Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century

'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 (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. Following Myers and James, they argue that such accounts have empirical status. So-called paranormal and supernormal events are not supernatural but are potentially explicable with natural laws that we have not yet understood. Nature is not to be equated with matter: to use a hypothesis of mental causation is not to resort to supernaturalism but rather to practice an enlarged scientific psychology.

����

F.W.H. Myers (1843-1901) was a Cambridge-educated independent researcher and colleague of James. He published between 1880 and 1901 and helped found the Society for Psychical Research, aimed at the empirical, scientific study of mesmerism, hypnosis, telepathy, hallucinations, and other so-called abnormal phenomena. His main concern was to demonstrate the possibility of the survival of the human personality after death, a reasonable correlate to the scientific demonstration of thought and consciousness as not mere epiphenomena of the brain but in themselves fundamental natural (not supernatural) realities.

Kelly et al. insist that neglect and outright dismissal of Myers’s work are unjustified and unfortunate. Science has ignored the “well-documented empirical phenomena” reported in the work of Myers, James, and other reputable researchers using impeccably scientific methods. In fact, Myers was “deeply committed to the ultimate lawfulness of nature and to the use of empirical methods.” He held that all phenomena, mental and material “are in some sense continuous, coherent, and amenable to the rational, empirical methods of science.”

Anthroposophists will find Myers’s concept of the Subliminal Self intriguing:

In Myers’s terminology, the Subliminal Self is the bearer of this larger consciousness, and the supraliminal self is our ordinary, everyday, so-called normal awareness. With limited space I cannot elaborate this, but it is clear that “subliminal,” which in Myers lexicon means “lying beneath [really: beyond] the threshold of ordinary consciousness,” is comparable to anthroposophy’s higher self, or to use Georg Kühlewind term, the supraconscious: the source from which flow our spiritual faculties. Myers calls the Subliminal (read Higher) Self the true Individuality.

James took from Myers and further developed the theory of the brain as filter; this is the transmission model according to which the brain selects from a more extensive consciousness, the realm of Myers’s Subliminal Self. James argued that “Matter [the brain] is not that which produces consciousness but that which limits it, and confines its intensity within certain limits. This suggests a striking (though not exact) parallel with Steiner’s concept of brain-as-mirror.

����

The main body of 'Irreducible Mind' is an exhaustive review of the literature (case studies, scientific reports, philosophical and religious perspectives) on the full range of what psychologists consider to be abnormal or “rogue” mental phenomena: psychosomatic healing; past life memories (reincarnation); automatisms and psi phenomena (ESP, psychokinesis, precognition); placebo effects; meditation and healing; near death experiences (NDEs); out of body experiences (OBEs); genius; hallucinations; and mystical experiences.

The chapter on psychophysiological influence is a good example of the scope of each of the others. The author here, Emily Kelly, reviews hundreds of well-attested cases in psychosomatic medicine and psychoneuroimmunology in which a change in mental state clearly seems to be the initiating cause, and a change in a physical state the results; these cases are beginning to persuade scientists of the important role of mental formations in health and healing. For example, the case of a man who was told that he had incurable cancer of the liver, who died, and who was then found (in an autopsy) to have an insignificant tumor, too small to have caused death. And the case of a 43-year-old woman who died after minor surgery: a fortune-teller years before had told her she would die at age 43 and the woman had told a nurse she would not survive the operation.

Other cases under these headings make for fascinating reading: bereavement and mortality; sudden and voodoo death; postponement of death; meditation and healing; placebo effects—which are accepted by science; faith healing; sudden skin changes; false pregnancy; stigmata; multiple personality, in which, for example, the person has marked, measurable differences in visual acuity or other physical attributes, depending on which personality is in charge; distant mental influences; hypnosis-induced analgesia and healing of burns and warts.

Kelly fully examines the reliability of the accounts in every case and evaluates the mainstream explanations. In general, mainstream scientists explain away the event by attributing a physiological basis to the mental state. That is, they grant that the emotion or thought of the subject is causal, but that emotion is itself “only” a neurological process in the brain. But this, she points out, only shifts the problem of explanation to another realm: how does the brain-based emotion bring about the physiological effect? Physicalist explanations of hypnotic analgesia say that the brain produces the needed neurochemicals or blocks the relevant neural pathways. But how does it know to do this? What is the mechanism that brings this about? Science has no answer. In all the physicalist-biological-neurological explanations based on cerebral mechanisms the same question remains:

what sets those processes in motion to bring about the desired effect?

Especially resistant to physicalist explanations are volitional cases. She cites the case of the yogi who voluntarily stopped his heart beating for five days—this was recorded by an EKG—and survived. And the subject who demonstrated for a researcher his control of his heart rate, raising it by imagining he was racing to catch a train and lowering it by imagining he was lying in bed. In fact, she says, volitional control of our ordinary muscular activity—how the intention to raise an arm translates into the appropriate motor response—remains a mystery, encapsulating the mind-body problem in its essence. The problem cannot be magically erased by simply asserting that the intention and the response are both brain processes.

Indeed. That we don’t know how we will, that of all our spiritual capacities the working of willing is the most remote from conscious control, is known to any reader of Steiner’s basic books. Again I am reminded of Kühlewind, who not infrequently asked workshop participants to reflect on how it is that our vocal cords (and other physical speech organs) know exactly what to do when we want to make a sound or sing a tone.

The chapters on genius and mysticism, both by Edward Kelly and Michael Grosso, are long and very engaging. In the former they discuss language and meaning, non-discursive modes of symbolism, and the creative personality, with references to Kant, Maslow, Jung, and even Aaron Copland. The discussion extends to a refreshing and respectful consideration of Coleridge’s investigations into the nature of human imagination. The authors explain the efforts of CTM to account for the mental activities involved in the use of metaphor and analogy, along with their rather devastating critique of those efforts: “all existing computational models [are unable] to address the fundamental issues of semantics or meaning and the intentional activity of knowing human subjects—the heart of the mind.” Some researchers have proposed a structure-mapping-engine (SME), essentially a diagram or mapping of ideas (objects and predicates) and their relationships, which the proponents of SME believe is a real step toward understanding how human minds think. Kelly and Grosso “register their astonishment” that these researchers think this explains anything, because they have set up these models already knowing the relationships. They “bypass the crucial issue as to how concepts or representations are acquired or constructed in the first place, leaving it to the designers [of SME] to provide all the necessary ‘knowledge’ in precisely the right form.”

As for mysticism, mainstream psychology has ignored mystical experiences despite the sheer volume of evidence.

Kelly and Grosso discuss the phenomenology of mystical experiences, their cognitive properties (that experiencers are convinced they “know” something fundamental), the critical question of their truth value, the strong evidence of a “universal core” of common elements across cultures (for example, reports from subjects of different spiritual traditions as well as atheists describe an experience of an identity with some reality variably conceived as a “Universal Self, the One, the Absolute, the Ground of Being, or God”). The authors urge the undertaking of serious research aimed at a “more detailed, precise and empirically well-grounded phenomenological cartography of mystical states.”

They discuss meditation here (also in other chapters) and touch on Plotinus, Koestler, Yogic and Buddhist practices, Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, and other Christian mystics. They urge the taking up of controlled scientific research, taking advantage of the growth of interest in meditative practices and the number of educational organizations, like Esalen and the Institute for Noetic Sciences, which are involved in the study of meditation and other transformative practices. These could serve as resources and provide subjects.

Their chapter on near death experiences (NDEs) and related phenomena is dense with documented accounts and careful consideration of explanations provided by science. They conclude that we have to be open as scientists to considering that NDEs are essentially just what their experiencers think they are: a temporary separation from the body, with the possibility that a permanent separation occurs at death. And for psychology:

…the central challenge of NDEs lies in asking how these complex states of consciousness, including vivid mentation, sensory perception, and memory, can occur under conditions in which current neurophysiological models of the production of mind by brain deem such states impossible. This conflict between current neuroscientific orthodoxy and the occurrence of NDEs under conditions of general anesthesia and/or cardiac arrest is head-on, profound, and inescapable. In our opinion, no future scientific or philosophic discussion of the mind-brain problem can be fully responsible, intellectually, without taking these challenging data into account.

����

Edward Kelly’s final chapter on the future of psychology is well worth reading by itself. In it he discusses brain-mind ontology and the ontological implications of quantum theory (which is essentially a psychophysical theory wherein consciousness itself is intrinsic to quantum dynamics). The best part, however, is a closer look at James’s thoughts on immortality and Myers’s theory of the evolution of consciousness. I highly recommend working through the chapter to these quotes, for here we find James with his impeccable prose explaining that his brainas-transmission theory is compatible not only with the independent existence of a larger pantheistic consciousness but also with an individual, personal post-mortem survival, and moreover a suggestion of something like karma.

As for Myers, in his view of evolution,

����

Myers’s Subliminal (Higher) Self, James on survival of the personal self, the filter/transmission model of the brain, Myers’s extraordinary views on cosmic-human evolution— the resonance with anthroposophy is breathtaking.

My reaction to this book is twofold. To an anthroposophist, the authors’ efforts to persuade readers of the falsity of the brain-causes-mind orthodoxy seem needlessly belabored. They focus almost exclusively on what is anomalous, paranormal, abnormal, unusual, and atypical. A different route for investigating experiences wherein mind (thinking) is causative and irreducible—one available to anyone with the requisite good will and earnestness—would be to study Rudolf Steiner’s epistemological works (followed by the taking up of a meditative path).

That Kelly et al. have overlooked Steiner in their open-minded, comprehensive survey of topics like consciousness, meditation, and reincarnation, a survey that has included poets and philosophers as well as writers in most spiritual traditions, is surprising. There is one brief mention of California Institute of Integral Studies, where anthroposophist Robert McDermott teaches courses covering Steiner’s work. But there is no evidence in Irreducible Mind that its authors are aware of Steiner’s spiritual science. Even brief discussion of Steiner’s spiritual psychology (the functioning and interrelationships of body, soul, and spirit) would suggest new directions for mindbody research, which is after all one hoped-for outcome of the book.

Nonetheless, my other reaction is hope. If cognitive psychiatrists with mainstream credentials want the scientific study of mystical and meditative states to become central in their field, if they are urging an enlarged theoretical framework that accepts body-free mentation and assigns autonomy and agency to mind and consciousness, then the time is ripe for anthroposophy to be heard. We may want to take the first step, or so I think, for they surely would appreciate Rudolf Steiner’s insights, which better than all the sources they’ve consulted can shed light on the riddle of matter in relation to spirit and ensure a viable future for psychology, and humanity.