Science's Mechanistic Human
Pinocchio, in the classic tale, yearns for boyhood, humanness, the magical quality of actual existence. Scientists who describe themselves as physicalists, or materialists, positing existence at its basic functionality to be mechanistic, seem to yearn for the opposite. We are nothing but biological machines, they declare. We have incredible brains that do incredible things, but it all begins and ends there, stuck inside a mass of highly evolved tissue sitting within a thin casing of bone. It’s a case of backward Pinocchio.
I watched a podcast with Sam Harris on the Lex Fridman Youtube channel, for over three hours, and it was extremely enlightening. Harris, neuroscientist, neo-atheist, philosopher, writer, has a mind that’s brilliant many times past mine. Certain religious people highly dislike him for his criticism of religion, in how it hurts and subjugates others. In extracting himself from religious belief, he’s substituted a science-based morality of compassion and enlightened thought over dogmatic thinking and its resultant ignorance.
It was in the section of the podcast about free will that most pointed out to me the weakness of the physicalist position. Harris spoke of himself gaining compassion when he thought of free will as an infinitely complex set of causes and effects, entailing DNA, society, upbringing, the condition of the body you were born into, all conspiring to push you to take particular actions at any moment, actions which, it must be admitted, are often done by human beings on an instinctive, or unconscious, non-thinking level. Why did we react so strongly to some slight teasing a person makes, causing us to have an uproar? Do we, in that moment, even remember the similar teasing we took as a young child and were wounded by? Are we mimicking the behavior of a short-tempered parent? Is it because of the third drink we had, our propensity for alcoholism inherited through our family line? His conclusion was, people were, to some degree, not to blame for their harmful actions.
This is certainly a discernable truth. If one were able to watch and examine the entire lifeline of those who traffic in criminal actions, we would undoubtedly at least gain a degree of understanding, and from that, compassion, for the factors that influenced the perpetrator. Born a tabla rasa, but negatively shaped and deformed by the world, by a harsh, violent upbringing, for instance, can explain much about criminal actions. The embedded unfairness and lack of justice within society at large could be another factor. There would be cases where people shaped their own evil natures, of course, being drawn to it by greed and the understanding of how power works. In that case we would have less compassion, but we would at least understand the circumstances, and wonder what drove them to be controlled by greed. The corruption of society itself is a factor which must take some blame.
The nature/nurture argument has all been discussed and dissected thousands upon thousands of times. Harris’ conclusion was that birth is purely the luck of the draw, our circumstances in this life are a straight crap shoot. We could have been born in any condition, so if we’re lucky, we should show gratitude, and help the less fortunate. No argument there. But is it, is it just a crap shoot?
Since the beginning of history, people have believed in reincarnation as the method of continuity in the world. In the New Testament, Jesus is said to be thought of by some as the reincarnation of Elijah. It was a common belief among the Egyptians and Greeks, and only disappeared en-masse when Christianity took over and the idea of heaven replaced it. It’s a core teaching of Hinduism, and Buddhism. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is entirely devoted to dying correctly, to facilitate the best rebirth. The Dalai Lama is chosen as a reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama. Reincarnation has been, historically, the world’s most commonly held belief of what happens in an afterlife.
One of the unfortunate effects of the scientific revolution has been how it’s turned its back on issues where observational or anecdotal evidence exists, but aren’t easily verifiable. Biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake has talked endlessly about this shortcoming of science, how the academy won’t sponsor experiments that veer into metaphysical questions, or “paranormal” subjects, precognition, telepathy, unexplained animal behavior (homing pigeons), etc.
I’m Buddhist, and people within the Buddhist community just laugh and shrug their shoulders when it comes to science’s blinders on certain metaphysical ideas, ideas Buddhists accept quite easily. Like reincarnation. Or that we’re all connected, everyone and everything. Quantum physics is fessing up to a weak maybe on the connected idea, which in simply observing nature seems patently obvious. How does a flock of fish move together? How and why do starlings perform their murmurations? Interconnectedness been accepted within Buddhism for 2500 years. Some 2000 years ago, in the Lotus Sutra, the unimaginable size of the universe was talked about in metaphorical terms, long before telescopes. It also speaks of the universe being inhabited by many kinds of beings.
I completely believe in the scientific method as the best way we have to discover truth. The problem with current science is its self-restriction in delving into these other subjects. A common practice in scientific method is, given a theory you can’t prove through experiment, the theory’s equations are put into other equations. The mathematics are then tested, to see if it works there. This has been practiced within quantum physics with results that are astonishingly precise.
The theory of reincarnation is somewhat similar. What’s passed along in death isn’t a soul, it’s an energy storage. It’s the release, at death, of all the karmic energy we’ve accumulated in this life, positive and negative, and that energy of our life, which is never destroyed, continues. Birth isn’t a lottery, it’s a continuation. What kind of universe would it be that plays a lottery with existence? Parceling out degrees of good and bad. A very strange universe indeed.
As you sow, so you reap. In every other phase of life we observe and experience, this ever-present continuum of cause and effect is recognizable. So why would it disappear in death? In birth?
Physicalist scientists can’t accept this because they have to carry on the dogma of a mechanistic universe, where we’re just very smart evolved meat robots. You die - meat robot stops working. Reincarnation functions in a realm we can’t see or measure, therefore science says it can’t exist. But not seeing dark matter is ok, because they can measure its effect. Which is exactly the same process with reincarnation. Once we plug it into the theory of life and birth, we can see it at work, and suddenly everything makes sense. All the inequities of a lottery disappear. You are what you did. You bring with you what you created. Not in a specific sense, in an energy sense. However, some habitual things must be rememberable in some way. How does a Mozart write his first symphony at eight years old? Yes, his father taught him since he was able to sit at a piano, but in a lottery, what gave him the talent to be the wunderkind musician he was? Any well-functioning lottery would have given his father a son without musical talent. If talent is heritable, how? Where’s the musical gene in the DNA, science? In fact, that’s not the kind of thing DNA does.
The mind of Mozart, in previous lifetimes, came to deeply understand music, or perhaps it was mathematics, that he in his lifetime then applied to music. Whatever the process, from birth, his mind was instantly comfortable recognizing the innate structures of music, the math of it, the intricate combinations of orchestral sounds, the crowd-pleasing technicality displayed in a racing, controlled solo. The heart-rending melodies. Explain, anyone, how a random lottery, somehow giving Mozart the music card, concocts a brain capable of understanding how to brilliantly create these feats? And please delineate all the mechanistic bodily processes that make it so, too.
Or, put reincarnation into the equation. That’s all. Simple. Solved.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is another scientist whose mind is titanic and whose thinking navigates the universe, but when asked about this transition to death, and what comes after, he said he was happy to slowly become atoms again and contribute in that way to the continuation of this amazing universe. That’s noble, I guess. But I would ask Neil what’s better for the universe, his prodigious mind melding back into it, to be reborn, put to his purpose again, or to be worm food?