Cognitive consciousness
jaraymaker
- Online Publication Date:
- 05 Jan 2016
Helminiak devotes a great deal of time to examining the current debate on the capacity of the human brain to come to knowledge of God—what in neuroscience is termed “God in the brain” debate. He immediately wades into the debate, providing the reader with two helpful suggestions: (i) that ancillary to the debate is the mind-body problem, which needs to be resolved, and (ii) that a critical epistemology that addresses both physical and non-physical realities is essential to resolving both the mind-body problem and the “God in the brain” question. He suggests correctly that the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian, Bernard Lonergan, has already produced a seminal work on human consciousness that, properly appropriated, can advance the dialogue between neuroscience and religion on the issue of human consciousness. He justifies this thesis in all the seven chapters of the book, explicating Lonergan’s work and showing how it fits into current debates on the brain and human consciousness.
Helminiak acknowledges that postmodern debates over “truth” and “objectivity” have made it difficult for neuroscientists or psychologists to come to any consensus on epistemology. He relies (again brilliantly) on Lonergan’s account of human consciousness and its correlative epistemology to show how these heuristics can resolve questions of the mind that neuroscience and psychology have failed to answer. Chapter Two, titled “Epistemology: A Portentous Prolegomenon,” is particularly engaging. This is the edifice, or if you like, the bulwark of the book—everything harkens back to this chapter. It relates human transcendental experiences to neuro-scientific research with a view to determining whether God (the object of transcendental experience) can be the object of neurological function. He probes whether the brain is structured to be sensitive to God. Using three representative examples of scholars who have discussed the problematic of consciousness—Roger Penrose, who acknowledges that consciousness is a distinctive reality amenable to some kind of scientific explanation, but wrongly uses a physics-based model to talk about consciousness; David Chalmers, who strictly held consciousness to be a natural phenomenon, falling under the sway of natural laws; and Daniel Dennett, who explicitly dismisses any appeal to internal experience as obscurantism—Helminiak argues that the limitedness of science is, in the final analysis, a methodological problem. Lonergan’s epistemology, he further argues, adequately addresses this methodological problem. Drawing from current research in psychology on human consciousness, which he weaves with Lonergan’s account of human knowing, Helminiak shows how it is in performing different acts of our conscious intentionality that we experience not only ourselves as human subjects, but also the spiritual facets of our existence.
dh creatively uses neuroscientific research, particularly quantitative electroencephalography (eeg) and magnetoencephalography (meg), to strengthen this argument. While recognizing the contributions of eeg and meg to resolving the Cartesian mind-body problem, he also carefully points out the limitations of such research. One big flaw is their inability to provide any “consistent or coherent understanding of the relationship between brain and mind” (84). Helminiak goes on at length to show how “inadequate epistemology” and “intellectual agnosticism” (84) are to blame for this conceptual confusion. He lays down this critique in anticipation of an important suggestion he will make later—that only a psychology inclusive of the spiritual dimension of the mind can explain human transcendent experience. As can be gleaned from Lonergan’s critical realist epistemology, Helminiak determines that the “subtle and difficult” (110) problem can be resolved, not by “sensate modeled epistemology” (111), but by a careful application of the kind of intellectual epistemology (discussed in Chapter Two) that Lonergan offers—criteria of attentive experience, intelligent understanding, and reasonable judgment.
In later chapters of the book, Helminiak spends a great deal of time showing how the mind is real in the same way the body is real, and how the two are to be thought of as two distinct realities. In his explanatory terms, the mind is a complex phenomenon that entails at least two realities that are open to further neuroscientific research: psyche and spirit. The mind emerges from the brain as a reality distinct from the brain, but not separate from it. Moving beyond the troublesome bipartite model that has long stalled the mind-body debate, Helminiak relies on the phenomenology or more precisely the self-appropriation of Lonergan. Relying on Lonergan’s self-appropriation is quite helpful because Lonergan, as Helminiak correctly points out, styled his phenomenology-like analysis of self-appropriation “to avoid entangle complications among the different schools of phenomenology” (309). In this analysis, mind and body are to be conceived of as properties (or “conjugates,” to use Lonergan’s own term) of the polymorphism of the human species. Lonergan’s unique analysis assumes consciousness to be a kind of “spirit.” Helminiak draws on this insight to refine the bipartite model of the mind-body problem, positing instead a tripartite model of organism-psyche-consciousness, which is to say, body-psyche-spirit. Since the differentiation of psyche and spirit within the mind sheds light on the possible enhancement of human spiritual sensitivity, consciousness can be conceived as “dynamic, self-transcendent, open-ended, trans-spatial and trans-temporal, unitive, ineffable or mysterious, and experienced as gift or ‘grace’” (319). This dynamic thrust of human consciousness helps us understand how “anticipatorily and heuristically, God names the ultimate explanation of the existence of all things” (346). Helminiak sheds light on theologians’ hypothesis that God accounts for the datum of existence and ultimate explanation of contingent existence. While imagination and sensate-modeled thinking may project an infinite regress to account for existence of contingent universe, infinite regress lacks both coherence and intelligibility. “It violates the principle of non-contradiction: what is inherently contingent cannot also be non-contingent” (348). Thus, to give an account of the existence of what cannot explain its own existence, something other than contingent being must be posited—Necessary Being, which believers call God.
The reader will enjoy how well-researched, well-written, and well-organized Brain, Consciousness, and God is. The structure of the book makes it easy to move from chapter to chapter to locate and return to tangential matters, to which the author frequently refers the reader. Helminiak has produced a compelling, brilliant book that makes a significant contribution to the psychology of religion and the science-religion dialogue. The book has both name and subject indexes that makes it easy for students and researchers to keep track of the multiplicity of names and topics discussed. The book may not be an easy read because of the jargon of the neuroscience, but readers will find that Helminiak takes time to explain to the non-specialist what is otherwise a difficult subject matter