Can you debiologize your mind? And if you do will anything remain?

 

The Seven Deadly Sins

Religious traditionalists have criticised scientists who study the physical effects of spiritual activities, such as meditation, as “biologizing the religious response”.

Which got me wondering, if you can biologize mental activities, then can you do the converse and debiologize them?  In particular can you completely debiologize your entire mind, and if you do, will there be anything remaining?

If, as a thought experiment, I took away all the biologically determined aspects of my personality (wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony), would there be anything left whatsoever?  Richard Dawkins certainly thinks so: 

''We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."  - Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976)

This 'pure, disinterested altruism' sounds rather like the Bodhicitta that appears when our mind has been freed of delusions.  

So is defiance or eradication of gene-based biological delusions and memetic mind-viruses the way to progress along the spiritual path?  

Dawkins' claim raises a few questions...

(1) If I removed everything biological from my mind, would there be anything left at all? Aren't we just biological mechanisms - biophysical 'gene machines' and nothing more?

(2) Are these genetic drives really tyrannical delusions, or do they serve some useful purpose?   

(3) Are the traditional biologically-based 'seven deadly sins' of Christianity all that I need to eliminate, or is their something deeper that gives rise to them?     

(4) How do I go about eradicating these biologically based delusions?  If I try to repress them will they just do something Freudian and reappear in other, nastier forms - like Islam?   Rather than just trying to hold down the lid on innate genetic drives, is there any way of transforming or transmuting them?

(5) Assuming I could analyse and eradicate all biologically based delusions arising from my selfish genes, and all the garbage from malignant memes, would I automatically become enlightened?  Or are there still other factors holding me back?

So let's examine each of these questions in turn... 

(1) We are nothing but biological machines. If we completely debiologized there'd be nothing left.

This assumes that our behavior and mental activities are completely mechanistically determined. Buddhist philosophy rejects this view.  Removing all biological mechanisms from our mental processes will not remove the 'nama' processes that are the non-biophysical basis of our minds. See Buddhist Philosophy.


(2) Are these genetic drives really tyrannical delusions, or do they serve some useful purpose?

All animals, including ourselves, have genetically programmed drives to eat, reproduce, fight for territory and mates, kill prey, help our kin and so on. These drives appear to our mind as attachment and aversion.

Manifestations of attachment include sexual desire, hunger and the need for security. Manifestations of aversion include fighting, fleeing and avoiding painful and dangerous situations. All these mental reactions have evolved because they gave our ancestors a selective advantage. They are, or were, essential for preservation of the individual and procreation of its genes.

We humans can to some extent distance ourselves from these drives. We can examine them and if necessary rebel against them. From the Buddhist point of view this is especially significant when these instinctive drives become pathological and turn into harmful 'innate delusions', giving rise to mental states such as anger, hatred, sadism, jealousy, greed, miserliness, sexual abuse and so on.



(3) Are the traditional biologically-based 'seven deadly sins' of Christianity all there are to eliminate, or is their something deeper that gives rise to them?    

In Buddhist ethics, aversion and attachment (and their associated thought patterns such as anger and greed) are two of the Three Poisons. The third poison is ignorance, which consists, among other factors, of being unable to separate the true nature of ones mind from the delusions which afflict it (especially the delusion of inherent existence).   

If we look at the seven deadly sins we see that five of them are in the attachment category (greed, pride, lust, envy and gluttony)  and two are in the aversion category (wrath being a strong aversion to people, and sloth being an aversion to effort).  None could be classed as ignorance, except possibly pride, which since it is an excessive attachment to self-image, necessarily assumes a distorted view of the self (which doesn't actually exist in the way we are accustomed to think of it).

The Buddhist view is that all manifestations of aversion and attachment arise from ignorance of the way that things exist.   This mistaken view regards things, phenomena and people as being inherently or essentially good or bad. So as well as getting rid of the seven deadly sins, we also need to cut their root, which is ignorance of the true nature of reality.

This 'ignorance' of the true nature of reality is also biologically based, and is a result of the limitations of our perceptual and neural systems.  See The evolutionary basis for the delusion of inherent existence in  Evolution, Emptiness and Delusions of the Darwinian Brain

 
(4)  Repression versus transformation. 
Repression won't make biological delusions go away. It will just bottle them up until they eventually explode.   That's why Buddhist psychology uses 'tantric' techniques to transform attachment into the spiritual path, see  Tantric Sex,  Tantra: Transforming enjoyments , Gruesome Tantric Visualizations and Attachment and Tantra 



(5) Assuming I could analyse and eradicate all biologically based delusions arising from my selfish genes, would I automatically become enlightened?  Or are there still other factors holding me back?
 
If simply debiologizing ourselves was enough to ensure enlightenment, then we'd  all become enlightened as soon as we died! However, according to Buddhist beliefs, as soon as we die, uncontrollable forces (karma) start to work to draw us into future rebirths in biological bodies.

Unfortunately, the ordinary mind has very little choice in its rebirth and will be drawn to an environment determined by its imprints and habitual tendencies.

If we recall the symbiotic minds hypothesis, we can see how this makes biological sense. A biophysical body inhabiting an environmental niche of extreme aggression and violence will be at an advantage if it can attract and capture a mind well acquainted with anger.  One which lives in an environment of severe scarcity would do well to attract a mind which is greedy and miserly. An animal which lives a sedentary boring sort of life, for example chewing the cud, will not benefit from a mind which has its thoughts on anything other than the mundane.   

Minds which are habitually angry, miserly or deliberately ignorant will be captured by inhabitants of  the environments to which they are best adapted.  The others may stand a chance of human rebirth. (In Buddhist beliefs, there is no guarantee that a human mind will be reborn into the human realm - there are plenty of other vacancies to be filled by suitable candidates)

'Sow an action, reap a habit.
Sow a habit, reap a character.
Sow a character, reap a destiny.' 

So as well as rebelling against the tyranny of the selfish replicators, we also need to purify the imprints and habitual tendencies that our minds have accumulated over millennia of being reborn into the biological realms. 


...AND, CAN YOU DEBIOLOGIZE GOD?

Anthropomorphism and Zoomorphism - anger, hatred and attachment as divine attributes?
 
Returning to the subject of memes, it's interesting to note how biological and memetic delusions can interact and synergize each other. 

By attributing two of the three poisons (attachment and aversion) to God, theologians are indulging in anthropomorphism (ascribing human characteristics to God), and also zoomorphism (ascribing animal characteristics to God). 

Dogs can show jealousy, bulls can show anger, even ants can show tribalism. All animals show attachment to something - mates, food, territory and status (pecking order).

Sunday School T-shirts?

The three poisons are products of biological evolution. Their purpose is to ensure the best chance of survival of the individual's genes in the natural world 'red in tooth and claw'.

The three poisons persist in humans because our bodies are products of evolution, and our minds have spent long aeons attached to the bodies of animals. 

But the belief that these biologically-based delusions form a part of the psychological make up of the Abrahamic Gods (who presumably have never been biological beings) is itself a delusion caused by anthropomorphic projection of the three poisons of the human mind on the cosmic scale. Man makes God in his own image.

Buddha never ruled out the existence of God as a philosophical concept. Subsequent Buddhist teachers have however warned against worshipping vindictive, jealous, angry, sadistic, possessive faith-based 'samsaric' gods such as Jehovah and Allah, who are merely the omnipotent and eternal mental projections of the worst aspects of human tyrants... 

"But as for those who disbelieve, garments of fire will be cut out for them; boiling fluid will be poured down on their heads.   Whereby that which is in their bellies, and their skins too, will be melted; And for them are hooked rods of iron. Whenever, in their anguish, they would go forth from thence they are driven back therein and (it is said unto them): Taste the doom of burning."
 
...not exactly what you'd think of as Enlightened Beings.

So an anthropomorphic, zoomorphic or 'samsaric' God could be defined as one who shows one or more of the following features, or encourages them in his devotees:

• Attachment to being flattered/worshipped.

• Hatred of those who don't flatter him, or even worse, cartoonists who draw satirical caricatures.

A Samsaric God

• Jealousy of other Gods (Jealousy = Attachment + Hatred). Professor Dawkins quoted a passage from the Bible that commanded that if a friend or member of your family should try to persuade you to worship another god - "You must kill him, your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the hands of the rest of the people following. You must stone him to death because he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God."

• Anger when his wishes are unexpectedly thwarted (though if God were really omniscient and omnipotent then he would know in advance that his wishes would be thwarted and could stop it happening because ... oh anyway..)
  

• Tribalism to encourage attachment to the Chosen Ones ('The Saved' or 'The Umma') and hatred of 'the other'.  Religious tribalism is rapidly assuming the form of Global Divisiveness - dividing the world into Us and Them, God's Warriors versus God's Enemies, Dar al Harb versus Dar al Islam...  But if God is almighty, why are his enemies still allowed to exist. Why does he need bombers to kill them? Can't he do it himself?
  

'There is no compulsion in religion'

• Lust (for 72 virgins).

To a sex-starved, socially-inadequate shaheed, the prospect of sexually enslaving 72 virgins by blowing himself up and killing kuffars in the process may indeed seem like paradise. But consider how attachment may change into aversion over the course of eternity:

Each girl will need to be pleasured at least once a day, and anything less than 15 minutes is going to be a disappointment and reflect badly on your manhood. You'll also need a few minutes for changeover and foreplay before you get stuck in to the next one. So its humping three virgins an hour, every hour, with no rest...

Heaven, Hell or an eternity of aversion therapy? After two weeks even the most pious shaheed would wish he'd been gay. Or maybe he'd just settle for a bowl of raisins.  

Nevertheless, it is blasphemous to examine such beliefs logically.

More at Buddhist Philosophy

 

Buddhism and Terrorism - Meditation on Memes

The Saints of Otranto

Yesterday Pope Francis canonized 800 victims of a religiously-motivated terrorist attack on Otranto, Italy.

This got me thinking about memes again.  Will the most aggressively violent memes inevitably destroy the gentler and more mystical ones by a process of ruthless natural selection, or can peaceful memes somehow inactivate their virulent competitors?

Meme expert Susan Blackmore has suggested that Zen meditation may be able to 'weed-out' these pathological memes.  

Here are some excerpts from her article  Meditation as Meme Weeding 
 
"...American philosopher Daniel Dennett has described the process as the ‘evolutionary algorithm’ – a simple mindless process that once the requisites are in place must happen. If you have heredity, variation and selection then you must get evolution or “Design out of Chaos without the aid of Mind” . It’s as simple as that.

What Dawkins explained, in The Selfish Gene, was that this process is not confined to our most familiar replicator, the gene, but must apply to any information that is copied with variation and selection. All around us, he said, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup of culture, is another replicator. Ideas, habits, skills, stories, technologies, and artistic creations are all copied by a process that may loosely be called imitation. Copying is not perfect, so there is plenty of variation and recombination, and far more copies are made than can possibly survive. So we have a new replicator, a cultural replicator. Taking it from the Greek for ‘that which is imitated’ and abbreviating it to a word that would sound something like ‘gene’ Dawkins called them ‘memes’..."

"...There are many kinds of meme virus. A good example is an email virus. A typical one shouts “Warning, Warning, news just in from IBM (or Bill Gates or …) terrible virus, warn all your friends immediately that if they open a mail called “bla bla” their hard disk will be wiped clean”. This little collection of words can be called a memeplex – shortened from ‘co-adapted meme complex’; in other words, a group of memes that succeeds by hanging out together and getting passed on together. This little memeplex has a very simple structure. I call it C-TaP. It is basically a ‘copy me’ instruction backed up by Threats and Promises. In this case you are told to pass on the message. If you do you will help your friends (the altruism trick), if you don’t they will get their hard disk wiped (using fear to threaten). The memeplex also uses urgency, status (e.g. IBM), and exploits the fact that passing on an email message to lots of people is quick and easy. And so it is that this stupid little bit of text has been copied around and around the world, infecting millions of computers and still going strong after 5 or 6 years. If you doubt the power of memes to change the world then reflect on this silly little memeplex. It has frightened countless people and clogged up whole email systems. A few mindless words have had obvious and serious effects on the physical world. They have even found their way onto this page. This is the power of the memes. Buddhism is a meme.

I began deliberately with a very simple virus but there are far more powerful ones that use exactly the same structure. Dawkins calls them ‘viruses of the mind’; he means religions.

Dawkins used the example of Roman Catholicism; a collection of basic teachings that are passed on in church, by learning the catechism, and through prayer, singing hymns and saying grace. Beautiful cathedrals tempt worshippers inside and lift their hearts, making them want to spread the memes again. Beautiful music and songs carry the words of God and Jesus to more ears and minds. Good Catholics pass on all these ‘truths’ to their children and are encouraged to have lots of children who must, in turn, marry (or convert) a Catholic and bring up their children in the faith. The reward is everlasting life and the punishment – well it’s even worse than having your hard disk wiped..."

"...Being infected with a religion at an early age is no trivial matter. It shapes your mind, affects which memes you will subsequently accept or reject, and affects everyone you come into contact with. Very few people choose their religion, even though most think their religion is the best. Most are infected in childhood and never throw the infection off. We are seeing some of the consequences of these religious memes in the world situation we face today.

"...Our minds, at rest - alert and open - are like a beautifully weeded garden, bare brown earth where anything might grow. And just as the weed seeds are ready to jump into all that bare brown earth, so the memes are ready to jump into our open minds. If weed seeds find a space to grow, off they go, and soon all that open space is a mass of dandelions, speedwells and rosebay willow herb.

It is the same with thoughts. Think about what kinds of thoughts are the most troublesome. I don't believe many people are plagued in meditation by the sounds in the room, or by images of scenery once observed, or images of walking or jumping, or even flying. In other words, it is not our immediate perceptions, nor the things we have learned by ourselves that are troublesome; it is the ones we pick up from other people. It is all words and stories that cause the trouble; all memes.

"...Meditation is the hoe. Meditation is also, of course, a meme. You would never have invented the techniques of Ch’an meditation for yourself. They have been part-invented and part-selected over thousands of years, passing down from person to person in a long evolutionary path. But all of them have this in common - they are ways of defusing the power of other memes."

Read the full article here

Sudden Jihad Syndrome

Sudden jihad syndrome 
If we accept Churchill's virus analogy - 'as dangerous in a man as rabies in a dog'  -  we will recognise that terrorism isn't a mutant form of 'the Religion of Peace' that is produced by radicalisation. On the contrary, thuggery, hatred and murder are written into the basic DNA of the pathogen, and only need the right conditions to be expressed by any carrier of the disease, see 'Sudden  Jihad Syndrome'.


Kalama Sutra
In complete contrast to other religions, Buddhism had elements of meme-weeding from its very beginning.  In the  Kalama Sutra,   Buddha said that all religious teachings, including his own should...

(1) Not be believed on the basis of religious authority, or 'holy' books, or family/tribal tradition, or even coercion and intimidation by the mob.

BUT INSTEAD ONE SHOULD

(2) Test the methodology by personal experience. Does it do what it says on the box?

(3) Is the philosophy rational? Or does it require you to believe six impossible things before breakfast?

(4) Judge the tree by its fruits. Is it beneficial, or does it tell you to act against your conscience and 'The Golden Rule'.

 

Could meditation on memes prevent terrorism?
If young men from vulnerable cultural and family backgrounds were better informed about memes and memeplexes, perhaps they could resist this jihadist indoctrination and  recognize these malignant memes for the pernicious parasitic processes that they are, before they took over their minds and turned them into robotic killers. 

One interesting question is whether the meme theory is itself a meme ('The Metameme') and whether its spread could block and give immunity to more pernicious memes, much like the harmless cowpox virus can block out the lethal smallpox virus. 

"I have been made victorious with terror!"

If you are a sexually repressed teenager, who suddenly realises that the promise of 72 virgins for killing kuffars is nothing more than a mechanism for a mind-virus to ensure its dominance over competing memes, by eliminating their carriers, then you may be less enthusiastic about blowing yourself and fellow passengers to pieces in a train or bus.



Related posts


Buddhism and Islam - Resources

Were the Boston Bombers mentally ill?

Metameme

Accepting our Evolutionary History does not Mean Rejecting our Spirituality

Richard Dawkins

''We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."
- Richard Dawkins 'The Selfish Gene'

In these four sentences Professor Dawkins has described both the scientific view of the 'human condition', and the main motivations for following the Buddhist path.



Defying the tyranny of the genes
All animals, including ourselves, have genetically programmed drives to eat, reproduce, fight for territory and mates, kill prey, help our kin and so on. These drives appear to our mind as attachment and aversion.

Manifestations of attachment include sexual desire, hunger and the need for security. Manifestations of aversion include fighting, fleeing and avoiding painful and dangerous situations. All these mental reactions have evolved because they gave our ancestors a selective advantage. They are, or were, essential for preservation of the individual and procreation of its genes.

Examining our genes

We humans can to some extent distance ourselves from these drives. We can examine them and if necessary rebel against them. From the Buddhist point of view this is especially significant when these instinctive drives become pathological and turn into harmful 'innate delusions', giving rise to mental states such as anger, hatred, sadism, jealousy, greed, miserliness, sexual abuse and so on.

Three poisons:
Pig = Ignorance
Cock = Desirous Attachment
Snake = Hatred

The Three Poisons
In Buddhist ethics, anger and greed (and their associated thought patterns) are two of the three poisons. The third poison is ignorance, which consists, among other factors, of being unable to separate the true nature of one's mind from the delusions which afflict it (especially the delusion of inherent existence).


Defying the tyranny of the memes

A meme is a delusional mind-virus which spreads by thought-contagion among people in the same manner that a computer virus spreads among PCs. Many cults have a memetic component.

The term 'meme' was coined by Richard Dawkins in the 1970's, but the idea goes back at least to the 1890's when Winston Churchill compared a certain religion (no prizes for guessing which!) to the rabies virus - 'as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog'.

If a religion or cult shows most of the following features then it is a pernicious meme:

• Self-referential or circular claims to the truth such as "This meme says it is the divine truth. Since it is the divine truth whatever its says must be true. Therefore it must be the divine truth because it says so, and all competing memes must be the work of the devil".

• Threats of eternal punishment in hell for disbelief in the meme (rather than for evil actions).

• Commands to persecute or attack people who do not believe in the meme.

• Boosting the believers' egos by telling them they are 'chosen' or superior to believers in false memes, who are dehumanised and vilified as 'najis kafirs' (filthy unbelievers).

• Disabling the faculties of disbelief ('immune response') by claiming that faith is superior to reason.

The harm that can be done by attachment to memes far exceeds that from attachment to wealth, possessions or people. Memes have been the cause of many of the wars, terrorist campaigns, persecutions, pogroms and witchhunts in history.

On the other hand, if a religion is based on wisdom, tolerance, free enquiry, rationality and universal compassion, then it is a beneficial spiritual path.

Memes are 'intellectually formed delusions', as distinct from the genetically-programmed innate delusions. However, memes often interact with and derive their power from innate delusions. For example, the meme that infects socially-inadequate, sex-starved young men and causes virulent hatred against the infidel, together with a desire to become a martyr in order to have an eternity of sex with 72 virgins, derives its power from testosterone-fueled innate delusions of aggression and lust.

Buddhist meditation attempts to weed out memes.

Delusion of inherent existence
There's one innate delusion that's more subtle than the obvious ones, such as greed and anger - it's the delusion of grasping at inherently-existent phenomena. We see the world in terms of 'things' because our genes are telling us to grab resources. But if we take a step back and view the universe in terms of geological and cosmic timescales, it is apparent that there are no inherently existent things, only processes of continual change. All phenomena are dependently-related and empty of any defining essence.

Individuals, buildings, artifacts, species, continents, planets and stars are transient phenomena caused by the coming together of parts. All compounded things are impermanent and eventually disintegrate. It is grasping at things as if they were permanent, or desirable in themselves, that is one of the principal causes of dukkha - the sensation of unsatisfactoriness due the the transience of all biological pleasures.

Rebellion and liberation

Tara the Liberator

The outcome of a successful rebellion is liberation from tyranny. We've identified the tyrants as the delusions that poison our minds.

Analysis of deluded religious motivation allows us to recognise and remove memes, even when they are deep-seated results of childhood indoctrination. With practice in meditation we can also overcome hatred and attachment and the subtle delusion of inherent existence of things. We can then declare our independence from the selfish replicators.

Who or what is rebelling?
But, if we aren't just the products of our genes and our memes, what are we? Who or what is rebelling against the replicators? What is the end result of liberation? How is it possible for us to think of ourselves as non-deluded, non-mechanistic, non-biological free agents?

According to Buddhist philosophy, the reason we can work towards liberation is that our minds, although influenced by biology, are not themselves biological nor indeed physical in nature, nor are they emergent phenomena of physical or biological processes. In meditation we can imagine we are throwing away or peeling off all our biological and social attributes in order to find out what we really are. We discover that we are pure awareness, a formless non-physical mental continuum that continues from life to life and body to body.

The true nature of the mind is peace

Where do we go from here?
If we indeed come to the conclusion that our mind is a non-physical continuum that attaches itself to biological systems in life after life, then we might decide we don't want to carry on this way. Our delusions are bad enough when we are humans, but what chance have we if at our next rebirth our mind attaches itself to a chimpanzee, dog or pig? Before humans evolved, our minds spent countless millenia attached to the bodies of animals, and there's nothing to prevent them becoming attached to animals again. We have no absolute guarantee of taking a future human rebirth.

'We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.' - This is known in Buddhism as 'Our precious human life'.

Our minds can only get access to the sensory and intellectual equipment needed to liberate themselves when they are in the human realm. So we should avoid actions and thought-patterns which might lead to lower (e.g. animal) rebirth. We also need to get our minds permanently out of the cycle of death and rebirth as soon as possible.

Animals are unable to separate their minds from their innate delusions and their biological nature. But we humans know from philosophical analysis that we are non-physical entities. There's no reason why this muddy vesture of biological decay should always grossly close us in. What we need is someone to help us shuffle off this mortal coil once and for all. The questions are - who and how?

Deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism.
As Professor Dawkins points out, pure disinterested altruism is, in evolutionary terms, a new phenomenon. It does not exist in nature and does not arise spontaneously in humans. It needs to be deliberately cultivated by conscious effort. To quote Shantideva:

"First I should strive to meditate
On equalising self and others.
Since we are equal from the point of view of suffering
I should protect everyone as I do myself."

In Buddhism, pure disinterested altruism, in its initial form, is known as 'Wishing Love'. It is the wish that those around us should be happy and free from suffering. Buddhist teachers are very careful to emphasise the 'pure and disinterested' aspects, because love is often mixed with attachment. The difference between love and attachment is:

• Attachment is "How can you make me happy? "

• Love is "How can I make you happy?"

Normally, the fact that love is mixed with attachment doesn't matter too much, but we can think of situations where it can be damaging, for example the over-possessive parent, or the parent who wants their child to fulfil their own frustrated career ambitions, or the husband who kills his wife in a fit of jealousy.

Pure disinterested altruism in its developed form arises out of compassion for the suffering of all sentient beings, and the desire to rescue all, without exception, from Samsara. It is known as bodhichitta. Bodhichitta is the motivation for striving for ones' own liberation for the ultimate benefit of all.

Bodhisattva

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