Introduction: The Persistent Question

The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.

—William James, Principles of Psychology, 1890

Introduction

This is a book about the mind and its place in nature. It is an attempt to bridge the yawning gap between personal experiences of consciousness and the images of mind that frequently appear in the literature of the various cognitive sciences. There is also the need to understand better why such a gap exists in the first place, and whether it can—or should—ever be closed by a ‘definitive’ theory of consciousness that is satisfactory—or at least plausible—to all. But to begin, here are a few examples of subjective experience.

The Mystery of Consciousness

1. ‘The sky is pale blue today, with fluffy clouds. The sun is bright, and there is a slight bite in the air. A wind is blowing the late-summer leaves and the flowers on the patio out of my window are bright red. Every so often, a nearby workman operates an electric cutter that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It’s a relief when the motor stops, because you can hear the birds.’

2. ‘Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and the never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was …’[1]

3. ‘About two years ago, while on holiday in Cornwall, I went for a walk with my sister along the beach … My sister walked on in front of me; I was left alone. It was as if time had stood still. I could think of nothing, I only felt I was “somewhere else.” I was part of something bigger and absolutely beyond me. My problems and my life didn’t matter at all because I was such a tiny part of a great whole.’ [2]

4. ‘… And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become a plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.’ [3]

5. ‘As the drug [an anaesthetic] began to work, I slipped down and lost awareness and feeling of my body. Visual impressions were relatively Spartan, but were mostly beige. Had experience of “white darkness” at one point, and complex patterns in dark brown against white beige very like the side-decorations in Tibetan art …

‘Reality felt gooey, or made of ice cream mixed with syrup. Feelings: at one point, I remember smiling and saying that I knew what the Buddhists were talking about. It was like I’d climbed a mountain to see a vast plain of “reality” and that it was good and light … These are metaphors; what I experienced, for fleeting moments, was ineffable.’

All five of the previous paragraphs describe different types of subjective experience. The first is a simple description of what lies outside my window. The second is a quotation from the novel Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce, which records the ramblings of the sleeping mind of Molly Bloom. The third is a description of a spontaneous mystical experience. The fourth is from Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning, describing everyday life in Auschwitz, and the final one is an account of the extraordinary distortions of consciousness that occur when an hallucinogenic drug is administered. And these paragraphs are just pallid representations of the rich and various subjective experiences that are possible for a human being.

Scientists today are in many respects poorly equipped for the investigation of subjective experience,[4] and a cursory look at the literature reveals a mind that seems in some respects quite removed from the rich, organic and multifaceted experiences above. Compare 1–5 with the following quotes:

A. ‘It seems to me to make no sense (in scientific terms) to try to distinguish sharply between acts that result from conscious intention and those that result from our reflexes or are caused by disease or damage to the brain.’ [5]

B. ‘… the mind is fundamentally a sentient computing device, taking sentences as input from sensory transducers, performing logical operations on them, and issuing other sentences as output.’ [6]

C. ‘… the [Robotic system] CADBLIND Mark I certainly doesn’t have any qualia … So it does indeed follow from my comparison that I am claiming that we don’t have qualia [i.e. private, ineffable, subjective experiences] either. The sort of difference that people imagine there to be between any machine and a human experiencer … is one I am firmly denying: There is no such sort of difference. There just seems to be.’ [7]

D. ‘Big Ideas sometimes match the structure and function of the human brain such that the brain causes us to see the world in ways that make it virtually impossible not to believe them.’ [8]

E. ‘… there is nothing more [than brain function], no magic, no additional components to account for every thought, each perception and emotion, all our memories, our personality, fears, loves and curiosities.’ [9]

If we take passages 1–5 to be reasonably accurate descriptions of their respective experiences, then they challenge the claims in A–E. It is true that there are some points of correspondence. For example, one could imagine some version of passage 2, which consists of garbled thoughts, being spewed out by a computer or ‘sentient computing device’ (statement B); although it’s actually an expression of some complicated social intuitions, not to mention complaints.

But what about passage 4 and passage A? The writer of passage 4, a concentration camp inmate, describes constantly having to make internal decisions that could result in life or death. This seems completely at odds with the statement that there is essentially no difference between the behaviour caused by brain damage and that caused by a conscious decision.

Now compare passage B with passages 3 and 5, the mystical and drug-induced experiences respectively. Could a ‘sentient computing device’, or even a robot, possibly have such experiences? Maybe, maybe not—it really depends upon the ultimate nature of such experiences, which remain obscure (and dubbing them hallucinations begs the question of the hallucination’s nature). But at first sight, such experiences don’t seem terribly compatible with the idea that the mind ‘is’ an information-processor.

Premature Certainty

Given these discrepancies and even contradictions, why do the authors of A–E come across as so certain of their ideas? If pressed, most or all of them would admit that there is an awful lot that we do not understand about the brain and/or nervous system.

One impetus for such surety might be to eliminate any occult or religious element from the study of the mind. This is clearest in statement E, with its reference to magic or ‘additional components’ (aka ‘souls’). This eliminative drive can often reach the point of overkill, and one suspects that part of the resistance to free will is due to the concept’s religious origin.

Another related factor is the entanglement of the mind-sciences with Scientism.[10] Scientism is the belief that science is or can be the only explanation of anything.[11] The followers of Scientism think that science can answer any question in any field, and that other modes of knowing—like art, spiritual practice or intuitive knowledge—are at best temporary stand-ins before a scientific explanation can be found. Followers will also tend to be almost comically blind to the problems and limitations of science and technology.[12] The problem with Scientism in this context is that it muddies the waters between what we actually know and what we only think we know. Another illustrative example:

F. ‘If anyone says that will influences matter, the statement is not untrue, but it is nonsense … Such an assertion belongs to the crude materialism of the savage. Now the only thing which influences matter is the position of the surrounding matter or the motion of the surrounding matter.’ [13]

This is clearly similar in spirit to statements A–E, the only difference being that it was made in 1874, long before any in-depth examination of the brain had begun. And it is by no means the only such statement made during the Victorian period. At this period, there was enough physiological data to tie thinking in some way to the brain, but by no means enough to be making such definitive statements. Given that such pronouncements have not really changed significantly in over a century, and that they existed before there could have been much evidence for their truth, some degree of wariness about them is surely warranted.

These claims remain moot to this day. Despite many assertions to the contrary, we are far from certain how the conscious mind fits into the wider world. To be sure, some portions of our subjective experience seem very closely tied to brain mechanisms. Baars notes that, for example, subjective experiences of light (brightness, hue and saturation) correlate pretty closely with the known neurophysiology of vision. Also, experiences of a mind’s eye seem to correlate closely to specific functions in the visual cortex.[14] This close correlation between neural mechanisms and at least some subjective experiences should be conceded before we proceed.

But it’s still true that we know far too little to conclude for certain that every single experience that we have is tied directly to some specific neural mechanism. In any case, the nature of said relationship remains far from clear. There have, of course, been attempts to close this gap, one of the most common being the assertion that subjective experiences are somehow illusory, and thus dissolvable into their correlating mechanism.

The Illusion Illusion

Look again at statement C, which denies qualia in machines and thus humans. Statement C is part of a larger argument that goes something like this: computer functions and human functions are comparable if they do the same job, like wine-tasting. We can reasonably say that computers or robots today do not experience qualia, or private, subjective experiences. But they can do some of the same ‘functions’ that we can. Since computers do not need qualia to successfully complete tasks like wine-tasting, ergo we don’t either. QED.[15] Anyone who thinks they have qualia is subject to the ‘Grand Illusion’ of consciousness.[16]

The assertion that we are just fooling ourselves about qualia, free will, rational thought, the unitary sense of self, the self itself, and in fact just about any significant aspect of the human mind is a very routine response to any objections raised about the ideas in passages A–F. Our brains, the story goes, are ‘designed by evolution’ to think that we have qualia or free will, or purpose.

For example, Colin Blakemore, the author of passage A, goes on to say that the feeling of control we have is just a product of the machinery of the brain, put there by natural selection. Daniel Wegner has written an entire volume on how the feeling of conscious will is an illusion.[17] Similar stories, as I have said, have been made for a number of other mental attributes. In a like vein, resistance to these stories is generally rationalized as our in-built evolutionary drives kicking against unpalatable truths.

This rhetorical trick makes it very hard to dispute such ideas without seeming to be irrational and unscientific. If I argue that I certainly feel as if I have at least a measure of free will and do appear to make choices then the response will be that I am being ‘fooled’ by my own brain.

But such statements are often internally problematic. For example, Colin Blakemore seems to unwittingly exclude himself from the consequences of lacking free will. For one could argue that he has perceived that his brain is fooling him about free will and has decided not to be fooled. But this implies that he has a choice about whether he is fooled or not, which suggests that there is actually some choice about whether we accept the ‘illusions’ our brains serve up to us, which in turn suggests a wider form of freedom of choice. We will return to these sorts of dilemmas in the chapter on free will.

The words ‘illusion’ or even ‘delusion’ have become part of the standard lexicon in neuroscience. These words are often used in a very ill-defined way to effectively dismiss phenomena that are themselves often ill-defined. Thus we read that the self ‘is’ an illusion.[18] Well, maybe so, but there is hardly any common definition of the ‘self’, just as there is really no commonly agreed definition of ‘illusion’, and the same might be said of free will.

Susan Blackmore attempts a definition of such illusion as ‘not something that does not exist but that is not what it seems’,[19] using visual illusions to illustrate this. But this is hardly satisfactory either. Firstly, visual illusions, like conjuring tricks, are only illusions to the person apprehending them. Without the observer, there is no illusion. So if the self, or the visual world, or free will, really is an illusion, who, precisely, is being fooled?

One could attempt to move this illusion story to a neural level and claim that no one needs to experience an illusion if we imagine that the visual system is set up in such a way that the illusion just happens. But this only moves the story back a step, because one still needs an observer to apprehend the results of that neural quirk.

And as Popper and Eccles pointed out,[20] one has a choice about which way one sees such a figure. Examples include the ambiguous figure which can be seen as either two faces or a vase. Ah, but, that might just mean that there’s a ‘higher-order’ computational switch that flips between the views.

But is such a higher-order switch really sufficient to account for such a choice? On the one hand, one could argue for a whole series of such discrimination mechanisms that get steadily more sophisticated as we move into the brain. On the other, my instinct is that one still needs someone acting as a whole person to recognize an illusion and create or ‘program’ a new discriminatory switch.[21] Once more, we just have an assertion that an essentially mechanical system could do this.

We could also argue that virtually anything we observe is in a sense an illusion. A distant cow looks small because of the ‘illusion’ of perspective. The table on which I am writing seems solid but is, according to physics, mostly empty space. Light itself is ‘nothing but’ electromagnetic energy. The world appears flat most of the time but it is really round. The Sun appears to circle the Earth. These are all quite different sorts of illusions, which is really shorthand for saying that our senses very rarely, or even never, offer us up things that can be taken at face value. On this level, we might agree that our minds are not what they seem, but neither is anything else.

But quite often ‘illusion’ arguments have a specific, common function, which is to preserve the theoretical status quo against observations that seem to challenge it. Free will apparently contradicts determinism, so it ‘must’ be an illusion. The idea of a substantive self contradicts modular, functional theories of the human being, so has to be a phantom. The subjective sense of moving through a rich visual world does not tally with behaviouristically-inclined interpretations of the visual system, so the experience cannot be as it appears (however that is). In each case, our subjective experiences become subordinate to abstract theories, which are supposed more ‘real’ but discard much.

The frequency with which the ‘illusion’ argument is used seems to me suggestive. If our only way to explain a phenomenon is as an ‘illusion’, then maybe we need to go back to first principles and find out why we need to invoke such an explanation, so frequently. After all, without careful qualification, such a claim can come perilously close to a dismissal of the apparently illusory phenomena.

Consciousness as a Function of World-View

The major dilemma for Western science—and those who follow it—is how to fit subjective experiences into a larger world-view that at least appears to preclude them. As the philosopher John Searle put it; ‘How can we square [the] self-conception of ourselves as mindful, meaning-creating, free, rational, etc., agents with a universe that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles?’[22] Searle is claiming that the background assumptions of Western science conflict in some fundamental way with our everyday view of ourselves.

Many writers in the mind-sciences are prepared to take the sort of assumptions Searle names for granted; hence the insistence that free will and subjective experiences are illusory. In other words, the ‘illusion’ arguments are predicated on the assumption that the ‘fields and forces only’ world-picture is correct in all essential respects. If such a world-picture is correct, then the only way to accommodate the problems of consciousness is by calling them somehow illusory.

Alan Wallace claims that these background assumptions have become so ingrained that they amount to a sort of secular faith that he calls ‘scientific materialism’.[23] He claims that this faith creates a situation equivalent to medieval scholasticism, where arguments had to conform to a certain set of theological assumptions before they were accepted, and any that did not were considered heretical.[24] Opinions that diverge significantly from these assumptions are simply not taken seriously.

If one accepts Wallace’s assertion that ‘scientific materialism’ has become a sort of substitute theology, then the statements A–F begin to look like expressions of dogma rather than value-free, objective, remarks. Statement D, which has not been discussed yet, is pertinent here. The ‘sticky’ Big Idea, which apparently adheres because our brains are ‘wired’ to believe it, turns out to be Cartesian dualism which, according to Lieberman, has not changed in thousands of years (although strictly speaking the kind of dualism Descartes advocated originated with him). Although he uses a number of neurological studies as evidence, the upshot is that this belief is characterized as yet another neurological illusion.

Two things need to be flagged here. First, that any kind of dualism has been traditionally reviled in the cognitive sciences since their inception, so this is far from a neutral assessment. We must, of course, beware of biases, neurological or otherwise, that might lead us to accept or reject an idea unfairly, but all this means is that we must try to use more than gut feelings to assess theories. After all, our brains might ‘compel’ us to accept that two plus two equals four, but this would not prevent it from being true, mathematically speaking.

Second, the question of consciousness remains open enough that some variety of dualism or pluralism cannot be fully ruled out and may even be necessary. Rosen pointed out that ‘Science is built on dualities. Indeed, every mode of discrimination creates one’.[25] He meant that the very nature of science splits one phenomenon from another to facilitate explanation, and creates dualisms everywhere. This may, for all we know, be a ‘neurological’ process itself, but even if that were true, it hardly renders science invalid. Again, it just means that we must use other means to confirm or deny scientific ideas. William James made the same point over a century ago.[26] But, if this is true, why have dualisms become such an anathema?

Insistent Monism

A central tenet of the belief system Wallace labels ‘scientific materialism’ is the insistence that the universe consists of one kind of stuff, sometimes known as ‘matter’, and that at least in principle everything can be reduced to the rules governing this ‘stuff’. Monism is defined by Christof Koch as follows; ‘The metaphysical position that all is the manifestation of a single underlying reality, principle, essence, or substance, and is governed by a universal set of laws … Monism is opposed to dualism, the belief that there are two domains, the physical and the mental.’[27] Physicalism is a variant, proposing that everything is derived from ‘matter’ (atoms and constituents) and energy and is governed by physical laws.

These assumptions have become so deeply ingrained in our culture that they have almost become truisms. But I will argue that it seems at least as plausible to see our universe as containing lots of ‘realities’ or ‘principles’. For most intents and purposes, this pluralistic assumption is how physics already operates.[28] It will also be claimed that an insistence on materialistic monism—a component of the belief system entangled with science—has seriously distorted thinking and created an unnecessary fear of alternatives.

An additional problem highlighted by both Wallace and Stapp is that such ‘materialism’ (or ‘physicalism’) often proves to be shorthand for a particular brand of materialism based upon nineteenth-century assumptions. Both writers note that pretty much all of the assumptions upon which classical physics rested have been violated in some way by twentieth-century physics. This has serious, but mostly unnoticed, consequences for consciousness researchers.

The ‘ground rules’ of physics were significantly revised over the course of the twentieth century, and many in cognitive science have yet to take sufficient notice of this. The physicist Henry Stapp observed that ‘philosophers of mind have isolated themselves in a hermetically sealed world, created by considering only what other philosophers of mind have said, or are saying, with no opening to the breezes that bring word of the highly pertinent revolutionary change that had occurred in basic science decades earlier’.[29] According to Stapp, most philosophers of mind are trying to build their models in a world-picture that is thoroughly outmoded.

A Plethora of Theories

Paul Feyerabend noted that although it is ‘possible to create a tradition that is held together by strict rules … that is also successful to some extent … is it desirable to support such a tradition to the exclusion of everything else?’.[30] Feyerabend answers this in the negative, and this ‘no’ forms a central argument of his book. There are multifarious possibilities out there, and blinkering oneself in advance makes little sense.

It makes a good deal of sense, therefore, to consider multiple approaches to the study of consciousness, and fortunately, in at least some venues,[31] liberality has prevailed. There exist a plethora of views about consciousness, from the conservative to the radical. Some think that once we understand the brain or ‘computational’ mechanisms that supposedly underlie every subjective experience, then that is explanation enough. Others agree with the basic idea of neural mechanisms or ‘information-processing’ for completing tasks, but speak of a ‘hard problem’ which means that a subjective aspect, which seems to do nothing but watch, needs to be tagged on.[32] Still more think that such problems will disappear once we add a body to the brain and take social and physical interactions into account.[33]

Some—currently a minority—concur with Stapp and think that conventional science cannot handle subjective experience, placing their faith in some modification of quantum theory, or even claim that ‘consciousness’ is inherent in the universe and has somehow been around since the Big Bang. And on the fringe of psychology there are those who think that ‘consciousness’ can operate at a distance, influencing other minds and even the physical world directly.[34] Still more evoke strange entities like ‘psychons’,[35] ‘shins’,[36] or ‘memes’.[37] We will take a brief look at some of these theories over the course of this book.

It is terribly hard to work through this material in anything like a comprehensive manner and gain a coherent picture that does not contradict one or other of these opposing views. Each of these researchers comes to the table with different metaphysics, or underlying assumptions about how the world works. Each tends to highlight certain lines of evidence and to ignore or even deride others. But when the dust settles, it is often anything but clear who is right, who is wrong, or even if any of these conflicting theories has merit.

My contention, in fact, is that none of these ideas may prove definitive, and that to an extent, at least, a plurality of approaches could remain necessary. This is because any single approach or research programme will be inevitably partial and limited by its basic assumptions.

There is, however, a very human tendency to take our own partial, conceptual games for reality. As Sogyal Rinpoche noted, we tend to get ‘confined in the dark, narrow [conceptual] cage’[38] of our own making and are liable to mistake the cage, game or approach for the whole of reality. But if we truly accept our own partiality or bias, then the drive to ‘convert’ everyone to one game, theory or cage becomes a highly suspect exercise.

A recent example of such urging occurred when the Journal of Consciousness Studies published work on the controversial remote staring experiments of Rupert Sheldrake. In a letter, Christof Koch expressed his surprise that ‘JCS would give a platform to these sorts of ideas. It makes the job of those of us that seek to identify and study consciousness as a natural phenomenon, subject to known physical and biophysical principles, so much more difficult’.[39]

This seems to me a curious response. Koch’s equation of ‘consciousness as a natural phenomenon’ with ‘known physical and biophysical principles’ strikes me as unreasonable because it implies that models of consciousness that evoke new principles or explanatory frames cannot by definition be natural or truly ‘scientific’. This seems excessively conservative, because it assumes that contemporary physics and biophysics is complete, correct and all-encompassing. There are strong grounds for supposing this to be premature because contemporary physics has enough difficulty with biological systems, let alone conscious ones.[40]

Elsewhere, Koch with Francis Crick suggested that one should only consider alternatives to mainstream theories when one is forced to by anomalous experimental data, discovered in the course of a conventional research programme.[41] This suggestion has some merit in theory, but is probably less than airtight in practice. Historically speaking, psychology has proved more than capable of ignoring or rationalizing away research anomalies; in the case of behaviourism, the mind itself was ignored for over half a century.

In contrast to these views, I wish instead to advocate an approach closer to Feyerabend, where ‘anything goes’[42] and alternative views are not merely respected, but encouraged. We should not worry too much about contradictions between viewpoints or world-pictures, and focus instead on building alternative pictures in areas where currently dominant theory is weak. In the spirit of ‘anything goes’, I would like to question an often unconscious adherence to some logical principles which I believe creates a lot of confusion within the field.

Insights from General Semantics

In my view, many problems and disputes within consciousness studies can be traced to an often unconscious adherence to Aristotelian logic and essentialism.[43] Count Korzybski observed that much of Western thought seems to be based upon presuppositions that seem natural to us but are constructions of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He believed that these presuppositions have an enormous impact upon the way we think about these problems. Korzybski’s work has today mostly fallen into shadow, which is unfortunate, because in my view some of his insights could be of immense benefit to the field.

Aristotelian logic has a number of presuppositions.[44] The law of identity holds that a thing is what it is, so a tree is a tree and the truth is the truth. It also means that it is all what it is. The law of the excluded middle holds that something is EITHER true OR false. Either a person is a man or they are not; either something exists or it does not. From this follows the law of non-contradiction, which says that someone cannot be simultaneously, for example, a man and not a man, or a proposition cannot be simultaneously true AND false.

These laws imply permanent, polarized and static relationships that tend to force people to think of different categories as discrete things, even in places where this is inappropriate. To counter this, Korzybski invented a number of post-Aristotelian principles. He proposed that there are no identity relationships in nature, which was expressed by the statement ‘the map is not the territory’. Similarly, words are not the things they represent. Secondly, he proposed the principle of not-allness. This is the idea that a label (‘man’, ‘tree’, ‘true’, ‘false’) does not convey a complete and exhaustive picture of the event, object or process so labelled. Third was the principle of self-reflexiveness, which holds that whilst the map is not the territory, a better map includes a map of the map and the observer.

Fourthly, he argued against the use of the verb ‘to be’ when making high-level abstractions, especially those of a very general nature (as in ‘everything “is” matter’, ‘human brains “are” computers’, ‘everything “is” mind’, ‘biology “is” engineering’, ‘we “are” nothing but memes and genes’, etc.) In statements like this, the word ‘is’ stands in for ‘equals’, within an Aristotelian system. It implies that the noun/s after the ‘is’ stands for concrete things, whereas in reality they often denote highly abstract, flexible, and even vague concepts. Korzybski suggested that we avoid the use of the verb ‘to be’ in these circumstances, and replace them with relational language and verbs suggesting processes. So the above statements may be rewritten; ‘everything seems like matter to me’, ‘some aspects of the human brain may be usefully described in computational terms’, ‘everything seems like a mind to me’, ‘some aspects of biological systems can be usefully understood by using engineering metaphors’, etc.) Unfortunately, the literature of cognitive science is replete with such totalistic ‘is of’ statements, as in interpretations of Artificial Intelligence that assume that ‘cognition’ in human brains and computers ‘is’ identical on some level.

Korzybski was not pressing for the abolition of Aristotelian logic, which still remains useful in some contexts, but he did question the use of such principles as a basis for thinking about many, or even most, situations in science and the outside world.[45] Korzybski’s principles seem to me to allow us to build better and more reflexive maps within cognitive science and consciousness studies, and, to a degree, they will be applied in this book. His ‘General Semantics’ encourages multi-valued logic (truth values stated probabilistically in a spectrum between zero and one), avoids atomism or elementism (e.g. type-token Platonism, thoughts as atomic or granular, behaviour as reducible to a specific neural mechanism, etc.), and discourages sweeping ‘allness’ statements (‘everything is…’, etc.) Other advantages should become clear over the course of this book. The primary lesson I take from General Semantics is the principle of non-identity, especially with regards to words. So often in this field maps are mistaken for territories, even amongst philosophers who really should know better. This principle dovetails with my pluralistic approach, or the assumption that any map we make will tend to partiality.

The principles also allow us to be consciousness of the slippery and vague use of words. Words like ‘mind’, ‘consciousness’, ‘matter’, ‘naturalism’, ‘physical’, ‘free will’, ‘determinism’ are often used unreflexively in debates even though they are too wide-ranging and general to allow precise formulation. Other words that do have technical or precise definitions in some contexts are often used in loose and imprecise ways. Such words include; ‘information’, ‘information-processing’, ‘representation’, ‘computation’, etc. Where I use these words, I use them in provisional, relational and also metaphorical ways only.

The Current Context of the Debates

We seem to be living in a revolutionary era, where advanced neuroimaging techniques hold centre-stage in the hunt for consciousness. In the light of new data, some have urged that we should sideline theoretical or philosophical worries in favour of empirical investigation,[46] the underlying, rather positivistic, assumption seeming to be that technological advances will conquer all and inductively provide comprehensive solutions to most problems.

Neuroimaging has certainly resulted in a cascade of new data for the mind-sciences. By 2005, approximately 100,000 fMRI studies had been conducted,[47] and have led to some extravagant claims. The Sun newspaper for the 14th March 2009 published a quote from an fMRI researcher who claimed that we might be able to develop a ‘mind reading’ technology within ten years, and the futurist Ray Kurzweil thinks that, due to the improving resolution of scanning techniques, we will have complete models of the brain and will be able to fully ‘reverse engineer’ it within a decade or three.[48]

Spend long enough reading predictions like this and one gains the impression that the scientific juggernaut is indeed unstoppable. However, as the enthusiasts would no doubt be quick to remind us in different contexts, critical thinking remains an essential part of scientific practice. We should be entitled to ask some fairly penetrating questions about these claims—and, indeed, the wider claims of cognitive science, no matter how venerated our ‘scientific’ authority is held to be.

This is especially important because the influence of neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry is by no means entirely positive, and in some contexts has been quite pernicious. Wallace noted that while modern, Western approaches to the mind are ‘remarkably empowering to those who create, market, and distribute … technology and drugs, [they are] profoundly disempowering to the individual’.[49] For example, some neuroscience pundits have suggested that we should change our criminal justice system because of what neuroscience has ‘discovered’ about the brain.[50] To quote the recent title of a book opposing such views, ‘did my neurons make me do it?’[51]

A big problem, however, is that many of these views are based upon the problematic assumptions that we outlined above. Similarly, the neuroimaging and other studies that purport to verify such views have been mostly conducted within this theoretical framework. Scientific work does not simply reveal what ‘is’ there; it remains, in part, manufactured knowledge that gets shaped by one’s expectations, and this remains doubly true in the human sciences, where there is always a danger that a human being will shape themselves to fit social expectations, even in ‘neutral’ scientific experiments. Scientists, too, hardly constitute disinterested observers, because, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, one often sees what one wants to see. So there are both social and theoretical grounds to challenge such sweeping assertions about human nature. The social grounds concern how much power we wish to place in the hands of cognitive science, generally at the expense of the individual. The theoretical grounds are based upon the limits, biases or even serious deficiencies of current models of the person.

Plan of the Book

To understand where we are, it is often important to understand how we have got there. The first part of this book traces the changes in our views of minds and consciousness from early modern times to the present day. These chapters have been written in a revisionist spirit, challenging the view of relentless progress towards a ‘true’ view of human nature and emphasizing the multiplicity of various traditions within and without science. To this end, I have examined some byways of exploration, such as Mesmerism and psychical research. I will attempt to show that varieties of knowledge can bud, flower, and become forgotten as the collective attention system of societies change their orientation. I will also try to show that even ‘pseudosciences’ like phrenology can be instrumental in producing worthwhile science. Another issue, salient to the twentieth century and beyond, is how predominant ideologies can shape or even distort views of human beings.

Part Two, Philosophical Issues, begins with a survey of various ontologies of mind and nature. I then suggest a revised epistemology, after Feyerabend, Neurath and Cartwright, that questions the idea of ‘Universal Laws’ of nature and proposes instead a patchwork pluralism. This is needed to counter an unreflexive adherence to classical physics that underpins predominant views in the philosophy of mind and neurobiology (Wallace’s ‘scientific materialism’). Having established this revised epistemology, I examine the problem of biological causation, which needs, in my view, to evolve beyond mechanistic models to better accommodate mental life.

The currently predominant metaphysic/ideology within science is monistic physicalism, which forms the basis of a range of research programmes. In Part Three, Physicalism and its Limits, I examine some of these research programmes and probe some of their limits. These approaches include the computational or information-processing approaches and questions of Artificial Consciousness. A number of theories have been proposed, which mainly seek to understand consciousness more accurately in terms of the operation of specific neural mechanisms, and these will be examined next. I will also look at the controversy behind quantum theory and its possible role in consciousness. Thirdly, I examine neuroimaging and its limitations.

In Part Four, I survey some select controversies and speculative theories concerning consciousness and the mind. I begin by moving slightly beyond physicalism, defending subjective experience as a primary reality and embracing a relational and phenomenological view of consciousness, similar in some respects to that of Protagoras and Buddha. This sort of approach might, I feel, be accommodated alongside an expanded and organismic view of living things. This leads to questions about how consciousness might emerge in the universe, and controversies about whether some form of teleological theory is needed to account for said emergence or whether conventional theories suffice. Thirdly, I examine the free will debate and, since free will is linked to the self and agency, what I term ‘deep’ and ‘shallow’ views of said self. Finally, I examine the difficult question of psychic phenomena and whether they may be considered commensurable with current science.

I make no apologies for examining both heterodox theories and controversial human abilities in the course of these discussions. This is partly because, if we are to expand beyond orthodoxy, we must be aware of at least some ordinarily excluded alternatives. In dealing with controversial material, I have tried to be as even-handed as possible, and to present and respect the views of experts with whom I might disagree. One should also be aware that the simple discussion of an idea does not denote unquestioning belief. At the same time, I believe that it is wrong to refrain from discussing areas of interest simply because one is afraid of what others might think, and that free thought should really mean free thought. With these basics out of the way, we can now begin our explorations.

1 Joyce, 1986/1922, p. 608.

2 Witness quoted in Maxwell & Tschudin, 1990, pp. 46–47.

3 Frankl, 1992, p. 75.

4 Varela & Shear, 1999; see also comments in Midgley, 2001.

5 Blakemore, 1990, p. 270. Quoted in Tallis, 2004, p. 24.

6 Churchland, 1986, p. 36. Quoted in Tallis, 2004, p. 24.

7 Dennett, 1991, p. 375.

8 Liberman in Brockman, 2009, p. 89.

9 O’Shea, 2008, p. 12.

10 Tallis, 2004; Collins & Pinch, 1998.

11 Midgley, 2001.

12 See Dawkins, 2006, for a lengthy example. Dawkins has 20:20 vision for the numerous flaws of religion, but seems oblivious to problems generated by science and technology, e.g. the neutron bomb, poison gas, pollution, vivisection, the abuse of scientific knowledge in the name of profit, the common compliance of scientists to oppressive regimes, etc.

13 Thomas Huxley, quoted in Clifford, 1874, Body and Mind, Fortnightly Review, 16 (n.s.), pp. 714–736. Quoted in Kelly et al., 2007, p. 53.

14 Kosslyn, 1994; Baars, 1999.

15 Dennett, 1991.

16 Blackmore, 2003.

17 Wegner, 2002.

18 Blackmore, 1993; 1999; 2003.

19 Blackmore, 1993.

20 Popper & Eccles, 1977.

21 The idea that we cannot just see thinking and perception as just brain-events but must look at the system—and observer—as a whole is discussed in Bennett & Hacker, 2003.

22 Searle, 2007, p. 5.

23 Wallace, 2000; Wallace & Hodel, 2008.

24 Wallace, 2000.

25 Rosen, 1991, p. 40.

26 James, 1902/1985.

27 From the Glossary pages of Koch’s website: http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/ accessed on 29/09/09.

28 Popper, 1959; Popper & Eccles, 1977.

29 Stapp, 2009, Physicalism Versus Quantum Mechanics: http://arXiv.org/abs/0803.1625 accessed on 13/10/09.

30 Feyerabend, 1975, p. 19, his italics.

31 The Journal of Consciousness Studies being a good example of this. The JCS has included serious discussion of such verboten topics as psi phenomena and children’s apparent memories of previous lives. At the same time, it also features many contributions from mainstream researchers on mainstream topics, with extensive mutual critiquing. Such liberality comes close to Feyerabend’s demand that ‘anything goes’ in scientific research.

32 Chalmers, 1996.

33 Bennett & Hacker, 2003.

34 See Radin, 1997; 2006.

35 Eccles, 1994.

36 Stokes, 2007.

37 Dawkins, 1976.

38 Sogyal, 1992.

39 Koch, 2005. Quoted in the footnote in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, 12 (6), p. 6.

40 See Rosen, 1991; Elsasser, 1998; Dupr , 2001.

41 Crick & Koch, 2002.

42 Feyerabend, 1975.

43 Korzybski, 1994.

44 See Lance Strate’s lecture notes on general semantics, undated, for a general summary, and Korzybski, 1994, for details: http://www.generalsemantics.org/learningctr/guides/lecture-notes-on-teaching-general-semantics-by-lance-strate.pdf

45 In a similar vein, I am not suggesting the wholesale rejection of all of Aristotle’s ideas. On the contrary, we will see that a number of people have suggested that the adoption of an Aristotelian view of causation may afford us better understanding of biological systems; see chapter seven. A rejection or critique of some of a person’s ideas does not imply a rejection of all of their ideas.

46 Koch, 2004.

47 Uttal, 2005.

48 Kurzweil, 2005.

49 Wallace, in Varela and Shear, 1999, p. 186.

50 Especially Gazzaniga, 2005.

51 Murphy & Brown, 2007.