Mario Beauregard - Expanding Reality: The Emergence of Postmaterialist Science

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Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded. But once mastered, no one can help you as much.

The Buddha

Every human being religious, scientist or atheist needs to believe in something. In the case of atheists, they believe in nothingness after death, even though they hold no evidence of it. They also believe that God or a transcendent principle at the origin of the world does not exist. With respect to scientists and Science, and with science being a product of human activity, it is not immune to prejudices and dogmatic beliefs. This is particularly obvious when most scientists who work in a specific area of research embrace a dogma extensively. The impenetrable truth status attached to Darwinism in biology proves the impact that such a phenomenon can have.

For more than a century, neuroscience researchers have believed that new neurons could not develop in the adult human brain we were born with a maximum number of neurons, and this would only dwindle throughout our life. Neuroscientists also believed that the adult brain was a static machine that did not have the ability to change. However, in recent decades, this dogma has been cast aside in light of several studies that have convincingly shown that parts of the human brain, as well as many animal species, retain the ability to produce new neurons throughout adult life. According to these studies, contrary to what we thought, the adult human brain is very plastic. Indeed, it constantly alters its structure and function by creating new neurons and synaptic connections between neurons. In addition, in the mature brain, existing neural networks are constantly reorganized, and new networks are developed. This neuroplasticity indicates that we are not prisoners of the brain we inherited at birth.

As mentioned in the introduction, another fundamental dogma in neuroscience, one that remains influential, is the idea that all mental events, consciousness and the self are simply reducible to the physical and biological processes of the brain. In this regard, different materialist theories have tried to explain how the brain produces the mind. One of them is the theory of psychophysical identity. This theory claims that we comprehend our mental processes and our consciousness in the first person, that is, from within and subjectively (I feel happy.); while with neuroscience techniques, our brain activity is measured in the third person, that is externally and objectively (My brain releases more serotonin when I am happy.). In other words, mental events and brain events are perfectly parallel, like two sides of the same coin. However, it is brain states, electrical impulses, and chemical reactions in our brain that create mental states, not the other way around. Most contemporary neuroscientists stand by this view, including Gerald Edelman and Jean-Pierre Changeux.

Eliminativism is another prominent materialist theory about the relationship between mind and brain. The philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland, as well as Daniel Dennett, are illustrious supporters of this radical theory that denies the existence of mental events: our mental world is just an illusion, and we are only imagining having sensations, memories, emotions and thoughts. Eliminativism recognizes only the biophysical processes of the brain. It posits that mind, consciousness, ego, and free will are prescientific concepts that stem from naive and simplistic ideas belonging to popular psychology. Proponents of this theory hope that these concepts will soon be eradicated thanks to advances in neuroscience. As to