This article by Daniel Witt is reprinted with permission from Evolution News.

Every field of study has a window of acceptable discourse, where scholarly disagreement is respected. If you step outside that window, you are likely to be treated as a crank or a crackpot. But the window is always shifting, depending on the current state of research and the current climate of opinion. What is unacceptable now may be common knowledge in the future, and vice versa. Which naturally leads to the question…how does one challenge a dominant paradigm without going “too far” and getting shown the door? 

One strategy is to say very little in the way of opinion, and content yourself with asking questions, in all meekness and humility. This seems to be the tack Karina Kofman and Michael Levin (the Tufts and Harvard biology professor who recently made a case for a Platonist interpretation of biology) have decided to take in their new paper “Robustness of the Mind-Body Interface: case studies of unconventional information flow in the multiscale living architecture” (currently in preprint).

They write:

It is well known that paradigms in science can function as self-maintaining attractors, exerting influence with respect to the amount of attention and funding that is available for various research directions, especially ones that threaten to disrupt them. Thus, one of the most interesting and sometimes rewarding approaches is to specifically look for data which does not comfortably fit a given paradigm.

How delightful and non-threatening! Of course, there is another reason paradigms are self-maintaining — although the authors don’t mention it, the elephant in the room is the fact that questioning a dominant paradigm might permanently damage your career. You might lose respect and credibility, and even, in some cases, be exiled from mainstream academia altogether. Just ask Günter Bechly, Richard Sternberg, Guillermo Gonzalez, or any number of others.

That might be why the authors take caution to an almost comical degree, to the point where it’s a bit difficult to discern what the paradigm they’re critiquing actually is. It takes careful reading to understand that they are critiquing nothing less than the idea that the mind may be equated with the physical brain. 

Note: In an interesting coincidence, the new book by Michael Egnor and Denyse O’Leary, The Immortal Mind, also pushes against equating the mind with the brain. It will be published on June 3 and is currently available for preorder. See here for information about preorder perks.

Many Experimental Results

Rather than making a positive case for any alternate theory, Kofman and Levin content themselves in this paper with simply pointing out a rather large number of experimental results that most decidedly are not predicted by a theory of the mind as a physical system. Although most frameworks “are sufficiently ingenious that they can be stretched to accommodate quite a lot,” that’s not really point, they write. Instead of just asking “Can this result be made to fit in my theory?” one should ask “Did my theory predict this result?” Thus:

Here, we make no firm conclusions nor push a specific theory. However, we hold that the issue isn’t whether a model can have epicycles attached to it to save it from uncomfortable observations — almost always, it can (for a while, anyway). The better question is, do we have models that actively predict the existence of the kind of phenomena we describe above — that entail them as a primary consequence, embrace them comfortably, and most crucially, suggest ways to use them for new biomedicine and for driving new discoveries on the nature and possible futures for humankind.

For those who might not know, “epicycles” were the hypothetical loops that were added to the orbits of the planets in our solar system to make the geocentric model of the universe match the appearance of the sky. (The fact that the earth is moving too, and at a different speed from the other planets, means that the path of the other planets in the sky is not the simple sun-like circular orbit you would imagine from a straightforward geocentric perspective. When the earth passes a slower planet like Mars, it seems to turn and make a weird backwards loop in the sky. Thus the need for epicycles.)

It’s a well-chosen barb, because the thing about epicycles is… they actually worked. That is, it was possible to construct a geocentric model that did actually explain the appearance of the night sky. But you never would have predicted the epicycles from a basic geocentric perspective, while under the heliocentric model the sky appeared exactly as you would predict it to appear.¹ The lesson is that it’s always possible to add exceptions and special rules to make the evidence fit your model — but if you have to do this a lot, it may be a sign that the model is wrong. You can deal with a few incongruities, but at some point you have to consider that perhaps your model is incongruous with reality. 

With that in mind, Kofman and Levin proceed to present the reader with a veritable potpourri of incongruities — a feast of epicycles, for those who like that sort of thing.  

Melted Caterpillars and Headless Worms 

They start at the beginning, with the minds of primitive organisms. Primitive though they may be, it’s hard to see how any machine could be complex enough to do what their minds seem to do.

For example: when caterpillars are in their chrysalises, their brains physically dissolve (along with the rest of their bodies) and are rebuilt as butterfly brains. Yet experiments show that memories from their caterpillar days survive. In a controlled study, researchers used shock therapy to make caterpillars averse to a certain scent, and then presented them with it after they had become butterflies. Sure enough, the butterflies still remembered to avoid it — in spite of the fact that their brains had been broken down and rebuilt basically from scratch during metamorphosis! 

Even stranger… if you cut off a planarian flatworm’s head, it will grow a new head — with the old head’s memories intact. (If the memories can be said to have belonged to the old head at all, which this study would seem to call into doubt.) 

Experiments like these seem to indicate that there is something lacking in the model of the brain as a computer, with memories stored in the arrangement of neurons like data on a hard drive. Or maybe the memories are just encoded somewhere we haven’t thought to look yet. Either way, there’s more to the story than scientists can yet explain. 

Hypnosis and Helpful Ghosts 

After surveying the paradoxes in primitive cognition, Kofman and Levin move up to clinical studies of humans. Once again, they are very careful not to drag readers too far out of their comfort zones:

As suits one’s level of appetite for disruption, these can be taken as: serious challenges requiring major re-thinking, disparate facts to be accommodated with the paradigm by minor extension, or even just as hypothetical thinking aids for stretching our theoretical skills to consider “what would it mean if it were true”.

The phenomena discussed in this section include some well-known puzzles: cardiac arrest patients with little detectable brain activity who nevertheless experience more-vivid-than-real-life “near death experiences”; terminal lucidity in Alzheimer’s patients; patients who have half their brain surgically removed to little cognitive effect; etc. They also include some less well-documented and often downright bizarre occurrences — such as a report of a lesbian woman who became “inexplicably but strongly attracted to men” after receiving a heterosexual individual’s heart via transplant. Or the case of a woman whose life was apparently saved by the voices in her head: 

In this case, a woman in her 30s from London experienced voices in her mind which spoke and pressured her to go get diagnostic scans for her brain tumor. She had no prior neurological signs or symptoms so there was no clear justification to request diagnostic imaging. Yet, once the doctor conceded to the voices’ instruction and ordered a head CT scan, a brain tumor was indeed identified. After the tumor was removed, the voices said goodbye and never returned to the woman again (Azuonye, 1997; Bobrow, 2003).

Kofman and Levin indulge in a moment of passive-voice speculation about the cause of the astute voices: 

It is unknown whether this is evidence of previously-unknown modules in the human mind which have access to normally unconscious physiological body states and can occasionally report them via the linguistic interface, or something else.

(I have to admit, I laughed out loud at “or something else.” Not because that seems unlikely, but because — well, there’s a lot you can fit into those three words…) 

In another report, a woman with no known past exposure to German began speaking it while under hypnosis by her husband. This time, Kofman and Levin do not offer any speculation as to how such a thing might occur, but only vaguely suggest that it implies “the presence of faster routes to this skill than is predicted by current theories of memory and language acquisition by human brains.”

Questioning the Unquestionable 

Maybe the climate of opinion is shifting. There seems to be a growing interest in mainstream academic circles in questioning certain scientific paradigms, particularly in evolutionary biology and neuroscience. I’m reminded of what evolutionary neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell wrote in his recent book defending free will: 

We make decisions, we choose, we act — we are causal forces in the universe. These are the fundamental truths of our existence and absolutely the most basic phenomenology of our lives. If science seems to be suggesting otherwise, the correct response is not to throw our hands up and say, “Well, I guess everything we thought about our own existence is a laughable delusion.” It is to accept instead that there is a deep mystery to be solved and to realize that we may need to question the philosophical bedrock of our scientific approach if we are to reconcile the clear existence of choice with the apparent determinism of the physical universe. [Emphasis added.]

Those are strong words. But are these scientists really ready to question the “bedrock” itself? Or are there deeper layers that remain unquestionable? Mitchell, for his part, is not ready to challenge the doctrine of methodological materialism. Kofman and Levin are willing to go somewhat further, albeit with great caution. Whether they continue to push the boundary, or someone else does, I suspect that the boundary will continue to be pushed — you can only add so many epicycles before it’s time for a revolution. 

Notes

1. After Johannes Kepler figured out that the orbits of the planets are elliptical, rather than circular.