Dualisms and Neurotransmitters

What I have to say here is based on a NY Times article I read several months ago. You can find it here. Take a couple of minutes to read it, because the rest of this is a critique of aspects of the article.

Consider this sentence taken from the article: "Should the brain want to ignore what it might otherwise notice, dopamine must be muzzled." What strikes me about this sentence is how it mixes the idea of the brain as an autonomous agent (or the defining organ of a larger agent, say, me) with the notion of the brain as a simple chemo-biological mechanism. That is, if you or I want to ignore something we have to find some way to block dopamine in our brain. But how is this different from deciding to ignore something? Presumably when we make an effort to concentrate (i.e., decide to ignore other things), that too has biochemical effects in the brain, perhaps even the "blocking" of dopamine. Ah! But here we're getting into the meet of my problem: I said making an effort has biochemical "effects". Really, shouldn't we just say that making this effort is a biochemical occurrence. Otherwise we are some form of dualist, asserting that biochemical reactions cause certain mental states.

My impression is that, in fact, most writing concerning neuroscience is largely dualistic in its approach. This is ironic. Really. Scientists are ever angling toward scientific materialism and yet they preserve these patterns of dualistic speech in which it is at least implied that mental states (e.g., feeling happy) are caused/affected by the presence or absence of certain chemicals in the brain.

And there's the paradox. The folks who claim to be scientific materialists are, I think, generally dualists. They would tend to think of dopamine as having a causal relation to "internal states". In the applications of such research they will want to prescribe some treatment that is supposed to affect these internal states. On the other hand, if we do away with this dualism we wind up thinking that one's psychological experience is not separate from my physical experience and thus we might start trying to treat our psychology by doing the right things with our bodies. By that I mean, what I think must affect my brain chemistry (because my brain chemistry is what I think... it does not "cause" what I think). So, being trained to think well must be linked (quite strongly?) with "good" brain chemistry. What we do with our minds (whether we give in to desires, petty feelings, etc.) must be reflected in brain chemistry. Similarly for the rest of the body. What we do with our bodies affects/is affected by what we do with our minds. This is the unity of human experience.

This is all to say that at least part of the time that we're treating "chemical imbalances" in the brain, we might ought to be teaching people to live better. That is to say, virtue must be related to happiness and vice versa (didn't St. Thomas already say that?). I will go further and say that being continually exposed to sin in the form of sexual temptation, murder, etc. (yes, TV is a great example... how many shows are fundamentally about murder?), might logically cause chemical imbalances in our brains: it might cause us to sin and be less happy.

So there. In other writings I've argued that sin affects the weather. Now I'm arguing that sin affects your dopamine levels.

If blogs aren't good for bold, sweeping statements, what are they good for?

Doctored Up and Reading Again

On December 8, 2009 I successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation in Civil and Environmental Engineering (Hydrology and Fluid Dynamics focus). As of Feb 2, 2010 I am starting to come out of the haze that was finishing my Ph.D.

What's happening now? Well, on Dec 14, 2009 I started a postdoc at a nearby (but different) university. Though I'm a postdoc at a new place, I still basically feel like a student, except that I now have a lot more meetings to attend. My new work is more hydrologic, and at least in the short term, less scientific. That is, I'm effectively working on a policy study for the state government. It's glorified technician work. The appeal for me is that it is a project that will affect water management and pollution in my backyard (speaking somewhat figuratively). I mean, it will literally affect my backyard, but only as a little piece of an entire watershed. The project integrates economic theory, watershed modeling and behavioral psychology to figure out how to most efficiently (and effectively) reduce nitrogen loads in local drinking water reservoirs. So, there's the draw: it's immanently practical. The drawback is pretty much the same point. There's very little science in the sense of figuring out something new about how the world works. We are, instead, applying what we know (in theory) to a particular place.

I've also been reading again. Recently I've read a large pile of papers about rivers and ecology, started Bill Cronon's book Changes in the Land, and Silence by Shusaku Endo. This morning I read an essay by Donald Worster called "Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History". It's an earlier environmental history article (~1990) that outlines some of the ways the free market and land use have interacted for better or worse on the way to making a case for viewing history with an "agroecological" lens because "whatever terrain the environmental historian chooses to investigate, he has to address the age-old problem of how humankind can feed itself without degrading the primal source of life."

In addition I am a hundred pages or so into Steven Shapin's The Scientific Life which is a sociological investigation of the vocation/occupation of scientist over the course of the 20th century. So far, it's fascinating. Perhaps I'll post a review when I'm done. I also just finished a biography of St. Francis by Julienne Green entitled God's Fool, one of the better bios in my opinion.

On the list for the near future: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle which looks very promising but I haven't gotten to it yet, The Path Between the Seas a big book about the construction of the Panama Canal by David McCullough, and The Brothers Karamazov. That's the short list of readings that are coming up. But there's a far longer list behind those.

Right now, though, it's back to work. I'm taking the new job as an opportunity to be more diligent about keeping up with the state of research in scientific disciplines related to my work (which means reading a one or two dozen papers a month) as well as learning to program in C++, navigating Linux, and extending my Mathematica and Matlab skills.