"Sure I Feel Better, But is it Science?"

The answer to this blogpost's title is "yes".

The material below is from a presentation I gave at the Iowa Holistic Health Conference in 1999. There was a variety of health practitioners there who use holistic and alternative healing modes -- things like herbs or meditation, but also even more "spiritual" approaches like "healing touch" or reiki. Some of these people get a lot of flack from "mainstream" medicine practitioners, particularly when their methods rely on non-materialist views about the mind-body connection. My talk at the Conference was to provide argumentative support for these holistic methods. A lot of mainstream health pros are what we can call "reductive materialists". They would say that the "mind" or "spirit" is just brain neurons firing, and nothing more. Their view is that something like reiki (depicted in the image) is just woo-woo, or nonsense. The content below outlines some of the rebuttals that alternative medicine practitioners can use.

If you're not a practitioner yourself, but you're considering whether or not alternative methods make sense, the material below may help you get your philosophical ducks in a row.

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If alternative medicine, particularly what we call “holistic health”, involves body mind and spirit, then it will be beneficial for practitioners seriously to consider the philosophy and historical background of questions concerning mind, the physical world and the very nature of scientific explanation.

Conventional medicine regards some modes of treatment within holistic health skeptically.  Some of the resistance arises from the usual hesitancies people have toward changes.  But some of the resistance is very profound, and it arises because some holistic health practices contradict very fundamental world views held by elite scientists and medical practitioners.  These views pertain to the metaphysics of the universe, questions about the nature of mind and its relation to matter, and assumptions about the scientific process itself -- questions about what actually constitutes science, and what it should actually mean to explain something “scientifically”.

The answer to the question in the title is “Yes”, and holistic health advocates can promote their ideas by exposing flaws in conventional scientists’ views of the nature of mind and matter -- views which elevate matter and diminish or ignore mind -- and by not accepting conventional scientists’ simplistic assertions about the scientific processes and about the ways in which rational thought must proceed.  Most importantly, holistic health advocates can respond in constructive positive ways, promoting a sound, rational, approach to science which incorporates, perhaps in surprising ways, the mental aspect of nature; we don’t want to retreat into “deconstructive” approaches which deny the importance of rationality and sound observations, or which deny the importance of the “physical” aspect of nature -- approaches which unwittingly accept the false premises of conventional science.

Certain alternative healing modes are related to topics typically included in the study of parapsychology -- psychokinesis (mind over matter), clairvoyance, telepathy, etc.  These are also referred to as paranormal studies. Parapsychology and holistic health face nearly identical challenges to being accepted by conventional science. Some of the resistance to holistic health can be understood, and remedied, by studying the ways in which certain debates have proceeded within parapsychology.

Scientific Materialism

Challenge 1

The idea of mental energies healing people at a distance violates the laws of physics.

 Rebuttal 1

 Physics doesn’t even address any properties of mind or consciousness, therefore no laws are violated.

                     OR (longer version)

Laws of physics and laws of science which describe the ways in which events can occur, even if we regard them as perfectly true, are always understood to have the caveat “... all other things being equal” or “... in the absence of other mitigating factors.” Physics does not preclude minds from serving as those “mitigating factors”: this is clear from the simple fact that physics is silent on the issue of how minds interact with brains, with brain cells, or with anything else.  There is nothing in physics for claimed mental activities to violate.  Mental actions at a distance no more violate the laws of physics than they violate the laws of economics or forestry, which are just as silent on the issue of the efficacy of minds as is physics.

Challenge 2

“Mind” and “consciousness” are nothing more than shorthand terminology referring to complex brain states.  Consciousness as we think of it is really an illusion.  Although there may be aspects of physics not yet known, everything that there is in the universe is potentially explainable in terms of physics.

Rebuttal 2

Why would lifeless matter, complex or not, have “illusions” about anything? The materialist stance violates directly observable features of our subjective existence, trying to sweep them under the rug.

The Mind-Body Problem

Challenge 3

Material substances can’t be affected by mental states.

Rebuttal 3

Body-mind dualism is a philosophical stance, not a scientific result. It arose out of a desire to attribute “miracles” to God rather than incorporate them into a natural science that recognizes mind as a part of nature. By balking at a natural science of consciousness, scientists are actually, unwittingly, yielding to a religious tradition.

Reductionism -- Scientific Method

Challenge 4

Science has been successful so far in reducing natural phenomena to physics.  Laws of chemistry, for example, have physical explanations.  Biological laws are increasingly being explained chemically.  We can expect this to continue, and this will preclude mental events from having any serious standing within science.

Rebuttal 4

You are mischaracterizing the reductions you describe.  “Physics” not only expands its range, but often needs to be redefined itself every time it supposedly encompasses or “reduces” some new phenomenon.  The reduction of a phenomenon to physics doesn’t make that phenomenon non-existent. Physics just expands its vocabulary to include it. For example, if panpsychism is correct then physics could grow to accommodate the mental aspects of the world, which it has so far ignored.

Challenge 5

Even if consciousness exists and is not reducible to matter, it still is not a legitimate object of scientific study because minds (other than our own) are not things that we can observe objectively.  They are locked in an individual, subjective realm, not accessible to scientific methods.

Rebuttal 5

Historically, the subjective world hasn’t been a topic for scientific investigation, but that is only due to some religious and philosophical prejudices held by the ones we called scientists at the dawn of the modern age, not due to any inherent inability of scientific methods to deal with the subjective realm.  Electric fields are never directly “observed”, but scientists (rightly) infer things about them based on the behaviors of certain objects under their influence.  Similarly we can infer certain quality of minds (mental states) based on behaviors and self-reports of people.

Modernism and Post-Modernism

Challenge 6

To believe in things like healing touch is to revert to “magical” thinking which prevailed in a pre-scientific age.    In the modern age, rational thought did away with older superstitious thinking. Knowledge is now based on shared, repeatable observations and logical thought, not wishful thinking and personally held untestable beliefs.  “New Age” trends are part of a destructive post-modernism which turns its back on modern advances in science.

Rebuttal 6

Phenomena which used to seem magical can be treated scientifically if we choose to.  "Modernism" does promote sound, empirical, rational methods, and that's good. Unfortunately though it often makes a lot of arbitrary assumptions about our subjective, mental existence. Post-modernist should not turn their backs on the good aspects of modernism which promote sound methods, but they can reject the arbitary philosophical assumptions that modernists make about the mental and spiritual aspects of the world. In this way we can play a role in a constructive post-modernism that is truly scientific.

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Theories Concerning the Mind-Body Problem

Dualism      

Mind and matter (the body) are essentially (ontologically) different “substances” which interact ... somehow.

Epiphenomenalism           

 This acknowledges that mind exists and that it is fundamentally different from matter, but gets around the question of how the mental could affect the physical by simply claiming that it doesn’t.  Mind is a byproduct of the brain somehow which does not have any causative powers.

Monism      

Monism claims that there is only one underlying “substance” which underlies both the mental and the physical.

Materialism          

 Materialists are monists who claim that the underlying essence of the universe is what we think of as physical matter, devoid of any subjective experience or sentience.

Identity Theory         

Identity theorists are materialists who believe that the mind and the brain are the same thing, in the same sense that “the morning star” and “the evening star” are the same thing.  They believe it may be convenient to talk about “mental” things, but such talk, they believe, is really just talk about brains.

Functionalism       

Functionalists are materialists in that they believe that only physical matter constitutes the universe, but believe that “mind” refers to functional properties of brains, not to brains themselves.

Eliminative Materialism                       

Eliminative materialists believe matter exists and that it’s just a confusion to even talk about minds.

Idealism       

Idealists are monists who solve the problem by saying that the fundamental “substance” of the universe is thought.  What seems to us to be physical is just some aspect or expression of the mental.

Panpsychism        

 Panpsychists believe that mind is a property held by matter (at a very elementary, rudimentary level for simple material structures). “Matter” has both an objective, outward existence and a subjective, inward existence.

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Bibliography

Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration, David Ray Griffin, 1997.

Reinventing Medicine: Beyond Mind-Body to a New Era of Healing, Larry Dossey, M.D., 1999.

The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion, Ken Wilber, 1999.

The Conscious Universe, Dean Radin, 1998.

Subjectivity and Reduction: an Introduction to the Mind Body Problem, Barbara Hannan, 1994.

Advances in Parapsychological Research, volume 8, contains an article “Psychic Healing and Complementary Medicine”, Sybo A. Schouten, 1997.

Parapsychology: A Concise History, John Beloff, 1993.  (The 15 page Prologue contains a nice account of the dawn of modernism, with regard to society’s treatment of the paranormal.)

Deviant Science: The Case of Parapsychology, James McClenon, 1984.

Consciousness Reconsidered, Owen Flanagan, 1992.

The Limits of Influence, Stephen E. Braude, 1997. (This contains, among many other things, a good discussion of the point that parapsychology does not violate existing laws of science.)

Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death, Carl B. Becker, 1993.

The Rediscovery of the Mind, John Searle, 1992.

The Relentless Question: Reflections on the Paranormal, John Beloff, 1990.

Theories of Consciousness, William Seager, 1999.