A Unifying Approach to Mind and Brain: Ten Year Perspective

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the mind-brain relationship. The approach to the mind-brain relation arose largely out of efforts to explain the seeming unity and/or duality of conscious experience in the bisected brain. The chapter focuses on the interpretation of consciousness as an emergent of brain activity. It interprets the emergent conscious properties in terms of conventional neural circuit theory. A further postulate is added to this discussion in which the subjective conscious effect of a brain process is viewed as a functional or operational derivative. In other words, subjective meaning is conceived to depend primarily on the way a given cerebral process works in the context of brain dynamics. The thing that counts in determining a conscious perceptual effect is the preparation to respond to a perceived outside stimulus in an adaptive, meaningful adjustment, rather than the way in which the brain's neural process happens to copy or correspond with the perceived stimulus with respect to shape, size, unity, texture, timing, etc. Conscious phenomena, thus, conceived as dynamic emergent properties of high order cerebral processes, are not merely products of neural complexity, but are also designed specifically to produce operational subjective effects.