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Postscript
In an attempt to enrich my rather limited c-v neurophysiologic background, all of Eccles's writings were enthusiastically read. However, after thumbing through the introductory neurophysiologic chapters in Facing Reality (1970), I was unexpectedly confronted with Eccles's religious philosophy regarding mind, mental events, and soul. To put it mildly, I was shocked by what I read. My mind began spinning and I developed what clinically might be considered "psychological dyslexia." My reading became dysmetric. I found myself scanning the content rapidly, and merely catching, or almost catching, the gist rather than the sequential details. Sentences, paragraphs, pages, and even chapters were skipped over in an ambivalent attempt to finish rapidly. I felt anxious, upset, disappointed, and Òneurophysiologically betrayed.Ó It was difficult and even impossible to slow down and study what was read. I just wanted to finish and get the book over with. My defenses were up. Blocking was intense. My concentration kept drifting away, and extreme effort was needed to refocus and fixate the content in a sequential fashion. In many ways, the emotions and defenses triggered by the content reminded me of my initial reactions when confronted by a need to read and comprehend Freud's ingeniously written twenty-four volumes.
The resistance forces triggered by Facing Reality were working at a fever pitch, and it was initially impossible to ascertain their source and motivation. As a result, I surrendered to their pressure and denied the content. Unfortunately, Facing Reality was side-stepped, and its significance remained latent for several more years. Following completion of the dyslexic research efforts, my thoughts were, for reasons unknown, directed towards an attempt at neurophysiologically explaining mind and mental events. Perhaps a new challenge was needed to replace the "old" dyslexic one. Perhaps a solution to the dyslexic riddle provided me with the emotional and neurophysiologic support and background needed to launch a daring new venture. A cosmic field theory of mind was developed.
By this point in research time and space, I had sufficiently "matured" to tackle once again Facing Reality. The resistance forces had somehow been worked through and were no longer significantly active. Upon once again tackling Facing Reality, it appeared as if my mental formulations were most significantly guided and organized by Eccles's mental tune. Could Eccles's mental tune have unwittingly triggered and organized my clinicalá theoretical notes and speculations so that they might be replayed, as if new, via a combined psychoanalytic-psychiatric-neurologic instrumentality?
In order to successfully illustrate Eccles's formulations of mind and mental events, I have decided to present the reader with a few quotations from Facing Reality (pp. 64, 83):
I feel that there is still confusion in the use of such words as mind, mental, mentality, which in some extremely primitive form are even postulated as being a property of inorganic matter! Hence I have refrained from using them, and employ instead either "conscious experience" or "consciousness"…
Nor do I believe with the physicalists that my conscious experiences are nothing but the operation of the physiological mechanisms of my brain. It may be noted in passing that this extraordinary belief cannot be accommodated to the fact that only a minute amount of cortical activity finds expression in conscious experience. Contrary to this physicalist creed I believe that the prime reality of my experiencing self cannot with propriety be identified with some aspects of its experiences and its imaginings—such as brains and neurones and nerve impulses and even complex spatio-temporal patterns of impulses. The evidence presented in this lecture shows that these events in the material world are necessary but not sufficient causes for conscious experiences and for my consciously experiencing self.
If we follow Jennings, as I do, in his arguments and inferences, we come to the religious concept of the soul and its special creation by God. I believe that there is a fundamental mystery in my existence, transcending any biological account of the development of my body (including my brain) with its genetic inheritance and its evolutionary origin, and, that being so, I must believe similarly for each one of you and for every human being. And just as I cannot give a scientific account for my origin—I woke up in life, as it were, to find myself existing as an embodied self with this body and brain—so I cannot believe that this wonderful divine gift of a conscious existence has no further future, no possibility of another existence under some other unimaginable conditions. At least I would maintain that this possibility of a future existence cannot be denied on scientific grounds…
For a final statement of my belief, I would like to quote from an earlier Eddington lecture by Thorpe (1961):
"I see science as a supremely religious activity but clearly incomplete in itself.
I see also the absolute necessity for belief in a spiritual world which is interpenetrating with and yet transcending what we see as the material world… Similarly I believe that anyone who denies the validity of the scientific approach within its sphere is denying the great revelation of God to this day and age. To my mind, then, any rational system of belief involves the conviction that the creative and sustaining spirit of God may be everywhere present and active; indeed I believe that all aspects of the universe, all kinds of experience, may be sacramental in the true meaning of the term."
Before concluding this postscript, it appeared to me most worthwhile to present, in addition, the materialist or unitary versus dualistic views of the mind-body problem as brilliantly discussed by Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine (pp. 202–204, 219–220):
In his book The Concept of Mind (1949) Professor Gilbert Ryle, an Oxford philosopher of strong Behaviourist leanings, attacked the customary distinction made between physical and mental events by calling the latter ("with deliberate abusiveness", as he said) the "ghost in the machine"…
By the very act of denying the existence of the ghost in the machine-of mind dependent on, but also responsible for, the actions of the body—we incur the risk of turning it into a very nasty, malevolent ghost.
Before the advent of Behaviourism, it was the psychologists and logicians who insisted that mental events have special characteristics which distinguish them from material events, whereas the physiologists were by and large inclined to take the materialist view that all mental events can be reduced to the operation of the "automatic telephone exchange" in the brain.
During the last fifty years, however, the situation has been almost reversed. While Oxford dons kept snickering about the horse in the locomotive, those men whose life work was devoted to the anatomy, physiology, pathology and surgery of the brain became increasingly converted to the opposite view. It could be summed up in a sigh of resignation: "Oh, Brain is Brain, and Mind is Mind, and we don't know how the twain meet." Let me give an illustration of the type of experiment which led them to that conclusion.
Penfield reports: "When the neurosurgeon applies an electrode to the motor area of the patient's cerebral cortex causing the opposite hand to move, and when he asks the patient why he moved the hand, the response is: 'I didn't do it. You made me do it.'… It may be said that the patient thinks of himself as having an existence separate from his body.
"Once when I warned such a patient of my intention to stimulate the motor areas of the cortex, and challenged him to keep his hand from moving when the electrode was applied, he seized it with the other hand and struggled to hold it still. Thus, one hand, under the control of the right hemisphere driven by an electrode, and the other hand, which he controlled through the left hemisphere, were caused to struggle against each other. Behind the 'brain action' of one hemisphere was the patient's mind. Behind the action of the other hemisphere was the electrode."
Penfield concluded his memorable paper.[1] "There are, as you see, many demonstrable mechanisms [in the brain]. They work for the purposes of the mind automatically when called uponÉ But what agency is it that calls upon these mechanisms, choosing one rather than another? Is it another mechanism or is there in the mind something of different essence?É To declare that these two things are one does not make them so. But it does block the progress of research."
Two recent symposia on Control of the Mind (1961) and Brain and Conscious Experience (1966) were impressive demonstrations of the swing of the pendulum. Sir Charles Sherrington, perhaps the greatest neurologist of the century, was no longer alive, but his approach to the mind-body problem was repeatedly invoked as a kind of leitmotiv: "That our being should consist of two fundamental elements offers, I suppose, no greater inherent improbability than that it should rest on one onlyÉ We have to regard the relation of mind to brain as still not merely unsolved, but still devoid of a basis of its very beginning."
Consciousness has been compared to a mirror in which the body contemplates its own activities. It would perhaps be a closer approximation to compare it to the kind of Hall of Mirrors where one mirror reflects one's reflection in another mirror, and so on. We cannot get away from the infinite. It stares us in the face whether we look at atoms or stars, or at the becauses behind the becauses, stretching back through eternity. Flat-earth science has no more use for it than the flat-earth theologians had in the Dark Ages; but a true science of life must let infinity in, and never lose sight of it. In two earlier books I have tried to show that throughout the ages the great innovators in the history of science had always been aware of the transparency of phenomena towards a different order of reality, of the ubiquitous presence of the ghost in the machine—even such a simple machine as a magnetic compass or a Leyden jar. Once a scientist loses this sense of mystery, he can be an excellent technician, but he ceases to be a savant. One of the greatest of all times, Louis Pasteur, has summed this up in one of my favourite quotations:
"I see everywhere in the world the inevitable expression of the concept of infinity… The idea of God is nothing more than one form of the idea of infinity. So long as the mystery of the infinite weighs on the human mind, so long will temples be raised to the cult of the infinite, whether it be called Brahmah, Allah, Jehovah or Jesus… The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things. They bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language—the word 'enthusiasm'—en theos—a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it. The ideals of art, of science, are lighted by reflection from the infinite."