As philosopher McGinn puts it, ‘consciousness is an anomaly in our present world-view and, like all anomalies, it calls for some more or less drastic rectification in that relative to which it is anomalous.’ (1995, p.226). The model described below is an attempt to do just that and is based on the following postulates:

• The mind heavily depends on the nervous system (including the brain) and its development. This is not controversial, so it does not need further elaboration.
• As the above criticism of the materialist perspective shows, the mind cannot be identified with the brain. Even Aristotle argued that the mind must be immaterial on the basis that a material organ could not have the range and flexibility required for human thought. Similarly, in modern times, mathematician Gödel, for example, believed that his famous theorem showed that humans are capable of demonstrably rational forms of mathematical thought which could not be exhibited by a mechanical or formal system of the sort that mind would have to be if only physical. Brentano’s notion of the irreducible flexibility of intellect points in the same direction.
• Rather than being a discrete entity (as a brain is), the mind is considered a convenient name for the sum of mental events belonging to one person. These mental events must be interactive processes, otherwise the mind would be merely an epiphenomenon. And, if this interaction is only between the environment and the body/brain (as behaviourism suggests), the mind

So, the experiential aspect is inseparable from its physical correlate, but neither of them can be analysed in terms of the other. Renowned physicist Wolfgang Pauli, for example, finds this position appealing

It would be most satisfactory of all if physis and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality. (Jung and Pauli, 1955, p.210)

A consequence of this perspective is that everything, including objects such as a stone or stick, has both a mental and a physical aspect. A modern version of this view is developed by David Chalmers, who claims that the fundamental feature behind mind and matter is information. Some objections to this view can be raised too:

• Dual-aspect theory seems more an attempt to avoid the problem than to solve it. Let us consider information, as Chalmers proposes. An often mischievously overlooked issue is that ontological status is given to an essentially epistemological concept. This is hard to spot because it is so widespread nowadays. For example, we say ‘genetic information’ – but genes, or for that matter, computers or books do not contain information. Genes contain some chemicals, books contain blots of

This view is called parallelism and was first formulated by a follower of Descartes, Geulinx, but is more often associated with the philosopher Leibniz. The obvious problem here is that it certainly appears that there is a causal relation between body and mind (it is normally assumed that an injury is the cause of the subsequent pain, and that feeling pain makes one scream). To explain this, Leibniz proposed that God arranged this in advance, so that the mind and body act synchronously (the so-called doctrine of pre-established harmony). Thus, the experience of pain is not caused by the injury, it is prearranged that one event parallels the other. Such a ‘deus ex machina’ explanation seems highly implausible though. One would expect that a being capable of instituting ‘pre-established harmony’ would also be able to find a way to allow the interaction between mind and body – surely a more elegant solution. A similar (but perhaps even more bizarre) view is known as occasionalism, proposed by another 17th century philosopher, Nicolas Malebranche. He suggested that whenever he wanted to move his arm, for example, it was actually moved by God rather than his volition. This would make God very busy indeed.

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Still, this view is now largely eschewed in both scientific and spiritual circles (albeit for different reasons). Very few are prepared to publicly support such a position, as this could expose their academic or scientific careers to ridicule and diminish the chance to publish their work. Hence, only already well established figures, such as Nobel laurates, John Eccles or Eugene Wigner, have dared to argue in its favour. Common sense, however, never fully abandoned this idea. The first who tried to establish dualism on a rational basis was philosopher René Descartes in the 17^th century. For a couple hundred years after him, dualism had been the dominant view. He envisaged two entities, one consisting of the immaterial mind (with properties such as thinking, feeling, willing), and the other of the material body with physical properties (shape, size, mass). By recognising the specific quality of mental states, dualism can account for many phenomena that are an insurmountable challenge for materialists. However, it has its own problems:

• The first difficulty is the very existence of mind. The brain, as a material substance, can exist independently from brain processes (as in the case of a corpse). However, this does not seem to be the case with the mind. One subjectively experiences mental events, but not the mind independent from those events. An individual in a deep sleep, for example, is aware of nothing, rather than an ‘empty’ or stagnant mind, indicating that the mind is just a term for the conglomerate of these processes. However, if this is the case, the mind cannot exist on its own and cannot interact with the brain. It can only be either a product of the brain activity or a product of an interaction between the brain and something else (we already considered the former and we will consider the latter shorty).
• Descartes would not allow the possibility that animals have minds. This begs the question how and why would simple organisms (without mind) evolve into creatures that have it. And where from and why has this mind substance suddenly appeared?

Home and Robinson comment:

Bohr’s quasi-positivistic, essentially subjective view of nature… taken to its logical extreme, denies the existence of the physical world – or at least its dynamical properties – until they are measured. (1995, p.175)

And Bohr is not alone in taking this view. For example, Hameroff, who believes that the solution to the mind-body problem lies in quantum physics, states: ‘When unobserved, an atom or sub-atomic particle behaves as a ‘wave of possibilities’; observation in effect ‘collapses the wave function’ and a particle appears’ (1994, p.100). One of the founders of quantum physics, Heisenberg, stressed that physicists no longer deal with elementary particles, but with our knowledge of these particles – that is, with the contents of our mind. Other eminent quantum physicists, such as Schrödinger and Wheeler, have a similar view. It is hard to avoid a conclusion that ‘such interpretations moved science towards the idealist as contrasted with the realist conception of philosophy’ (Morowitz, 1981, p.38-39). This perspective may be attractive as an antidote to the prevailing materialism in scientific circles, but it too faces a few uncomfortable issues.

• First of all, this particular interpretation of quantum physics is not the only possible interpretation. For example, theoretical physicist, David Bohm, who departed from the mainstream interpretation of quantum phenomena, devised a system that is compatible with experimental results and yet does not necessitate an observer to make matter real.

The assumption behind this position is that a combination of simple structures can give rise to some qualities that their constitutive elements do not have. A simple example is the wetness of water that emerges from non-wet molecules of hydrogen and oxygen. More broadly, the idea is that physics gives rise to chemistry, chemistry to biology, biology to the brain and the brain to consciousness – but, crucially, none of them can be reduced to their precursors. This is a big improvement on reductive materialism because emergentism can account for subjective experiences, and perhaps even for the non-physical properties of the mental. However, it has some other shortcomings.

• Emergentism does not explain why and how the brain gives rise to mind, but simply assumes that it happens. Not only does the question why the complexity of the brain would lead to consciousness remain unanswered, but also why the complexity increases at all. Considering that emergent systems are always open systems, it is possible that factor(s) external to the system force this increase. If this proposition is taken on board, the conditions and factors that contribute to the emergence of consciousness would need clarification, as they are far from obvious.
• The assembly of neurons and other cells that make up the brain undoubtedly produce some new qualities (e.g. an equivalent to the wetness of water would be the sponginess of the brain). However, the mind is different. Its phenomenal properties appear sharply dissimilar to those of the brain. It can be expected that the increased complexity of the nervous system would allow more complex processes in the brain to occur, but it seems implausible that sentient, experiencing entities could spontaneously evolve at one point out of wholly insentient, non-experiencing substance.
• There is no reason to believe that these properties are specific to human beings. True, the mental life of other organisms may be much more limited, but that does not mean that they are just carbon

Idealism is not so absurd as it seems at first glance (especially if it is considered epistemologically rather than ontologically). In the end, what we know is the content of our mind (our perceptions are part of our mind not reality); and that content does not necessarily correspond to something ‘out there’. For example, the experience of solidity is only a mental product. As science confirms, a stone that appears solid is in fact mostly empty space. The usual refutation that goes something like ‘if you hit a table, the pain will be an obvious proof that it is real’, does not, in fact, hold water. There is no reason why pain cannot be an established reaction to mental representations as much as material objects that have an independent existence. After all, we can experience pain in a dream as a result of hitting a dreamt table that is evidently not material.

A more serious problem that this position faces is how things unknown and unperceived by anybody can still exist. For example, somebody hides a treasure and subsequently dies. Nobody knows about it, but years later it is accidentally found. It makes sense to think that the treasure has existed all the time, although it was not in the mind of anybody. Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753), a philosopher often associated with this perspective, argues that reality is coherent and has continuity because it is in the mind of God, who is an omnipresent observer. Philosopher Leibniz (1646 – 1716) takes the view that there are many individual minds that together make possible the existence of the physical universe. However, even if the idea that God or many individual minds provide

Support for materialism does not amount to much. Some of its proponents admit that they are motivated by such considerations as Occam’s razor or a general belief that everything is reducible to one kind of entity. The reason why this perspective seems plausible to many is that brain injuries or certain chemicals can alter mind states. However, although this proves that the brain affects the mind, it is not evidence that the mind is the brain. To make a comparison, if a car breaks down or runs out of petrol, the driver is forced to stop her journey. This is not a proof, though, that the driver does not exist, or that she is identical to or a product of mechanical processes in the car’s engine. Yet, materialistic interpretations make a similar leap of faith in an attempt to explain the mind solely by brain processes. It is more or less left to philosophers to argue this point as there is no scientific evidence that the mind can be reduced to the brain – only that they correlate. Hanfling (1980, p.52) illustrates that correlation and identification are not the same:

…connection is not enough. To say that rain is connected with a fall of the barometer is very different from saying that rain is a fall of the barometer; and the same is true of sensations and brain-processes – even assuming that they could be correlated in the same sort of way. To go from correlation to identification requires a further step. Is this further step also a matter of science?

Materialism still has an appeal because it offers an easy solution to the problem that bedevils dualism: how states of the mind (expectations, volitions, feelings) can initiate physical movements. If the mind is identified with the brain, this issue becomes trivial: the one part of essentially the same system affects another in a way