The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [130]
Certainly, scientism can’t take authenticity seriously. Making heavy weather of what introspection seems to tell us turns out to be a big mistake. It may be responsible for a certain amount of great art, like Finnegans Wake or Waiting for Godot, highly entertaining to those who can sit through them. But taking introspection seriously creates a demand for satisfying narratives or stories, the search for ultimate meanings and cosmic purposes, and the quest for values in a world devoid of them. The quest is deep, heroic, and futile.
Scientism is committed to the mind’s being the brain. It tells us that the direct route to mental health has to be by rearranging brain circuits. In most cases, we cannot do that yet. While we are waiting for neuroscience to advance far enough to do so, should we try psychotherapy? Well, it could help, but not the way most people think.
There are, of course, many kinds of therapy, many of them pseudoscientific spin-offs from Freudian analysis. Most of these just “double down” on the mistakes common sense makes when it takes introspection seriously. Some of these psychotherapies even take dreams seriously. But there are also scientifically serious approaches to talk therapy. For instance, various forms of cognitive-behavioral therapy are sometimes prescribed along with the pills. They might work. Stranger things have happened. Scientism has no problems with the improbable, so long as it’s consistent with physics. However, if talk therapy does work, it will be like this:
Your therapist talks to you. The acoustical vibrations from your therapist’s mouth to your ear starts a chain of neurons firing in the brain. Together with the circuits already set to fire in your brain, the result is some changes somewhere in your head. You may even come to have some new package of beliefs and desires, ones that make you happier and healthier. The only thing scientism insists on is that those new beliefs and new desires aren’t thoughts about yourself, about your actions, or about anything else. The brain can’t have thoughts about stuff. It’s got lots of beliefs and desires, but they are not thoughts about things. They are large packages of input/output circuits in your brain that are ready to deliver appropriate or inappropriate behavior when stimulated. There is no reason in principle why the noises that your therapist makes, or that someone else makes (your mother, for example), shouldn’t somehow change those circuits “for the better.” Some of the changes may even result in conscious introspective thoughts that seem to be about the benefits of therapy. Of course, science shows that it is almost never that simple. It also shows that when talking cures work, they usually do so as part of a regime that includes medicine working on the neural circuitry. The meds reach the brain by moving through the digestive system first, without passing through the ears at all.
Even when talking cures have an effect, they almost never have the same effect on different patients. Imagine that everyone with the same complaint went to the same therapist, who said the same things to them. Just for starters, the noises would be processed by vastly different “speech recognition” neural circuits in all those brains. The slight and the not so slight differences between these circuits in each person’s head would result in different outputs to the rest of each person’s (also quite different) neural circuitry. And the differences in the rest of the circuitry would amplify the different effects. Even the therapist would begin to see differences in how the same therapy was affecting the patients on the couch differently. Some might remain deep in thought, while others might nod in agreement. Still others might grimace. And some just might get up and walk out.
On those comparatively rare occasions when people’s behavior actually changes after therapy,