The demise of scientific duality

MUKUL SHARMA

FOR a long time, 19th and early 20th century science used to be uneasy about their antecedents. Its precursors — those who developed the infrastructure and backbone of empirical enquiry — either derived from pagan elements and culture or, like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and right up to the father of modern genetics, Gregor Mendel, were all deeply devout Christians. Thus there was this huge scientific sigh of relief when the likes of a Darwin finally cleaved the divine away from the data and established a tradition that culminated in theories of relativity and the foundation of the new physics. Anyway, then along came the behavioural sciences and neurology and upset the applecart all over again. Earlier, psychology had just about been tolerated as one of those wannabe disciplines that had gone soft in the head for dealing with unscientific stuff like emotions, memories, dreams and other subjective phenomena. In fact the neurosciences too were considered okay only till such time as they dealt with something tangible such as the brain and regarded everything like mind and consciousness as merely an emergent property or a function of its complexity. But when it began investigating the effects of this airy-fairy artefact back on the brain, the scientific mind boggled. How could an epiphenomenon have a feedback loop to its origin? Yet meditation, for example, appeared to work in reverse, in the sense that there was neuronal activity associated with it and, in many cases, as part of the restructuring pattern of the brain. This was unbelievable because in western philosophies of the mind, epiphenomenalism is of the view that mental events are caused by physical precedents and cannot themselves instigate anything material. Not only that, now the cognitive sciences had to deal with the next episode — transcendent consciousness! Would scientific inquiry have to investigate enlightenment after this or what? In his book The Universe in a Single Atom the Dalai Lama wrote, “If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.” Science should accept the same thing in reverse. Or as the Buddha said: “Don’t take my statements to be true simply out of reverence for me. But rather, put them to the test.”