The NYT op-ed piece: At least one good response.

Image via WikipediaAs I predicted, there has already been a lot of response to the NYT op-ed piece by David Brooks (click here), about science, materialism, and religion/spirituality. [My first blog entry about it is here]. Some of the responses have, indeed, been quite negative, in the usual knee-jerk kind of way; but I just found one entry that I find thoughtful and well-balanced. It appears in the wonderful blog called "The Frontal Cortex", written by Jonah Lehrer (author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist). Here's part of what he had to say:

My own sense is that there's an increasing interest among neuroscientists to grapple with what David Chalmers calls "the hard problem," so that the subjective nature of human experience isn't simply brushed aside as an "epiphenomenon". In other words, you can't study the brain by pretending that emotions and the self don't exist. Here is how Brooks summarizes the intellectual atmosphere:

"The momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer."

Well, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a neuroscientist who wasn't a hard-core materialist. That, after all, is why they're studying the brain. But I do think there's an increasing respect for entities (like the self) that can't be studied simply in materialist terms. Or at least there's an increasing recognition that reductionist materialism has real limitations. As the novelist Richard Powers wrote, "If we knew the world only through synapses, how could we know the synapse?"

Brooks ends by arguing that "science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other." Mysticism is a loaded word, but I'd certainly agree that many of the most profound mysteries of human existence have been deepened, and not erased, by modern neuroscience.

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