A biological experiment is turning out to have groundbreaking implications for ethics, as well as boosting the career of a high-flying B.C.-raised neuroscientist.
In a study of humans playing a cooperative game involving money, researchers recently discovered that they could make subjects more generous by spraying the hormone oxytocin into their noses.
Paul Zak, a neuro-economist at Claremont Graduate University in Southern California, concluded that oxytocin makes people more trusting and essentially creates “the feeling of right and wrong” in the brain. Zak is writing a book called The Moral Molecule.
Patricia Churchland, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, who was raised on a farm in Oliver, is firmly in the same neurological camp when it comes to why human beings make moral decisions.
Churchland, 68, believes humans are governed entirely by chemicals like oxytocin, which has sometimes been dubbed the “love hormone.” It makes humans feel bonded and attached.
“There is only the brain,” Churchland is convinced.
So is Patricia’s famous husband of 43 years, Vancouver-born Paul Churchland, also of the University of California, San Diego. The couple met at the University of B.C. in 1962 in a class on the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle.
They went on to teach philosophy and neuroscience at the University of Manitoba before being scooped up by the U.S. university. Together, the combative academic stars have been working to shake up the world of science, religion, philosophy and ethics.
Not shy about being in the limelight, they have – among many other media and Internet appearances – been featured together in a lengthy profile in The New Yorker.
Although the two scholastic dynamos are respected as early pioneers in neuroscience and brain plasticity – a field that has now become fashionable through books such as Norman Doidge’s The Brain that Changes Itself – the Churchlands have also been accused of being “reductionists,” of reducing everything that matters in the world to evolutionary biology.
Patricia Churchland came to the University of B.C. last week as a Cecil and Ida Green visiting professor. Her latest book, which delves into oxytocin and other molecules associated with animal feelings, is titled Brain-trust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality (University of Princeton Press).
Even while living in Southern California, B.C. remains the second home of the Churchlands. They have, for almost two decades, lived at least three months a year in their summer place on Bowen Island.
When The Vancouver Sun expressed interest in profiling Pat during her UBC appointment, she invited me to one of her lectures, funded by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, followed by a group lunch and then an interview.
In person, Churchland is tall and energetic. Her lecture style in front of about 40 students and faculty was friendly, anecdotal and filled with acidic comments about the complete wrong-headedness of most philosophers and religious teachers.
Since Churchland believes all philosophy must in the future be conducted as “neurophilosophy,” she constantly returned in her talk to the ultimate supremacy of the brain – to how it determines everything about animals and humans. Especially their moral behaviour.
Attacking any attempt to bring “absolutistic” philosophical or ethical “rules” to human existence, she instead focused on the importance to ethics of the neurochemicals associated with mammalian emotions, such as oxytocin, dopamine, vasopressin, serotonin and adrenalin.
Given her predilection for psychopharmacology, Patricia often pokes fun at what she dismisses as “folk psychology,” saying it will eventually be entirely superseded by neuroscience, the study of the nervous system and brain.
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Like countless philosophers before her, Churchland is trying to answer the so-called “mind-body problem.”
She is delving into how the mind communicates with the body. How can an invisible intellectual thought lead a human to move their physical body to type on a keyboard or kick a soccer ball? And what is consciousness?
Since Churchland argues that the answer to the mind-body problem lies in the brain, in unadulterated biology, she is often considered a “materialist,” someone who believes the universe is made up of unfeeling bits of matter.
However, at one point in her lecture, Churchland said that the world’s 30,000 neuroscientists basically all agree that “neurons make decisions.”
That made me wonder whether she was as much a materialist as opponents argue. The proposition that “neurons make decisions” is also put forward by so-called “panpsychists,” or “panexperientialists.”
Panexperientialists, such as philosophers Gottfried Leibniz, William James, David Ray Griffin and novelist Philip Pullman, are not materialists. They believe that consciousness coexists in some basic form in all things, even in atoms and neurons.
I wondered if Churchland was more open to panexperientialism than believed. So, during a lively lunch with seven scholars, I asked about her remark that most neuroscientists declare that “neurons make decisions.”
With a wary laugh, she exclaimed: “Don’t quote me on that!” Trying another approach, I asked whether she was a “determinist” who believes all animal behaviour is fated by evolutionary biology.
Or did she think that humans and other living things, even neurons, have some degree of freedom of choice?
Churchland did not embrace the notion of “free will.” But she did acknowledge that humans and other living things, including the cells that make up the brain, can learn some “self-control.”
After the group lunch, we were finally able to sit down for more detailed questioning in a quiet office of the Peter Wall Institute.
Asking about her B.C. upbringing, Churchland said her orchard-keeping family and most of her friends in the Okanagan “were very poor . We all came from these small farms where you had to work your butts off.”
But the teachers at Southern Okanagan high school were “absolutely fabulous” in the 1950s and ’60s, she said, inculcating a host of students with a genuine love of learning.
Churchland said her rural upbringing led to her developing a strong pragmatic streak. As a result of her work in neuroscience, she said she now realizes, “It all comes from the brain.”
When I asked her how she would define herself on the spiritual-philosophical spectrum, however, she surprisingly answered: “Pantheist,” adding “I love nature.” Pantheists are defined as people who view the natural world as the absolute, as the equivalent of God.
Then Churchland suddenly apologized for having to cut the interview short. She said she had some pressing matters.
With time running out on our conversation, I quickly blurted: “What gives your life meaning?”
On the surface, at least, her answer didn’t seem to have much to do with the hard edge of materialistic brain science. It was soft, emotive and traditional.
“Love,” she answered.
“And kayaking, and children and dogs.”