The Question of Spirituality

These posts examine modern psychiatry from a critical point of view. Unfortunately, mainstream psychiatrists usually react badly to any sort of critical analysis of their activities, labelling critics as “anti-psychiatry,” whatever that is. Regardless, criticism is an integral part of any scientific field and psychiatry is no different. As it emerges, there is a lot to be critical about.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

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Following last week’s post, a reader commented:

(I have) lived most of my life with significant recurring mental health problems (psychosis). In an effort to throw off the cloak of this enigma I have spent quite a lot of time attempting to understand spirituality within and outside of the context of religion.

We can deal briefly with the concept of spirituality as conceived within psychiatry: it doesn’t exist. For mainstream psychiatry, spirituality equals hocus-pocus. Moving on, the reader mentioned the work of the psychologist, Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) who proposed that humans have a “hierarchy of needs,” ranging from the basic physiological needs of life, through emotional security to what he called self-actualisation, meaning morality, creativity and acceptance, etc. He had recently read Maslow’s last book, Religions, Values and Peak Experiences (1964) in which the psychologist argued that modern science had become too mechanistic, abandoning to religions the important human concepts of values and meaning [1]. Maslow didn’t like that either as he felt that religions readily degenerated into a rigidly hierarchical, sterile and ritualistic dogma where the business and continuity of the church, temple, etc. became more important than the spiritual development of its members. This became the dominant theme in Maslow’s rather short but productive life. He’s right on both points but I think his solution was wrong.

I hadn’t come across this book but I have now, it’s available for download as a pdf and the actual book itself is only about 60 pages. It was written over 60 years ago and it shows, it’s very much a product of its age, but you can see what he’s trying to deal with. During his training, Maslow was exposed to behaviorists and to Freudian psychoanalysis but didn’t like either school. He felt behaviorism’s antimentalism made it sterile while Freud focussed excessively on the destructive side of human life; neither gave any credit to human creativity, morality, altruisum and other virtues. It’s clear from his last book that he didn’t understand why psychologists and psychiatrists would adopt either of these fairly extreme positions. The answer to that dilemma lies in the philosophy of science.

In the late 19^th Century, sciences such as physics and chemistry were roaring ahead, with biology panting along behind them but psychology wasn’t even in the race. Despite the best efforts of the world’s first psychologist, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), who tried to adapt the methods of physiology to studying the mind, introspective psychology was going in circles. Nobody could get a grip on the nature of experience or of higher human mental function, or at least no two people could agree. From early in the 20^th Century, a growing number of psychologists decided that trying to understand the mind as such was a waste of time, it could only lead to confusion and contradiction. They dismissed the mind as a misleading mystery that diverts attention from the real causes of our actions, our interaction with the environment. The only way to understand human conduct was to strip mentalism out of the equation, leaving only observable behaviour as the sole reliable scientific datum. Out with values, beliefs, morality, altruism and all that wishy-washy stuff, all that counts is what we can see and measure. That bleak and mechanistic approach fitted perfectly with the gathering revolution in science, now known as positivism, which dug a deep moat between science, meaning what we can see and measure, and all that other stuff [2, Chap. 3; also 8]. John B Watson (1878-1958), the most influential of the early American behaviorists, said:

Mediaeval tradition has kept psychology from becoming a science. Psychology, up to very recent times, has been held so rigidly under the dominance both of traditional religion and of philosophy – the two great bulwarks of mediaevalism – that it has never been able to free itself and become a natural science [3].

At the end of that century, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) thought that we could understand the mind in terms of the dominant science of his youth, hydrodynamics. He and his followers accepted the reality of the mind and constructed a model that functioned more or less like the sewers of a big city. Over the next 60 years or so, psychoanalysis developed, expanded and fractured into a hundred combative schools, just because there was no way it could be tied to an agreed realistic foundation. We think, we experience, we decide, but what are these phenomena? Nobody could agree and it became a matter of who could shout loudest, especially after Freud died [4]. Now they didn’t say that metaphysical matters such as values, art and morality don’t exist, because they were all cultured and civilised people, they just said that while at work, scientists can’t be concerned with such things.

None of these people were trying to be monsters but their self-consciously amoral ideas led to some of humanity’s greatest crimes. Stripped of morality and clothed with scientific virtue, people got the idea that humanity was degenerating just because low class people had lots of children while the upper classes had far fewer. This fused with the notion that there is a hierarchy of races, with a small number of superior races surrounded by swarms of inferior people, all breeding like rabbits, hence eugenics, the idea of controlled breeding to improve the stock. To prevent a new dark age, it was felt necessary to strip away such tender-hearted notions as sympathy, pity and such like and stop the riff-raff from breeding. With nothing to brake it, that leads to genocide. That’s how science came to be mechanistic and dehumanising, which inflamed the widely read and human-centred Maslow. But he was also opposed to the dehumanising influence in institutionalised religion. All too often, religion became a profitable business for a select few, to which the great majority payed lip service on Sundays and ignored it for the rest of the week.

All this is true. Maslow’s solution was that we need a new science which can incorporate values and give a central place to what he called peak experiences. What are peak experiences? I don’t actually know because even though he uses the term something like 140 times in the book, it’s undefined. Essentially, it means what each reader wants it to mean. Thus, Maslow fell into the bear trap that positivism and behaviorism had been trying to avoid: reliability. The early positivists weren’t trying to make science boring and mechanistic because it appealed to their cold and sterile souls, they wanted science to be reliable. If, for example, you consent to an anaesthetic for surgery, you want to know that the process is reliable and you’ll wake up after it. If you get on a plane to travel overseas, you want to know that their systems are reliable and you’ll get off in the right city after an uneventful flight. Reliability is what science is about, that’s all it’s about. As they saw it, the choice was either sticking to what can be seen and measured, or taking a leap of faith but never knowing when you had drifted from “reasonable supposition” to unprovable metaphysics, i.e. to fairy tales, political prejudice or outright lunacy. This, of course, is what Popper’s criterion of falsifiability is about. Religion, morality, fairy tales, madness, politics, art, these things are matters of taste and can’t be falsified: de gustibus, non est disputandam. There’s no arguing over taste. In science, however, what seems like a solid scientific fact today can always be proven wrong tomorrow by new facts. A scientific opinion can be refuted, religious or political opinions can’t.

By failing to define “peak experiences,” Maslow left the door open for all sorts of charlatans to gallop through. For example, what would be a peak experience for one DJ Trump? Probably ripping $50million off somebody and knowing that they know he did it and there’s nothing they can do about it. He’d be in seventh heaven for a week. We’re not going to consider what would be a peak experience for the late J Epstein, or this religious maniac in the West Bank whose only goal in life is to see millions of dead Palestinians because that would be doing God’s will (starts at 0.15; he’s a lawyer but he’s not insane, he’s simply evil). The point is that attempting to describe mental states without some limitations is always going to end in tears. I think Maslow was probably a genuinely nice middle class person and wrote a nice middle class psychology but the simple fact is that most people in power aren’t nice. His “hierarchy of needs” doesn’t give any account of bad people, nor does behaviorism. Psychoanalytic theory was no use, it ended up saying only that bad people are driven by destructive wishes, i.e. it was description masquerading as explanation.

The biocognitive model for psychiatry is very different from any of these. It says: the mind is a real dualist entity that emerges predictably from certain highly specified functions of suitable machines, be they carbon-based or silicon-based (or others). The mind is real because it can act on the real or physical world but it is dualist in that it is not constrained by the laws of the physical world. The process of emergence of mind follows the laws of a dual-valued calculus (i.e. it is not random or miraculous), generating an isolated (private) and unique informational state which is experienced as “me” [see 2, Chap. 4 for definitions of information and computation]. The behaviorists were correct in saying that behaviour is constrained by the external world; we don’t, for example, try to breathe underwater but that’s a boring truth. By using our minds, we can devise ways of remaining underwater for long periods but behaviorism couldn’t explain creativity (Skinner says in BF&D that a creative artist is simply a person skilled at arranging creativity-inducing environments, which is a cringe-inducing definition). The concept of an emergent, dualist mind accounts for free will, in that it can devise new informational states that do not exist in the material world and choose between them, all without breaching the laws of thermodynamics. The emergent mind decides its own future: the physical universe is deterministic but we (and other minded animals) aren’t.

How reliable is the biocognitive model? How well does it fit with our concepts of evolution, of creativity, morality and so on and, of course, of mental disorder? I think it fits very well, certainly far better than any previous model. Consider the question that bothers philosopher David Chalmers: zombies [5]. A zombie is defined as a person who is absolutely normal in every physical and behavioural respect except he (it?) has no inner mental life. A zombie looks at a sunset and says “Oh, look at that lovely shade of lilac” but there is nothing happening behind its eyes. How do I know that you’re not a zombie? As a logician, Chalmers wanted proof at philosophical level, i.e. proof that it could not be otherwise. Naturally enough, proof at that level doesn’t exist, there’s no test but there’s behavioural evidence, that you react to things exactly as I do. That’s Chalmers’ objection: how do we know with philosophical certainty that you have an inner experience? We don’t but two more factors are important. There is a wealth of physiological evidence: even though I haven’t looked inside my head lately nor in yours, all humans are almost identical physiologically. My physiology generates inner experience so I presume yours does, too. If you want to say “That’s unproven,” then don’t go to the hospital next time you get sick. Hospitals are only for people with human physiology.

Finally, there’s the argument from evolution, as in “There’s nothing new under the sun.” Evolution builds on what went before: it is impossible for me to be the first person in history to experience an inner life. Chomsky made this silly mistake when he announced, ex cathedra, that human speech sprang into existence 75,000 years ago following a single small mutation [6, Chap. 7]. So what did Homo sapiens do for the preceding 250,000 years of their existence? And why just then, when all the physical requirements for speech (ears, tongue, teeth, respiratory control etc) were already in place? Doesn’t make any sense at all. The human mind developed from the protohuman mind, which developed from a non-human mind... Behavioral evidence, physiological evidence, evolutionary evidence. That will do.

Nearly a century after the Vienna Circle of positivists announced that science could no longer concern itself with ephemera such as the mind [8], we now have a formal theory of mind that slots it neatly into the prevailing scientific ethos, namely, information theory. People object, saying: “When Freud used the prevailing ethos, you objected.” True, but I’m afraid I can’t slot it into the scientific ethos that will prevail in a hundred years’ time, we’ll have to wait and see what it is. But I don’t think it will be as dramatically different as, say, biology was after Darwin or physics after Einstein. The basics of IT have been around since 1832 when, while walking across a paddock, the 17 year old George Boole (1815-1864) had a flash of inspiration. With a dual-valued logic (now known as Boolean algebra), he realised, he could account for the computational side of human mental life [7]. The biocognitive model simply extends that to cover emotion, sensation and so on but, because it emerges from a physical structure using a strict calculus, it imposes restrictions on what can be seen as reliable.

We can reliably say that all humans have minds, and that minds cause behaviour as an emergent phenomenon. The mind is not the brain and can’t be “reduced” to the brain but what we experience is heavily influenced by biology. We have, as Maslow noted, basic physiological needs (food, water, shelter etc) that must be satisfied; once these are settled, we have a series of drives that are heavily influenced but not controlled by biology. These include the urge to socialise and its counterpart, the fear of strangers, the urge to form dominance hierarchies and its opposite, the urge to resist being oppressed. These are not absolutes but they feel good (“powerfully reinforcing,” as the behaviorists said), so we indulge them within the limits of a set of rules known as morality. Some people keep to the rules and can feel satisfied within them, other people break them. Personality therefore becomes the distinctive set of rules we each adopt which govern our interactions with the social and physical environments.

Other important, genetically-programmed impulses are the response to the perception of a threat and the response to a major loss. Needless to say, if the physical activity of the brain is disturbed in any way, e.g. by infection, drugs, brain damage, sleep deprivation, etc., it’s computational output will be disturbed. That doesn’t say that all disturbance of mental function is necessarily biological because there can be disruptions at the level of the information processing. If the input is wrong (“I’m sure I saw something out there”) or the algorithmic structure (beliefs) is wrong (“I believe people are out to get me”), then the output will be wrong. This applies on a more personal level: “I know from experience that if I try to speak in public, I will shake and sweat and dribble; people will see it and laugh at me; that will be intolerably scary; that thought makes me shake and sweat, therefore I won’t try.” If and when people get trapped in a state of self-sustaining distress, we call that mental disorder but it’s psychological, not biological.

All this is to say that the mind is an informational space generated by the physical brain. This statement is at the level of an established scientific fact. Humans have a unique and private mental life that some like to call spirituality, although I prefer to avoid that word because of its supernatural connotations, e.g. spiritualism, immortality, telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance, precognition, mediumship and so on. In the biocognitive model, these things cannot happen just because there is no mechanism for them. There is no way for information from the future to influence my current mental (informational) state because it doesn’t exist. Telepathy, meaning mind-to-mind communication, is impossible as there is no medium by which information can be exchanged between minds, no mental Bluetooth as it were. Telekinesis, same again, the mind’s informational state cannot be communicated to an inert object to make it move without some intervening medium which obeys the laws of physics. Immortality and reincarnation are excluded just because the minute my heart stops beating, the informational state known as my mind will cease to exist, never to be reconstituted. The informational state will be lost forever.

As a philosophical exercise in his “playful” book, Reality + [5] (read ‘stupid’), Chalmers wonders whether the human mind could be “uploaded” to a computer, giving us immortality in a digital universe. If he knew any biology, I don’t think he’d bother with the idea but my feeling is that there are far more important philosophical and practical matters we need to deal with before wasting time on that sort of thing, e.g. the problem of human aggression that flows from the biologically-influenced urge to form dominance hierarchies. But imagine if the technical problems were overcome and we were uploaded to live forever in a virtual universe where Trump, Epstein and the rabid zionist lawyer had managed to take control. Wouldn’t that be jolly: hell, as Sartre said, is other humans. In the book he coauthored with the Nobel laureate neurophysiologist, JC Eccles [8], Karl Popper said:

I don’t look forward to an eternity of survival ... the idea of going on forever seems to me utterly frightening. Anybody who has sufficient imagination to deal with the idea of infinity would, I think, agree... [9, p556] (In the last chapter of the biocognitive book [2, Chap. 11.7: An afterthought on religion], I did allow the possibility that, at the point of death and by some unimaginable technology, the human mind could be uploaded to dark matter, thereby conferring immortality, but it wasn’t meant seriously. Consistent with Popper, it seems to me that the only way we could survive eternity would be if we had no memory).

The human mind is real but not the same sort of real as the wind blowing in the trees outside. It is an emergent informational space, unlocalised, insubstantial (immaterial) and therefore not subject to the physical laws of the material universe, meaning it satisfies the essential criteria for a “spirit.” As such, it is able to act recursively on its physical substrate, the brain, thereby giving us control over our bodies and our future while prohibiting any supernatural actions. All this is true of animals, the only difference being that they don’t waste time talking. Creativity is simply generating optional futures and choosing the best. Yes, it seems to come from nowhere but that’s not magic, that just tells us how fast the mind works. Morality is a set of rules that we all agree should be followed in the interests of peace and sustainability of the environment. The only trouble we face today is that power is highly attractive to some people and, once they get their hands on the controls, they divert the machinery of society to their ends, not yours or mine.

In the biocognitive approach, personality is the set of rules that we each use to produce observable behaviour. Personality just is a set of rules. If they are internally consistent and mesh with the larger society’s set of rules, producing a fairly harmonious state, we call that normal personality. If they are internally inconsistent, producing distress, or conflict with the larger society, we call that personality disorder. There are no “categories” of personality disorder, although one type of rule can dominate, e.g. one person is preoccupied with order, following rules, punctuality, tidiness, etc, while another is dominated by the thought that people are out to hurt him, nobody cares, he can’t trust anybody, offence is the best form of defence and so on. All this relates to early life when these types of rules are extracted from the social environment. For most cases of mental disorder, psychotherapy is the proper path, meaning a process of exploring the person’s set of rules to find what is causing the trouble. Once they are “brought to consciousness,” as it were, they can be amended, which is made much easier by relating today’s rules to yesterday’s traumatic events.

To my knowledge, the biocognitive model is the only theory of mind that does this. I agree with Maslow that behaviorism was sterile but we need to understand what the early theorists had in mind when they decided that antimentalism was the only viable path for science. Their model didn’t work [6, Chap. 4] but it was a genuine attempt. Psychoanalysis was far too early. Given the available technology, there was no way they could write that sort of theory as a valid (reliable, non-magical) scientific theory. Also, Freud put huge emphasis on the darker side of human affairs but that was Freud. It meant that his theory couldn’t translate to creativity or to the larger world. Current mainstream theories in philosophy don’t start with a formal mechanism of emergence of mind so they just wander in circles, describing what the mind does but not explaining how it does it [4, Part II].

There you have it, a valid theory of human mind/spirituality/consciousness which is entirely consistent with modern concepts of science and involves no supernatural elements. To my knowledge, this is the first time in history that anybody has been able to make that claim but time will tell. It generates a system of ethics and morality but does it lead to religion per se? In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins says religion serves four purposes: explanation, inspiration, exhortation and consolation. He believes these functions are all better handled in non-religious systems. What we need is an ethical or moral system based in natural principles, not handed down from on high.

The American author Anne Lamott said: “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” That’s true beyond any doubt when your god tells you to slaughter a million Palestinians. That is the ancient problem with a supernatural spirituality, there are no natural limits. If the priest or rabbi or pastor says “Hate those people because they are unbelievers and must die,” then who can say he’s wrong? The person who says “That’s wrong, it says ‘Thou shalt not kill’” will be first to get the chop. A natural spirituality without supernatural, wish-fulfulling fantasies is essential if we wish to survive as a species (and all the other minded species whose languages we don’t understand).

References:

1. Maslow AH (1964). Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press.

2. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London: Routledge.

3. Watson JB (1924). Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist. Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott.

4. Masson JM (1984). The Assault on Truth: Freud’s suppression of the seduction theory. New York: Simon and Schuster.

5. Chalmers DJ (2022). Reality+: Virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy. London: Allen Lane.

6. McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.

7. Boole, G. (1854). An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. Dover Classics of Science and Mathematics. New York: Dover (1958). Now available through Google Books.

8. Hahn H, Neurath O, Carnap R (1929). The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle. Ernst Mach Society, University of Vienna. http://rreece.github.io/philosophy-reading-list/docs/the-scientific-conception-of-the-world-the-vienna-circle.pdf

9. Popper KR, Eccles JC. The Self and its Brain. London: Springer, 1981.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.