The new mentalist paradigm and ultimate concern.

Abstract

����� With a scientist's faith in empirically verified truth and a long commitment to the brain, behavioral, and life sciences, I spent most of my working years believing in scientific explanations of Man, life, and the universe. The more I learned about the workings of the brain and its methods of processing information, the stronger became my allegiance to the kind of truth that receives objective support in the outside world. Nevertheless, without abandoning or compromising scientific principles, I have come around today to rejecting the materialist doctrine of twentieth-century science and its claim that everything in the universe can be accounted for in strictly physical, mass-energy terms without reference to mental or conscious forces. As a brain scientist, I now believe in the causal reality of conscious mental powers as emergent properties ofbrain activity and consider subjective belief to be a potent cognitive force which, above any other, shapes the course of human affairs and events in the civilized world. This turnabout in my system of belief began with some changed concepts concerning consciousness and the relation of mind to the physical brain. It soon became apparent that if the revised mind-brain concepts were to gain general acceptance, the implications would transform our scientific views ofboth human and nonhuman nature and ofthe kinds of forces in control. Among the many human value and worldview spinoffs, I could foresee the foundations emerging for a global ethic for all nations based in the neutral universality of scientific truth and promotThis essay is the outcome of an invitation to write a personal account of the beliefs I live by as a scientist and how I put them into action. Designed for a popular volume of similar essays by prominent contemporaries, it is presented here with some minor revisions and a few references.