DOES GOD EVOLVE?

This was the topic discussed at our January Philosophers' Cafe.  The following contains the text of my opening presentation.  - C. Marxer

God has evolved right along with humans.  Like us, his precise origins are lost in the fogs of prehistory.  His lineage can be dimly traced back through many generations of animal ancestors and nature spirits, worshipped by ancient hunting/gathering clans and tribes.  When people invented farming, the nature spirits were replaced by more anthropomorphic deities.  These tended to be power gods bent on outdoing competitors and helping their tribes or chiefdoms conquer territory, enslave enemy peoples, and set up permanent kingdoms.  Our God was one of those.  Let’s begin with his first appearance in history.

 Apparently God—called El or Yahweh in the old days—was born into a dysfunctional family of Mesopotamian deities about 4000 years ago.  He grew up in a tough neighborhood.  In order to protect his Chosen People, called Israelites, and receive the worship to which he felt entitled, he had to do some terrible things like wipe out a few tribes and kill the firstborn of Egyptian families.  As a result of all that nastiness, he developed some unfortunate character traits:  narcissism, jealousy, impulsive anger, bossiness, misogyny, sexual prudishness, and a fondness for murder and genocide.  His early career was marked by many triumphs and humiliating defeats at the hands of other gods. 

Finally sometime in the sixth century BCE, Yahweh became the chief god of the Jews and the only one whose existence they would acknowledge.  After a few more decades, Yahweh became fed up with the stresses of his job and decided to let the Jews fend for themselves.  As usual they made a mess of things, so God decided to intervene one more time.  He sent his only-begotten son Jesus to set things right, but that didn’t work out very well, either.  So the Heavenly Father recalled his son, quit the earthly life altogether, and retired to heaven to become the One and Only transcendent God of the whole universe.  Good career move.

God is acknowledged as the One Supreme Being today by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. He no longer meddles in human affairs or performs miracles to prove how awesome He is but prefers to rule from an infinite distance through the laws of nature and the instructions of the various priests, preachers, prophets, popes, and imams who serve as His ministers on Earth. 

Philosopher and filmmaker Woody Allen once allowed that God is not evil, that the worst you could say about him is that he is an underachiever.  I disagree.  I think God is a case of arrested development.  His evolution from polytheism to monotheism indicates a certain gain in maturity, but he seems to have exited the world before attaining his full potential.  So we must ask:  what kind of a god is God these days?  Is he the best that he can be, or is he still a work in progress?  What would his psychograph look like?  Does he need therapy?

Like that of humans, God’s psychological development, has been uneven.  

For example, the level of humanity’s cognitive development is very high.  Literacy rates worldwide are at record levels, and among the intellectual elite we have advanced logic, mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, technology, and Scientology.  The level of God’s cognitive development is also very high (according to some, he knows everything).

On the other hand, the level of humanity’s moral evolution is unimpressive -  approximately that of an average 14-year old with anger management problems.

God, too, has evolved morally to about the level of a 14-year old, but with precocious power (some say He’s omnipotent).  Anger management problems are the least of his disorders.  I mean, look at what he allows to go on around here:  massacres, genocides, suicide bombings, American imperialism, and Donald Trump.  God apparently still hates pagans, unbelievers, idolators, homosexuals, transvestites, masturbators, fornicators, birth controllers, African Americans, Syrian refugees, Palestinians, and Muslim women.  In fact, he seems not to think very highly of women in general, ever since that minor transgression in the Garden of Eden.  He just can’t get over it.  Also, although he is supposedly pro-life, he aborts millions of unborn humans every year in procedures called miscarriages.

Here’s another of God’s adolescent traits.  The Heavenly Father is more like a Heavenly Voyeur (some say he knows and sees everything.)  He seems to enjoy watching us screw up.  He also likes to watch humans and animals suffer so-called natural disasters such as falling from high places, sinking in quicksand, being eaten alive, suffocating in sandstorms, drowning at sea, burning to death in fires, succumbing to horrible diseases, and fatally ingesting peanuts.

However, God is not entirely disengaged from his creation.  Just as humans love board and video games, God is obsessed with planetary games, usually of a violent sort, such as whipping up monstrous storms, earthquakes, tidal waves, floods, plagues of locusts and pine beetles, species extinctions, and global warming.  One of his favorite games is World of Warfare, which now looks to become as eternal as he is.  He’s saving his absolute favorite for last, called the Rapture, which He wins by destroying the world.

This is all pretty immature.  Like us, God has a long way to go.

*  *  *  *  *

This somewhat cheeky account elicited a wide range of challenges:

  -  “Ideas about God change, but God Himself is eternal and unchanging.”

  -  “God doesn’t exist; ideas about God change in response to changing social, economic, and political conditions.”

-  “What about other gods in other traditions?”

-  “What about the God of the heart or feeling?”

-  “I have conversations with God every day, so this topic is irrelevant.”

-  “God is not necessarily a ‘He.’”

Surprisingly, no one accused me of shortstopping the story with the death of Jesus, the Son of Yahweh.  What about Jesus’s legacy?  What about Christianity?  What about the good news of universal salvation in the Gospels?  What about the Social Gospel and Liberation Theology? Isn’t God now the loving Heavenly Father and, being so, has he not achieved full maturity in his moral development? 

I confess to the crime.  God’s biography does not end in the first century CE. Jesus corrected the bad reputation his father had acquired over the centuries, proclaiming that God actually loves people and has prepared a new destiny for them: “For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” (John: 3:15, New International Version)  Jesus further announced that the old, severe Mosaic law was to be enhanced by a new law of love extending even to one’s enemies.  We can justly call this a considerable leap forward in moral maturity.

Unfortunately, Jesus had preached a mixed message.  Yes, he enjoined his followers to love God and to love their neighbor as themselves and even to love their enemies, but he also said he came not to bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34).  Furthermore, those who rejected him, he warned, would suffer eternal hellfire, a terrifying doctrine much emphasized by the Christian Church which took Jesus literally in his comment about that “sword.”  Crusades and inquisitions followed a few centuries later.  So this new God was not so different from the old boss God.  He still demands exclusive obedience and faith and continues to allow the horrors I listed above (and many others). 

As I said earlier, this God still has a long way to go.  My Christian critics are right about one thing, though:  there is a larger story to tell about the evolution of God, but what many don’t yet recognize is that the Abrahamic God represents just part of it.  Developmental psychology, anthropology, and spirituality tell us that over some 200,000 years human cultures and their God(s) have evolved through at least 6 identifiable stages or structures, each of which represents an advance over the previous stages while retaining the most important features of those stages.  In the following brief summary, I will continue to use the name ‘God’ as convenient shorthand for the various stages of spiritual development and to stress the underlying unity of the evolutionary story. 

The overall pattern of the evolutionary story is that of thesis, antithesis, synthesis; or emergence, crisis, transcend-and-include.  All cultural stages—the archaic, the magical, the mythic, etc, eventually encounter problems that can’t be solved at their level of consciousness.  A higher level then emerges along with changes in technology and social organization.  The God of the earlier stage is replaced by a more adequate God who helps the society to stabilize itself at the higher level.  Magical God evolves to mythic, mythic to rational, rational to pluralistic, and beyond.

First to appear (emerge) in humanity’s spiritual story is the magical God of the survival clans of ancient times.  It was perceived as nature and ancestral spirits which could both harm and benefit the group.  Shamans exercised supernatural power through visions, rituals, curses, and spells.  Eventually, crises of various kinds, e.g. population growth, required God to exercise more power.

With the emergence of larger tribal societies and chiefdoms comes the magical/mythic God, still polytheistic but more anthropomorphic and more powerful.  He/she required worship and sacrifices in return for protecting the tribe from enemies, demons, dragons and other horrible beasts, and natural disasters.  The young Yahweh was just such a god, a warrior god, as we have seen, endowed with great magical power over people and nature.  Again crises forced God to adapt and vanquish rivals.

Next to appear is the mythic God, often portrayed as Creator and Ruler of the world whose Sacred Power and Absolute Law is revealed in scriptures or through prophets. His plan for the salvation of all is administered—often brutally—by emperors, kings, or religious authorities who claim to rule by Divine Right.  This God was virtually unchallenged for hundreds of years until the myths began to crumble under the assault of a new, naturalistic engine of truth—science.

The modern era saw the rise of a rational God who relies on the scientific method as the sole source of truth about the world.  This God is dismissive of magic and myth, which are seen to be literally false.  He prefers rational discourse to religious command as a means of achieving cooperation in human affairs.  Salvation in the form of endless Progress is promised by the God of reason and technology.  This structure dominates in today’s globalized civilization, but is now facing multiple serious crises.

A few decades ago, a pluralistic or holistic God appeared, taking a broader perspective than the analytic and materialistic rational God, who was perceived to be shot through with gender, racial, and ethnic bias; its economic system guaranteed to produce gross inequalities and class conflict.  Rational God was also oblivious to its destructive effects on the environment.  The new pluralistic God identifies itself with the Great Web of Life, seeing all things and people as interrelated and interdependent.  Relativism, tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism, feminism, truth and reconciliation, environmentalism, animal rights, consensus decision-making, and emotional sensitivity are among its principal values.  All positive and noble in theory.  Unfortunately, pluralistic God’s political correctness, extreme relativism and deconstruction, narcissism, and contempt for all other Gods seems now to a growing number of thinkers to be an obstacle to the more radical approach needed to effectively address the various crises the world now faces.

In response, just emerging now among a small but growing  number of individuals worldwide is an integral or holistic God that discovers the patterns that connect the previous stages with one another in a coherent, global evolutionary process.  He/she/it preserves all of the life-enhancing traits of earlier Gods, while critiquing those aspects of the mythic, rational, and pluralistic Gods that lead to environmental destruction, military and culture wars,etc, blocking solutions to the wicked problems we face in today’s world.  Integral God uses information from all major cultures, traditions, and academic disciplines and fully honors all higher spiritual levels and states of conscious development.  He/she/it is taking the first steps toward a Theory of Everything that has wide applicability to the problems faced by a fragmented, broken world.

If this story is accurate, we can see that God has indeed evolved, not really with us, as I said initially, but rather in us.  The history of God is our history.  It should be clear by now that I have been extending the name ‘God’ far beyond the Yahweh or Allah of the Abrahamic religions.  If ‘God’ makes you uncomfortable, you can substitute ‘Spirit,’ ‘Consciousness,’ or some other term that feels better to you. 

Whatever term you use, the story will be the same, the story of an evolving universe that seems to have put humans at the cutting edge of creative advance where the next stage will emerge.  Will God have a central role to play in the coming transformation?  If so, which God?

*  *  *  *

Sources:

For more on Yahweh’s moral development from an atheist perspective, see Robert Wright, The Evolution of God.

Good introductions to Integral Philosophy can be found in  Steve McIntosh, Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution and Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything.

Crossroads: Labor Pains of a New Worldview is an award-winning documentary featuring comments by 15 scholars, journalists, and philosophers on why a radical new vision for the world’s future is needed.  It can be viewed free at http://crossroadsfilm.com/.

REINCARNATION SCIENCE

This is a slightly enhanced text of the talk I gave at the November 14 Philosophers’ Café.

It’s hard to know what to think about reincarnation.  The Dalai Lama says he does not remember his previous lives.  Shirley MacLaine says she remembers all of hers.  So did the Buddha, according to the legend, although he advised his disciples not to think about the afterlife – they weren’t going to find out anything about it.  His Tibetan disciples of later times thought a great deal about reincarnation and still do.  They think the most urgent task of life is to strive for moral perfection so as to escape the seemingly endless cycle of birth and rebirth that humans are fated to endure.  Not exactly a recommendation.

Reincarnation is the religious or philosophical belief that a human life does not end at death, that in some manner an essential aspect of a person survives and is born into a new body with a whole new life to live.  We have to define the term rather abstractly because different traditions hold different notions about what it is exactly that reincarnates. 

Reincarnation is not a mainstream belief in western cultures, but it is well established in many others:  the ancient Greeks (Plato), Hindus, Buddhists, West Africans, North American natives, even early Christians.  Some modern esoteric philosophies embrace the doctrine as well.
Mainstream philosophy these days tends to be materialistic and oriented towards science, math, and logic as the only reliable sources of knowledge.  Most mainstream thinkers, therefore, are dismissive or even contemptuous of all supernaturalistic beliefs.  Hence, there is not much literature on the subject of reincarnation.

I had not taken much of an interest in reincarnation before starting work on this talk.  Frankly, the thought of this life being only one of an interminable series of existences I found rather depressing.  But philosophers must face music of all kinds, so I started to find out what current (and respectable) literature is available.  In addition to the ever-helpful Wikipedia, I read three recent books on the subject, each approaching the subject from a different point of view.  Robert Thurman’s Infinite Life was written from the standpoint of an expert on Tibetan Buddhism and spirituality.  Ervin Laszlo and Anthony Peake’s The Immortal Mind aims for a synthesis of empirical research and quantum physics in search of a paradigm shift in how we should think about human life and afterlife.  Life Before Life by Jim B. Tucker is a strictly scientific study of children’s stories about their previous existences.

Does it surprise you to learn of scientific interest in reincarnation?  A considerable body of serious research into the subject has accumulated over nearly 50 years. There are many books that contain the stories of people who remember their past lives, but I have confined my attention to the work of two researchers at the University of Virginia, Dr. Ian Stevenson and Dr. Jim B. Tucker.  Together they have compiled and evaluated over 2500 cases of children's memories of previous lives. Dr. Stevenson, who wrote the introduction to Life Before Life, is the preeminent expert in the field, having specialized in this type of research for over 40 years.

Time does not allow for recounting even one of the stories, which tend to be lengthy and detailed, so I will restrict my remarks to the scientists' methods and their conclusions. Researchers in this field are working in the domain of social psychology. That means the data they are interested in are the reports or stories they are told by their subjects, in this case children who have or had memories of previous existences. The research requires travel to the homes of the children, detailed interviews with the children, their parents, and other adults who may be familiar with the stories, and careful checking of the stories by interviewing anyone who might have known or known of the previous person.

The researchers adopted a strictly open-minded, analytical approach, as required by any scientific investigation. The goal of the project is “to determine the best explanation for the statements by the children and to see if science should consider reincarnation as a possibility.” The broad approach is that of systematic skepticism: reject any case as unsolved that could possibly be accounted for by normal explanations; resort to paranormal explanations as a last resort.

The subjects of the research were usually children, who began to tell their stories between 2 and 4 years of age. The basic pattern of the stories is that a young child repeatedly claims to have memories of a previous life and gives enough details to identify a deceased individual whose life matches the child's statements. The remembered lives tend to be recent, the median time between death and the new life being only 15 – 16 months. Almost always only one life is described. Physical marks, behaviors, and emotions seem to carry over as well as memories. The children always speak from the viewpoint of the previous person, e.g. “I was your grandmother.” “You are not my parents; I need to get back to my real parents.” “This is my house.”

Most of the children stop talking about their previous lives at 6 or 7 years of age. Some even deny remembering, which is not surprising. At this age many childhood memories are lost,  (“early childhood amnesia”).  They almost never talk about what happened between the lives, and rarely offer any words of wisdom. The focus is on people and events.

After confirming the statements that could be confirmed, the scientists were faced with the question of how to explain these bizarre stories. They considered two types of explanation: normal and paranormal:

• Normal: fraud (intentional lying by adults), fantasy, coincidence, knowledge acquired through normal means, faulty memory, and genetic memory (not generally accepted by scientists).

• Paranormal: telepathy, clairvoyance, spirit possession, and reincarnation.

In Life Before Life, Prof. Tucker describes in detail the meticulous process of ruling out normal explanations for the cases the researchers categorize as “strong.” No single explanation applies to all the features of a given case. Birthmarks and birth defects; childrens' statements; past-life behaviors; and children's recognitions of persons still alive may call for different normal explanations to be applied. All the normal explanations failed in the strongest cases. For those the researchers were forced to consider the paranormal.

Overall conclusion

Tucker, Stevenson and others working in the field have become convinced “that reincarnation is the best - even though not the only - explanation for the stronger cases we have investigated.” As Prof. Stevenson put it, “Memories, emotions, and even physical injuries can sometimes carry over from one life to the next.” However, they insist, the evidence does not warrant postulating a soul as the vehicle of reincarnation. Exactly how the personal characteristics move from one life to the next remains a mystery.

Tucker admits this is an astounding conclusion but insists it is not more so than some currently accepted in theories in physics (“weird science”). Therefore, he says, as required by good science, we must be willing to consider reincarnation as a possibility. He is careful to point out that this conclusion requires the assumption that (non-physical) consciousness is a fundamental part of the universe.

In my opinion Tucker's conclusion is somewhat too conservative. Since there is no scientific law that precludes reincarnation as defined in the studies, philosophers have known all along that reincarnation is a possibility. There is no contradiction in the notion that consciousness can exist independently of the body, which partly explains why people throughout history have found it easy to imagine a soul going to heaven or hell, ghosts returning to haunt the living, spirits taking over a person's mind, and so on. What the modern studies have added to the tradition is empirical evidence that reincarnation is a fact. Again, the claim is about evidence, not proof. Proof of the sort found in mathematics and physics is not attainable in this domain. But it seems to me that the evidence contained in the researches we have been examining warrant the conclusion that reincarnation is to some degree probable, not merely possible.

All scientific conclusions and predictions are more or less probable.  Well established theories in physics and chemistry enjoy a high degree of probability.  Social sciences have to settle for a lower standard, but the best results in those domains nevertheless qualify as knowledge.  There is no reason to expect less from a scientific study of stories of past lives.  Here is the basic argument of the reincarnation project:

1. We have lots of data - stories told by children in all regions of the world about past lives they remember.
2. Working hypothesis: at least some of these stories may not be explainable through normal means; a paranormal explanation may have to be employed. 
3. Investigation and analysis have revealed a number of cases (deemed 'strong') that cannot plausibly be explained through normal means.
4. Other paranormal explanations are useless (unverifiable, unfalsifiable).

Therefore, reincarnation is the best explanation for the strong cases.  I contend that if Tucker and company want their investigations to be regarded as advancing the cause of science, that is, as new knowledge, they should be willing to say that reincarnation is probably real.

TROUBLE WITH THE BRAIN, Part 2

By now we are all beginning to realize that one of the most intractable problems is that of defining problems.    -  H. Rittel and M. Webber

Neuromania has become popular as a term for scientists and others who have been so dazzled by advances in neuroscience in the last few decades that they have persuaded themselves that brain science can explain everything about the human mind, consciousness, and selfhood.  Prof. Joe Herbert is afflicted with neuromania, but at least he understands the fundamental problem that is blocking progress toward preventing and treating mental disorders.  It is that we cannot answer the question: How does the brain produce consciousness?  Let’s call this the Standard Question.

One serious problem with this formulation is that it rules out approaches by psychoanalysis and other branches of psychology that have a lot to say about consciousness and mental problems but do not concern themselves with the brain.  Could it be that many so-called mental disorders can be understood as problems of living that are best dealt with by the methods of talking therapy and not by drugs or other brain treatments?  If so, then a balanced approach should be interdisciplinary, which calls for abandoning the Standard Question in favor of a more open definition of the problem.  My suggestion is explained below. 

Part of the reason why science has failed to find an answer in several hundred years is that the question is not amenable to investigation by the experimental methods of brain science.  The brain is objective; it is observable.  Consciousness is subjective.  It cannot be observed.  Your thoughts, feelings, and dreams are private.  No one can know what they are unless you choose to say what they are.  So, to learn anything at all about what a brain event means, neuroscientists have to ask the subject what she is experiencing.  Even neuromaniacs know this.  What they don’t seem to realize is that by doggedly sticking with the Standard Question they beg the prior question, does the brain produce consciousness?  If it doesn’t, then there is no hope of finding out how the brain produces consciousness.  If you define a problem incorrectly at the outset, your chances of hitting upon the right solution are nil.

Does the brain produce consciousness?  Let’s make this specific:  does the brain produce thoughts?  There is not the slightest evidence that it does.  ‘Produced’ is a causal metaphor taken from agriculture and manufacturing.  In both of those we can watch the process of production take place - a farmer’s field produces crops, products roll off an assembly line.  We can see the beginning, we can watch the process unfold, and we see the product at the end.  By contrast, no one  has ever seen a brain produce a thought.  Here’s an ordinary thought from arithmetic:  5 + 7 = 12.  When you think that thought, will a neuroscientist be able to see it in your brain with his scanner?  Of course not.  What’s in the brain is physical; the neurons have mass; the energy of their activity can be measured.  A math equation is not visible, has no mass, no measurable energy, no physical characteristics whatsoever.  Therefore, it cannot be in the brain, nor can it be produced in any simple sense by the brain.  ‘Production’ is a bad metaphor for our purposes.

To realize this is not to deny that our brain interacts with our mind.  It clearly does, and neuroscience is making great progress in learning more about brain-mind correlations.  But because of its narrow focus, neuroscience never gets beyond this basic premise:  the brain is a necessary condition for mental activity to occur.  No brain, no thoughts or feelings.  Damaged brain, impaired thinking or feeling.   Take off the tunnel viewer and we realize the brain is only one item in a large network of necessary conditions, including our cardio-vascular system, our digestive system, and the other parts of our bodies that are essential to life and therefore to the proper functioning of the brain.  So the whole body is involved along with other, non-body conditions that I will discuss later.  Neuromania commits the Fallacy of the Single Cause:  the assumption that because the brain is a necessary condition, then it must be the sole and sufficient cause of our mental lives.  That’s plainly false.  (It’s not science, by the way, since no experiment supports the assumption.  It’s bad philosophy.)

The Standard Question also ignores the fact that the relationship between brain and mind is a two-way street.  It is inter-action.  Mental activity can bring about changes in the brain.  Neuroplasticity and the placebo effect are just two items of evidence that demonstrate this.

The brain does not produce thoughts, feelings, dreams or any other experience.  So to ask “How does the brain produce consciousness?” is to mis-define the problem.   It sends researchers off in a direction that cannot fail to mystify them in the way so poignantly described by Prof. Herbert in his Aeon piece.  In my previous post I asked three questions that pose no difficulty for any six-year-old child but leave neuromaniacs scratching their heads.  Here they are again:

1. If I imagine my mother’s face, why can’t a neuroscientist see the image in my brain, even with his state of the art scanning machine? 

2. If pain sensations occur entirely in my brain, why do I feel the pain of a sore toe in the toe and not in my head?

3. Suppose I spot a bird in a tree and point it out to a friend.  If seeing the bird takes place entirely in my brain, why do I point away from my head toward the tree? 

Here are the straightforward answers that anyone not afflicted with neuromania understands perfectly well:

1.  Because the image of my mother’s face is not in my brain.  

There is no “inner theater” inside my brain equipped with a little screen on which my imagined pictures are projected.  The same goes for my dreams.  So, you may ask, if not in my brain, then where are they?  This is another misguided question.  People assume everything real has to have location in space, but we have seen already that this belief is false.  Thoughts are real, so are dreams and the phantoms of my imagination, but because they have no physical characteristics, they are not physical realities and therefore cannot be located in our very physical brain.  And if they are not in my brain, then they are not anywhere at all.  There may be a way to avoid this strange conclusion, but if there is it won’t be through the dogmas of neurophilosophy. 

2.   Because the pain you feel is actually in the toe, not in your brain. 

This is laughably obvious.  Only a neuromaniac would try to persuade you that you are really feeling the pain in your brain, as if there were no difference between a toe-ache and a headache.  Of course, that’s not how the point is usually stated.  Materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett says that experiences like painful toes are illusions.  The pain seems to be in the toe, but that’s an illusion created by the brain, which is where the pain really is.  Surprise!  Your brain is a sly illusionist that has evolved over millions of years in order to fool you about the nature of your most ordinary experiences.  How the species survived all this time while trying to adapt to an illusory world is not explained.

3.  Because you are seeing the bird in the tree, not in your head.

There is a story going around about a psychiatric patient who was convinced that he had a squirrel in his head.  Now a condition of that sort is not impossible if the squirrel is small enough, but a bird in a tree is another matter altogether.  The tree is too big. 

Squirrel in Head 

No doubt I will be accused of trivializing the serious ideas of highly paid professors of philosophy and neuroscience.  My bad, but these absurdities are just the logical consequences of trying to cram all of our experiences into a 3-pound lump of meat and then poking around in it to somehow find them again in the tangle of 86 billion neurons that make up the meat. 

Back to our main issue - if the Standard Question is poorly formulated, how should we state the mind-body problem?  I suggest we scrap it altogether because, as we have seen, it is based on faulty assumptions and has unbelievable implications. 

1. The Standard Question assumes that the brain alone is fundamental (materialism) and mind is secondary - a mere product or epiphenomenon. 

2. It assumes that the brain is like a factory, “producing” thoughts and feelings like the liver produces bile. 

3. It implies, weirdly, that mental activity begins and ends in the brain and that our experience of a body and a world outside the brain is an illusion. 

4. It implies that brain science is the only reliable source of knowledge about consciousness and the only path to discovering treatments for mental dysfunction.

5.  Strangest of all perhaps is that the materialist project dismisses the most basic conviction people hold about how their lives work, namely that it is the self who thinks, perceives, feels, and acts.  Here is world-famous neuromaterialist Patricia Churchland who has worked long and hard to convince herself that she is just a brain in a skull:

           My brain and I are inseparable. I am who I am because my brain is what it is. Even so, I often think about my brain in terms different from those I use when thinking about myself. I think about my brain as that and about myself as me.  I think about my brain as having neurons, but I think of me as having a memory. Still, I know that my memory is all about the neurons in my brain. Lately, I think about my brain in more intimate terms as me.

All of these ideas have been seriously damaged, if not demolished, by philosophical criticism.  Since we are very far from a significant consensus among scientists and philosophers on these matters, there is no good reason to stick with the Standard Question.  Philosopher Colin McGinn argues that we cannot answer it, because the human mind lacks the basic concepts to link the subjective realm of mind with the objective realm of the physical brain.  This is another way of recognizing that the Standard Question is a badly formulated problem. 

Can we do better?  Yes, but we are not likely to get a simple, all-encompassing question that can guide our investigations.  Here are the facts we have to work with: 

1. I am a conscious person whose essential nature is awareness.  I am aware of my inner world of thoughts, perceptions, memories, dreams, emotions and a lot of other interesting phenomena.

2. I am intimately related to my body without which I would have no life or consciousness.  My body is part of an external world of objects and events with which I interact constantly.

3. I live in relationship with other beings who have inner lives and with whom I must achieve mutual understanding and work cooperatively.

Each of these aspects of my world is taken as a domain of investigation by various branches of inquiry:  introspective psychology and spirituality, the physical sciences, and the social and cultural sciences, respectively.  Each is defined by its own broad, orienting question:

1.  Who am I?  What can I know about my own mental activities and potentialities?

2.  What can we know about the world we live in?

3.  What can we know about our relationships with others and how we should behave towards them? 

After a 400-year philosophical digression into an unfortunate debate about mind and body, we have circled back to the Big Three Questions that have always defined the project of philosophy.  It feels like coming home. 

Is there a way to integrate these great fields of inquiry, to show how they all fit into a larger map of knowledge and reality?  Perhaps, but that’s a story for another time.