The Dalai Lama is scheduled to take part in a series of events at Stanford University on November 4 and 5, 2005. The event that interests me is "Craving, Suffering, and Choice: Spiritual and Scientific Exploration of Human Experience" where " Participants will seek to identify common ground between Tibetan Buddhism and neuroscience " It is planned that the event will be broadcast via live webcast. as the limited number of seats available are long taken.
The potential for cross-fertilization is quite strong I feel. Though I saw a reference on Google news yesterday that suggested that not all the neuroscientists are happy about this. I don't have access to the full text but apparently there's an article in Nature that suggests that there's a petition against the event. I can only speculate that there are the usual concerns against introspectionism and possibly some issues about religious insight being of dubious scientific value. However those are the very reasons I'd be interested in such collaborations to see if anything of value came out of them.
I'm in a scurrilous mood so I'd like to suggest that maybe a bit of introspectionism objectified with modern instrumentation might not be a bad thing for some psychologists to probe. I've often wondered if Psychology didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater when the early ideas of the introspectionists were so completely abandoned in favour of more objective methods. Of course while Psychology was in its infancy and we lacked the tools, it makes complete sense that we looked to more objectively verifiable evidence. However now that we have begun to develop more sophisticated detection methodologies, I can't help wondering if we are on the verge of seeing some neo-introspectionist ideas emerge into the discipline.
William Adams has a paper called "Introspectionism Reconsidered" which is resonant with some of these thoughts and provides a reasonable background on some of the ideas and numerous flaws in the introspectionist approach.
I wouldn't consider myself an introspectionist by any means, but personally if I had access to the equipment and willing subjects, I'd be happy to test experienced meditators all day long just to see how theig neurological process might differ and would consider it of value to get qualitative feedback from them about their subjective states. How harmful can it be to enter into dialogue with people experienced in neurological technologies, no matter how strange their nomenculature or how ancient and alien their techniques may seem?
Image Courtesy : Peter Garnhum
Update : "Dalai Lama to lecture on neuroscience amidst protests" from Vaughan over at Mind Hacks provides more detail and links on the matter. He notes "The Society for Neuroscience have defended their decision and noted that the Dalai Lama will not be talking about 'religion or politics'." Glad to hear that they're standing their ground. I'm looking forward to watching the webcast.
12:37:22 AM 
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