101 – Brain, Belief & Behaviour

Author: Dinah Livingstone. Published September 2011 in issue 101 of Sofia.

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Contents

Articles
Reviews
Poetry
Regulars and Occasionals

Editorial

This year’s SOF annual conference on Brain, Belief and Behaviour was held in Leicester in July as usual.

This issue of Sofia contains shortened, edited versions of the three main speakers’ talks. Uncut recordings of the three talks will be on SOF website www.sofn.org.uk Gwen Griffith-Dickson spoke about the breadth and variety of religious experiences and warned against any kind of reductionism – scientific or religious. Colin Blakemore spoke about neuroscience and its growing capacity to locate specific functions in the brain.

Nailing up 7 theses, Alan Allport argued that the functional beliefs which implicitly guide our knowing are more powerful than our explicitly stated beliefs.

The talks were not theological but gave interesting information and insights into how our brains work.

With scientific discretion, in their talks all three speakers refrained from expressing an opinion about whether ‘religious experiences’ – it is possible to view what is happening in the brain while these are occurring – have a supernatural or natural cause.

However, all three made it clear that there was no need to resort to a supernatural explanation for them and ‘religious experiences’ cannot prove or disprove the existence of God.

For example, Alan Allport related how in a Quaker meeting, some people thought of certain ‘peak’ experiences as supernatural, as coming from outside themselves, while others described ‘what I suppose are essentially the same experiences as coming from within their own nature.’ He carefully did not give his own opinion. However, having remained professionally impartial throughout his talk, at the very end he launched into a passionate declaration of his two most profound convictions: that the two most important things are how to live, and ‘being and knowing myself to be part of the communion of all conscious beings.’ I found that last-minute breakout very cheering.

Gwen-Griffith Dickson looked at the similarities and differences between psychotic and religious experiences. (I thought of Theseus’ speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘The lunatic, the lover and the poet /Are of imagination all compact:/One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, /That is, the madman...’) Her plea was: ‘Don’t narrow the scope!’ Colin Blakemore spoke about the big human brain and speculated how this could have evolved. He explained that it was not just a question of size but complexity: ‘Elephants and whales have much larger brains than human beings, but the cells are bigger and are more widely spaced, so human beings have twice as many cells as any other species.’ He described how the brain can grow more cells. Experiments have shown that the hippocampus of London taxi drivers gets bigger when they have passed the fiendishly difficult exam called The Knowledge (see picture on back cover).

This idea of increasing complexity made me think of the German word for writing poetry: dichten, which sounds very close (but sadly, is not etymologically related) to the word dicht, meaning thick or condensed. We do not have much room for poetry in this issue, but oddly enough two very different writers – Anne Ashworth in her third Part of a Pilgrimage and Stephen Mitchell in his SOF Sermon – both appeal to George Herbert. In talking about simplification, Anne says, ‘It would be good to talk with George Herbert, that lover of English words, that freshest of poets, who so well understood the matter.’ And in his sermon, Stephen quotes Herbert’s poem The Call:

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:

Such a Way, as gives us breath:

Such a Truth, as ends all strife:

Such a Life, as killeth death.

He points out that every word is a monosyllable except the word ‘killeth’, but goes on to look at how concentrated such ‘simple’ language is. The Herbert poem Prayer on page 15 is a string of metaphors for prayer, except for the last two clinching words: ‘something understood’. This most famous of ‘list’ poems was echoed in the 1960s and 1970s by many ‘list’ poems beginning ‘Love is…’; ‘Revolution is…’, for example, Liverpool poet Adrian Henri’s poem:

Love is feeling cold in the back of vans Love is a fanclub with only two fans Love is walking holding paintstained hands...

Gwen Griffith-Dickson ended her talk with Hawaiian song, and explained how in it ‘the layer of meaning known as the manao and that known as the kaona may be self-sufficient, coherent, related to the others, and still irreducibly different’. Similarly in other cultures, much love poetry, like the Song of Songs, can be read as mystical poetry. Everywhere the best poetry is ‘thick’ with meaning and resonance.

Having learnt much from the speakers, I came away marvelling even more at how ‘thick’ our brains are, not because they are the absolute biggest in the animal kingdom, but because they have the most cells, they are the most complex, the most condensed, and therefore the most poetic, with the poetic genius to create all gods.

Congratulations on a fine 100th issue of Sofia. I found your article and your poem – and Edward Storey’s – most inspiring. Kenan Malik’s discussion about ethics and science raised horrible possibilities. To limit human freedom by artificially ‘conditioning’ our behaviour through chemical means is to consider practices that remind me of the worst excesses of the Third Reich. I can’t see that Christian ethics are in any way comparable. The Ten Commandments are good guidelines, whether divinely inspired or not, and surely the commandment to love is beyond dispute.

Incidentally, I was interested to see your reference to the song ‘You can’t kill the Spirit’. I remember chanting it with some women at Greenham Common when I went there with my daughter to ‘embrace the Base’!

— Joan Sheridan Smith

Joan Sheridan Smith joansheridan@madasafish.com Sofia Arts Reviewer Cicely Herbert and I, with my daughter, were at Greenham on that day too (December 12th 1982), together with 30,000 other women, singing ‘You can’t kill the Spirit. She’s like a mountain..!’ – Ed Conference A very interesting conference where the speakers opened up an important area of knowledge which throws a little light on ‘knowing ourselves’. Nice to welcome eighteen new people. I spoke to one who was looking for somewhere to enrol as a member but no luck. Have we missed out on eighteen new members?

Also on hearing that the next conference is on Work and Worth the comment was ‘how boring – don’t think I’ll come to that, I hated work.’ Must say that I also thought it unappealing. I hope any advance information is more attractive.

— Cicely Herbert

Julia Nicoll Hemel Hempstead An Enlightened Philosophy I’d like to thank the SOF Conference Committee for the kind invitation to lead a workshop at the recent SOF Conference. I really enjoyed meeting people there. Thanks especially to those who came to the workshop and contributed to such an interesting discussion. For those who would like a copy of the presentation, a more extensive version can be downloaded from the book’s website at www.anenlightenedphilosophy.com where there are also several interviews and reviews. The book is also available on Amazon.

Since the weekend I have been giving some thought as to how our debate can be more widely shared. We have tried to do this through a Facebook page for An Enlightened Philosophy, which is at www. facebook.com/anenlightenedphilosophy. The Facebook method has two advantages in that it naturally proliferates, and does invite feedback and debate. I wonder whether in the first instance members of SOF might like to stimulate more debate on the Enlightened Philosophy book page, and beyond that whether there is scope for a SOF Facebook page to act as a point of proliferation for SOF and widely networked debate? I’d be interested to discuss this.

— Julia Nicoll, Hemel Hempstead

Geoff Crocker geoff.crocker@3wa.co.uk Museum of Garden History I can’t tell you what an exciting feeling I had when I opened your large envelope yesterday. It is really so good of you to have sent me the 100th Birthday edition of Sofia. I never really expected this, and, moreover, the very kind reference to my book on how the Museum of Garden History, renamed the Garden Museum, was brought into being. This was to put on record the Nicholson’s (John and Rosemary) achievements. They were both such wonderful people, I was so fortunate to have known them… What a lucky chance my friend Monica and I met you and your friend Cicely in the Garden of the Museum! How did we come to speak, I wonder? I think it was in looking at the tomb of the Tradescants, father and son.

I was so interested in reading through the Sofia magazine. There are some good and thoughtprovoking articles there… I hope you will forgive me for taking this opportunity to enclose an article I wrote quite recently… Elizabeth Fleming London Elizabeth Fleming’s article on A Corner of Lambeth is on page 26.

— Geoff Crocker

I enjoyed reading Stephen Mitchell’s review of Don Cupitt’s latest (final?) book The Fountain – A Secular Theology. In the penultimate chapter of the book, Don echoes the thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche concerning the needs of every philosopher to satisfy himself that ‘the vision of the world in which after many years of toil I have at last felt able to come to rest’ is the correct one for him. For Don, this involves seeing life as ‘a temporal process, a flux of events that continuously pours out, scatters, and passes away’, a world that is ‘lovely but is always disputed, and above all is very transient’. I have no problem with either of these conclusions.

The problem with Don’s philosophy, for me, is that it denies the possibility of the continuation of a person after his or her physical death; it denies the possibility of any eternal ‘I’. He sums this up in three words (p. 78), ‘I am flux’. For Don, everything is flux and everything passes away into nothingness, including ‘I’. 13.7 billion years to produce conscious, living forms capable of appreciating beauty, music, art, literature, poetry and nature; to show tenderness, compassion, forgiveness and love; and, to build machines for exploring the universe itself and then - total darkness. Don’s universe is conscious of itself for an instant and then no more – ever.

Over the years, I have greatly valued reading Don’s books, none more so than his Sea of Faith. He has certainly provided me with many years of toil.

However, one other book that has had a profound effect upon me is Grammatical Man. Like Sea of Faith, it was published in 1984. It was written by Jeremy Campbell and published by Pelican Books. It introduced me to the idea that there are three components of the universe: matter, energy and information. The first two are physical and capable of objective measurement. The third component is not; it has to be read – it presupposes subjective activity in the form of writing and reading.

Jeremy Campbell describes how ‘the universe, and the living forms it contains, are based on chance, but not on accident’. By ‘chance’, Jeremy Campbell means ‘possibility’; the possibility that something in-form-ed, designed or intended can be read, actualised or realised out of chaos and uncertainty. Possibilities become certainties. Language is a good example; the contents of a message get more and more resolved the further the message is read. Out of a finite store of words and a set of rules (grammar), endless messages, stories etc. are possible. The same reasoning would apply, in physics, to fundamental particles and scientific laws; all kinds of matter and energy can be realised. In biology, the genetic code, with its alphabet of four chemical bases, A, C, G and T, provides the instructions for creating millions of different life forms; from heucheras to humans. In all these examples, the non-random element or information, exploits the uncertainty or chaos which is present to produce new structures and to inform the world in a myriad, novel ways. It makes me think, here, of Don’s flux of events – reality in the process of realisation. I think, also, of his thoughts about language creating the world.

However, Don’s ‘chance’ I take to mean ‘accident’.

For Don, everything happens unintentionally and unexpectedly – without any cause. It is and then it isn’t; and that is that. The question that I would like to ask him is how does he account for an informed universe? I suppose it is the old question of ‘how do you account for there being order rather than disorder?’ Did the vastly complex instruction manual for the creation of conscious life just begin to write itself shortly after the Big Bang? I would of course share Don’s view that we humans have created meaning and purpose (and religion too, of course) but then, we in turn, are a part of the universe. The possibilities of human language, meaning and purpose must themselves also have been present in the first few seconds of its creation.

My conclusion is that Don is wrong. I say that respectfully because I value greatly his life’s labours. I believe that the universe is more than matter and energy. It also has spirit (or information, if you want to call it that). There is, indeed, flux; without flux there would be no life. But I do not see myself as flux; I feel that I am the product of flux. From second to second, I cannot be certain of life. Religions provide road maps; Christianity seems a very good and lifeenhancing one. I share Don’s view that God does not exist and is not real. For me, however, he is the very Existence and Reality within which I live and move and have my spiritual being. He transcends, pervades and is encountered through the vehicle of matter and energy, but, in the words of the title of Keith Ward’s latest book (published in 2010 by Lion Hudson), he is More than Matter’ I believe that being alive after physical death remains a possibility. Quite what form we shall take, no one knows.

Grenville Gilbert is a SOF member living in Devon.

— Grenville Gilbert, Devon