Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century, With CD containing F. W. H. Myers's hard-to-find classic 2-volume Human Personality (1903) and selected contemporary reviews
Edward F. Kelly, Michael Grosso
Language: English
Pages: 800
ISBN: 0742547922
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
might be used or of what it was that really happened. But would that constitute a full episodic memory of the event in question? In other words, as semantic memory weakens, episodic memory inevitably must lose substance. Furthermore, such a weakening would by no means always be revealed by conventional “tests” of episodic memory such as recollection of recent events or of recently presented word lists, or discrimination of words that were versus words that were not on such lists (see also, Dalla
of the three OBE patients) had autoscopic experiences in association with seizures or (in one case) with a possible ischemic attack during migraine. The imaging and stimulation results suggested involvement of a common cortical region encompassing the junction of temporal and parietal cortex (TPJ), a region which is thought normally to be involved in the integration of vestibular information with tactile, proprioceptive, and visual information regarding the body and its location in perceptual
simple stories, poems, and the like. The authors of these various scientific-discovery programs have been widely faulted for setting things up in advance in such a way as to make their “discoveries” inevitable, a criticism with which we generally agree, and in that light the overall assessment of this work by Boden herself, generally an uncritical enthusiast of the CTM, is telling: “The success of programs for scientific discovery, limited though it is, is not matched by programs for producing
could hardly agree more. 57. This is the same Gustav Fechner, the physicist, known to most psychologists only as the founder of psychophysics. 58. This Fechner/James concept of integration or compounding is explicitly rejected by Balfour (1935) and McDougall (1911/1961), both of whom also reject Myers’s closely related conception of the Subliminal Self. Both, however, seriously misrepresent it. Balfour, for example, states that “the unity resulting from the compounding of consciousness is
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