The conceptual foundations of decision-making in a democracy

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Capita Selecta.

Body and Mind

INTRODUCTION. This subject has divided the philosophic and scientific community in two camps. The adherents of the materialistic, so called ‘Psycho-Physical Identity’ theory hold that all processes at work in our mind are basically identical to those in our body in that they can be explained by the same concepts of physics and chemistry we use to explain the inert world. Their opponents, the dualists, deny this and claim that the way our mind works, especially our awareness of our own self, cannot be reduced to these concepts and therefore is out of reach of any empirical scientific method: we must accept the essential duality of body and mind.

The subject is relevant to the concept of democratic argumentation. For if dualists are correct, then the rules for democratic argumentation presented in Part Five would neglect essential information, namely those ‘mental facts’, say an immortal soul, which according to its proponents do exist but can never be apprehended in terms of empirical scientific theories meeting even my limited single purpose demarcation criterion.

I will show that this problem is a non-issue. It becomes a problem only because:

-	Both camps look exclusively at the extremes: inert materials versus the conscious self-reflecting human mind.
-	Both fail to investigate the basics of the information process which is active in all forms of life.
-	Both look at the mind with the eyes of an engineer, and thus apply only the analytical method when investigating our brain.

Materialists see no valid reason to assume that our mind involves processes so different from those operative in our body as to mandate the postulation of a mental world which would require essentially different concepts from those needed to explain our body. Dualists show that our mind cannot be satisfactorily explained exclusively in terms currently used in physics and chemistry. Given the quality of the proponents of both camps, I am very glad that I can agree with both of them as to these conclusions. Their error lies in the - usually tacit - assumption that we can explain the body in terms of current physics and chemistry alone. Duality is very real and unavoidable, but it opposes not the mind to the body, but the living to the inert world. Once we have added to physics the concepts needed to explain the living world, especially the information process, we can effectively counter all objections of dualists. Our mind will be in principle explainable by the same kind of empirical theories which we engage to explain our body. The thus amended materialistic view justifies a monistic approach even when dealing with our mind; democratic argumentation and the single purpose demarcation criterion will not exclude any relevant aspects of our world which are necessary for establishing the de factii of social decision making which - as explained - should in a democracy not meddle with immaterial issues such as religion and personal belief. At the same time the need for additional concepts to those of physics supports the objections to purely physical monism.

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The most eminent proponent of the monists is Herbert Feigl with his essay ‘The Mental and the Physical’ while the dualists find an eloquent champion in John Eccles with his book ‘Facing Reality’.

THE IDENTITY THEORY: HERBERT FEIGL. The duality which materialists reject takes two forms. The first one is the religious concept of the soul. It is quite legitimate to ask if- once a man has died - he lives on in some spiritual world, distinct from the world we live in. But the subject cannot be apprehended by theories meeting our demarcation criterion. The question can only be answered by an act of faith and cannot be settled by democratic argumentation. It pertains to theology, not to (the philosophy of) empirical science. Until somebody can - by democratic argumentation - make a good case for the statement that there must exist a realm of the mental (pertaining to the de factii which might be involved in social decision-making in a democracy) which by its nature cannot be explained by methods of empirical science, we must turn to physical, chemical and any other kind of scientific theories for an explanation of all phenomena which are involved in social decision-making. Until such a case has been made, we have to reject concepts like an immortal soul as a legitimate statement of fact in a democratic argumentation.

The other form of dualism divides the world into a material one (things, inert or living) and a mental one, and states that one cannot be reduced to the other. Therefore materialism must be wrong. The most recent work I could find was Eric Polten's ‘Critique of the Psycho-physical Identity Theory’. It is not an easy book to read for someone who is not a philosopher by vocation. As so often, complexity hides the flaw of a very simple basic argument. In essence, Polten says that we do in fact distinguish between body and mind, we do notice a difference, so they cannot really be identical. Quite so. But identity is not the issue. While Polten refutes only this identity, he commits the breach of rules of argumentation by concluding that his arguments to also reject the theory that has made the greatest impact in recent times, the one presented by Herbert Feigl in his above-mentioned essay which I will use as a reference point. For Feigl does not claim such identity. Feigl is concerned with the methods by which we can describe and explain body and mind. His materialism consists of the assertion that the methods of empirical science we use to explain the body can also deal with the mind. Polten's criticism of Feigl thus is irrelevant.

Unfortunately, Feigl restricts the realm of scientific methods to the ones we use in physics and chemistry to explain the inert world, and that makes him vulnerable to most of the arguments of his dualistic opponents.

However compelling, the impact of Feigl's essay was limited mainly to the community of philosophers. Feigl wants philosophical analysis to be ‘continuous’ with scientific research, a point of view to which I subscribe with all my heart. But for any cross-fertilisation between philosophers and scientists ever to happen, the writings of philosophers must be couched in a language accessible to people who are not professional philosophers (see my Part Six). The essay of Feigl certainly does not qualify as such. I will therefore try to restate in common language the problem which Feigl attempts to deal with.

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People have in their minds certain images of how things are, they are conscious of certain ‘raw’ feelings such as pain, anger. They entertain certain personal notions about what they feel or believe to be just or unjust. These direct perceptions are called ‘phenomena’, and we can talk about them by directly designating them: we can say ‘I feel sad’, ‘he is angry’, ‘I feel great pain’ etc. The words we use are called the phenomenal language. (In my terminology, they refer to facts.)

We can in this phenomenal language also make statements of a more universal aspiration, such as ‘however angry I may be, the anger always subsides sooner or later’. Or ‘in all human beings, anger will subside after some time’. We will call ‘mental’ both the direct perceptions, phenomena, as well as the more general statements we make about these direct phenomena.

But we can also try to talk about these feelings in the language of science, and for instance describe these feelings by using terms and laws of neuro-physiology, which in their turn are based on theories and terms of other sciences such as physics and chemistry. Feigl calls ‘physical’ the terms and entities appearing in the language of science. The problem - as posed by Feigl - consists of the three questions:

1)	Can phenomenal and physical languages ever talk about the same thing?
2)	If so, can we ever find correspondence rules for translating the statements of one language into the other? If someone says ‘I am angry’, can I then say: ‘Oh, then the state of the neurons in your brain must be such and such’? And vice versa?
3)	Those who answer both questions in the affirmative are divided on the subject of the physical language involved. On school of thought equates ‘physical’ with ‘scientific’; it admits that we might have to develop special concepts in science to deal with the mental. Feigl calls this language physical-1. The others - amongst whom Feigl himself - hold that the concepts used for the explanation of inorganic life are sufficient to deal adequately also with the mental, and calls it physical-2.

Feigl very tentatively answers the first two questions in the affirmative, but - especially in his postscript - says that there are many unresolved difficulties.

Indeed there are. But these are in major part ascribable to the choice for the physical-2 language. As the reader will know, I hold that a language consisting exclusively of concepts needed to explain the inert world is not only inadequate to deal with the human mind, but with any living system. Take the second question above. Even though I would answer it in the positive, I would not agree that anger can be reduced to the physico-chemical state of neurons. Even if it would be so that anger always results in a certain state of certain neurons - which is far from certain - this state would be only part of the story. For to describe how this state of anger will develop, we would also have to know how the neurons got into that state, which requires more than the description of the genetical ‘make up’ of the individual, it would need his history, his experience. And knowing how the state of certain neurons came about will not enable us to predict with much certitude which events will make him angry, for that usually does not depend on a single event, but also on the context of that event. That applies to an animal as well as to a human being. Physical language 2 in any case misses the concepts of subjectivity and self-directed teleology essential to any understanding of living beings, from bacteria to man.

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In physical-2 language, events of the inert world can be explained without reference to their position in space and time. The inert world does know - at our scale - events which are time-related in the sense that they are irreversible, for instance due to the second law of thermodynamics. But such events can be reproduced at any place and time, they are independent of the ‘experience’ of their constituting elements and of the history of their surroundings. With the clouds of gas in the classical experiment of thermodynamics, only the thermodynamical state of the gases is relevant. In the living world, reactions are profoundly influenced by the way in which a given physico-chemical state of a being came about. History is embodied in the ‘order’ of its constituting elements. Order may also play a role in events in the inert world, but in that case the order itself has a - predictable - effect, has a ‘meaning’ in itself which is independent of the identity of the element involved in the event. In the living world the order appears as random as soon as we abstract from the historical process by which it came about and the ‘function’ it has in keeping the process of life going. All these items are not part of the current physical-2 language. They are responsible for the tentativeness of Feigl's assertions.

In his postscript (p 136) Feigl writes that ‘the sentience problem was most succinctly and elegantly formulated by Mrs. Judith Economos who ... lists four propositions which appear be true but are difficult to reconcile with each other.’

Economos' first proposition is: ‘People have sensations, thoughts, etc., of which they are aware, but of which others are not aware except through the owners' reports or behaviour; and these sensations, thoughts etc. [i.e. what we call the mental, author] are not located in space, nor do they possess, produce or consume energy nor have mass.’

That proposition is simply wrong. A thought has a very real existence, be it only as that section of the continuous process of thinking which we have - artificially and for the purpose of analysing it - isolated it from this process. The process itself involves the mobilisation of molecules located in our brain which have mass; it consumes energy, and also is located in time, a very important element which Economos fails to mention. Thoughts and sensations also have something else, which is what Economos really was talking about, namely a meaning for the subject entertaining those thoughts. This meaning is an element which cannot be dissociated from the information process without losing its identity, and therefore cannot be grasped exclusively by the method of physical or chemical analysis. Mental entities such as a thought or a sensation therefore have physical and chemical properties plus meaning, which is a subjective and telenomic concept strange to the inert world, but not necessarily to empirical science. Holding that meaning cannot be part of empirical science because we cannot describe it in terms of energy and mass is tantamount to disqualifying the concept of colour because the only instruments of measure presently available to us are a yardstick and a balance, while colour has neither weight nor size. Only with the concept of waves can we grasp the phenomenon of colour, and we can accurately describe it as soon as we have an instrument for measuring wavelength. The introduction of the concept of subjectivity and (ex post) telenomy - resulting in meaning - becomes perfectly legitimate in empirical science once we have explained the process of its generation through the interplay of genes, experience and selection which can be explained in terms of physics and chemistry. Trying to explain meaning only in terms of physics and chemistry, without the theory of the process of information, must necessarily prove vain, just as the attempt to explain colour without the notion of waves.

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Another error bedevilling the subject is illustrated by the fourth proposition put forward as true by Mrs. Economos, and quoted by Feigl (p 137). ‘The concepts which we have of mental things or events on the one hand, and of material things on the other, are logically independent; that is to say, there is no demonstrable inconsistency in supposing a world in which there were material objects but no awareness, or conversely a world of awareness without anything in it fitting the description of matter.’

This sentence is a mess. ‘Logically independent’ means that one cannot be deduced from the other. Mass and energy are concepts which are logically independent, and we are free to attempt the feat of imagining a world composed of matter alone or of energy alone without generating any logical inconsistency. But the theory of physics holds that mass and energy are in fact inseparable; so, however formally free we are in imagining a world composed only of energy, it would be a world totally different from the one we live in, and our mental exercise would have no relevance at all if we want to explain the world with which physics deals.

We can see mental concepts as independent from material ones only because we force this condition on them by an effort of our imagination. A geometrical point has no independent existence at all. It requires the conjunction of the notion of a point as a globe of small size coupled to the theoretical and counterfactual supposition that this size is infinitely small (a size which can never exist). It therefore remains eternally dependent on the existence of creatures able to entertain such a hypothetical proposition. Entertaining such a proposition requires activity in the brain of a such creatures, requires energy and mass, in short requires the physical.

Mental ‘things’, thoughts, are thus intrinsically dependent on material ones, and we cannot suppose a world of awareness without anything in it which fits the description of matter (for instance neurons) except as a gratuitous game, as a thought experiment.

Summing up, we find that there is identity between the subject of the phenomenal language and of the language of science, provided we enrich the physical language with the concepts and (logical and mathematical) relations required to deal effectively with living systems. If successful, we might find correspondence rules for translating statements from one into the other. Philosophy can and should contribute to such an effort; but to do so effectively, it must present its findings in a language that can be understood by the scientist and it must submit to the discipline of scientific (and democratic) argumentation.

THE DUALITY OF BODY AND MIND: JOHN ECCLES. I will not deal here with the plethora of metaphysical or tautological arguments for duality like Polten's. Instead I will set my conclusion against that of a pre-eminent neuro-physiologist who - in his well known book ‘Facing reality’ - argues for duality on the basis of his knowledge in this field.

‘Facing Reality’ starts with an up to date (it was published in 1970) explanation of the structure of our brain and the processes involved in the recording and interpretation of stimuli from outside. Its main conclusion is that a neuro-physiological explanation of our brain is totally adequate to explain how it performs these functions. That takes up about a quarter of the book. The

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remainder is devoted to the argumentation of why this neuro-physiological approach is inadequate to explain other aspects of the human mind, especially our conscious self.

As will be evident by now, I agree that his purely neuro-physiological explanation of our mind is inadequate. But Eccles also concludes that no scientific theory about our mind will ever be able to explain the mystery of our personal existence, will ever provide an answer to the question: ‘What am I’? We cannot and need not, says Eccles, do without a concept of our own spiritual existence. All the scientific theories we may develop to explain our body will in some essential way fail to explain our self-conscious mind. Eccles fears that ‘...a false materialistic philosophy of man will denigrate him to be merely a clever animal, and hence a thing.’(p. 175)

The fundamental error he - and so many others - make is the assumption that we will be able to explain our body by the same methods of physics and chemistry which he considers inadequate to explain our mind. He takes for granted that these methods can adequately explain an animal, and therefore our body; he calls an animal a thing.

Eccles refers to Adler, and his ‘The Difference Of Man And The Difference It Makes’ in which Adler proposes that linguistic ability differentiates man from the other - non-linguistic - animals, and that therefore ‘...only men are persons, while animals are things’. It will be clear that I strongly object. Granted that man is different from animals, that does not make animals ‘things’ without personality. It is precisely that oversight which obscures the view of the real nature of consciousness.

Adler implicitly defines a person as somebody who is conscious of his own self, who is capable of reflection, which is characteristic of man; he states in fact that a creature is a person only if it is human, and that therefore an animal is not a person because it is not human. As soon as we introduce the notion of an information process with a subject, Adler's definition of a person ceases to be evident. If we define a person as being the ultimate centre of all information processes of a living being, then an animal also is a person, has a personality. If we define a person in criteria which are particular to a human being, then Adler's statement is a tautology at best or a petitio principii at worst. Recent experiments with chimpanzees, dolphins, killer whales etc. indicate that they exhibit at least rudiments of being conscious of themselves, for instance the ability to recognize themself in a mirror.

As I will not tire of saying, I do not reduce man to an animal. But surely the conceptual gulf between man and animal is smaller than between an animal and a ‘thing’. As argued in my chapter ‘Steps in evolution’, p. 46, the emergence of an external memory, a symbolic language and self-consciousness can at least conceptually be explained as a quantum jump of properties already existing in higher-level animals. Once achieved, that indeed leaves man as a totally different phenomenon. But a quantum jump does not justify the assertion that the methods which enable us to understand animals will be inadequate if applied to man, provided they are supplemented by whatever methods we need to deal with this quantum jump.

Eccles objects to the materialist's view of the brain as a machine. But that is exactly the error which he makes when looking at our body, which is not a machine either. Neither is a fly or a

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spider. As explained in my Part Two about life and information, we cannot understand even simple creatures like bacteria by limiting ourselves to the methods developed in physics and chemistry to explain the inert world. Only after we have developed and applied adequate methods for dealing with the living world, and especially with the information process, will we be able to decide whether they are also adequate to deal with our mind or not. But there is as yet no compelling reason to doubt it.

In accord with the prevailing custom, Eccles started at the highest level of the information process, the human mind. Had he started at the lowest level, he would have noticed that his description of how humans learn, and in general of how they process information, contains a value element, some telic feature, some essential subjectivity that they have in common with all living beings. In the whole of his first chapter about how our brain works, he only explains how we learn, never what we learn. Neither here nor in the rest of this book does he devote any attention to the question: ‘by what criteria do we select information and do we transform that information into a decision to act?’

Eccles is motivated in his rejection of the materialistic view of man by the same fear that led Popper to postulate the existence of an absolute, objective truth, even if we are forever barred from being certain that we found it. That fear is the loss of values, of ethics as a safeguard against totalitarian aberrations. While Feyerabend goes overboard when rejecting any scientific method, he did a good job in exposing the totalitarian element inherent in any absolute concept or value, whether soul or truth. And history provides sufficient examples to substantiate that rejection of monism is more prone to result in a totalitarian society than its acceptance. The totalitarian nature of Marxism does not follow from its scientific components such as economics or historic materialism, whether right or wrong, but from its inoculation with the metaphysical, idealistic philosophy of Hegel and its concomitant immunity from rational criticism. A concept of man that is amenable to scientific and therefore democratic argumentation offers better opportunities to fight totalitarian tendencies... provided we do not invest scientific theories with the infallibility which materialists refuse to grant any metaphysical system.

What exactly does Eccles reject? Let us quote him (p.45): ‘Too often we have statements that a man is nothing but a clever animal and entirely explicable materially. And again, we are often told that man is nothing but an extremely complex machine and that computers will soon be rivalling him for supremacy as the most complex machine in existence, and that they will have performances outstripping him in all that matters. I want to discredit such dogmatic statements and bring you to realize how tremendous is the mystery of the existence of each one of us.’

As said above, man is indeed more that a clever animal. But what he has that animals lack is not mysterious at all, at least no more mysterious than a lot of other unexplained phenomena: the capability of creating external memories, and to organise the function of his brain so that it permits a symbolic language, reflection and self-consciousness. The second phrase of the above quotation shows the extent to which Eccles underestimates life. In what really matters, the ability to survive and reproduce under its own steam, even the most complex computers are no match for living beings, not even for the simplest bacteria.

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Eccles quotes from Polanyi: ‘It may seem unbelievable, but it is yet a fact, that for 300 years writers who contested the possibility of explaining life by physics and chemistry argued by affirming that living beings are not, or not wholly, machinelike, instead of pointing out that machinelike functions in living beings prove that life cannot be explained in term of physics and chemistry.’ Applause. But to me it is just as unbelievable that Eccles (and others) finds in Polanyi's statement an argument against the possibility of a materialistic explanation of our mental faculties: from Polanyi's statement we can only deduce that physics and chemistry are insufficient as an explanation, not that they will never be part of one. For if we cannot explain a living being by its machinelike functions alone, we also cannot explain it without them: without a brain with its chemico-electrical circuits there can be no thinking. As previously explained, what has to be added are (empirical) methods for dealing with complex, interdependent and dynamic systems of learning elements.

Eccles can conceive reality only as split into the ‘primary’ reality of our conscious experience and the ‘secondary’ reality of the world around us, with no way to reconcile the two. Yet he is convinced that both must be in the end part of the one total reality. The only way he can find to escape from this paradox is to postulate some unifying spiritual concept irreducible to physics. Again - as with Polanyi's machinelike beings - the solution simply is to turn this statement around and start with the wholeness of reality, and acknowledge that cleaving it into a primary and secondary reality is an act of man who imposes this division on reality because it helps him to grapple with it and - in an information process - to make it amenable to his own ends.

This split perception of reality is man's destiny, is part of that which indeed makes him unique, because he is the only creature which can achieve this feat of self-consciousness. As with all things in this world, it comes at a price, which is precisely the alienation, the ‘poignant problems confronting each man’, to quote Dobzhanky (the biology of ultimate concern): ‘...fear, anxiety and death-awareness.’

But this same consciousness enables him to get a conceptual grip on the world around him and exploit it to his advantage on a scale beyond all other living beings. Man is indeed unique, but not because conscious thinking supposes some new property of matter, but because he is the only being that can do it.

The one mystery which is widely supposed to be un-amenable to any material explanation is that of the self-conscious ‘I’. This - as I call it - ‘autonomous centre of observation’ is said to be forever beyond direct observation. Indeed it is. But there is no mystery involved in this statement: it is due to the same type of impediment which prevents me from seeing the ground I stand on. As long as I stand on it, it is indeed beyond investigation. But I only have to step aside to have its mystery revealed. Similarly, the observer can never at the same time be the observed and observer. But if he is endowed with memory and the ability of reflective thinking, he can observe what he was a moment ago. That is how all of us who are prone to self reflection have analysed how they arrived at previous observations or conclusions, have analysed how they have thought. Yet simultaneous observation of itself is what Eccles and other dualists seem to require of the ‘I’. As soon as we remove this - totally unwarranted - requirement, the problem disappears.

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Evidently, Eccles assumes that if the ‘I’ is to be explainable by empirical science, it must be a molar entity, an organ, some specific group of cells in our brain. He nowhere explains why we cannot - as I do - see it as a function, which would solve the mystery. As argued in my chapter ‘Subject, object and the notion of “I”’, VOL.ONE, p. 61, I is the highest level of the value-giving point of view of information processing, which is directed at survival and reproduction. This ‘I’ then is determined essentially by its function and cannot adequately be apprehended by only purely physical or chemical analysis. In the case of self-consciousness, some part of the brain executes the function of an observer. Suppose the ‘I’ observes a thought process. If we consider observing it, this process must have been recorded in certain memory-cells. Reflection on how this observation could come about need then involve nothing else than to assign - possibly ad hoc - to some other group of brain cells the task of investigating the memory traces left by the previous process.

To my knowledge, the notion of total and detailed morphological specialisation of cognitive functions in brain cells of the neo-cortex has been abandoned by neuro-physiologists. The above ad hoc assignment of the reflective function is then at least a plausible hypothesis we can use until empirical science provides sufficient evidence for accepting it or for replacing it by a better one (which may have been done by the time you read this). Until proven false, this assumption is in any case to be preferred over any assumption involving elements which cannot be subject to the methods of empirical science and democratic argumentation. In fact, my assumption is congruent with Eccles' own view of the functioning of the brain, provided we abandon the notion of ‘I’ as a separate molar entity.

The evolution of a conscious ‘I’ may be similar to the social process by which we learn a symbolic language. I have argued in PART TWO that the information process of life shows a development from very specific processes to ever more general ones. The highest level of generality is achieved by abstract concepts which are applicable to all specific situations. A totally general information process like logic requires a totally general point of view to direct it, it necessitates the notion of an ‘I’ which is dissociated from any specific circumstance and process and thus must in some way - and artificially - be separated from the rest of reality, creating the dichotomy between the subjective reality of the ‘I’ which exploits for own purposes the ‘objective’ reality around it. The conscious self does present us with a problem, but that is not a matter of solving self-created logical paradoxes, but of finding out how the brain performs the above task.

The view that the division between the self and the rest of the world is not existential but functional would be in line with the view which Eccles expresses on p. 52 in the paragraph about the Objective-Subjective (secondary\primary reality) dichotomy. He notes that the distinction does not reflect an actual state of reality, that there is no existential division between the subjective world of our thoughts and the objective reality about which we think. What is subjective to one person becomes objective (part of the external, objective world) to another. That seems like a paradox to Eccles; but as soon as we see this distinction as functional, as a means to put order into our life, it becomes quite legitimate and unproblematic.

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Eccles refutes the hypothesis that the uniqueness of the self derives from the uniqueness of genes by pointing out that genetically identical twins, alike as they are to external observers, each in its own conscious experience and selfhood is as distinct from its fellow twin as it is from any other self. Quite so. But that is exactly the conclusion to which the functional view of the ‘I’ would lead if placed in the context of an appropriate view of life, which is that of a process. Any analysis of a living being, which perforce refers to a certain moment, describes not a molar entity but a snapshot of a stage in that process. To an observer, genetically identical twins - however much alike their genes may be, must be considered unique because the spatial and historical dimension of their lives can never be identical simply because they cannot be at the same place and time as the other, they cannot simultaneously pass through the same narrow door. As any living being is the result of interaction between the information contained in the genes and the circumstances in which the genes develop, even genetically identical twins will grow into different, if very similar, adults.

Many, like Jennings, try - in vain - to explain by some biological feature the atomization of humanity into individuals, into selves who ‘feel’ they are different from all other selves. It is exactly the other way around: however different human beings may be in their genetical construction and baggage of experience, to become fully human they must acquire one common ability: awareness of self and the ability of reflection. All humans are one in their ability to feel as a separate individual... if they have developed in a human society. We will never for sure know if a ‘wolf-child’ reared entirely by animals would have that capability, as he will not be able to tell us. All we could have are the results of experiments similar to those with chimpanzees.

Eccles writes (p.83): ‘...I believe that the prime reality of my experiencing self cannot be identified with some aspects of its experiences and its imaginings - such as brains and neurons and nerve impulses and even complex spatio-temporal patterns of impulses... these events in the material are necessary but not sufficient causes for conscious experiences and for my consciously experiencing self.’ I agree, but then we cannot explain any processing of information by living beings solely in these terms. We can in this way explain how a panther selects his prey and chases it, but not why. We cannot answer the question: what makes him do it. To provide a complete explanation, we always must include the motivations embodied in his genes and nervous apparatus (instincts) which can be explained mainly in terms of their expectation of effectiveness, based on past experience of individual or sort, in ensuring survival and reproduction of the ‘self’. As that effectiveness need only have been proved ex post, that involves no metaphysical concept.

In short, in all chapters Eccles runs into the same problem (see for instance p. 159), namely that neuronal events are a necessary but not sufficient condition for perception of any kind, and at any evolutionary level; that is so even for a perception that is as ‘physical’ as visual perception. The error he makes is to deduce from this that the missing condition must necessarily require the existence of some entity which cannot be explained by using the methods of empirical science. The element which Eccles, as well as Sherrington, are missing is meaning which indeed defies a purely physico-chemical explanation. The argumentation of Eccles does not contradict functionality. It shows us of how a brain works and provides the neuro-physiological background and examples to support the contention that ex post functionality can explain meaning.

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Having shown that the missing component in the physico-chemical explanation of consciousness is immaterial, Eccles concludes that it will not be subject to disintegration upon the death of the material basis which carried it. (p. 174) Yet again this is an unwarranted conclusion. The meaning attached to any kind of information is totally immaterial, a matter of subjective value-giving, but disappears with the destruction of its material carrier, just as the colour of a wooden bowl would disappear if we burn it. Quite possibly, we do have an immortal soul. But that concept does not follow from what we know about man, nor is it needed to understand man as we encounter him between his conception and his demise.

Let me make one thing clear. If we succeed in explaining man - as a conscious thinking and self-reflecting entity - without recourse to spiritual concepts like a soul, we have not proved that a soul or a spiritual world do not exist. Such a negative proof is logically impossible. I would not even state as my own considered opinion that spirit, soul and God are just fictions. The one conviction I have is that I am ignorant of the truth in such matters, and that the same applies to all other human beings. All I want to establish is that we do not need these concepts to explain the generally accepted and common experience we have of man - that is of us - as inhabitant of this world. And that we can - and therefore should - refrain from introducing such concepts into science except as a topic for cultural anthropology or psychology.

Holding that the concept of consciousness is explainable by the same type of activity, namely science, which we deploy in physics and chemistry does not lead to the demoralisation and loneliness so feared by Eccles and the authors he cites. Becoming aware of the improbability of life, feeling part of the common fight of all living beings against chaos and realising that men have become the (potential) spearhead of life in this fight can be enough to provide direction and coherence to the life of all those who look for fulfilment on this planet; at least it is for me.