22 On Behaviorism and the Like II, or Why Alan is Not Beating a Dead Horse

In an enormously compelling and emotional talk Alan once again tackles how scientific and contemplative communities have tackled “the hard problem”, that is how one can explain the relationship between qualia and its neural correlates.
Alan first looks back on the 8th and the 14th century to show how Tibet was once a barbaric force that was then completely transformed by Buddhism. This brought about an immense contemplative culture and tradition that now reaches our Western/modern civilization by way of e.g. Gyatrul Rinpoche teaching Padmasambhava’s text “Natural Liberation” to everybody who is filling to listen with faith. All the while the European civilization was in relation to its philosophical tradition still nowhere! That it didn’t exactly “get better” in Europe shows the dominance of behaviorism in the 20th century and scientific materialism. Furthermore, Michio Kaku’s book “The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind”, which sounds very promising and is all the more disappointing and - if anything - proves that a theoretical physicist with no training in psychology, neuroscience or any kind of mind science should not write a book about the mind. As it turns out, Michio Kaku boldly states that there is a smooth continuum of consciousness from the thermostat (as the lowest form) to humans (the highest form). Thus, the human brain is nothing else than an extremely complex thermostat - which sounds very much like Aristotle’s theory (which is equally unempirical) that the brain is nothing but a refrigerator that keeps the body cool. Taken the absurdity of that argument (especially because it’s not backed up by evidence), it might come as a surprise that there are even more people who share that opinion. One of them is Daniel Dennett, a philosopher, who argues that humans are simply largely autonomous robots with no qualia at all! This is exactly what Descartes once assured Europeans of in relation to animals. That very view was then used as a justification for treating animals in such cruel ways that leave most of people speechless. The same view was then used to justify the violence against black people, Native Americans, Jews, and with every other group of people that somehow stood in the way of the dominant in-group. And as different as the historical contexts might be in all these cases, the argument always ran: “They are not like us, they don’t feel the same way we do, they are just animals”. The view that Dennett and the like represent is what Alan calls human racism as the whole of mankind is being treated like mindless robots. One does not even want to think about what atrocities could be justified with such a view of people as robots…
Alan, however, ends on a positive note by quoting John Searle and most and foremost Shantideva to inspire us all to do our best to change the world for the better.

Meditation starts at 00:13