Zadok Paper S100 Winter 1999
The Nature of Humans-Mind and Brain; Body, Soul and Spirit
by Alan Gijspers

The mind and consciousness

John Stott, argues, "Your mind matters"48 as a defence of strong Christian intellectualism. However, behaviourists in the 1920s argued against a concept of mind for they wanted to purge psychology of all of all "intangibles and unapproachables".49

Most modern philosophers of the mind take consciousness as a given,50 and equate the mind with consciousness.51 But I think this is grossly reductionistic, denies the depth and breadth of mental processes and mental illness52 and removes consideration of subconscious processes. Some psychologists then recast the mind/body problem as a mere scientific question of the "origin of consciousness in evolution".53

David Chalmers54 describes two types of consciousness, the psychological and the phenomenological. Psychological consciousness is behaviourally defined by what it does, akin to perception, while phenomenological consciousness is defined by what it feels, more akin to sensation. The first can be investigated by behavioural psychology whereas the second requires introspection. The two forms coexist.

Chalmers goes on to describe the richness of our consciousness-our thinking, reasoning, understanding and conceptualising, our dreaming, loving, playing, laughing, weeping and creating.55 Indeed, both the intellectualism of Stott and the definition of mind as consciousness reduce the richness of the non-material world of humans-their love, enjoyment and worship-their soul and their spirit!

Consciousness is often described as operating by way of analogy. We construct a space and allow an "I" to move in that space, excerpting, narrating and conciliating relevant aspects to manipulate them into some meaningful relationship with "me".56

Popper describes eight properties of the mind,57 which are also properties of electrical and magnetic forces. These mind forces seem to develop their own autonomy from physiological processes. He further argues that, just as electrical forces are the result of chemical processes, so the mind seems to be the result of physiological processes leading to mind forces. "How can these forces, which are set up in the brain, continue themselves . . . and continue to have a kind of identity which is even able to initiate in its turn biochemical processes in the brain? That seems to me to be the body-mind problem." In Popper's estimation (and in my own) this is the nub of the mind-brain problem. How can something arising from brain processes, not just manifest itself as mind but actually drive the brain, analogously to a keyboard operator typing on a computer? How can a property that emerges control that from which it has emerged? That is the key mystery.

To understand consciousness further consider John Searle's Chinese room analogy58 (which has been debated extensively since its introduction). Suppose we stood outside a room and inserted into it a whole lot of Chinese sentences and out of the other end come equivalent English sentences. There is no way that we can know who is in the room. It could be a person fluent in Chinese and in English or it could be a machine. The difference according to Searle is that the person would understand what was going on whereas a machine would simply process the sentences without understanding. That understanding is the element of consciousness; that subjective quality, technically known as qualia, is the extra dimension that humans seem to have. The experiment is a thought experiment only. In actual practice my linguistic colleagues tell me translation is nowhere near so simple. "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" will come out, "The vodka is strong but the meat is bad!" There are great subtleties in good translation but the analogy is worthwhile. For Searle it illustrates well the difference between the outcome and the understanding. However, the artificial intelligence buffs have used this analogy to try to develop a computer which will fool everyone into thinking that the machine is actually hiding a sentient person. Vodka and meat notwithstanding, there is no way we can infer a machine's understanding from the outside. By analogy, Puddefoot59 as an artificial intelligence scientist suggests that we could regard the brain as a machine and hence suggests that computer scientists could simulate brain function and give the appearance of an intelligent robot, or even a robot with self-consciousness and, hence, a mind. Such a view is also canvassed by Chalmers.

Because consciousness is subjective it is regarded by some as scientifically inaccessible. However, doctors have been analysing subjective sensations and thoughts since time immemorial. Subjective sensations are called symptoms and many medical textbooks describe symptoms common to many people with the same condition in great detail. Psychiatrists and counsellors listen in great detail to the person's inner life. How do you access consciousness? By engaging in conversation. By listening. There are rules for listening to ensure that the listener really hears what the patient is saying and not what the interviewer thinks the person is saying. There are courses in history taking, in listening not just to words but to verbal tone and body language. While Freud's approach may be based on too theoretical a framework, he surely was correct to sit and listen to people to find out about their inner life. This listening can reach a new state of scientific accuracy by appropriately constructed questionnaires, focus groups, interaction analysis and other techniques now being developed by counsellors and social scientists using the more holistic

To: Models of mind/brain interface

Alan J. Gijsbers MBBS FRACP DTM&H PGDip Epi, is Specialist Physician at Turning Point Drug and Alcohol Centre and at the Department of Drug and Alcohol Studies St Vincent's Hospital. He is a Visiting Physician at the Epworth Hospital, a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Medicine at the Department of Psychological Medicine Monash University and Senior Fellow at St Vincent's Hospital Clinical School, University of Melbourne. He also contributes to a Dual Diagnosis Clinic at the St John of God and St Vincent's Collaborating Centre consulting on people with both Drug and Alcohol and Psychiatric Disorders. He is a fellow ISCAST and editor of their national bulletin. He also somehow manages to be a husband to his wife, Lois, and a father to three children.