Emeritus Medical Researcher
Human beings (Homo sapiens) evolved by natural selection from large organic molecules in the primeval soup that constituted the seas and oceans of the early Earth. Along the way, collections of matter which possess the attributes of life were formed such as plants and animals. A human being (Homo sapiens), is the only organized collection of matter that is self-aware. All thoughts and actions of this human being are encompassed by three overarching, predominant, interconnected Desires or Properties or Characteristics which are: (i) Self-maintenance and self-replication- which includes food, shelter, love, sex, beauty, social relations (ii) Worship of a super-natural Being (God) or many gods (iii) Curiosity – which leads to knowledge, invention, discovery, skills Every morning, as soon as I wake up, I become aware that ‘I am’, that ‘I Exist’. I am aware of my body with my five senses; I am also always aware of my ‘mind’ because I always have thoughts.
As the French philosopher Descartes said- “I think, therefore I am – cogito, ergo sum“. According to Buddhist philosophy, there is no permanent unchanging spirit which can be considered as ‘Self‘, or ‘Soul‘ or ‘Ego‘ as opposed to matter. So, my Buddhist religion and Buddhist philosophy assert that there is (‘No I’), that (‘I’) is an illusion, and most people who profess Buddhism as their religion believe that this idea of (‘No I’) is an integral component of Absolute Realty (Paramattha Sitsa) and that to cling to the belief (‘I am’) is heresy (Thet-kaya deik-hti) Scientific knowledge also says the same thing, more or less, in a different way.
I cannot get rid of the consciousness, the natural awareness, the inward notion of ‘I’, that ‘I exist’. There are many others who belong to other religions or atheists who believe differently from Buddhism about the mind and the afterlife. Renowned astrophysicist, Carl Sagan, in his book (‘The Dragons of Eden'(1977),”Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence“), as well as many other scientists say that there is ‘No Mind’ which exists independently of the body and/or the brain. Carl Sagan blends science and philosophy with poetic insight and literary skill in expressing his conviction about the Mind; he puts it rather elegantly as follows: “My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings – what we sometimes call Mind – are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology and nothing more. ‘Mind’ may be a consequence of the action of the brain severally or collectively. Some processes may be the function of the brain as a whole. At any rate, both because of the clear trend in the recent history of biology and because there is not one shred of evidence to support it, I will not in these pages, entertain any hypothesis on what used to be called the mind-body dualism, the idea that inhabiting the matter of the brain is something made of quite different stuff called ‘Mind‘.”But I would like to ask ‘How?’ (The whole may be greater than the sum of the parts- ATBT). How does the workings of the anatomy and physiology of the brain produce the consequences, the internal phenomena such as thoughts, ideas, will, sorrow, joy, love and so on. How does sight become seeing or visual consciousness; and sound become hearing or hearing consciousness? I have not, with my limited access and understanding of Buddhist and scientific literature, come across any rational explanation of How. What I find are postulates, beliefs or descriptive and secondary sources. Maybe I missed it. (But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” ATBT). I would also argue that evidence depends on how it is obtained and the criteria used. We scientists have been using scientific research and the scientific method to observe natural phenomena and to obtain new knowledge since the scientific revolution led by the ‘greats’ such as Kepler, Newton, Darwin and others; and regard all other methods as invalid. The scientific method, the ‘hypothesis-deductive model’, consists essentially of a cycle of observations of natural phenomena, development of a hypothesis by inductive logic to explain all similar phenomena, (develop a ‘testable hypothesis‘), do experiments to verify or refute it (as propounded by Kuhn in ‘The structure of scientific revolutions‘); and make predictions of future phenomena as well as what happened in the past. Most of us whose profession involves science and the pursuit of scientific knowledge and skills implicitly believe in ‘Scientific determinism’ – that ‘present events are determined by past events and in turn determine future events‘-as asserted by the French scientist Laplace. Having said all that with regard to Cosmology – I, as a scientist, cannot but believe in what Stephen Hawkins, the eminent astrophysicist said – ‘that we are but an advanced tribe of primates living on a small planet revolving around a very ordinary star (our Sun) in one of the peripheral spiraling arms of the Milky Way Galaxy, one among millions of galaxies’. Scientists are convinced, based on scientific evidence, that the solar system and our Earth are pieces of rock formed from remnant debris of a Supernova – the explosion, the death throes of a star – that coalesced because of gravitational forces. We human beings and all living and non-living, physical things on Earth are made of ‘stardust‘.
When practicing doctors and working scientists everywhere, nowadays, find that their scientific knowledge and methods conflict with those of their respective religions, especially rituals and beliefs that accrue to the essence of their religious teaching, which is often – ‘they suspend either their religious beliefs or their scientific knowledge, methods and beliefs. They adopt a hybrid or double set of beliefs and values at different times and places‘As a doctor, I can use my scientific knowledge and medical technology to successfully cure disease in patients sometimes, relieve suffering often, and even give comfort frequently with the aid of advanced information technology, so that I am more and more confident in medical knowledge, skills and technology and convinced of its comparative effectiveness and efficiency. Like many other Burmese Buddhist doctors in Myanmar and elsewhere, I have been able to compromise, reconcile myself to the dilemma of mind-body dualism and keep these two sets of belief and practice separate, and therefore I became a hybrid doctor.
Sources
- ‘What the Buddha taught’ by Walpola Rahula, Paperback edition published in 1978 by The Corporate Body of the Buddha Educational Foundation
- ‘The Essence of Buddha Abhidamma’ by DrMehm Tin Mon Published in 1995 by MehmTayZar Mon, Yadanar Min Literature, 15/19, U Wisara Qr.Dagon, Yangon.
- ‘The Selfish Gene’ by Richard Dawkins Published by the Oxford University Press 1976.
- ‘An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology’ by Padmasiri de Silva.Third edition published by Rowman& Littlefield Publishers Inc. New York.
- ‘The Dragons of Eden’ by Carl Sagan Published by Random House Inc. May 1977.
