Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century

Front Cover
Rowman & Littlefield, 2010 - Philosophy - 800 pages
Current mainstream opinion in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind holds that all aspects of human mind and consciousness are generated by physical processes occurring in brains. Views of this sort have dominated recent scholarly publication. The present volume, however, demonstrates empirically that this reductive materialism is not only incomplete but false. The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in some cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms. Topics addressed include phenomena of extreme psychophysical influence, memory, psychological automatisms and secondary personality, near-death experiences and allied phenomena, genius-level creativity, and 'mystical' states of consciousness both spontaneous and drug-induced. The authors further show that these rogue phenomena are more readily accommodated by an alternative 'transmission' or 'filter' theory of mind/brain relations advanced over a century ago by a largely forgotten genius, F. W. H. Myers, and developed further by his friend and colleague William James. This theory, moreover, ratifies the commonsense conception of human beings as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with leading-edge physics and neuroscience. The book should command the attention of all open-minded persons concerned with the still-unsolved mysteries of the mind.
 

Contents

A View from the Mainstream Contemporary Cognitive
1
Problems with Biological Naturalism
19
Conclusion
45
Empiricism
63
Views of Mind
74
HallucinationsSensory Automatisms
108
Conclusion
114
Mind and Health
129
Conclusion
363
Mystical and Conversion Experiences
411
Conclusion
421
Incommensurability
451
Conclusion
492
Opportunities for Further Research
563
Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century
577
Summary and Prospectus
639

Specific Physiological Changes Appearing Spontaneously
148
Changes in Another Persons Body
218
Memory
241
The Problem of Survival
281
Automatism and Secondary Centers of Consciousness
301
Automatism and Supernormal Phenomena
353
An Introductory Bibliography
645
Experimental Studies 652
652
Index
759
About the Authors
799
Copyright

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