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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Tom Clark
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
U.T.Place
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
John Duns Scotus
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
David Shiang
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Peter Slezak
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Werner Loewenstein
Hendrik Lorentz
Josef Loschmidt
Alfred Lotka
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
A.A. Roback
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Robert Sapolsky
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
C. S. Unnikrishnan
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Vladimir Vernadsky
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Jeffrey Wicken
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Roger Sperry

Roger Sperry was a psychobiologist (neuropsychologist and neurobiologist) who won the Nobel Prize for his split-brain research done with, among others, his student Michael Gazzaniga. Sperry found that the two hemispheres of the brain, after cutting the corpus callosum connecting them, each remained "a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and . . . both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel."

Up until the mid-1960's, Sperry strongly agreed with philosopher Karl Popper and scientist John Eccles. Like them, he rejected materialism (or physicalism) and reductionism about the mind and brain. Although Popper and Eccles described Sperry's research as supporting their idea of an as yet unexplained "interaction" between dualist mind and brain, Sperry thought of himself as a monist. Sperry in 1966 began referring to himself as a "mentalist." He suggested that the opposing view of "materialism" needed a refined definition, arguing that "mentalism" was not synonymous with "dualism" and "physicalism" was not the equivalent of "monism."

He said:

By our current mind-brain theory, monism has to include subjective mental properties as causal realities. This is not the case with physicalism or materialism which are the understood antitheses of mentalism, and have traditionally excluded mental phenomena as causal constructs. In calling myself a ‘mentalist’, I hold subjective mental phenomena to be primary, causally potent realities as they are experienced subjectively, different from, more than, and not reducible to their physicochemical elements. At the same time, I define this position and the mind-brain theory on which it is based as monistic and see it as a major deterrent to dualism.
Sperry revised his materialist thinking when "extending the concept of emergent control of higher over lower forces in nested hierarchies to include the mind-brain relation." "Emergent mental powers," he thought, "must logically exert downward causal control over electrophysiological events in brain activity." But he found this notion awkward. Could the mental forces be "equally or more potent than are the forces operating at the cellular, molecular and atomic levels?"

This would be a "new psychophysical interactionism," not the dualist interactionism of Karl Popper and John Eccles. This raises René Descartes' classical mind-body problem. Today it is described as the problem of mental causation. How can an immaterial "mental event" possibly be the cause of a material "physical event?"

In 1965 Sperry gave a lecture at the University of Chicago on "Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values." He says that he

worked the new mind-brain ideas into a discussion of holist-reductionist issues, emergent downward control and ‘nothing but’ fallacies in human value systems, in a broad refutation of the then prevalent ’mechanistic, materialistic, behavioristic, fatalistic, reductionistic view' of the 'nature of mind and psyche'. It was on this occasion that I openly changed my alignment from behaviorist materialism to antimechanistic and nonreductive mentalism (- as the term ‘mentalism’ is used in psychology in contrast to behaviorism; not, of course. in the extreme philosophic sense that would deny material reality).
Sperry's idea of emergent downward causal control anticipated Donald Campbell's 1974 paper on "downward causation."

Sperry gave the subjective experience of consciousness (regarded as an emergent property of brain activity) a causal role in the control of brain function. This differed from earlier emergence theories of consciousness (e.g., C. Lloyd Morgan), which were parallelistic, double aspect, or epiphenomenal. All rejected any direct causal influence of mental qualities on neural processing. Sperry's causal conscious mind strongly opposed the then dominant behaviorist philosophy of reductive mechanistic materialism. (Ibid.. p.197)

The resulting "cognitive revolution" of the early 1970's marked the return of many insights about the mind offered by William James in his 1890 Principles of Philosophy. Psychologists John Watson, B.F. Skinner, and the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle had imposed a half-century taboo on "mind" in American psychology. Although the taboo began to lift, the new "cognitive scientists" continued with a mostly mechanical and reductionist view of their mind models, as did the philosopher Daniel Dennett.

Determinism versus Indeterminism
Sperry was a strong determinist. He thought quantum indeterminism was irrelevant for the mind, as well as for the body.

Although Karl Popper did not think indeterminism was important for free will until late in 1977, Popper did think it played a role in the mind being an originator of new causal chains. And Popper said that his two-stage model of free will was an example of downward causation! He cited both Sperry and Donald Campbell as the source of the idea of downward causation.

Sperry, on the other hand, accepted downward causal control, but denied indeterminism. He said:

Another main theme of Popper’s philosophy, indeterminism, is applied to the mind-brain relation. In this we are in fundamental disagreement. I hold that every time the elements of creation, whether atoms or concepts, are put together in the same way under the same conditions, that the same new properties would emerge and that the emergent process is, therefore causal and deterministic. To this extent and in this sense it may also be said to be, in principle, predictable though generally, with few exceptions, it is not so in practice. Rather than viewing the mind of man as a ‘first cause’ or ‘prime mover’ (Popper,1962; Popper & Eccles,1977). I see the brain as a tremendous generator of emergent novel phenomena that then exert supercedant control over lower-level activities. The higher-level functional entities of inner experience have their own dynamics in cerebral activity and, contrary to Popper’s interpretation of my view (Popper & Eccles,1977, p. 209), they also ‘interact causally with one another at their own level as entities’ (Sperry, 1969b). But the creative process is not indeterminant. The laws of causation are nowhere broken or open (excepting perhaps in quantum-level indeterminacy which is here irrelevant). It is all part of a continuous hierarchic manifold, a one-world continuum.

On these terms, human decision-making is not indeterminant but self-determinant. Everyone normally wants to have control over what he does and to determine his own choices in accordance with his own wishes. This is exactly the kind of control our mind-brain model provides (Sperry,1976b; 1977b). But this is not freedom from causal determinacy. A person may be relatively free in this view from much that goes on around him, but he is not free from his own inner self. The emphasis here is the diametric converse of the behaviorist contention that ‘ideas, motives, and feelings have no part in determining conduct and therefore no part in explaining it’

Sperry continued to distinguish conscious events from their neural correlates. His new concept of the mind as a causal, functional emergent distinguishes the causal efficacy of consciousness from its neural correlates. He says:
Once generated from neural events, the higher order mental patterns and programs have their own subjective qualities and progress, operate and interact by their own causal laws and principles which are different from and cannot be reduced to those of neurophysiology... The mental entities transcend the physiological just as the physiological transcends the [cellular], the molecular, the atomic and subatomic. etc. The mental forces do not violate, disturb or intervene in neuronal activity, but they do supervene. Interaction is mutually reciprocal between the neural and mental levels in the nested brain hierarchies.
Sperry says that he could have called his model "enlightened physicalism," "neomaterialism," "emergentist, cognitivist or mentalist materialism," "nonreductive materialism, etc." (This last is reminiscent of philosopher Jaegwon Kim's "nonreductive physicalism." Kim has published many articles and books on supervenience, but he concludes that nonreductive physicalism is impossible.)

Sperry says his "concept of the mind-brain relation not only refutes the doctrines of behaviorism and materialism, mechanistic determinism and reductionism, as Popper and Eccles correctly infer, but also and with equal force, strongly discounts dualism."

We know the forces in the wheel. We do not understand similar "forces" in the brain!
Sperry cites a wheel rolling downhill as an example of downward causal control. The atoms and molecules are caught up and overpowered by the higher properties of the whole. He compares the rolling wheel to an ongoing brain process or a progressing train of thought in which the overall properties of the brain process, as a coherent organizational entity, determine the timing and spacing of the firing patterns within its neural infrastructure.

Sperry publications
Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values (1966) (PDF)

A Modified Concept of Consciousness (1969)

Mind-Brain Interaction: Mentalism, YES; Dualism, NO (1980)

For Teachers
For Scholars
References

Sperry R. W. (1965) Mind, brain and humanist values. In New Views of the Nature of Man (ed. Purr J. R.). University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Condensed in Bull. Atomic Scientists (1966) 22, 2-6.
Sperry R . W. (1966) Brain bisection and mechanisms of consciousness. In Brain and Conscious Experience (ed. Eccles. J. C.), pp. 298-313. Springer, New York.
Sperry R. W. (1969a) Toward a theory of mind. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 1. 230-231.
Sperry R. W. (1969b) A modified concept of conciousness. Psychol. Rev. 76, 532-536.
Sperry R. W. (1970a) Perception in the absence of the neocortical commissures. In Perception and Its Disorders, Vol. XLVIII. pp. 123-138. Assoc. for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease.
Sperry R. W. (1970b) An objective approach to subjective experience. Further explanation of a hypothesis. Psychol. Rev. 77.585-590.
Sperry R. W. (1972) Science and the problem of values. Perspect. Biol. Med. 16, 115-130. Reprinted in Zygon 9, 7-21 (1974).
Sperry R. W. (1970) Mental phenomena as causal determinants in brain function. In Consciousness and the Brain (eds. Globus G., Maxwell G. & Savodnik I.). Plenum Publishing Corp., New York. Reprinted in Process Studies 5, 247-256 (1976).
Sperry R. W. (1976b) Changing concepts of consciousness and free will. Perspect. Biol. Med. 20, 9-19.
Sperry R. W. (1976c) A unifying approach to mind and brain: ten year perspective. In Perspectives in Brain Research (eds. Corner M . A. & Swaab D. F.), Vol. 45. Elsevier Scientific, Amsterdam.
Sperry R . W. (1977a) Bridging science and values: A unifying view of mind and brain. Am. Psychol. 32, 237-245.
Sperry R. W. (1977b) Forebrain commissurotomy and conscious awareness. J. Med. Philos. 2, 101-126.
Sperry R. W. (1978) Mentalist monism: Consciousness as a causal emergent of brain processes. Behav. Brain Sci. 3. 367-367.

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