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The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism

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Popper does not need any presentation, nor any apologetics. I just pretend to say a few words about this impressive book under the prism of the current mind-body philosophy.

I asked to my professor of mind-body philosophy if I could study Popper, and he told me "no, no, he is too complicated with his 3 worlds theory". Instead, he wanted me to study Kim Jaegwon, the hey day mind-body philosopher. I did it, but Kim represents a very narrow philosophy, in my opinion. Finally, I went to Popper, and I feel like home. I tell you why. Excellent and plain prose, focusing on the central problems from the very beginning, and impressive understanding of vast regions of knowledge, Popper does not hesitate in emitting a judgment about a certain theory, a humanistic thought.

His opponents will say that is a personal book, somehow oldie, overcome by recent books. But I don't agree. You will find in Popper a sound critic of: materialism as the deafault position in mind-body philosophy; a very interesting critic to the identity theory; interesting thought and critics about philosophical reduction; why does not help to equate minds to computers; how we are to understand correctly perception; etc. All this critics are still very pertinent to current mind-body philosophy. Popper is all the time offering arguments: I don't like that argument because of that; I like it because of that; that's my argument in defence of my position, etc. (Compare it with the ugly and difficult prose of Kim, for instance, where you are to find arguments camouflaged in a vegetation of long dissertations on history and ontology, whatever this words my be.)

On the other hand, Popper offers also his positive solution, a very interesting one which, I believed, needs to be considered carefully and with sympathy.

John Eccles (1903-1997) was an Australian neurophysiologist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse. Karl Popper (1902-1994) was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics, and one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century.

They state in the Preface to this 1977 book, "The problem of the relation between our bodies and our minds, and especially of the link between brain structures and processes on the one hand and mental dispositions and events on the other is an exceedingly difficult one. Without pretending to be able to foresee future developments, both authors of this book think it improbable that the problem will ever be solved, in the sense that we shall really understand this relation. We think that no more can be expected than to hope to make a little progress here or there. We have written this book in the hope that we have been able to do so." They go on to state, "it may be well to mention at once one important difference between the authors: a difference in religious belief. One of us (Eccles) is a believer in God [he was Catholic] and the supernatural, while the other (Popper) may be described as an agnostic."

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

KP: "The most reasonable view seems to be that consciousness is an emergent property of animals arising under the pressure of natural selection (and therefore only after the evolution of a mechanism of reproduction)."
KP: "We know that, but we do not know HOW, mind and body interact; ... Nor do we know how mental events interact, unless we believe in a theory of mental events and their interaction which is almost certainly false: in associationism."
JE: "One of us---at 18 years old---had a sudden overwhelming experience. He wrote no account of it, but his life was changed because it aroused his intense interest in the brain-mind problem. As a consequence he has spent his life in the neural sciences with some continuing involvement in philosophy."
JE: "It can be claimed that the strong dualist-interactionist hypothesis that has been here developed has the recommendation of its great explanatory power. It gives in principle at least explanations of the whole range of problems relating to brain-mind interaction. It also aids in the understanding of some aspects of memory and illusion and creative imagination... But most importantly it restores to the human person the senses of wonder, of mystery and of value."
KP: "(A)s fas as parallelism CAN be achieved, we should try to get parallelism between mind and matter; only it breaks down somewhere, and interaction has to come in. Of course, we should at first operate with a kind of minimum interaction."
JE: "So I am constrained to believe that there is what we might call a supernatural origin of my unique self-conscious mind or my unique selfhood or soul; and that gives rise of course to a whole new set of problems... By this idea of a supernatural creation I escape from the incredible improbability that the uniqueness of my own self is genetically determined. There is the experienced self that requires this hypothesis of an independent origin of the self or soul, which is then associated with a brain, that becomes my brain. That is how the self comes to act as a self-conscious mind, working with the brain in all the ways that we have been discussing, receiving and giving to it and doing a marvellous integrating and driving and controlling job on the neural machinery of the brain."

Obviously I do not have to mention the structure of this very old thick book first published in 1977. It seems that this book on the body-mind problem is already a classical one and almost fading out of the mind, or more appropriately, out of the brain, of current mainstream neuroscientists. The ideas of these dualist authors appear not favorable to the following authors, for example:
(1) Daniel Dennett in his book "Consciousness Explained (1991)" rejected the idea of Dualism from the start of his book based on the first law of thermodynamics: the law of conservation of energy.
(2) In his book "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994)," Francis Crick cited this classical book only in the further reading list, saying: "I myself have little sympathy with either of their points of view. They would probably say the same of mine."
(3) No reference to this classical book in Antonio Damasio's recent two books of (1) Descartes' Error (1994), and (2) Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (2010).
I would like to mention only one point which was discussed in the dialogs of the two authors (in Dialog X) in the last part of the book: Would the dualistic idea of theirs violate the first law of thermodynamics: the law of conservation of energy?
In the history of physics there were times when the violation of the law was suspected by physicists. The examples cited by the authors are: (1) on the occasion of the discovery of electro-magnetism after the establishment of Newtonian mechanics, (2) in the process of radioactive beta-decay of nucleus before the discovery of neutron and the theoretical hypothesis of neutrino in the 1930s. These suspicions were eventually removed based on the development of novel physical theories.
Based on these historical facts and also referring to the physicist E.P. Wigner's idea, the philosopher Popper says "I think that this is only to say, in a different way, that physics is open to something as yet unknown." Popper's idea is that the physical dimension (World 1 in their terms) would be open to World 2 (the world of subjective experiences), though he never says that World 2 belongs to some non-physical dimensions. The two authors discussed further the interaction between Worlds 1 & 2, which might violate the law of conservation of energy, possibly in such a very minuscule amount as being difficult to detect.

Now, what I, just a curious reader of this book, wonder is that why all these scientists and philosophers do not mention the problem of "soul": does it have a physical weight, something like the amount 21 g? Or I should scientifically put it as follows: Is there really an unaccountable energy balance in the life-to-death transitions of human? If the 21 g (one of the reported four missing weights) is confirmed authentic, this means that the cherished law of conservation of energy is violated in the transition! I repeat the simple question: why don't they mention this problem? One may say that the experiment conducted by Dr. Duncan MacDougall published in 1907 is not any scientific experiment at all, but it was a scientifically uncontrolled sloppy one. Was it really so? Although physics Prof. Robert L. Park states in his book (Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science (2008)) to the effect that the missing weights are the result of MacDougall's wishful thinking and superstitious nonsense, no scientist has ever "scientifically" either refuted or confirmed the missing weights. Rather, recently a paper was published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2010 Spring Issue (Vol. 24, No.1, pp. 5-39: Rebuttal to Claimed Refutations of Duncan MacDougall's Experiment on Human Weight Change at the Moment of Death. [This Vol.24/No.1 is on sale at amazon.com.]), which supports MacDougall's experiment being scientifically sound on a basis of theoretical simulations of the weighing experiment.

Eccles and Popper are not alone in their strugle against established scienctific thinking, mostly based on the axioms of a materialistic aporach to reality. Dietrich Henrich is one of the most underrated philosophers of our times and needs to be mentioned here on the side of the two.
I say so because he has the capacity to explain the issues of the most prominent German philosophers, especially in that case where some of their most imminent statements were ignored today by sheer false interpretation on the bases of wrong set axioms.
Henrich is a purporter and adviser to understand the will as subject, not as a willful" object, as many materialists do. There are still a lot of them among brain- researchers who think according to the Credo of evolutionists.
This is in contrary of what brain-researcher and Nobel prize winner John Eccles and Philosopher Karl Popper stated in union. For them the brains was nothing more than a piano on which the piano player Spirit played. Even Eccles had experiments which should prove, if not that there must be something like the non-material entity, that there must be the nonsense of a molecular-limited personality.
Man is not a mere gathering of molecules, instead in first line an acting personality. The molecules serve at last this purpose and lack self-purpose. The same goes for the brains. It is nothing more than an organ. It is not what makes man.
Meanwhile there are many such experiments with the same result. The brains is capable of much, but not everything. For Popper, Eccles and Henrich it has been clear that the Thinking, if it wants to conceive itself as originating from material, contradicts its own existence. Worse than that these commitments in thinking lead to chaos, from which it stems thanks to evolution.
But by far not all brain-researcher share this opinion. For Popper, Henrich and Eccles and presumably most normal thinkers it is difficult to understand how one can cling to theories when the facts contradict. That is also true for interpretation of data from experiments. For example in one test the probates had to press the keys of a computer keybord at their own will. They were free to choose whatever key they liked.
It could be expected that in case of a pure materialistic procedure of the sense registration and sense processing it would at first start with an activity of the brains because of the activating of the will to press a certain key. Next would follow the pressing of the key and the feedback of the senses hat the pressing was done, accompanied by the activity of the brains to process the information.
Astonishingly it has to be stated, that only after the pressing of the keys, or better after the decision of the will of the probate to press the key, there was any brains activity.
Everybody would take this as hint, that the will of man is not at all at home in the brains, but in a spirit that can not be found or proved in a material world with material means. Already the popular scientist Hoimar v. Dithfurt noticed that there is no reasonable denying of a non- material spirit.
Yet it would not have fallen from heaven but has so to say developed out of the material world. It is strange that the evolution purporters try a reinterpretation of the data. They do take for granted, that the will of man must be in the brains. So if after the pressing of the keybord activity in the brain is measurable it means simply that the human will is not free! This a dangerous misapprehension on which Henrich wants to hint. Science seems not to be able on certain (?) fields to think clearly, because she is hanging at their wrong axioms and apparently not getting free.
If man had no free will, instead everything is materially predetermined, he would have no more responsibility for his works. Can we hear out of this the old lie of the serpent which propagated the same consequences for human wrong behaviour? "Not at all you will be called to account!" Hitler and Stalin were no human monsters and Osama Bin Laden is not. They acted due to accidents by natural laws in the reach of molecules. We cannot help those who believe that!

This is a book in three parts. The first, is on the self; written by philosopher of science Karl Popper. The second is on the brain; written by neurologist John Eccles. The third part is transcript of dialogues between the two. But here's the thing. They are both body/mind interactionists, or shall we say, dualists living in a world of materialism.

First, my obligitory disclosure. Eccles section is slow going if you are not well familiar with brain science, so my review focuses on section one and three. (I tried to read Eccles section, but it proved too much.)

Popper starts off by distinguishing three 'worlds' (not literal, but metaphorical) of things. World 1 is the world of physical matter; world 2 is the world of subjective thought; and world 3 is that of objective thought (thought translated into language, creative product or something else 'apart' from your subject. He then tackles what he regards as mistaken philosophies in the traditions of materialism and paralellism. As the book was written in 1977, most of the views he tackles - like the behaviorist assertion that mind doesn't really exist but as impulses - no one really believes anymore. As a result, much of this is not very exciting.

Both his section and the final section of dialogue between Eccles and Popper are very slow going in that Popper, in particular, rehashes his views on mind/brain interaction, the 3 worlds of thought and other previously published scientific views without explaining them or their relevance to his dualism as well as he could have. In the end, I was left wondering a.) is what Popper and Eccles wrote here all that interesting?; and b.) is it at all contreversial? In the end, I answered "no" to the first question - after all, even those of us who profess materialism are, in daily life, practicing dualists. To the second question, I answer "yes". Much of what Popper has to say is going to strike the reader as contreversial. I just don't think it - particularly his 'three worlds' theory - will strike her as relevant or accurate.

This book presents a very odd spectacle -- grown philosophers discussing a dualist theory of mind/brain interaction that is strikingly similar to L Ron Hubbard's theory of Thetan/meat interaction. It's especially appalling that Eccles drew the mind/brain line at precisely the point where the neuroscience of the day ended: we can find cells for feature recognition, so that's in the brain; we can't find cells for 3D object recognition, so that's in the mind. You would think that Popper's theories of what makes good science would reject this kind of thinking. Is the Mind of this book even falsifiable?

On the other hand, Eccles' section two is a well-written and unusually readable summary of brain research.