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Authors: Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Sharon Begley
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achievements.” How, Bogen asked, did Sperry react? Very little, replied Zangwill. From about 1980, almost all of Sperry’s writings were about consciousness and mental forces acting from the top down. When he was honored at Caltech in 1982 on the occasion of his Nobel, those who had come to know him only recently assumed, recalls Bogen, “that he’s gone religious like so many old folks.” By 1990, even Caltech professors who had known Sperry for four decades “had given up trying to defend or even to understand ‘the philosophy of his later years,’ as one of them put it.”
Although Sperry put great stress on the reality of the mind in the causal chain, when pressed he seemed to fall back on classical materialist assumptions. He emphatically denied the importance of quantum mechanics for understanding mind-brain relations, insisting that Newtonian physics was entirely up to the task. “It remains true in the mentalist model that the parts…determine the properties of the whole, i.e. microdeter-minism is not abandoned,” he wrote in his last major paper. “The emergent process is…in principle, predictable.” Thus the mental forces he was so fond of referring to were themselvesdetermined from below. To those, like me, who were becoming committed to the genuine power of mental force and its integral role in a quantum-based mind-brain theory, Sperry’s views seemed like a refined form of epiphenomenalism.
A GNOSTIC PHYSICALISM also holds that mind derives exclusively from the matter of the brain. In contrast to the epiphenomenalists and functionalists, however, adherents of this school acknowledge that this may not be the whole story. That is what the “agnostic” part reflects: those who subscribe to this worldview do not deny the existence of nonmaterial forces, just as an agnostic does not actively deny the existence of God. Rather, they regard such influences, if they exist, as capable of affecting mental states only as they first influence observable cerebral states. William James falls into this camp. Joe Bogen is careful to distinguish physicalism from materialism. The former holds that the mental does not change without the physical’s (that is, brain states) changing, too. This says nothing about the existence of nonmaterial influences on the mind. It simply asserts that any such influences must work through the brain in order to affect the mind. In contrast, materialism transcends physicalism in actively denying the existence of nonmaterial influences.
In explaining his own position, Bogen recounts an argument he once had with the philosopher Paul Churchland about the mystery of how brain produces mind, and the need some philosophers and neuroscientists perceive to invoke something immaterial and without spatial extent to affect the brain. Churchland burst out, “Throughout the history of this subject the mind has been considered to be between God and brain. But now you presume to put the brain between God and mind.” To which Bogen replied, “Exactly so, which is how I can be a committed physicalist while remaining agnostic or even indifferent about the immaterial.”
P ROCESS PHILOSOPHY , a school greatly influenced by Alfred North Whitehead, holds that mind and brain are manifestations of a single reality, one that is in constant flux. It thus is compatible with classical Buddhist philosophy, which views clear and penetrating awareness of change and impermanence ( anicca in Pali) as the essence of insight. Thus, as Whitehead put it, “The reality is the process,” and it is a process made up of vital transient “drops of experience, complex and interdependent.” This view is strikingly consistent with recent developments in quantum physics.
D UALISTIC INTERACTIONISM holds that consciousness and other aspects of mind can occur independently of brain. In this view, mental states have the power to shape brain or cerebral states—and, going even further, the mind cannot in
Although Sperry put great stress on the reality of the mind in the causal chain, when pressed he seemed to fall back on classical materialist assumptions. He emphatically denied the importance of quantum mechanics for understanding mind-brain relations, insisting that Newtonian physics was entirely up to the task. “It remains true in the mentalist model that the parts…determine the properties of the whole, i.e. microdeter-minism is not abandoned,” he wrote in his last major paper. “The emergent process is…in principle, predictable.” Thus the mental forces he was so fond of referring to were themselvesdetermined from below. To those, like me, who were becoming committed to the genuine power of mental force and its integral role in a quantum-based mind-brain theory, Sperry’s views seemed like a refined form of epiphenomenalism.
A GNOSTIC PHYSICALISM also holds that mind derives exclusively from the matter of the brain. In contrast to the epiphenomenalists and functionalists, however, adherents of this school acknowledge that this may not be the whole story. That is what the “agnostic” part reflects: those who subscribe to this worldview do not deny the existence of nonmaterial forces, just as an agnostic does not actively deny the existence of God. Rather, they regard such influences, if they exist, as capable of affecting mental states only as they first influence observable cerebral states. William James falls into this camp. Joe Bogen is careful to distinguish physicalism from materialism. The former holds that the mental does not change without the physical’s (that is, brain states) changing, too. This says nothing about the existence of nonmaterial influences on the mind. It simply asserts that any such influences must work through the brain in order to affect the mind. In contrast, materialism transcends physicalism in actively denying the existence of nonmaterial influences.
In explaining his own position, Bogen recounts an argument he once had with the philosopher Paul Churchland about the mystery of how brain produces mind, and the need some philosophers and neuroscientists perceive to invoke something immaterial and without spatial extent to affect the brain. Churchland burst out, “Throughout the history of this subject the mind has been considered to be between God and brain. But now you presume to put the brain between God and mind.” To which Bogen replied, “Exactly so, which is how I can be a committed physicalist while remaining agnostic or even indifferent about the immaterial.”
P ROCESS PHILOSOPHY , a school greatly influenced by Alfred North Whitehead, holds that mind and brain are manifestations of a single reality, one that is in constant flux. It thus is compatible with classical Buddhist philosophy, which views clear and penetrating awareness of change and impermanence ( anicca in Pali) as the essence of insight. Thus, as Whitehead put it, “The reality is the process,” and it is a process made up of vital transient “drops of experience, complex and interdependent.” This view is strikingly consistent with recent developments in quantum physics.
D UALISTIC INTERACTIONISM holds that consciousness and other aspects of mind can occur independently of brain. In this view, mental states have the power to shape brain or cerebral states—and, going even further, the mind cannot in
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