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

The competing theories

At present the best monists can offer is an incomplete hypothesis, lacking in data, though as will be shown later, the debate will not centre so much on the question of data but on questions of the philosophy of science and of questions of a wider epistemology. This is an important point: here what is offered as a scientific hypothesis is actually a meta-physical point of view. As such then it cannot be answered purely from a scientific framework but in a broader philosophical context.

I would argue that monism is only tenable if reducing mind function to brain function does not result in loss of information. If, however, such reduction dismisses large tracts of our understanding of human thought and behaviour then we'll have used Occam's razor to cut our own throat. The simplest explanation here does not explain enough and the only form of monism we could seriously embrace is the monism which recognises mental processes as emergent properties. This view, espoused by Nancey Murphy, is sometimes called "Non-reductive physicalism".63

And what of dualism? Goodman lists four problems with dualism:64 that it is (a) unable to be falsified by empiric data; that (b) additional entities postulated by dualism are unnecessary; (c) the failure of dualism to identify 'mental substance' which must (if it is true to dualism) be of a different substance to physical substance; and (c) how can a mind with no spatial existence give rise to physical changes without violating the laws of conservation of mass, energy and momentum? How can a non-material entity act on the material world?

To paraphrase the last objection: Because I don't see how it can, therefore it can't be! Now, we need to be clear here. None of these arguments are strictly scientific. They are metaphysical. This does not invalidate the argument but it does indicate that we need to be sure at what level the debate is being conducted. Accepting this fourth argument is simply another form of positivist materialism!

A philosopher friend of mine, clarified the issues this way: Is there one type of stuff called brain and another type of completely different stuff called mind, or are they all of the same stuff? And does it really matter? Does it particularly matter to a Christian world view? His implication was that it does not matter, though Cooper65 would disagree. For him traditional Christian understanding is being undermined, creating confusion in the mind of the faithful and challenging the authority of Scripture. Further, to Cooper a rejection of dualism is unnecessary and centres around what happens to a person between the time of death and the time of the resurrection from the dead. He embraces what he describes as a "holistic dualism" and recruits John Cobb, Richard Swinburne, John Paul II and Herman Dooyeweerd into his ranks. This is precisely the reaction Jeeves fears. If on scriptural grounds Christians reject the conclusions of modern science that the person is an organic unity,66 Christians will bring the gospel of Christ into disrepute in much the same way that Christians have taken an unnecessarily harsh stand on the findings of Darwinian evolution.

Goodman's Organic-Unity theory states that for each mind phenomenon there is a brain counterpart, though the converse may not be true. Hence, we do not have "Organic mental disease" and "Functional mental disease" but that each disorder has an organic and a functional dimension.

MacKay, using information theory and the analogy of software (mind) and hardware (brain) argues that the mind (the subjective or inside looking out view) is the form of the brain and that the form changes by the flow of information.67 His is more subtle than the one-to-one correspondence implied in an Organic Unity view. Jeeves and Puddefoot and Polkinghorne are other Christian thinkers who would accept variants of this view. A similar view describes the mind as different from the body just as the overall process of glucose regulation in the body is different from the particular function of the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas.68

The notion of one physical and one mental dimension seems to me to be too simplistic for the multiplicity of both mental and physical dimensions of a problem. There are other layers also, like environmental and cultural aspects of the human person.

Most fundamentally, however, the above views do not seem to grapple with the mind as controlling the brain or driving the brain as a driver drives a car or a keyboard. This is Polkinghorne's description of top-down causality69 and I think a crucial point in the mind-brain debate. The organic unity view at best describes mind arising out of matter rather than mind over matter. Somehow the unseen world of ideas expresses itself in the seen world of action. There are theological counterparts in that God said and it was done, and the word became flesh. The unseen world expresses itself in the seen world, but (and I think this is the crucial point) the unseen world controls the seen world.

To: The problem of determinism

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.