Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century, With CD containing F.W.H. Myers's hard-to-find classic 2-volume Human Personality (1903) and selected contemporary reviews

by Edward F. Kelly, Adam Crabtree

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology

800 pages, Hardcover

Published December 7, 2006

Reviews

[Z · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd strongly recommend this for anyone interested in issues regarding the nature of consciousness. (How is it produced by the brain? What are challenges to studying consciousness from a third-person perspective etc.?)

I'm not a philosopher of mind, nor am I involved in any scientific field. I can't review this book within the context of the literature of those fields. However, as a curious human being, I found the willingness of these writers to deal seriously with the "outliers" of psychological phenomena thought-provoking. They don't "push" any view, but try to discuss the possibilities of another paradigm rooted in Myers' work to explain what are poorly comprehended within the standard physicalist monism of neuroscience.

[Cyrill Wiget]

Challenges to materialist orthodoxy, exploring anomalous consciousness phenomena.