Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century A review by Sara Ciborski Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century, by Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Alan Gauld, Michael Grosso and Bruce Greyson. Rowman & Littlefield, 2007, 655 pp. (+ 100 pp. references) The aim of this fascinating scholarly book is to challenge the dominant assumption in mainstream neuroscience and cognitive psychology that “consciousness is the product of brain processes, or that mind is merely the subjective concomitant of neurological [physical] events.” The authors have amassed a huge body of evidence that they claim makes this narrowly physicalist view of the human being not only untenable but empirically false. At the same time they offer an alternative working model, derived from the work of William James and F.W.H. Myers, for understanding the relationship of mind and consciousness to brain and body, one which accommodates the evidence and restores “causally efficacious conscious mental life to its proper place at the center of our science.” Myers’s long-neglected two-volume Human Personality (1903) is a “systematic, comprehensive, and determined empirical assault on the mind-body problem,” and as such deserves re-examination. Kelly et al. think that Myers’s hypothesis of a Subliminal Self and James’s filter/transmission model of the brain—more on these below—offer rich possibilities for productive research on consciousness, self, and the mind-body relationship. The authors are university-based scholars in psychiatry and psychiatric medicine, psychotherapy, psychology and neuropsychology, and philosophy. What makes this book important is that they issue their challenge while standing in the very heart of the scientific establishment. They write mainly for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in psychology, whom they hope to divert from the bedrock materialist assumptions of the field, but they also hope to reach the educated, curious general reader who is willing to make an effort to follow their
arguments and engage in the literature. For anthroposophists of the latter category I heartily recommend this book. The opening chapter demands and rewards close attention: it is an overview of the development of cognitive, experimental (not clinical) psychology starting in the 19th century when psychology lost its links with moral philosophy and united with naturalistic science. William James, best known for Principles of Psychology (1890), was an exception. He avoided “premature and facile attempts at neural reductionism.” As the 20th century progressed, cognitive psychology moved through increasingly reductive approaches to the mind-body problem: behaviorism, identity theory (finding exact correlations between mental states and neural processes), the computational theory of the mind (CTM), which Kelly calls “one of the dominant illusions of our age,” biological naturalism, and today’s newest theory: brain-as-global-workspace. Kelly describes the enormously significant breakthroughs in the scientific study of the brain, such as high-resolution electroencephalography William James, 1842-1910 (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which make possible precise observation of physiological processes in human brains. These technologies have (seemingly) substantiated biological naturalism—the theory that consciousness emerges from the brain—making it virtually unassailable and culminating in today’s brain-causes-mind orthodoxy. Kelly et al. accept the evidence of brain technologies. However, they regard the evidence of biological naturalism (from brain imaging) not as proof of cause but as evidence of correlation and as support for the filter/transmission model of the physical brain. They advocate a “synoptic empirical” method for studying the mind-brain problem that also includes factual accounts of events wherein the mind is, or appears to be, causative. Followsummer issue 2014
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