Science and Psychic Phenomena by Chris Carter

Author:Chris Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Company
Published: 2012-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

The most ancient of these beliefs is dualism, found as it is in the old shamanistic religions around the world. Although the first formal statement of dualism was by Descartes, one of the earliest written references to dualist thinking may be found in Plato’s description of the last hours of Socrates, in which Socrates ridicules the notion that purposeful behavior can be explained in physical terms. Plato made a sharp distinction between mind and body, holding that the mind could exist both before and after its residence in the body and could rule the body during that residence. An even earlier reference to a form of dualism may be found in a lecture given by Hippocrates on epilepsia (epilepsy), in which the brain is described as “the messenger to consciousness” and as “the interpreter for consciousness.” Modern dualists can count among their ranks several distinguished modern philosophers and brain scientists.t

Materialism in all its varieties also has an ancient history, going back at least as far as Democritus, who back in the fifth century BC wrote that “nothing exists, but atoms and the void.” It had a powerful and influential advocate in the nineteenth century in the form of Darwin’s close friend Thomas Huxley, who proposed the thesis that animals and men are automata. Huxley did not deny the existence of mental events, but he maintained that the relationship between mind and body was strictly one-sided, with the mental having no effect on the physical. Huxley described mental events as mere epiphenomena, or just useless by-products of brain activity. So men and animals for him were just automata, even if conscious ones. This is still the position of many philosophers, biologists, and neuroscientists.

Materialism was popular in psychology in the 1950s, as part of a movement known as “behaviorism,” and the doctrine of behaviorism is still adhered to by some neuroscientists and psychologists. But in the 1960s, the concept of mentalism began to spread in acceptance among cognitive scientists, mostly due to the writings of neurobiologist Roger Sperry. Sperry, who won the 1981 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on the functions of the two hemispheres of the brain, rightly recognized that the profound mystery of consciousness makes a choice between the alternatives difficult:

Once we have materialism squared off against mentalism in this way, I think we must all agree that neither is going to win the match on the basis of direct, factual evidence. The facts do not simply go far enough. Those centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension at present that no one I know of has been able even to imagine their nature.22

Apart from the dwindling number of pure materialists who still deny the existence of consciousness, and the dwindling number of researchers in the field of artificial intelligence still trying to raise money for the construction of “thinking machines,”u this position is reflected in the writings of most serious scientists. Nobel

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