How could conscious experience
affect brains? That’s an excellent question and it is also the title of a slim
volume that presents the thinking of Max Velmans on this interesting topic.

Velmans is Reader in Psychology at
Goldsmith’s College, London. At the end of the 20th century psychology at last
started to make inroads into the hoary old "mind/body" problem of
philosophy. One almost has pity for philosophy – as long as hard problems are
unanswerable with anything more than speculation they remain the province of
philosophy. As soon as progress is made on the problem, the problem becomes a
science.  But this observation isn’t a criticism of philosophy – as we will
see, philosophical work has to be done before collections of facts become data
for science. After centuries of effort the concepts that we use to understand the
mind are finally becoming useful enough to support a science.

HCCAB starts with a target
article by Velmans. This article is followed by a series of commentaries, some
critical and some not, by other scientists and thinkers. Finally there is a
chapter in which Velmans responds to the various comments and criticisms. It is
hard to imagine a better format for exploring difficult and controversial
material — especially for the interested layman.

It is a bit disappointing that the
"How Can" of the title is not directly addressed. It is asserted that
conscious experience can affect brains, but the reader will need to look up the
references to get the details.  But there is a good reason for the
disappointment – there is philosophic work that must be done before the
knowledge about the brain that is being gleaned by sciences like psychology and
neurobiology can be used. There is a tremendous conceptual gap between our
experience of mental events and our knowledge of the brain structures whose
function is the cause of those events. We seem to have two mutually exclusive ways
of perceiving mental phenomena — there is the first hand experience that we
each have which seems to be intrinsically private and subjective.  There is
also the third hand, objective experience that comes from an examination of the
brain and its functioning. It is this conceptual gap that Velmans addresses in
this book.

Velmans states the reasons why the
issue is important clearly: "The absence of an acceptable theory of mind
body interaction has had a detrimental effect on the acceptance of mental
causation in many areas of clinical theory and practice" (p. 5). The
problem for many philosophers is that the seeming mutual exclusivity of first
and third hand experiences means that an acceptable mind body interaction is in
principle unavailable. Velmans proposes that while our knowledge of our mental
events will always have a dualistic aspect (i.e., first hand vs. third hand
experience) that the two aspects are knowledge of one thing, seen from
different perspectives. Velmans calls this "ontological monism plus
epistemological dualism" This reviewer finds Velmans conclusion to be very
amusing – it says of one of the deepest mysteries of the past 2000 years – "That’s just the way it is — get used to
it!" The funniest part is that Velmans’ approach is probably the correct
one.

Velmans’ thesis is that the
difference between first and third person experiences is just a matter of
perspective and is no more mysterious than any other perspectival shift. A coin
seems to be a circle from one perspective, an oval from another, and a thin
rectangle from another.  There is no deep mystery about this even though many
people enjoy tearing their hair about it, exclaiming "How can it be!"

What Velmans establishes with his
argument is that the old mind body problem is not a problem – the distinction
is merely one of perspective.  With this philosophic point established the vast
amount of knowledge that science provides about the brain becomes more
meaningful and more useful. It is well known that brains cause conscious
experience. It is increasingly well established that conscious experiences
cause changes in the brain.  While the brain is an exceedingly complex
structure, so complex that even knowledge of all the internal structures of the
brain will not give a complete understanding of the myriad permutations of interactions
that we must expect comprise the mind, at least we know that the mind doesn’t
have to be composed of some mysterious ‘mental stuff’  that is separate from
good old garden variety ‘physical stuff’

How Could Conscious Experiences
Affect Brains? is a slim volume, a mere 95 pages including the
index. For those interested n the mind problem it is a worthwhile read.

© 2003 Martin Hunt

Martin Hunt is an artist living
and working in Vancouver, Canada. His work is inspired by math and science.
Lately he’s been indulging an interest in evolutionary theory and its relation
to consciousness.

Categories: Philosophical