IT’S OFTEN DELIGHTFUL, AND SOMETIMES JARRING, when the flow of the book you’ve been reading suddenly takes an unexpected turn, right at the end. Talented novelists know how to do that well, but it’s not what I expect to find in a book about the brain by a neuroscientist.
The first six chapters of David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (Vintage, 2011) are just what you’d expect in a popular work presenting the state of knowledge in a field like neuroscience. The writing is clever. The scientific findings are both remarkable and surprising. The research challenges widely held popular beliefs, especially about the importance of consciousness in guiding human behavior. And the author’s orientation throughout these chapters is modern and materialist, and therefore, anti-religion and anti-soul.
That’s why the turn in the book’s seventh and final chapter was so unexpected. After reviewing the ground he’d covered in the previous six chapters, Eagleman claims the material he has presented leads us to “a key question: do we possess a soul that is separate from our physical biology, or are we simply an enormously complex biological network that mechanically produces our hopes, aspirations, dreams, desires, humor, and passions?” (p. 203). He concludes that if it exists, and whatever it might be, the soul must be at least entangled “irreversibly” with the microscopic electrochemical and neurological structures of the brain.
So, consciousness is an epiphenomenon after all, not central to either our behavior or our identity. It’s the “enormously complex biological network,” the unconscious physiological mechanisms that run the show, and even the soul (whatever that might be) is “irreversibly” dependent on this material foundation (p. 209). Case closed, reductive materialism wins the day, right?
Well, not really, because Eagleman goes on to point out that, as an emergent system, the mind/brain may become “something greater than the sum [of its parts]” (p. 217). Reductive materialism cannot take neuroscientists far enough to give us a full picture of the brain, the mind, human behavior, and human being. It’s entirely possible there is some aspect of the reality our current scientific technology is unable to detect, much less to measure, leaving us with a crucial lack of understanding (pp. 221-224).
In other words, the confident reductionism and materialism of the typical neuroscientist’s understanding is really a form of whistling in the dark. The mind, the soul, and even the brain, are still black boxes which human science has only barely begun to illuminate.
Cue the transpersonal psychologists and Jungians, the philosophers and theologians, the mystics and spiritual masters. It’s time to enter into a new dialog, one that transcends conventional boundaries and categories. What are we to do with a paradoxical, soul-ish reality that is both material and spiritual, simultaneously? Peggy Lee probably sang it best, “Let’s keep dancing!”
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