The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for InteractionismThe relation between body and mind is one of the oldest riddles that has puzzled mankind. That material and mental events may interact is accepted even by the law: our mental capacity to concentrate on the task can be seriously reduced by drugs. Physical and chemical processes may act upon the mind; and when we are writing a difficult letter, our mind acts upon our body and, through a chain of physical events, upon the mind of the recipient of the letter. This is what the authors of this book call the 'interaction of mental and physical events'. We know very little about this interaction; and according to recent philosophical fashions this is explained by the alleged fact that we have brains but no thoughts. The authors of this book stress that they cannot solve the body mind problem; but they hope that they have been able to shed new light on it. Eccles especially with his theory that the brain is a detector and amplifier; a theory that has given rise to important new developments, including new and exciting experiments; and Popper with his highly controversial theory of 'World 3'. They show that certain fashionable solutions which have been offered fail to understand the seriousness of the problems of the emergence of life, or consciousness and of the creativity of our minds. In Part I, Popper discusses the philosophical issue between dualist or even pluralist interaction on the one side, and materialism and parallelism on the other. There is also a historical review of these issues. In Part II, Eccles examines the mind from the neurological standpoint: the structure of the brain and its functional performance under normal as well as abnormal circumstances. The result is a radical and intriguing hypothesis on the interaction between mental events and detailed neurological occurrences in the cerebral cortex. Part III, based on twelve recorded conversations, reflects the exciting exchange between the authors as they attempt to come to terms with their opinions. |
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The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism John C. Eccles,Karl Popper Limited preview - 2014 |
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action activity animals atoms auditory behaviour biological body causal cerebellum cerebral cortex cerebral hemisphere chapter E2 commissurotomy complex conĀ conjecture conscious experience consciousness corpus callosum cortical course criticism Descartes described discussion dominant hemisphere Eccles emergence epiphenomenalism evolution example existence explanation fact fibres Figure function give hippocampus human brain hypothesis idea identity theory important input interaction interpretation kind knowledge laminae language learning left hemisphere Leibniz lesions liaison brain limbic system linguistic material materialist mechanical memory mental mind-body problem minor hemisphere motoneurone movement neocortex nervous system neural machinery neuronal operation organism panpsychism parallelism parallelistic pathways patients patterns perception performance perhaps physicalist Plato potential prefrontal lobe processes pyramidal cells responses result right hemisphere seems self-conscious mind sense sensory somaesthetic soul Sperry stimulation structure suggest synapses temporal lobe things tion unconscious verbal visual cortex visual field World 3 objects