Wilson v. Ricard Body vs.

Wilson v. Ricard

Body vs. Mind -- Wilson vs. Richard

I am I merely a body or am I also a mind? Is the organ known as the brain merely another, albeit important functional tool of my body that enables me to carry on my tasks of daily life, much like my heart or hands? Or is the brain more than a complex organization of special cells, and is there something unique about this physically governing organ? Edmund O. Wilson suggests the former unsettling proposition in his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. According to Wilson, the preponderance of scientific data suggests that, no matter how marvelous the accomplishments of the brain, what humans like to call the mind can be easily altered by environmental influences that impact the ability of certain genes to survive into the next generation.

According to Wilson, science must win out over more romantic understandings of the purpose of human existence. Stronger, faster, smarter apes passed on their genetic material to their offspring, and this is why particular disciplines such as music, art, and literature evolved within the human species, not because human beings posses a particular innate superiority in the construction of the cosmos, because they have minds. These aspects of human cultural life emerged as means of control, or offshoots of the cognitive functioning that enabled human beings to exercise dominance over other species and other human tribes. What the disciplines of the humanities have preferred to call the mind is thus merely a product of human biology, and the brain is no more immortal than a human being's heart or the liver. Once upon a time, after all, the ancient Egyptians discarded the brain and preserved the other, inner organs as a way of preserving the soul. According to Wilson, the current obsession with splitting the physical brain from the mind on an intellectual level is just as futile and misguided. Individual, human thinking processes die when the human body dies and only one's genetic offspring live on to prosper. It is just as impossible to preserve an individual mind or spirit, as it is to preserve the soul by pickling the heart or shutting the body in a tomb. Instead of studying individuals, the focus of modern academic study should be upon culture and groups of cultures rather than individual minds or brains, because the individual mind, soul, or spirit does not really exist.

In contrast, to Wilson, Mathieu Ricard offer the more idealistic but perhaps comforting notion that the physical matter of the brain and mind are not synonymous. Ricard suggests the possibility of detachment of the mind from the body through the type of philosophical or religious practice that Wilson regards as futile, or at very least, less interesting and useful than science. Through meditation and achieving a higher sense of consciousness, the mind can control the physical aspects of the human body, suggests Ricard. Ricard believes that there is more to the brain than neurotransmitters and synapses.

The human species cannot be subsumed into the sum total of its DNA.

Ricard's form of Buddhism traditionally advocates the existence of reincarnation, an ideology that suggests that there is some element of the self that can be immortal and perpetuated in the form of energy or essence, beyond the existence of one's physical genetic linage. Ricard offers the legacy of Buddhism, and the lived experience of Buddhist monks as a reply to persons who would look to science alone as an explanatory hermeneutic for the purpose of human existence.

Wilson would agree with Richard, however, that the tension between how to perceive the mind and the brain as one of the essential, driving conflicts of modern intellectual life, and is still a topic of contentious debate between espousers of the sciences and the humanities. Wilson's answer to this debate is that much of culture can be traced to evolutionary and genetic pressures. The need for religion, for example, comes from the need to justify the dominance and subordination of some groups or persons, in the kill or be killed life of the jungle. According to Wilson, the creation of art and philosophy was spawned by DNA and can be traced "to the laws of physics." (Wilson, 1998, p. 266) What we call culture or mind is merely a portrait of what genes have been successful to reproduce and thrive in the next generation, and thus no culture is superior to another culture, and all cultural manifestations of religious belief or ideas about the integrity of the individual do not have an independent existence, but can be traced to evolutionary needs of the past. If some of these beliefs continue to perpetuate themselves, these ideals do not have their roots in basic, human needs that transcend the survival impulse. Rather they are like vestigial limbs, or organs that were once useful in exercising dominance or finding food, but no longer serve a coherent function.

However, the Buddhist monk son involved with a debate with his philosopher of the Monk and the Philosopher would contend that it is possible to have a sense of mind that is distant from the demands of the body. Mathieu Ricard notes that his chosen path of Buddhism advocates a letting go of the self or 'I,' the very self whose drive to replicate enables the self's DNA to be passed on from generation to generation. The fact that persons have been able to transcend such a sense of fixated, selfish consciousness and detach from their bodies is proof, for Ricard, of the self's existence. Ricard is less interested, however, than finding a totalizing explanation for all of human existence, and is more interested in finding an effective way of dealing with the stresses of life. This orientation of Buddhism is why that his father Revel calls philosophy or religion a way of being in life, rather than a modality of knowledge or a way of explaining human existence. One key aspect of Buddhism is that an adherent must live the teachings of Buddha and rather than focus on understanding the teaching from an intellectual standpoint, including a scientific standpoint like Wilson's thesis.

Wilson would see the Buddhist tradition as merely one more product of genetically generated culture. and, in light of modern scientific knowledge (as opposed to theorization about 'being') a great deal of scientific evidence has accumulated that support's Wilson's essential contention. For example, consider the mutability of the self in light of drugs designed to treat psychological disorders. A formerly scatterbrained individual can become tremendously focused so long as he or she takes the correct Attention Deficit Hyperactivity medication to combat this tendency. In light of Wilson's theorizing, one could say that a formerly useful genetic trait that was passed along, like the ability to be hyper-alert, that has now become less useful in changed modern culture, can now be altered to enable the person to be more functional in present-day culture, by altering the brain chemistry of the mind. Changing the brain chemistry changes what used to be called the mind or self. The need for monks like Ricard to find comfort in religion, or the need to theorize and grapple with circumstances on an intellectual level is likewise a personal trait, neither bad nor good, but a biological product. The examples of persons whose entire selves seem altered after a traumatic injury to the head, which alters their physical, cognitive function also seem to support Wilson's concept of a lack of body and mind 'split.'