The Self and Its Brain

"This book is timely, as it appears at a point of impasse between philosophy and science. It creates the first link between the philosophy of the self and neurobiology. In dealing with the self, philosophers have so far taken little account of scientific knowledge of the brain; scientists, for their part, have traditionally avoided philosophy in favour of purely material evidence. Eccles (a neurobiologist) and Popper (a philosopher), both believers in dualism and interactionism, consider the existence of consciousness one of the greatest riddles of cosmology. In Part I, Popper discusses the philosophical issue between dualist or even pluralist interactionism on the one side, and materialism and parallelism on the other. There is also a historical review of these issues. In Part II, Eccles examines the mind from the neurological standpoint: the structure of the brain and its functional performance under normal as well as abnormal circumstances, for example when lesions (especially those surgically induced) are present. The result is a radical and intriguing hypothesis on the interaction between mental events and detailed neurological occurrences in the cerebral cortex. Part III, based on twelve recorded conversations, reflects the exciting exchange between the authors as they attempt to come to terms with their conflicting opinions. This part preserves the intimate quality of these dialogues, and shows how some of the authors' viewpoints changed in the course of these daily discussions."--front flap.