Alan Gauld,Adam Crabtree,Edward F. Kelly,Emily Williams Kelly,Michael Grosso

Irreducible Mind

Notify me when the book’s added
To read this book, upload an EPUB or FB2 file to Bookmate. How do I upload a book?
Current mainstream opinion in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind holds that all aspects of human mind and consciousness are generated by physical processes occurring in brains. Views of this sort have dominated recent scholarly publication. The present volume, however, demonstrates empirically that this reductive materialism is not only incomplete but false. The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in some cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms. Topics addressed include phenomena of extreme psychophysical influence, memory, psychological automatisms and secondary personality, near-death experiences and allied phenomena, genius-level creativity, and 'mystical' states of consciousness both spontaneous and drug-induced. The authors further show that these rogue phenomena are more readily accommodated by an alternative 'transmission' or 'filter' theory of mind/brain relations advanced over a century ago by a largely forgotten genius, F. W. H. Myers, and developed further by his friend and colleague William James. This theory, moreover, ratifies the commonsense conception of human beings as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with leading-edge physics and neuroscience. The book should command the attention of all open-minded persons concerned with the still-unsolved mysteries of the mind.
This book is currently unavailable
1,489 printed pages
Have you already read it? How did you like it?
👍👎

Quotes

  • Byunggyu Parkhas quoted3 years ago
    Although the widespread impression is that NDEs occur among patients who have been clinically dead and then resuscitated, they in fact occur in a wide variety of medical circumstances. An examination of medical records in cases in our collection (all of them experiences reported to us retrospectively) showed that slightly more than half of the patients, although ill enough to have been hospitalized, were at no time in danger of dying (Owens, Cook [Kelly], & Stevenson, 1990; Stevenson, Cook [Kelly], & McClean-Rice, 1989–1990); NDEs may therefore occur when patients fear they are dying even if in fact they are not. Moreover, NDEs can also occur when patients are suddenly confronted with death but escape unharmed, as in falls or near-accidents (e.g., Heim, 1892/1972).3
    Nonetheless, there remain a substantial number of cases in which patients were clinically near death, such as during cardiac arrest or some other, usually sudden, loss of vital functions (Finkelmeier, Kenwood, & Summers, 1984; Greyson, 2003; Owens et al., 1990; Parnia et al., 2001; Sabom, 1982; Schoenbeck & Hocutt, 1991; Schwaninger et al., 2002; van Lommel et al., 2001). These include some in children who suffered cardiac arrest (Gabbard & Twemlow, 1984, pp. 154–156; M. Morse, 1983, 1994a, pp. 67–69, 1994b; Serdahely, 1990). In one recent prospective study of 344 cardiac arrest patients, 62 reported NDEs following resuscitation from cardiac arrest (van Lommel et al., 2001). In our own collection of retrospectively reported NDEs, out of 114 cases for which we have obtained and rated medical records, 35 were rated “4” on a 4-point scale of severity of condition, meaning that there was some documentation of loss of vital signs, often including cardiac arrest
  • Byunggyu Parkhas quoted3 years ago
    Many experiences called “near-death” experiences have occurred when the person was not physiologically near death, and individual features associated with NDEs occur in a wide variety of conditions in which the person is also clearly not near death. We believe that the difficulties in explaining, and even in defining, the NDE stem at least in part from the failure to examine this phenomenon within the context of this larger family of related experiences
  • Byunggyu Parkhas quoted3 years ago
    It was only the investigation of extraordinary circumstances, involving extremely small or large distances, speeds, or mass, that revealed the limits of the Newtonian model and the need for additional explanatory models. So too with the question of the mind-brain relationship: As Myers understood in urging his colleagues in psychology to study subliminal and other unusual psychological phenomena, exploration of extraordinary circumstances may reveal limitations of the current model of mind-brain identity and the need for a more comprehensive explanatory model.
fb2epub
Drag & drop your files (not more than 5 at once)