Every
now and then one comes across a book written by an author who magisterially
bestrides the philosophy/psychology divide by combining theoretical frameworks
with insights from the complete range of natural sciences. This is one such
book.

The author’s
background is in chemistry but his interests have led him via bio-chemistry
into genetics and the nature of the mind. In one sense this book follows on
from his Evolving the Mind: on the nature of matter and the origin of
consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) but the present
book can be read quite independently of the other.

The book is about
the possibility of free will and the philosophy of mind – which are, of course,
flip sides of the same coin. The author makes his position clear very early on
in the book: "Feelings and sensations … must be fully part of the physical
world." (p.viii) However, that does not mean that he is a paid up member
of the materialist/determinist club. His position is much more subtle as is
exemplified by his lack of comfort with Gilbert Ryle’s famous jibe about the ‘ghost
in the machine’ when he was attacking the dualist position.

As all
philosophers of mind tend to do these days, the author places a discussion of
qualia (feelings and sensations) at the heart of his quest for understanding
the mind/body relationship. He takes the liberty of coining further terms, the
noun qualagen, that which produces qualia, the adjective qualagenic and the
abstract noun qualagenesis. The book then proceeds to investigate how the
putative qualagens operate. Working along similar lines to those frequently
used by Oliver Sacks in his intriguing case-studies and often actually using
those studies as examples, the author builds a case to support his view that
qualagens are physical. He backs up these examples with the latest evidence
from Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).
In this way he adduces a great deal of evidence to back up his assertion that
qualagens are physical. At this point the reader may suspect that the author is
espousing a version of epiphenomenalism but we are quickly disabused of this
idea. The author follows through from his initial materialist position to state
that "…qualia must not only have physical causes in this sense,
they must also be causes of other physical events." (p.59) So now
it is clear that the author is supporting a type of central-state materialism
which identifies mental processes with physical processes. Of course, this is
where the problem of free will re-enters the equation.

The author is
scrupulously honest in rejecting bogus forms of double causation when
attempting to explain causality and tries to carefully distinguish between
causality, correlation and identity. At this point he dives into some quite
sophisticated but beautifully clear explanations of how the brain works at a
biological level. Basically in this section he is trying to back up his
assertion that qualagens are physical by analysing the processes of perception
and proving that they are all forms of transduction. Although he freely admits
that he has no answer to the ‘binding problem’, that is, how the brain
co-ordinates the numerous transductive processes (of which there seems to be a
particularly superfluous number when it comes to how the brain analyses visual
images), he nonetheless makes a good case for us not succumbing to polyhomunculophobia
— the fear that there might have to be a large number of ‘mini-me’s’ inside my
brain, each one analysing some aspect of the perceptual process. By the end of
this section the reader is likely to feel that the author is almost
trapped in a materialist/determinist position.

Almost but not
quite for he now makes a wider case by bringing in quantum theory. A review is
not the right place for a detailed discussion of his argument. Suffice it to
say that using the principle of indeterminacy and the equivalence of matter and
energy, he builds a strong argument for the rejection of the traditional
either/or approach to the mind/body problem. In a way that is analogous to
light being both a train of electromagnetic waves and a stream of particles and
yet at the same time being neither, the author sees consciousness as a subtle
form of matter – so subtle that a comparison with the fabric of space-time is
not out of order. He actually describes the stuff of consciousness as being
formed out of such a fabric – not one made out of atoms and molecules but
nonetheless one which is real and belongs to the material world.

From a biological
and specifically evolutionary point of view, the author has no doubt as to why
qualia evolved. The basic ones such as pleasure and pain served a survival
function. The more complex ones evolved along with our brains in order to help
us make new and more complex decisions. From a physical science point of view,
he has no doubt that emotional and molecular explanations of qualia are two
sides of the same thing. As to the free will issue, the author is ambivalent as
to whether a place can be found for it in the essentially unpredictable nature of
the universe especially at the quantum level. That ambivalence is reflected in
the author’s question as to whether science in general and physics in particular
may not have to undergo another paradigm shift for us to be able to integrate
our knowledge and come to a fuller understanding of consciousness, thus raising
again the issues most persuasively presented by Roger Penrose.

High schools,
colleges and universities where the philosophy of mind is on the curriculum
need to have this book on their library shelves. Just as with all good
philosophy, this book asks more questions than it has answers for. However, its
sheer breadth and depth make it a ‘must’ even if one is a convinced dualist!
For International Baccalaureate schools not only should it be in the library
for philosophy and psychology students but it would make wonderful reading for
the Theory of Knowledge course because the book is so cross-disciplinary and
raises questions of such profundity. As both a student and a teacher of
philosophy and psychology, I must say that it is one of the most stimulating
books about the philosophy of mind that I have read in a very long time.

© 2004
Kevin Purday

Kevin
Purday is Head of the Cambridge International High
School and is currently a
distance-learning student on the Philosophy & Ethics of Mental Health
course in the Philosophy Dept. at the University of Warwick.

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology