo treatment.  And there are all sorts of other studies reaching the same conclusions.

For the placebo effect to work the patient must believe it will work.  And, the positive effects of placebos are heightened  where the "beliefs and expectancies of both doctors and patients [are] maximized." (F. Evans, "Expectancy, Therapeutic Instructions and the Placebo Response" in Placebo: Theory, Research & Mechanism ).

So the placebo effect shows that strong belief itself can have a beneficial effect on the physical body.  This, of course, is not a feature of man-made machines.  We can hope our car does not run out of gas before the next highway oasis, or that the broken fan belt fixes itself, but these internal emotions have no effect on this sort of machine.   Thus, the placebo effect casts further doubt over the body-as-machine approach.

Next we come to the human genome project, the successful mapping of the genes making up the internal instructions for the physical body.   Genes, in turn, are composed of strands of DNA, the ultimate building blocks of living creatures.  One of the goals of the human genome project is to associate variations in DNA sequences with diseases.  If those with the same disease have the same genetic disorder, then modern drugs or medical treatments may be devised to repair the genetic error and thus cure the disease, if not now then perhaps in future generations.   See Revolution Postponed, Scientific American 60 (Oct. 2010).

The human genome project breaks the human body down to its essential components.  With automobiles, mechanics have been successful at  fixing breakdowns by replacing, adjusting, or manipulating the fundamental parts of the car.  If the body is also a machine, then it would make sense that once physical illnesses are linked to common variations in DNA sequences, the repair of these genetic errors will cure the disease.

But all is not well with this approach.  In a recent article in Scientific American, Revolution Postponed, Stephen Hall  highlights the failure of the human genome project to achieve this goal.  He quotes, among others, Walter Bodmer, one of the pioneers of the project, as saying, "It is almost impossible to find what the biological effects of these variant genes are, and that's absolutely key.  The vast majority of [common] variants have shed no light on the biology of disease."  Of course with all the time and money invested in  the human genome project, modern biology is far from throwing in the towel.

We can now put the pieces together:

Now before we ask whether it is possible the body is actually spirit, or mind-created, we need to face the question whether it is possible the body is something between machine and spirit; does it have to be one or the other?  This question raises the mind-body dualism problem; specifically, if we consist of both an immaterial, ephemeral mind and a material, matter-infused body, then how does the mind act on the body?  This is the famous "ghost in the machine" problem attacked by Gilbert Ryle in his book, The Concept of Mind. I agree that mind-body dualism of this sort is unworkable.  It results in part from trying to find a place for conflicting conceptions of mind and body in one worldview.  But the spirit/matter conceptions contradict each other.  Therefore, in this writer's view, the mind is either an epiphenomenon (i.e., some kind of emerging property) of the material brain, or the material body is an emergent image of the mind.  One of the conceptions must be wrong.

So, finally, is it possible the body is an emergent property or image of the mind? Even though this thought flies in the face of conventional scientific wisdom, the answer must be, of course it is possible. We know that in lucid dreams and powerful hallucinations the mind is capable of conjuring up a real-seeming world from nothing.  Modern philosophy, which is to say modern thinking, has its roots in Rene Descartes' Mediations on First Philosophy. In his meditations, Descartes found that the "real" world he experienced, as well as his own body, might very well be a dream, but that there was one fact he could not doubt: his own existence as a thinking being, a mind, an understanding. (In the end, Descartes concluded that God would not deceive him into believing a real world existed outside his mind unless one really did, and therefore brought himself to accept the natural world as something other than a dream.)  The notion that the natural world is spirit also pervades Eastern philosophy and religion.

The thought that body is spirit is anathema to the western scientific mind, which at this point of the discussion typically resorts to name-calling or label-throwing (such as calling any such idea "new-age quackery") rather than consider the approach scientifically, or with an open mind. Why scientists need to consider the body-as-spirit approach is strongly suggested by their own experimental findings.  Specifically, if the body is spirit, or an emergent image of the mind, then all of their experimental findings can be explained:

Does this all seem like some radical, new-age flight of fancy?  Maybe so. But it may seem radical because our current materialistic, body-as-machine paradigm is radically wrong.  The contrast bothers us. Perhaps it's time for the "new-age" explanation to replace the "old-age" explanation. When a new theoretical framework better explains experimental results than the current model, the history of science says we should look closer at the theory, not reject it through the simple device of names and labels.

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