Read Online The Mind and the Brain by Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Sharon Begley - Free Book Online Page A

any sense be reduced to the brain. Although mind depends on brain for its expression, brain is by its very material nature not sufficient to explain mind completely, for consciousness and everything else lumped under this thing called mind are categorically different beasts from brain and everything else material. John Eccles, who along with the philosopher Karl Popper for many years gallantly championed this view, put it this way not long before his death: “The essential feature of dualist-interactionism is that the mind and brain are independent entities…and that they interact by quantum physics.” Scientists and philosophers in this camp reject materialism to the point of actually positing a nonmaterial basis for the mind. Even worse, they seem to have a penchant for speaking about the possibility of life after death, something no self-respecting scientist is supposed to do in public (although both Eccles and Penfield did). Even scientists and philosophers who question whether simply mapping neural correlates can truly provide the ultimate answer have doubts about dualistic interactionism: neuroscientists may have worlds to go before they understand how brain gives rise to mind, but even ina field not generally marked by certainty they are as sure as sure can be that it does, somehow, manage the trick.
    Even this abbreviated rundown of mind-brain philosophies would not be complete without what the Australian philosopher David Chalmers calls “don’t-have-a-clue materialism.” This is the default position of those who have no idea about the origins of consciousness or the mind but assert that “it must be physical, as materialism must be true,” as Chalmers puts it. “Such a view is held widely, but rarely in print.” One might add that many working scientists hold this view without really reflecting on the implications of it.
    Although none of these worldviews has ended the mind-matter debate, most philosophers who study consciousness nevertheless hew largely to some form of the reductive materialist creed. But there are notable exceptions. Dave Chalmers is one of those arguing for what he calls “a non-reductive ontology of consciousness”—in other words, an approach that does not reduce consciousness to a (mere) physical process. Chalmers says that he “started out life as a materialist, because materialism is a very attractive scientific and philosophical doctrine.” But he became more and more dissatisfied with the dogmatic materialist ontology that posits that all aspects of consciousness are a logically entailed and perhaps metaphysically necessary outcome of materialist processes. He therefore began to focus on the explanatory gap between the material and the mental—between explanations of how neurons work, on the one hand, and our felt, inner awareness on the other. Even if we knew everything about every field and iota of matter in the universe, in other words, it is hard to see how that knowledge would produce that elusive “Aha!” moment, when we all say, Oh, right, so that’s how consciousness is done (in the way we might react, say, to a materialist explanation of how the liver produces bile). Those neuronal mechanisms, Chalmers concluded, would never in and of themselves add up to consciousness. Physical form and functionadd up to more physical form and function. “To truly bridge the gap between the physical nature of brain physiology and the mental essence of consciousness, we have to satisfy two different conceptual demands,” Chalmers told the public television series “Closer to the Truth” in 2000. “It’s not yet looking very likely that we’re going to reduce the mind to the brain. In fact, there may be systematic reasons to think there will always be a gulf between the physical and the mental.”
    If that gulf is unbridgeable, Chalmers therefore argues, consciousness might profitably be regarded as what he calls a “nonreductive primitive,” a fundamental building block