Pinker Whiffs at My Case for the Human Soul
Charles Murray replies to a critic.
Steven Pinker’s characterization of my op-ed “Can Science Reckon With the Human Soul?” makes little contact with its text (Letters, Oct. 30).
My piece outlined the evidence for terminal lucidity among people with advanced dementia. The essay alluded to detailed clinical descriptions dating the 19th century (80 of them, recounted in a 2009 peer-reviewed article), a growing technical literature on contemporary cases and Alexander Batthyány’s “Threshold,” a scholarly book that reviews the existing literature and presents a careful technical analysis of a large sample of cases.
Mr. Pinker ignores that, describing the evidence as “anecdotes” and my unscientific “reports.” He adds that “when there is desperation to commune with a loved one, any glimmer of responsiveness can be interpreted as lucidity.”
Yet I spelled out the two-part criteria for defining cases, qualifying them as “extraordinary evidence” and opening myself to a decisive refutation. All Mr. Pinker had to do was get the Kindle version of “Threshold” and spend an hour scanning it so that he could report whether cases meeting my criteria exist.
I wrote that explaining terminal lucidity through an unknown brain capability “would be akin to finding a way that blood can circulate when the heart stops pumping.” The basis for that analogy is the profound neuronal atrophy and loss associated with advanced dementia. Mr. Pinker invokes the complexity of the brain and how much we still don’t know about it. He doesn’t acknowledge that advanced dementia destroys the networks for memory, speech and self-recognition.
The point of direct contact between my text and Mr. Pinker’s letter consists of my final five words. Mr. Pinker alleges that they go beyond the data. He’s right. The empirical challenge to the materialist position from terminal lucidity implies that consciousness can exist independently of the brain but isn’t necessarily “evidence for the human soul.” That was a speculative leap on my part. I plead guilty.
Charles Murray
Burkittsville, Md.
Charles Murray’s Unscientific Case for the Soul
Prof. Steven Pinker evaluates the phenomenon of terminal lucidity.
ET
Charles Murray interprets anecdotes of “terminal lucidity,” unresponsive neurological patients coming to life for a final goodbye, as evidence for an immaterial soul (“Can Science Reckon With the Human Soul?,” Houses of Worship, Oct. 17). He admits that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yet his “soul of the gaps” argument—there’s something we don’t understand, therefore the soul did it—is extraordinarily weak.
The human brain, with 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections, is the most complex object in the known universe. No neuroscientist claims we understand its workings. Memory and intelligence are distributed across noisy, redundant circuits, which excite and inhibit each other in intricate networks and feedback loops. If one circuit deteriorates, another circuit it suppresses can rebound, including long-dormant copies. Many unpredictable eruptions of activity are possible. None of this implies a ghost in the machine.
But must we accept Mr. Murray’s reports as scientific data? Psychologists know that people are credulous about the cognitive abilities of those who matter to them, overinterpreting simple responses as signs of cogitation. In the 1960s, a primitive chatbot that mindlessly aped a therapist had people pouring their hearts out to it. With “facilitated communication,” parents were convinced they were liberating the trapped thoughts of their autistic children through a keyboard, unaware they were manipulating their children’s hands.
When there is desperation to commune with a loved one, any glimmer of responsiveness can be interpreted as lucidity, exaggerated with each recall and retelling. What Mr. Murray doesn’t report is documentation of any objective indicator of intelligence in these patients, such as a neurological battery or a test of verifiable autobiographical details.
The theory of the soul is itself incoherent. If a dybbuk can re-enter a ravaged brain as a gift to loved ones longing for a last goodbye, why are only a few people blessed with this miracle? Why did the soul leave in the first place, sentencing the loved ones to years of agony? Why can’t the soul stay put, making everyone immortal? What about patients who decline gradually: Do they have half a soul, then a quarter, and so on? How does the soul move the muscles of the tongue and throat? Might a patient with an empty skull become lucid? If so, why do we need a brain at all?
The scientific consensus that the mind consists of intricate activity in an unfathomably complex brain, which, like all organs, is vulnerable to disease and decay, suffers from none of these paradoxes.
Prof. Steven Pinker
Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass.
Can Science Reckon With the Human Soul?
A paradigm shift is coming as evidence emerges that we are more than our brains.
ET
College socialized me to dismiss religion. It was part of the academic zeitgeist: Smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore. I became a child of the Enlightenment, a materialist, confident the alternatives amounted to superstition.
I’ve been back-pedaling. Writing “Human Accomplishment” (2003) forced me to recognize the crucial role transcendent belief had played in Western art, literature and music—and, to my surprise, science. Watching my wife’s spiritual evolution from agnosticism to Christianity, I saw that she was acquiring insights I lacked. I read C.S. Lewis, who raised questions I couldn’t answer. I scrutinized New Testament scholarship and was more impressed by the evidence supporting it than that discrediting it.
I also discovered that the scientific story about the nature of the universe and human consciousness is more complicated than I had assumed.
Example: A central tenet of materialism is that consciousness exists exclusively in the brain. I first encountered claims to the contrary in the extensive literature on near-death experiences that grew out of Raymond Moody’s “Life After Life” (1975). The evidence now consists of dozens of books, hundreds of technical articles and thousands of cases. I read about Ian Stevenson’s cross-national studies of childhood memories of previous lives. He assembled a database of more than 3,000 cases, and more has been accumulating in the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies.
The evidence for both near-death experiences and childhood memories of previous lives is persuasive in terms of the credibility of the sources and verified facts, but much of it is strongly suggestive instead of dispositive. It doesn’t reach the standard of proof Carl Sagan popularized: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This led me to seek a subset of cases that exclude all conceivable explanations except that consciousness can exist independent of the brain.
Certain near-death experiences approach that level, but the most robust, hardest-to-ignore evidence comes from a phenomenon called terminal lucidity: a sudden, temporary return to self-awareness, memory and lucid communication by a person whose brain is no longer functional usually because of advanced dementia but occasionally because of meningitis, brain tumors, strokes or chronic psychiatric disorders.
Terminal lucidity can last from a few minutes to a few hours. In the most dramatic cases, people who have been unable to communicate or even recognize their spouses or children for years suddenly become alert and exhibit their former personalities, complete with reminiscences and incisive questions. It is almost always followed by complete mental relapse and death within a day or two.
The phenomenon didn’t have a name until 2009, but case studies reach back to detailed clinical descriptions from the 19th century. Hospices, palliative-care centers, and long-term care wards for dementia patients continued to observe the condition during the 20th century but usually treated it as a curious episode that didn’t warrant a write-up. With the advent of social media, reports began to accumulate. We now have a growing technical literature and a large, systematic sample compiled by Austrian psychologist Alexander Batthyány.
Two features of the best-documented cases combine to meet Sagan’s standard: The subjects suffered from medically verified disorders that made their brains incapable of organized mental activity; and multiple observers, including medical personnel, recorded the lucidity.
A strict materialist explanation must posit a so-far-unknown capability of the brain. But the brain has been mapped for years, and a great deal is known about the functions of its regions. Discovering this new feature would be akin to finding a way that blood can circulate when the heart stops pumping.
I see the strict materialistic view of consciousness as being in roughly the same fix as Newtonian physics was in 1887, when the Michelson-Morley experiment proved that the speed of light doesn’t behave as Newton’s laws said it should. It took 18 years before Einstein’s theory of special relativity accommodated the anomaly.
We are identifying anomalies in the materialist position that must eventually lead to a paradigm shift. Science will have to acknowledge that even though conventional neuroscience explains much about consciousness under ordinary circumstances, something else can come into play under the extreme conditions of imminent death.
The implications are momentous. Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow observed that for a scientist trying to explain creation, the verification of the big-bang theory “ends like a bad dream”: “As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” Neuroscientists who have been trying to explain consciousness may have to face their own bad dream: coming to terms with evidence for the human soul.
Mr. Murray is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author, most recently, of “Taking Religion Seriously.”
