Monday, July 16, 2007

Why Can't We All Just Get Along And a Recent Book The Irreducible Mind

In a world that is getting more chaotic all the time. It Makes people wonder will we ever be able to understand that we are all in this together. It's like we lost that connection with our true selves and it seems we getting more and more detach from what really matters and that is love. Anyways that my opinion on that matter.

Now there's a recent book out now called the irreducible mind this book is a severe blow to all materialist theories of the mind and brain relationship. For example take a look at this summary of the current state of neuroscience and why we need to go in a different path.

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.

Now this book goes over phenomena that is dismiss by mainstream science because it does not fit in with the assumption that the brain produces consciousness.


Let's now go take a look at what some brain specialists say about the brain and mind.

Brain specialists, Prof. J.C.Eccles, Sir Cyril Burt, Dr.Wilder Penfield and Prof.W.H.Thorpe stated that in their opinion the brain appears to be more a complicated organism to register and channel consciousness rather than produce it. "The brain is messenger to consciousness", Eccles said. In his famous debate with philosopher Popper "The self and its brain" this matter was examined further.

David J.Chalmers Ph.D. writes in the Scientific American (1997):
Consciousness, the subjective experience of an inner self, could be a phenomenon forever beyond the reach of neuroscience. Even a detailed knowledge of the brain's workings and the neural correlates of consciousness may fail to explain how or why human beings have self-aware minds.

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