This fall, it looks as if I’ll be returning to school at UNC Asheville. Although a top rated public liberal arts school, UNCA is not a bastion of PhD programs in liberal arts related areas. While that could be bad news for someone as devoted to the humanities as I am on my resume, I look at the situation as a determining factor in my ongoing 27-year-in-the-desert-wandering-around career path. What I’ve decided is to take the undergrad courses necessary to enter Medical School. I’m no Anna Quinn, but I feel that the opportunities for study in medicine is the next logical (if that term can be applied) progression of my education and career. It will take about 2 years to finish all the necessary courses to enroll, so I should be entering Med School around my 30th birthday.
Medical School is the correct path because of the possibilities in neuroscience, particularly neuropsychiatry. The field is relatively new (but with a rich heritage) and is a promising area for growth, study and involvement. Specifically, I want to devote my studies to what I’m loosely defining as "Evolutionary Causation." What I hope to do is to place a neurological viewpoint of causation along side the philosophical, epistemological, religious and scientific (quantum physics) roadmaps of causation and the self. It is broad and general, but I’ve realized that is how I define things and that is how I’m best able to flourish within a particular topic or idea.
My current hero is V.S. Ramachandran. Here are two quotes from his 2003 Reith Lectures which have stimulated my mind beyond belief and led to a flurry of thoughts and ideas in my own brain concerning my future career path…
So you see the amazing paradox is that on the one hand the experiment shows that free will is illusory, right? It can’t be causing the brain events because the events kick in a second earlier. But on the other hand it has to have some function because if it didn’t have a function, why would evolution bother delaying it? But if it does have a function, what could it be other than moving the finger? So maybe our very notion of causation requires a radical revision here as happened in quantum physics.
I love the connection with quantum physics! It is truly amazing to me how my studies in religion, art, philosophy and my past year of teaching 8th graders about the physical world (including the quantum world) comes together in that quote. It is a quote I’ve read and re-read a hundred times and I continue to find new connections and possible avenues of study present. The next quote is from a little later in the lecture…
The question is how does the flux of ions in little bits of jelly in my brain give rise to the redness of red, the flavour of marmite or mattar paneer, or wine. Matter and mind seem so utterly unlike each other. Well one way out of this dilemma is to think of them really as two different ways of describing the world, each of which is complete in itself. Just as we can describe light as made up of particles or waves - and there’s no point in asking which is correct, because they’re both correct and yet utterly unlike each other. And the same may be true of mental events and physical events in the brain.
We’ve just completed our study of light in my class. I love the illustration of the paradox of the mind and matter as the wave-particle duality of light. Amazing stuff!
So, with all that in mind (pun intended), that’s where I stand (not in the Lutheran sense… I can do other, but I choose to do this… or do I? What is choice??). It should be a fun, frustrating and mentally taxing few years ahead of me, but now is the time to synthesize everything I’ve been learning and make a product that is valuable for myself and society.
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Sam Harrelson lives in Asheville, NC and is pursuing his PhD in Religious Studies (Early Christian Origins). Sam is also an award winning blogger, speaker and online community strategist.
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"I've decided to use our new home in Asheville as my base camp for hiking the AT."
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(i'm listening to the Odyssey on audio books . . . )
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My fears seem justified, but I never thought you would get into that culture through med school!
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