ASM077 Instinct, Reincarnation, and God in Our Brains

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instinct reincarnation and god in our brains all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life this fall i'm traveling the country to promote my new book finding god in the waves and you can find out if i'm going to be in your town by visiting finding god in the waves.com slash tour new dates in boston and portland were just announced and more are coming all the time i hope to see you there but for now let's get it started hey mike i have a question about instinct what is it where does instinct come from uh how is it passed on from generation to generation is it genetics and is it a product of evolution or is it kind of in our brain makeup and if that's the case does that actually mean that we're simply passing along memories um i would love to hear a little bit more about instinct and how it evolves thanks instincts are unlearned complex behaviors that we see in organisms now they're they're different than memories right memories are the resulting emergent phenomenon from the shaping of a brain by its environment specifically an environmental stimulus that's a memory and instincts are different instincts are more related to drives or impulses that get processed through an organism's cognitive capacity right so which means you kind of uh need to have a reasonable cognitive capacity in order to have an instinct which is different than a reflex let's talk a little about that the most simple form of instincts are what we call fixed action patterns and a fixed action pattern is a sequence of actions that happen in response to a given stimulus a couple of examples might be easier to follow for many species of moth if you blast them with some ultrasound if you expose them to high frequency sound of enough intensity their wings will immediately fold up and they'll just drop they'll stop flying which is a great instinctual response to the presence of a bat right bats look with look for prey with ultrasound and so moth have evolved this response and this instinct uh some bird mating dances are fixed action patterns they're a sequence of actions and behaviors related to some stimulus maybe a a time of year a certain amount of rainfall and the presence of a female creates this instinctual mating dance in many species of bird okay so those are fixed action patterns now that's different from a reflex reflexive actions are unlearned just like instincts but reflexes are very simple actions and may not even involve a given organism's brain at all okay your knee tap doesn't require a lot of higher brain function or brain interaction in humans that's a reflexive action now examples of you know more elaborate instinctual drives baby sea turtles hatch from shells and immediately move towards the ocean with no instruction but it's a complicated behavior which we'll talk about in a minute stickleback fish attack the color red not the shapes of other fish so if you have you know a male stickleback fish in a tank and he is in a mating drive and you put a very realistic fish uh in the water he'll ignore it even if it's shaped like another male stickleback but if you take like a a wooden square and hold it corner up and paint the bottom red and put it in the tank that male stickleback fish will attack it and it's pretty complicated now where on earth is that behavior coming from what we understand in science today is these instincts are driven by dna but you would say how on earth can dna carry behaviors or memory well it's not just dna it's an interaction of dna and developmental environment that the organism developed in that includes its its gestation that includes uh you know growth there's all these factors because dna is not just a blueprint dna does lay out how you're going to develop but it's conditional it's conditional based on what resources you as an organism get as you develop and that may change the expression of your genes and because of that instincts are emergent phenomena they're not directly coded into dna but they emerge from the action of dna guiding the development of an organism molecule by molecule okay so for example dna lays out the template for a nervous system it doesn't define everything that the nervous system will do it just defines how it develops and how it's structured but the structure of that nervous system contains information contains conditional operations of its own it's really quite miraculous so this means this emergence means that a nervous system is capable of greater complexity than the dna from which it came right there's a lot of information stored in human dna but nowhere near as much information as can be stored in a human brain now instincts are drives that come from this emergent behavior between a nervous system and dna genetic development that are filtered through cognition and this can allow multiple simple behaviors that are dna driven to stack into very complex behaviors and rituals let's think back to our stickleback fish with the impulse to attack the color red but attack if you think about it is a complex thing it's a coordinated action of swimming respirating biting defensive strategies all these different behaviors coalesce into the expression of this instinct and so that's why we say it's an emergent phenomenon multiple more simple base functions are assembling to create an instinct the core drive get the color red filters through the fish's cognition and brings other functions and systems of that fish to bear in fulfilling the instinct now this is absolutely driven by evolution it's absolutely driven by evolution and dna that expresses an instincts that are beneficial to an organism in a given environment at a given time is more likely to be passed on now you mentioned something about is it related to memory do we pass on memories that's controversial in the sciences but let's look at one study one study found that if you took mice and exposed them to an unpleasant electrical shock when they smelled cherries those mice grew to be fearful of the cherries and then a second generation of mice that were not shocked were fearful of the cherries and then a third generation isolated from the first two were also afraid of cherries this would seem that through some epigenetic function some outer dna function epigenetic has to do with the types of molecules that surround dna and many scientists believe they can carry information through reproduction beyond what dna can carry that help organisms be primed for the environment that they're going to live in would mean that to some degree a fear of cherries was being passed on generationally now that that's controversial results some scientists reject it there's considerable discussion and debate but this is not some racial memory or generational memory psychic phenomenon this is well-grounded science with with studies to back it up and the debate is what's driving the results and how good was the methodology but i include that to say dna is there's so much information and it's so complicated that a surprising amount of information can be passed from generation to generation and therefore can also be shaped by evolution via natural selection [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads hey mike i discovered your show a couple of weeks ago thanks to peter ends and have greatly enjoyed it your irenic viewpoint and honest sharing of your story have been very valuable to me even in such a short period of time my question is what are your thoughts on the possibility of reincarnation i grew up thinking it was a strange idea reserved for people and other religions but now that i'm more open to other belief systems i find myself wondering if it could be true in some way this is particularly in light of what we know about consciousness and its dependence on biological systems and the way our cells are constantly being recycled through a global web of interdependence not to mention that we are no longer living in a world of dualism where the identity is separate from the body put it differently is there a chance i could have been born a sea cucumber thanks so much david well first of all david i don't know that we're living in a world where dualism is dead i think a belief in a separation between consciousness and the body is still very common especially in western societies although i agree more people are becoming open to the idea either through a return to older forms of judeo-christian theology or through materialist philosophies that consciousness and the body are interdependent and related to each other but what does that have to do with reincarnation and what can we learn well let's talk a little bit about what the definition for reincarnation is to begin with i went to dictionary.com and looked up reincarnation because i wanted to be sure that whatever i said fit accepted beliefs about reincarnation and there's three definitions listed one is the belief that the soul upon the death of the body comes back to earth in another body or form that's the most widely used definition for reincarnation number two is rebirth of the soul in a new body and number three is a new incarnation or embodiment as of a person so if we look at some of the things you hinted at in your question the idea that for example some of your atoms were almost certainly in a sea cucumber at some point or part of a sea cucumber and click up a little bit in complexity your dna is certainly an arrangement of information that has been present in your ancestry and the more recent ancestor the more closely that your dna is a continued manifestation of that particular arrangement of information but reincarnation tends to speak of the soul returning to a new body or the embodiment of a person and i think we would agree that your atoms aren't necessarily an embodiment of your person and neither is your dna the things we associate with you and your identity are much higher on the scale of emergence your beliefs your behaviors your code of ethics now that's an idea often included in certain religious ideas about reincarnation through the teachings of karma the weight of moral actions moving across embodiments or manifestations of a given soul and since this is ask science mike and your question seems to have a science tinge we have to look at kind of what science would try to do to address this question about reincarnation we want to start by being really clear about the problem that we're trying to investigate the test case and the fact is reincarnation speaks of a soul and what on earth is a soul whenever i say soul my soul hurts it gets to the soul of an issue she has a beautiful soul i am talking about an essential representation of a person that which makes them most uniquely them those qualities that are most closely identified with how i understand them when many or even most people say soul that's not what they mean i think others would say that a soul is an immaterial essence that is independent of our bodies back to that idea of dualism and that second claim is just one you can't support scientifically at least not today i'm not aware of any reproducible peer-reviewed studies forensic evidence or observation that supports evidence for an immaterial soul independent of our physicality so the same must be true of soul-based reincarnation if we talk more poetically as you were kind of doing about ourselves that's not the essence of our personhood being re-manifested now our ideas our beliefs the things we teach the actions we put into the world those things certainly carry on generationally beyond our own death and when i talk about the afterlife that's one of the first things i talk about is the way that our memes move beyond us especially if we live lives that impact other people but that's that's not what most people are talking about when they talk about reincarnation and frankly not what most people are talking about when they talk about the afterlife and i know that so in response i'd usually say i don't know what happens when we die most people most religious people have a belief about the afterlife specific beliefs about the afterlife that they tend to claim as fact and i don't do that that's because there's no way to tell what happens when we die empirically and all the different ideas about death and the afterlife that exist across religious traditions there is no way to weigh one claim against another and determine one is factual and the other false they're not falsifiable ideas if one person says i believe that when i die i'm reborn as another person and another person says i believe that when i die i stand before god and give an account of my life and a third person says i believe that when we die we're all admitted into heaven with god how do you know which one of those three people is right what evidence would you cite what support for their claim would make one claim better than the other hence why i say i don't know what happens in the afterlife i certainly have a hope that in some way we are reunited with god after death but i would never say that's a better or more thoughtful or more evidence-based claim than someone else who believes that we are reincarnated or that reincarnation is a path that leads to enlightenment or the afterlife or whatever system that their faith dictates i think that it's best given the incredibly common belief in the afterlife human societies have and the fact that we can't really weigh our claims against each other the best path forward is graciousness and generosity towards other people's beliefs about death and what comes after it i mean how many ethnic conflicts how many family relationships how many personal animosities have been related to the passion we put into our ideas about death in the afterlife and how much unnecessary conflict has been a result i would rather let people believe what they believe and figure out how i can make my life and their life better in this life the one that we all know is happening the one that we all agree is there how can we best embody an ethic and corresponding behaviors that make this life as close to heaven or better rebirth for everyone [Music] hi science mike my name is kara and i'm calling from up in canada i've been really thankful over the last year for both the liturgist podcast and this one as i've been going through a deconstruction of my christian faith and i'm trying to inch my way towards reconstructing something albeit with open hands so my question is about the personal nature of god you often speak about god as a ground of being or god not being a being but being itself on one hand i really relate to that concept but i have trouble putting it in relation to a god that you can have a relationship with in your podcasts i've heard you talking about god both in these ways and in a way where you speak to god and have a relationship with him part of my deconstruction of faith has come from the question that if god has some sort of personhood or personal nature i as a person have trouble relating to the way he or she chooses to love the world um looking at the classic question of senseless suffering or why it's so difficult to do good without some negative consequence or another i guess what it comes down to is the question if god is good and personal and all-powerful why would he or she make it so difficult to be in a shalom-type relationship with him or her with others and with creation i know that this question is likely unanswerable ones so instead maybe you could talk about how god is the ground of being and how that relates to god as a perfect highly relational and all-powerful being thanks so much for your time hope to hear back from you well it's funny you've asked me the question i've spent more time considering than any other in my life and it's one i don't have a great answer for i mean seriously i don't think there's any question i've researched or considered or wrestled with as much as this one you see the tension between a god that seems plausible with what we know about the universe through science and a god we can know and experience was the single biggest point of friction as i return to faith it's something i've wrestled with so much and it's so fundamental to my faith today and and how i relate to god that i spent two chapters the longest most dense chapters in my book uh on this topic in my book finding god in the waves and that's because the attributes we've assigned to god in christian history and church theology christian theology are really a pickle so god's all-knowing god's all-powerful god is loving good and just well already an all-knowing and all-powerful god is kind of a contradiction because god's power would be constrained by god's foreknowledge if you think about it temporally like if god knew what's going to happen or what god's going to do god can only do that or either god's knowledge is wrong or god's power is limited uh of course i would say one possible push back against that idea would be it assumes god exists in a temporal causal context and a god we sort of understand through physics a god that's compatible with relativity and space-time uh would not necessarily be causal would not be temporally bound at in in any way which is frankly an existence so alien we can't imagine it a word like being or consciousness it has no bearing on an entity which is not bound to a temporal awareness we don't even know what awareness would look like what awareness would be independent of a temporal context we really can't imagine that i've never seen a philosopher or physicist make a convincing description of what that would look like so already when we talk about these ideas we're using language was designed to help us function at our scale and applying it to scales of reality that our math really has trouble describing much less are rhetoric this is by the way why i'm driven to mysticism that even the god in physics is a god so foreign to me that i'm doubtful of my ability to understand or describe that god even if i have genuinely experienced that god which even that idea has a question mark behind it have i ever genuinely experienced god we'll talk a little bit about that in the next question so i won't waste more time on it here and then as you said if we imagine a god who is at least loving and in some way all powerful all-knowing in this this weird non-temporal context what on earth do we do with suffering this is called the problem of evil now i look at the suffering in my life and i look at how it's been good for me how it's caused me to grow how it's given me new perspectives the fact is as suffering goes i've had pretty healthy suffering really normal suffering from growth from loss from some trauma but but on the scale of human suffering i really haven't suffered that much so it's more difficult for me to say in some of these truly horrific and what we call unnecessary suffering that it somehow contributes to good in all cases that would be a really terrible claim for me to make on behalf of someone else and there's this whole discipline of study and philosophy called theodicy which make it makes a defense of god's character in the face of the problem of evil and i've just never seen an argument from theodicy that made me comfortable with the problem of evil this is also why i am a mystic god is a terrible math problem my friend morgan guyton says that god is a terrible math problem when we look at our neurological relationship with god the kind of thinking required to unpack problems like these is antithetical to having spiritual experiences and indeed experiencing a personal god so i counteract my philosophical theological wrestling with lived experiences with my faith practice of faith in community practice of faith in prayer practice of faith and liturgy things that make me feel close to god i do an equal or greater time to philosophizing and deconstructing as we so often say in this little community deconstructing which uh how long has that even been a word by the way i hear it all the time but i don't feel like that's a a word that uh has been around all that long could be wrong i didn't look it up and i don't have a huge problem with this apparent contradiction of a god who i talk to in prayer and a god who seems to reach out to me at different points in my life with love and the utter implausibility and logical philosophical problems that raises because human beings are just equipped with models that help us make sense of the world and even two of the best models i know that are the best grounded in evidence don't work with each other the first is the standard model of physics the standard model does a great job of explaining the quantum world in fact the more we test it with particle accelerators the better the standard model of physics works the better it appears to really describe reality more than any competing theory which is a problem because the standard model of physics works by ignoring gravity it pretends there's no such thing oh that's an issue because the other major system in physics that gets shown to be correct over and over is einstein's theories of relativity general and special relativity and they work by ignoring quantum phenomenon they only work at these larger you know massive scales and very high velocities so what do we do with that well in science we just admit those two models are incomplete and we're working on making them better over time but today we know which contexts they work in so when i'm trying to describe god in a way that my mind can agree with i talk about a ground of being i talk about a god who is not a being a god who has no consciousness a god who simply undergirds all of our reality and i let that model work in that context but when i need to talk to god in times of celebration or times of grief or times of need i use a different model of god a god who walks with me and talks with me and tells me i am her own then this is the god that i communicate with in prayer and those two ideas don't work with each other so what they're models i don't offer myself the conceit that i've mastered god or figured god out any more than i offer myself to conceit to say that i've figured out physics or the brain i have enough trouble lacing my shoes how could i be so ego maniacal to think that i have life or physics or their brain or indeed god figured out what i have is a model that as best as i can each day points me and other people towards god my work is about helping people experience god for themselves to find their own model their own map to the divine that works in their context and i'm just not sure we'll ever have a model or map of god that's universal that works in all contexts in the same way that we we really may never have a unified theory in physics that describes everything and to some degree i think that's quite beautiful um it means no matter how much we learn there's always more to discover and that sounds divine to me [Music] our last question comes in via email and it reads hi mike i have a follow-up question on the last segment of episode 72 a listener was asking about spiritual experiences and why he doesn't have them i unfortunately am in the same boat as that listener and your response does make sense that the more we practice spiritual exercises the more our brains respond to them however your approach spiritual experiences from a biological or neurological standpoint here's my quandary to me this physiological approach seems to mean that there is no spirit or truly spiritual experiences that they're all biological or neurological and that if there is a god our experiences don't come from it per se but from our brain if this has any truth to it it seems to be a score for atheism of course i am taking an extreme side for the sake of being poignant in my question i do believe there are truly spiritual experiences but could you clarify and elaborate on your response thanks for all you do and i look forward to hearing your response kyle davis california well kyle first of all remember i am super comfortable with atheism atheists and materialism my understanding of god actually embraces materialism and if it turns out that there is truly no supernatural god and that all the conventional ideas about spirituality are simply describing brain states that does not diminish my faith because the heart of my god is physics and i just admit that but i'm also a mystic and i have these experiences that seem to transcend my understanding of reality that i hold in this open hand as other listeners of the show have alluded to but let's let's kind of unpack this a little bit all human thoughts feelings and experiences happen in the brain all human experiences are biological in origin when you are in love we can see that happen in the brain when you eat pizza and you enjoy pizza we see that happen in your brain when you look at a sunset or a night sky and you're overwhelmed by its beauty or sent into a state of transcendence we see those things happen in the brain so are there any truly emotional experiences if emotions just happen in the brain what does that mean where else would emotions happen but in our brains is love any less powerful just because we experience it via brain function see to me the neurological grounding of our spiritual experiences doesn't prove or disprove anything about spiritual realms or experiences for the person who believes we have an immortal soul who believes god is a supernatural being a classical theist the fact that our brains reflect this world don't disprove those ideas or prove them they simply show the brain's role in our interpretation of reality you see the fact that we can brain scan you while you taste pizza doesn't prove or disprove that pizza exists either if we want to test the existence of pizza we would use different means of inquiry when we study the brain we're studying your response to something how it changes you and it's helpful to do that it's helpful to study the brain's reaction to faith because it allows us to tailor our behaviors in a way that supports the goals we have for faith practice if you want to feel god is close understanding how god develops in the brain and what people who feel close to god how their brain functions can help you move your brain to a state more like that and this is true in many ways neurological insights help us understand better approaches to marriage and family therapy it helps us better approaches to anxiety just because we can study how the brain responds to your spouse it doesn't mean your spouse doesn't exist right it just means this is one very helpful lens to look at human belief and behavior because nothing is influential in human belief and behavior as our brains truly spiritual experiences what is that when i heard jesus speak to me that happened in my brain was there some outer stimulus that created that or was it completely an inner feature of my mental landscape i don't know but i would call that a truly spiritual experience the light i experienced standing on the beach the light i've seen more recently in meditation and encounters with god or this truly spiritual experiences i think so even if we're living in a materialistic universe we talk a lot about this in an upcoming episode of liturgist podcast where my scientific hero andrew newberg was our guest he wrote a book called how god changes your brain i really recommend you check that out he talks a lot about neuro theology and how it may be it's perfectly compatible with more conventional beliefs about god and beliefs about spirituality of course i talk about a lot in my book as well although i'm tired of plugging every question you guys keep asking questions related to what i wrote the book about which is why i wrote the book as i did but back to your question i don't know i just would worry less about trying to decide what is truly in a spiritual experience or not instead look at is this changing who you are is it propelling you to a posture of gratitude or appreciation of beauty or love for other people the test of a truly spiritual experience is how it changes you and how it changes the way you move through this life false spiritual experiences uh would be those experiences that don't change you i don't grow you that don't move you to become who you can be and in doing so help others do the same well that does it for another episode of ask science mike i'd love for you to have your question on the show you can do that by going to asksciencemike.com scroll down to the bottom you can record a voice question or type an email out and send it to me we'll review that and many questions make it on the show you can also use the hashtag asksciencemike on twitter or youtube or soundcloud it is way less convenient but feel free to do that we do grab questions using the hashtag i want to thank my patrons on patreon for supporting the show for also doing the hard work of selecting every question on the show if you'd like to be one of them go to ask sciencemike.com click on the patreon button and you can learn more if money's tight i get it do a rating on itunes really really helpful uh or you can share an episode you enjoyed on social media but those things help the program grow i want to thank andrew gallucki for his work in pre-production and greg nordin for producing and sound designing ask sciencemike thanks for listening everyone and i'll talk to you next week