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Excerpt from BS 202:
Is Meditation a “mind science?” with Evan Thompson
I want to start my episode review by thanking Evan Thompson for taking the time to talk with me again. I also want to talk briefly about why I chose this topic.
First, as an independent podcaster, I have the freedom to choose topics that I find personally compelling. That is certainly the case for the claim that meditation is a mind science.
Before I launched Brain Science, I considered myself a Buddhist. But as I began to learn more about how the brain really works, I could not harmonize the dualistic Buddhist notion of the mind with what I was learning.
More importantly, many Western Buddhists and even respected scientists have accepted the claim that meditation is a mind science. This underpins the much larger claim that Buddhism is uniquely scientific. So, let's review the problems with this claim.
Dr. Thompson says that his objections are both scientific and philosophic. Though, it's fair to say that the focus of today's conversation was on his philosophical objections. Why does he reject the claim that meditation is an introspective science?
His main objection is that meditation does not as is often claimed, provide a pure neutral account of what is happening in the mind. There are several reasons for this. Whatever sort of meditation one practices, one is given instructions and expectations that inevitably influence the experience.
A more obvious objection is that the experience is not independently verifiable. Thompson didn't mention this, but it does disqualify meditation as a scientific practice.
Galileo is often held up as a role model of the scientific method because the observations he did with his telescope could be repeated or replicated by others. This is not possible with meditation.
Although this didn't come up during our conversation, another huge issue is that neuroscientists have learned that most of what the brain does is inaccessible to the conscious mind. Thus, even if we could get objective information through introspection, it would be woefully incomplete.
But perhaps the biggest argument in favor of meditation seems to be that it changes the brain in ways that can supposedly be replicated in different meditators. Is that a valid argument in its favor?
Thompson says no, because everything you do changes your brain. Actually, I think that brings us to a much more important problem with claimingmeditation is a mind science. Because the people making these claims are often enamored of brain imaging, they also tend to conflate the mind and the brain.
The whole point of embodied cognition, which actually is a philosophical position, is that the mind is more than the brain. Saying that the mind is embodied recognizes that the brain is embedded in a body within a world.
In his book, Why I Am Not a Buddhist, Thompson introduced an analogy that he also shared in the interview. He said Birds need wings to fly, but flight is not in the wings. Sometimes, those with a brain-centric view will say that the mind is what the brain does, but that's like saying flying is what wings do, but it takes the entire bird to fly. That's why he said mind is an activity of the whole organism.
We touched briefly on several other claims that tend to go along with the brain-focused approach to meditation. One was the idea that neuroscience has proven the Buddhist claim that the self does not exist.
Here, the key idea is realizing that there is no permanent unchanging self, does not make the self that the brain constructs unreal or an illusion. Modern physics has taught us that solid objects are mostly empty, but that doesn't make the objects an illusion or unreal.
The fact that our conscious experience of our inner world is unreliable does not negate the experience, but we can't look to it for an objective understanding of what the mind is doing.
We also talked about Robert Wright's use of evolutionary psychology to prove that Buddhism is true. I was struck by the similarity of the claim that we are stuck in a caveman brain and original sin, but the strongest objections to evolutionary psychology rest on its dependence on a modular view of the mind that does not fit contemporary neuroscience. This chapter is great if you're looking for a concise critique of evolutionary psychology.
At the end of the interview, we talked very briefly about cosmopolitanism. This is the idea that we are citizens of the world, but that doesn't mean that we all have to have the same beliefs or ways of life. Cosmopolitanism offers a ray of hope in our divided world. I will include several references about it in the show notes.
Much of Evan Thompson's book, Why I Am Not a Buddhist is an argument against the claim of many Western Buddhist that Buddhism is uniquely scientific and maybe not even a religion. He shows why neither of these claims stand up to either scientific or historical scrutiny.
Obviously, that topic is beyond the scope of this podcast, but I think Evan Thompson's book, Why I Am Not a Buddhist, is a worthwhile read for anyone who wants to learn more about these topics.
That being said, I want to close with a couple of themes that have been running through Brain Science for many years.
First, since most of what our brain does is not accessible to introspection, we cannot use meditation or any other introspective technique, including psychoanalysis to determine how it works.
Even more importantly, the mind is embodied. This means that it's embedded in a body that interacts with its environment. You are not a brain in a vat. And because the brain is not the mind, studying the brain alone is not enough.
I make this last point because even though I created a show about the brain, I've tried not to fall prey to neuromania. We are also wired to be social, so being human means being parts of cultures. These cultures are also constantly changing our brains as well as our minds.
I would love to hear your feedback about this episode. Feel free to send me email at brainsciencepodcast@gmail.com. And you can find complete show notes and episode transcripts on my website at brainsciencepodcast.com.
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