There is much to admire in this book. The authors first take on the hydra-headed monster that present-day cognitive thinking has produced, whacking off in turn each of its heads. This is a monster that years of industrious research and thought on the part of psychologists, neuroscientists, computer experts, and philosophers have created in their effort to understand "mind"; and the authors conduct a veritable demolition derby among their ideas. They risk still more opprobrium, then, by turning to other-worldly "psi" phenomena for their solution. Such phenomena are exemplified by, for instance, the channeling by mediums of people long dead, the memories children have of previous lives, near-death experiences, and mental telepathy. The authors turn to these phenomena for the needed explanation of mind and consciousness and cite extensively in its literature.
I must admit that I'm not one who has had experience of these out-of-ordinary phenomena. I've never been in a trance or seen someone who is; I've never observed someone channeling a spirit from another world; I can't read people's minds and tell what they are thinking with more than chance success; I can't telekinetically move anything; I've never had a near-death experience; I don't have any memories of moving down a birth canal (though this doesn't qualify, apparently, as a genuine psi phenomenon); I haven't even tried LSD to see what an alternative state is like. Not having had direct experience of this sort, I must leave the jury out as to psi phenomena's existence. However, I would not want to close the door on them - - the evidence the authors cite for them is impressive.
I do have a concern, however. After their critique of present-day attempts to explain mind by reducing it to something else, have the authors really left this reductionist path? Are they not simply substituting one form of reduction for another? As they point out, the crux of the problem that current reductionists run into is their inability to define any mechanism for the transition from their putative source to mind. How do they draw the latter from the former? By what mechanism do the brain's neural transmissions or electrical and chemical events transform into, say, a sensation of "red" or "hot" or the experience of a beautiful sunset? A jump takes place in the derivatory chain, and this invalidates the entire "explanation."
So now we have the same problem with psi phenomena. How does a savant accomplish his extraordinary feats? What is the mechanism by which messages from a dead relative come into a channeler's mind? How can memories of previous lives be transmitted into our consciousness? The authors are quite honest in their admission of ignorance here, and they emphasize over and over the need for further research. But absent clear ideas on this matter, they seem to leave us in the same position we were at the beginning.
A better approach from my point a view is the one taken by the philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Equally disparaging of any kind of physical or physiological reduction and fully acknowledging the unique qualities of mind, Cassirer posits an innate symbol function as the source of mental content. He shows in detail how this uniquely human function brings about the objects we have in our perception, the more general concepts we advance to, the entire worlds, finally, that myth, religion, art, and science create (for reference, see Cassirer's "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms" and my "Symbol Philosophy"). In this approach, there is no stepping outside mind to some other realm for one's explanation; no resort is taken to something that is foreign. It seems to me that this explanatory approach has the virtue of an inner coherence that the others lack.
But one should laud these authors for their study. Their book is admirably written and is throughout clear and readable. With their painstaking analysis and exhaustive detail, they have laid the groundwork for advancing beyond our failed physical reductionism. They have opened the door to approaches that will be more productive, and this is no small accomplishment. For what is at stake here is our understanding of a matter that is at once the most important and the most refractory of our various subject areas, "mind."
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Top reviews from other countries
Amazon Customer
Dense read, fascinating subject
Reviewed in Canada on February 28, 2022
José Macaya
Todo lo que no entendemos de nuestra conciencia
Reviewed in Spain on June 28, 2019
