Mechanisms in World and Mind

This book by a professor of physiology seeks to justify reductive physicalism as an explanatory hypothesis from the angle of perspective dualism, which distinguishes the mental view from the neuronal world invisible to the first person. Two central concepts are the mind as a bundle of experienced mental processes generating the first person perspective, and the self as a separation by perspective. The author claims that reductive physicalism, although it cannot be proven, has not been falsified and that mental functions must be causally powerless. Nowhere does he consider the importance of emergence or the evidence that reductive physicalism has been falsified by various parapsychological phenomena that he neither mentions nor investigates. His position involves the denial of top-down causation in spite of internal impressions to the contrary and the evidence from meditation research and the placebo effect. He regards the whole as entirely dependent upon the parts and qualia as task-oriented.

Moreover, only by reduction, he claims, can things be understood. He produces his own model of consciousness based on distinctions between proto-consciousness, phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness as a major achievement of evolution, which he explains in a comprehensive table (p. 106). An important concept is the subjective transparency of the neuronal, which hides the neuronal mechanisms that he holds to be responsible for our thinking and actions and which gives rise to the illusory first person perspective. Even if the assertion that humans are more than physics is justifiable, it is in his view compatible with reductive physicalism. The text is rigorously argued and stimulating in this regard despite the serious omissions mentioned above.