The Two Ways Science Got The Human Mind Wrong, & The One Way Buddhists Got It Right
A new pragmatism in the face of mechanistic empiricism
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There are a lot of people who believe that philosophy is a competition between ideologies.
They pit worldviews against each other, hoping that in this competition of intellect or ideology, there will be winners and losers. Someone will come out on top.
I actually believe that philosophers didn’t play this game often. In classical philosophy, I’ve seen more evidence that thinkers were intuitive, honest-to-a-fault, and anti-social. They described their worldview as it felt to them.
As William James said:
“The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means.
It is our individual way of seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.”
Until the 20th century, a great deal of philosophers never had their books read by their peers in their lifetimes.
They hedged a bet on their work with little-to-no, external validation. They simply trusted themselves.
Hundreds of years after their death, you hear people say, “This person was the greatest thinker of the 19th century.”
How funny that the greatest thinkers never got to live in a world of social validation. That human societies are often too mundane to see the brilliance of a philosopher within their lifetime.
So why do we use philosophy as an arbitrary competition when philosophers, themselves, rarely used their own ideas to compete with other people?
It’s only the students of philosophers, centuries later, who play this intellectual game with their ideas - after the fact.
And though this philosophical self-esteem game is common, I think it distracts from some of the deeper reasons philosophy works in people’s lives: the number one reason being––
It enables us to question our current paradigm.
This is something that philosophy students claim to want, but rarely do.
Philosophy enables us to question and see our societal paradigm as a flawed construct of our collective subjectivity…
And it helps us construct a more productive, meaningful, and pragmatic worldview to exist within, long before a society has discovered the validity of this worldview.
Sure, with the way I’ve just made it sound, it seems like philosophy is quite lonely. And if you enjoy being in a large crowd of people who share your worldview, then I’m 100% convinced philosophy will rub you the wrong way.
I, myself, enjoy my own company––as many other thinkers undoubtedly do. So I believe in this long lineage of philosophers who, instead of blowing where the wind takes them, could stop to think about whether our worldview makes the most sense––and whether it serves us, even if it’s a popular paradigm.
As Leo Tolstoy says:
“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
Questioning the beliefs of our peers or the beliefs we were raised to grow up in enables us to live a more intentional existence.
Sincere and meaningful thinkers are often the first to separate their worldview from others and understand that the worldview that best serves them isn’t necessarily the worldview that has reigning validity.
But is ‘validity’ truly motivated by a noble premise, in the first place?
Or is it, sometimes, motivated by fear, cowardice, (or even power & control)?
An example of the fear front, is that western skeptics have always been skeptical of the merits of eastern religions, until Buddhists, who had trained in meditation, openly invited these western skeptics to put them into an fMRI machine and test their brains during meditative states.
They wanted to show the western world that meditation had physiological changes (mind over matter). And they were right: these Buddhists are altering their brain states via intentional meditative practice.
You can read a little about it here, here, or here.
But what was wild, was that after neuroscientists were able to confirm that meditation did have measurable impact, suddenly you had the biggest western skeptics turn into the loudest advocates for meditation.
Some of these same skeptics now have podcasts advocating for the benefits of meditation and are suddenly considered “experts in the practice.” (Despite never truly believing in those benefits until a machine convinced them they were valid).
I mean, maybe I’m the only one disgusted by the hypocrisy.
But I think about this ALL THE TIME. Because If I had to choose a side to be on: I would choose to be the Buddhist who spent years doing something that worked, rather than the cowardly skeptic who refused to try something that worked until such time as science vindicated it.
And there’s a truly pragmatic reason for this:
After all, would science have ever been able to measure the impact of meditation if eastern Buddhists hadn’t cultivated this ability for centuries without anybody’s approval?
If we were all skeptics - there would be no meditation benefits to even measure and prove valid by science once the technology was built to measure those effects.
Essentially, science will only be able to prove certain things valid in the future - if we continue to advocate for them in the interim.
But think about it from the purely practical perspective: for thousands of years, people in the east have been benefiting from meditation.
Long before fMRI machines were even invented.
And if these western skeptics had their way: all of those people who benefited for centuries would never have even tried meditation.
And thus, they ALL would have missed out on learning to cultivate happiness and wellbeing within them.
Essentially, human beings for thousands of years would have failed to reap the benefits of meditation if they had lived within a worldview constructed only on scientific validity.
At some point we have to ask ourselves, is that truly the most rational way to live?
Now, I just want to pause to say that it doesn’t take a particularly intelligent person to realize that if stress causes things like high blood pressure––and you can reduce stress by doing things like deep breathing… it stands to reason that meditation would work on a basic level.
Far before claims of enlightenment. I mean: stress is easily the most overlooked example of mind over matter.
Your perception creates the conceptual assessment of stress
That conceptual assessment of stress triggers a hormonal stress response
These hormones affect digestion, blood pressure, and sleep.
High blood pressure can lead to chronic heart disease
Bam, you’re dead
So by simply working to change your perceptions and your mental awareness of the world around you, you can create a healthier mental attitude that does have measurable impact over your physical body and even your lifespan.
You don’t need to be “spiritual” to see the pragmatism of meditation at a base level.
(I might have already mentioned that I’m atheist. But for the record, Buddha was a fairly agnostic person as well. I, personally, consider the origins of Buddhism to be some of the first psychological writings).
But perhaps I’m just a person who exists in a lot more pragmatic frame of mind.
Or perhaps I just don’t fear being wrong.
If you reduced your own stress - then fuck the skeptics’ impression of you. The proof is in the pudding. You feel better.
If you’re intelligent and you give meditation a good faith try, and you feel changes within yourself, this, quite simply, has pragmatic value to you, regardless of societal validity.
This goes back to the definition of pragmatism spoken by William James. He says in one of his lectures:
“It’s astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence.
…
The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me … if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.”
At the time, William James was using the new philosophy of pragmatism to try and find a bridge between two types of intellectual thinkers: he categorized them as:
THE TENDER-MINDED: Rationalistic (going by ‘principles’), Intellectualistic, Idealistic, Optimistic, Religious, Free-willist, Monistic, Dogmatical.
THE TOUGH-MINDED: Empiricist (going by ‘facts’), Sensationalistic, Materialistic, Pessimistic, Irreligious, Fatalistic, Pluralistic, Skeptical.
Essentially these differences translate to those who believe that we can understand the world via our purely rational conception of it (rationalistic).
And those who believe that we must understand the world via sensory data and experimentation of it (empiricism).
The latter led to the Scientific Revolution and the Scientific Method.
However, I will admit that even in my philosophy classes this always confused me, because, in my view, the school of thought called empiricism quickly left the “sensory data” phase and grew into “mechanistic empiricism” throughout the 20th century.
Essentially, we’re now at the point where we don’t even trust our own senses. We trust the cold, hard machine’s senses.
And thus, people no longer want to just simply do meditation (and feel the results for themselves). They want to have a machine qualify the results for them. (Even to a point of over-reliance).
I actually have a funny example of this, but I don’t have the exact article anymore, so I will have to share the story from my memory of it.
Somewhere around 2018, I read an article from a nueroscientist who studies sociopathy.
One day he was looking through a stack of brain scans (that were presumably not labeled, to protect privacy or avoid bias). And he saw a brain scan that looked as if it came from a sociopath.
Perhaps he pulled it aside or wanted permission from the recipient for further study. But somewhere along the line it was revealed to him that the scan that showed a sociopath was his own brain scan. (He and his colleagues had contributed their own anonymous scans to the pile).
And thus, from looking at an fMRI scan of his own brain, he found out that he might be a sociopath.
This caused a little bit of an existential crisis because he didn’t consider himself a bad person.
The article went on to quote some of his family, who upon realizing that he might be a sociopath, said things like, “Well, you have had some odd reactions to things. Maybe some callous comments after a family death, etc. But we didn’t really think anything of it.”
Now I just want to pause to say that I don’t know that there is any valid evidence that a person who lacks empathy at a single moment in their life is 100% incapable of learning empathy in the future.
In my understanding of fMRI brain scans, they rely on current activity in the brain, or recent blood flow to areas of the brain. And thus, I’ve always wondered if it even makes sense to categorize someone “as a sociopath” - based on one particular scan during their lifetime.
In other words: is a sociopath fully and completely incapable of empathy for their entire lifetime? Or is sociopathy a fluctuating phenomenon.
We all know the stories of a person who has no empathy for a victim, until they, themselves, become a victim. Sometimes empathy comes from experience with trauma, that enables a person to suddenly learn how to relate to another person’s trauma.
So whether empathy and sociopathy are fixed states, or merely temporary filters that lead us to interpret certain events with more or less compassion than other events is an entirely new topic (one I’d really love to dig into in the future).
But the real takeaway here is that someone has a PhD in the academic study of the human brain––and is paid money to identify and research how the brain works (presumably this study was focused on empathy and sociopathy).
And yet, in all of those years of academic research he was unable to look inside his own damn mind for a few minutes and ask:
What IS empathy? Do I possess it? Do I possess it more or less than anybody else?
And because he was so well academically trained to never ask that question (in order to avoid bias)––he was an expert in something he, himself, didn’t even know he didn’t possess.
So when I hear descriptions of 100 years ago, people being torn between rational reasoning and empirical reasoning (or the reasoning of our sensory data)… I have to wonder if we’ve already moved well past empirical reasoning and we’ve already made the transition into “mechanistic reasoning.”
Essentially, we refuse to draw ANY conclusions until a machine tells us to.
Which seems to paralyze both the rational reasoning and the empirical reasoning.
In this particular case (remember I did start out as a psych major)… it seems like academic psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience are so afraid of the human bias––so afraid of the taint of the subjectivity of the human mind––that they’d rather have experts in the field of the human mind who lack even the basic awareness of their own mind.
And they do this to make the study of the human… more rational.
Which reminds me of the Michel de Montaigne quote:
“I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.”
But I’m not judging the scientific process in its entirety. I respect the scientific method. It just seems to me that a person who wants to exist in 100% valid parameters is actually the biggest loser of them all.
Because, they miss out on so many benefits.
Science moves slowly.
And an entirely valid method of pragmatically existing that is already discovered and utilized by “rationalists” could pass you by while you wait for “mechanistic empiricism” to legitimize it.
Science does move slowly.
Even last year, I was reading a study about how fish oil supplements don’t reduce our risk for heart disease (even though eating fresh fish definitely does)… the study was something like a 15 year long study.
And I just thought, holy smokes, a lot of people can’t wait 15 years to find out if a supplement does or doesn’t decrease their chance for chronic disease.
We’re all making daily choices about our health RIGHT NOW. Every day we make these choices about the food we put into our bodies.
So we all have to do the best with the information we have.
So, yes, I worry that the pace of science is such that we might never see answers definitively proven in our lifetime. This is particularly true in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience.
I worry that a hoard of human beings existing today are struggling to make sense of the world––to find answers and insight into why they’re suffering. And they can do nothing about it, because they’re taught that solutions are only valid if they’re mechanistically proven true.
Look at the mapping of the human genome. The Human Genome Project began in 1985 and with the assistance of newer technology, the final mapping was completed in 2022.
For 37 years, thousands of researchers anticipated that mapping the human genome would allow us to understand the genetic causes for certain mental illnesses.
They were specifically targeting schizophrenia, since three of the project’s architects had a personal interest in it.
After completing this project, they failed to identify a single causal gene, and instead found only 300 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) which are considered ‘risk genes’ that help express a causal gene, ‘but do not cause a disease in the absence of other factors.’
As the NIH describes it:
“Less than 2% of the human genome is made up of genes that code for proteins. The remaining 98% includes DNA segments that help to direct the activity of those genes.”
But there were no causal genes for schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, or any other mental disorders found by the Human Genome Project.
E. Fuller Torrey describes in this paper:
It has now been more than two decades since President Bill Clinton, flanked by Francis Collins and Craig Venter at a White House news conference, announced the completion of the Human Genome Project.
Clinton promised it would “revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases”' (Collins, 2010).
Specifically regarding psychiatric disorders, Francis Collins added that “the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness will be transformed” (Collins, 2003a).
37 years after this undertaking began, they’ve discovered no new insights into any severe mental illness, and even worse, there’s no insight into non-severe, regular problems of human psychology.
So whether you have a chronic disorder or you’re just a normal bum with regular-qualifying mental health burdens… this 37-year scientific project has nothing to offer you.
It gets worse! Everybody in popular culture has heard the claim that serotonin deficiencies cause chronic depression.
I had read research from around 2014 that debunked this idea. But it’s now TEN YEARS LATER and people still think it’s true. I’ve only recently begun to hear popular articles dispelling this “scientifically-caused myth.”
In an article by Joanna Thompson for Quanta Magazine, she describes the latest “death knell” of the serotonin theory.
An international team of scientists led by Joanna Moncrieff of University College London screened 361 papers from six areas of research and carefully evaluated 17 of them. They found no convincing evidence that lower levels of serotonin caused or were even associated with depression. People with depression didn’t reliably seem to have less serotonin activity than people without the disorder.
So why do SSRIs still work?
Although serotonin levels don’t seem to be the primary driver of depression, SSRIs show a modest improvement over placebos in clinical trials. But the mechanism behind that improvement remains elusive.
“Just because aspirin relieves a headache, [it] doesn’t mean that aspirin deficits in the body are causing headaches,” said John Krystal, a neuropharmacologist and chair of the psychiatry department at Yale University.
Another paper from the National Library of Medicine describes it with even more harshness:
The “serotonin hypothesis” of clinical depression is almost 50 years old. At its simplest, the hypothesis proposes that diminished activity of serotonin pathways plays a causal role in the pathophysiology of depression.
…
However, the serotonin hypothesis of depression has not been clearly substantiated. Indeed, dogged by unreliable clinical biochemical findings and the difficulty of relating changes in serotonin activity to mood state, the serotonin hypothesis eventually achieved “conspiracy theory” status, whose avowed purpose was to enable industry to market selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to a gullible public (3).
P.S. This goes back to what I said at the beginning:
Is ‘validity’ truly motivated by a noble premise, in the first place?
Or is it, sometimes, motivated by fear, cowardice, (or even power & control)?
Essentially, a predatory scientific industry (like Big Pharma) could seize on people’s fear and over-reliance of scientific validity… to market a simplistic solution to a complex, chronic problem.
And thus, the serotonin-deficiency theory was born and spread to the masses as an on-off switch that will solve their depression quickly.
BUT this merely allowed the industry to have power and control over the “happiness market.”
I bet you’re all thinking about those western skeptic podcasters now.
Holy smokes, two of our leading scientific claims (that chronic depression was due to a serotonin deficiency and that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were genetic) have now been proven false by science, itself.
While meditation - an eastern spiritual claim - has now been proven valid, by science itself.
What a time to be alive.
But listen, this is not surprising from a pragmatic perspective. (And you recall that the origins of Buddhism were not spiritual. They were more psychological).
But the mistakes made here have almost nothing to do with the science itself.
Rather, this is the price we pay for being human. And for allowing ourselves to be motivated by things like fear and power.
The desire for power made a predatory scientific body (like Big Pharma) abuse scientific studies in order to market a solution to malleable people.
(Again, that solution of SSRIs may still help to alleviate symptoms of depression. But the solution was just a promise built on false information).
But it was also the FEAR of being WRONG that enabled them to do this.
That FEAR of being invalid has led scientists to become more and more detached from the thing they’re trying to study.
Just like the neuroscientist who was studying sociopathy without even trying to conceptually define empathy or ask himself whether he even had it.
Eastern Philosophy, on the other hand, is derived from a centuries-old practice of deep self-awareness. Not your average self-awareness, but actually training and studying your own mind through hours and hours of daily discipline.
I’m not surprised that the Buddhists came out ahead here.
In fact, it’s the very reason I left a psychology career after only 3 semesters as a psych major.
Essentially, I wanted to write philosophy of mind that was built on that very same deep, relentless labor of hours and hours of daily discipline… and didn’t have to get hung up on the waiting game of mechanistic empiricism. (And that’s what I’ve spent the past 15-20 years doing).
As someone who never thought that happiness was an “on-off switch”… and viewed happiness, instead, as inextricably linked to personal meaning, perception, authenticity, self-worth, purpose, and choices… I’m relieved that the serotonin theory is dead.
Rather, I’m happy that a theory that was created by bad science was snuffed out by good science. And that the human brain is beginning to be seen - by science, itself - as a very complex set of millions and millions of neurons that have an elusive, individualistic relationship to each other.
(One that we might never understand unless we can build a quantum computer to process that amount of data).
Thus, the simplistic theories that reduce complex emotions to a mere on-off switch are dead. Or are, at least, getting there.
Still, a theory that had a 50-year prevalence is basically tens of millions of people’s whole lifetimes.
So how many people lost decades of their life to this theory?
And don’t get me wrong, after 20 years of writing philosophy of mind, I have thousands of nuanced ideas for the various influences on our ability to be happy.
And one of them IS our physiological health.
It doesn’t have to be either/or. Some people seem to believe that if our diet affects our mental health, then our entire personality must be derived from our genetics.
Two things can be true. Diet definitely affects our wellbeing.
And so does perception.
But until we confront our fear of being wrong, I suspect that we're paralyzing a generation of students on the pretense that they’ll be fools if they trust their intuition and pragmatically apply solutions that have not yet been proven valid by “mechanistic empiricism.”
We’re teaching a whole generation to ignore their own experiences.
Which is exactly against the advice of William James and his pragmatism. (And this is kind of ironic, considering he’s called the Father of Modern Psychology).
As he wrote:
The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable… and disputes over such notions are unending.
The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion - rather than that notion - were true?
If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.
Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.
He goes on to say:
Mr. Charles Pierce - after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action - said that to develop a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole significance.
…
To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve––what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare.
Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all.
James goes on to say:
I am accustomed to put questions to my classes in this way: in what respects would the world be different if this alternative or that alternative were true? If I can find nothing that would become different, then the alternative has no sense.
That is––the rival views mean practically the same thing, and meaning, other than practical, there is for us none.
That’s, in a nutshell, my whole psychological practice. To look for the things that aren’t proven true or not––but have measurable impact in the human mind.
And one thing to remember is that a person can equally be affected by a false belief as a true belief. And thus, our human mind is impacted by things that aren’t real every damn day.
So it’s useful to have a non-scientific view of the human mind, as something that operates in practicality, rather than reality.
When I read William James, I also think of the free will debate - and one of my recent essays about the practical application of not believing in a free will society. I argued that if an entire society didn’t believe in free will, then the practical application of this would be that the society would be used and abused by Strongmen.
Essentially, from a pragmatic perspective: it doesn’t matter whether free will is true or not. That’s not the important part of the debate. Especially when we have no scientific evidence one way or another.
What IS important, is playing out the consequences of believing it’s true or not. And then looking at the kind of society that these consequences would bring. My end conclusion was, “I’d rather live in a society ruled by people who believe in free will, than I would like to live in a society that didn’t.”
I’ve watched people hem and haw over whether free will exists for nearly a decade. But over that decade, I continued to exercise my free will and I became - if you can believe it - even happier.
Even more functional.
Whether I am free or not - every year I become happier on the premise that I am.
Whether I am free or not - I have become a hell of a lot more functional on the premise that I am.
So why would I change that, when not believing in free will achieves no practical purpose?
As I told someone on Bluesky a couple months back:
Instead of debating whether it exists or not, you’d be better off strengthening the muscle right now. Exercising your free will in practice. Cultivating your ability to make better decisions.
Then, in 10 years, you’ll have a stronger willpower than those people who are still tediously debating it.
Are there people who refuse to grow and change and take responsibility for themselves because they’re waiting for scientific vindication that their willpower even exists?
Based on my own experiences, I’m 100% sure that in the future, neuroscientists will confirm that a measure of willpower exists freely.
But you know what, dude? I may not be alive to see it.
So I continue to believe in free will and exercise it - meaningfully and productively. Because I’d rather take the risk of being wrong
and be happy, healthy, functional, self-aware, and unified…
Than waste my life trying only to be valid and end up being dysfunctional and powerless in the interim.
Essentially, I’d rather trust the results of my own experience. (Which typically was the original empiricism).
Just like, when I take supplements, I don’t just have a faith-based belief in them. I do actually want to see results. Fish oil supplements may not protect my heart, but they make my hair healthier.
If I try meditation and I feel happier, I’d rather keep doing meditation to get that result. Whether science has validated it or not.
And to all of the things that science might validate 200 years from now… but they work and have impact right now anyway…
I’d rather be benefitting from things not yet proven valid - and appreciating the benefits long before any skeptic dares to believe it works.
There’s something truly pragmatic and sensible about a human being who doesn’t waste a whole lifetime being unhappy - because they’re waiting for definitive proof that something works to cure unhappiness - before using it.
But there’s also something truly rational about self-forgiveness. About looking back at your life and saying:
I didn’t have all of the answers with definitive proof. But I did the best I could to make decisions that made me more functional, more pragmatic, happier, and a better human being overall.
And I’m proud of myself for that approach.
There are so many people in this society who fear being wrong––to crippling levels.
They can’t solve their own problems because they doubt all of their solutions.
They’re waiting for scientific evidence to give them accurate and valid solutions to their problems… not realizing that science may never understand the human mind in our lifetime.
And even if it did, it may never understand your unique malady.
What works for one person might not even cure you.
That doesn’t mean we can’t adjust our perceptions as science gradually adds to the synthesis.
But it does mean that it makes a lot of sense to experiment with our own behaviors and feelings, until we’ve managed to get better results, long before science catches up with us.
I don’t want to tell you to stop trying to be on the hunt for scientific proof.
I just want to tell you that scientific proof might prove something valid after you’re dead and gone.
And you missed out on living a wonderful life in the interim.
And sure - someone in the future will win an ideological war. Someone will receive accolades from their peers. Win awards for their research. Move society forward. THEN.
But that won’t do you any good if you’re dead.
And you don’t get to reap the benefits.
You only have a short life to live. Don’t waste it trying to be valid. When you can absolutely enjoy it being pragmatic and reasonably intelligent.
Questions For Discussion:
What are some of the pragmatic beliefs that society has had (without scientific proof) that have enabled us to grow as a society and achieve positive results?
What are some practical techniques to increase happiness in your life?
What are some experiences you’ve had with psychiatry or clinicians that you felt either helped you understand yourself more? Or helped you understand yourself less?
How can we practice being open-minded to new discoveries, while still trusting our instincts and intuition, reasonably well, in the interim?
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Always love it when an article references Buddhism, Hume and Descartes. Nicely done. :)