The Fallacy Of The Disembodied Mind

by tristero

This is woo-woo hoo-hah. Take this little anecdote:

Now let’s say that a man loses his job, becomes depressed, and wants a prescription for Prozac. What made him depressed isn’t the imbalance of serotonin in his brain but the loss of his job. Yet science continues to offer this kind of wrong explanation all the time. It mistakes agency for cause. The brain is serving as the agent of the mind, it isn’t causing mind.

Where to start? Chopra confuses anger, sadness, and possibly guiilt with what is clearly a medical condition. Or he confuses the colloquial use of the word “depressed” with the medical term “depressed.” Either way, he fails to recognize that there is a difference between the state of serious depression – which requires clinical treatment and shouldn’t rule out medication – and the complex of emotions felt normally when one loses a job – which doesn’t rise to the level of clinical seriousness. Those of us who either know someone who has clinical depression or who have personally suffered depression – perhaps most of us fall into one or other, if not both, categories – know that the depth of major depression and its very real dangers goes far beyond a mere reaction to the vicissitudes of life. In regulating emotion during depression, clearly the brain is badly misfiring, and that misfiring is indeed the cause of the disorder, among other causes.

To repeat, essentially, depression – in the technical sense – is a medical condition caused along the biochemical axis by certain dysfunctions in the apparatus that regulates the release of neurotransmitters, and not just serotonin (it is a gross oversimplification to limit the cause of depression merely to serotonin levels, dopamine plays an important role, as do other neurotransmitters). Depression manifests itself in behavioral symptoms detailed in the DSM-IV and it can be exacerbated (or brought on) by the brain’s reaction to life problems. However, clinical depression in no way is caused exclusively, or even predominantly, by life situations (with exceptions duly noted for extreme suffering: eg, the onset of depression after being tortured at Abu Ghraib, after losing your home in New Orleans, being arrested and detained indefinitely in solitary confinement a la Padilla, and so on). It is a brain disorder.

And then Chopra falls into one the hoariest errors in dualism. If the brain does not cause mind, then what does? And if that “what” is some non-material cause, say God, how does the non-material interact/interface with the material?

Now, whether or not we assume that Chopra is invoking something like God here – for example, he might be saying that what “causes” mind is the individual embedded in a culture – we are left, to Chopra’s misfortune, with the inescapable fact that there is no reliable evidence that an individual mind persists after the destruction/death of the brain, which really puts kind of a dent in his notion that the brain doesn’t cause mind.

Now if Chopra argued that mind cannot exist either without both brain and human society, he would be saying something I could agree to, but also something trivial. No one disagrees. But he seems to be asserting some kind of notion of mind that exists over and beyond physically-instantiated causes. And that is absurd. All he ends up doing is illustrate the pointlessness of attempting to argue by logic for the existence of the supernatural.

Likewise, another of Chopra’s point – the assertion that the wrong level of analysis often is brought to bear on the issue of depression – is very well-known. Again, speaking in generalizations, it is naive to talk about the “cause” of something like depression. It has many causes (including possible genetic ones), as do many other diseases for which Chopra doesn’t and wouldn’t claim supernatural cause – eg, diabetes. I would immediately agree that any psychiatrist who treated merely the neurotransmitter imbalances of depression without asking about life situations is doing his/her patient a grave disservice. But an efficacious treatment for depression does not, in any way require some kind of vague invoking of a supernatural, extra-material cause. In fact a resort to supernatural explanations would be worthless, if not counterproductive.

It is people like Chopra, who can’t wait to call upon woo woo, who make it extremely difficult to articulate criticisms of present-day scientific paradigms of depression and other complex human conditions. It seems reasonable to claim that the combination of personal biological functions and predispositions in concert with certain kinds of life situations is a more plausible cause of depression than the once trendy focus on the isolated chemistry of one individual. But that is a far cry from Chopra’s vague, and to my mind (ahem) at least, vaguely unpleasant, new age thinking.

There are responsible people who can talk about these very same issues. Depression, for instance, is a very important topic. What Chopra has to contribute to the discussion, other than his celebrity, seems roughly equal to zero. I fail to understand why HuffPo is giving him a platform and not some qualified physician.