The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism [Paperback]

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."

Some books are argument-driven: the writer has a strong point and the book develops the argument in a linear way, step by step. Others offer an unfolding framework of ideas, facts and reflections that give the reader the material and the tools to do their own thinking alongside the author or authors. This book is of the second kind. The threefold structure is explained in other reviews: Popper's philosophical discussion of the brain/mind (or, as I think he would put it brain/self) problem; Eccles's unpacking of the neurophysiology of the brain, which provides the physical structures out of which and upon which the phenomenon of perception, thought and self-awareness operate; and the final series of dialogues between the two, which bring together and clarify the first two sections, and seek to go further in thinking about what this all means. This is not a hard-driven thesis (though a thesis is certainly offered); rather it is an extended reflection and exploration of both idea and experiment that is in its way even more engaging.

The book is over 30 years old now, but this should not put potential readers off. Popper is as amiable and encyclopedic as ever. One of the things I appreciate about him is that he dialogues with thinkers through the whole of the tradition: Pythagoras or Hippocrates may be invoked with as much interest and respect as Hume or Kant or more recent thinkers and experimenters. When reading Eccles one has to be aware of the passing of time since his section was written - the comparatively few references to genetics, for example, are an indication of that. However, while this section would not be written in precisely the same way today, it is still an admirable explanation of the basic geography and function of the structures of the brain. That basic framework has been built upon in the years since, but not altered in its fundamental contours. For a beginner it still provides an excellent introduction. Despite the apparent complexity of the material (recognised by short summaries at the start of each section) I would strongly recommend persevering to read it all, both because of the inherent fascination, but also because the experiments and discoveries which Eccles recounts provide key information upon which the final discussions are based. Eccles is strongly critical of theorists who pontificate upon the brain/mind problem without having understood the structures and the mechanisms, and this middle section certainly demonstrates why he is correct in this. The third section is conducted with wonderfully gentlemanly restraint: "I think that is such an excellent summary, Karl. While I agree with you, I'd just like to say...." And so on! The two authors do in fact agree in general principle if not in detail, and that is one of the strengths of the book: it presents a steadily mounting and for me, ultimately convincing case. On the other hand I would like to have heard the authors in genuine dialogue with someone who held a different (e.g. a parallelist) view: the challenge in that case would have been to hold the book together! However, we have what we have, and it is a rich and satisfying exploration.

I should finally note what is implicit in the title, that Popper and Eccles both hold to an emergent view of evolution (if you are unfamiliar with the idea of emergence see among others Michael Polyani, 'Life's Irreducible Structure', Science 160, p.1308; Klapwijk, Purpose in the Living World; Alister Hardy, The Living Stream), that is, evolution at particular points approaches boundary conditions beyond which an intensification occurs and life breaks through to a new level which is thereafter not reducible to or explicable solely in terms of the preceding conditions. A review cannot hope to do justice to such an understanding: suffice to say that Eccles and Popper understand the emergence of the self-conscious mind to be an example of such transcendence. The mind, in their view, while a product of the brain and dependent upon the brain for its existence, cannot be reduced to the biology and physiological processes of the brain. They demonstrate that position on both philosophical and neurological grounds, to my mind (smile) quite conclusively. If that kind of careful, detailed examination of a fundamental problem interests you, then read this book.