Volume 29, Number 16 · October 21, 1982
Body, Mind, and Machine
By David Joravsky
Mind in Science: A History of Explanations in Psychology and Physics
by Richard L. Gregory
Cambridge University Press, 641 pp., $29.95
The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolutionary Continuity of Mental Experience
by Donald R. Griffin
William Kaufmann, Inc. (Los Altos, California), 209 pp., $8.95 (paper)
The Universe Within: A New Science Explores the Human Mind
by Morton Hunt
Simon and Schuster, 415 pp., $18.75
The Enlightened Machine: An Analytical Introduction to Neuropsychology
by Daniel N. Robinson
Columbia University Press, 158 pp., $20.00; $8.00 (paper)
Common sense and neurophysiology stubbornly insist on making a sharp distinction between mind and body, despite the efforts of monistic philosophers to make them one. Food in the mind is qualitatively different from food in the mouth. Saliva may flow in response to both stimuli, and the monistic preacher may therefore call the two cases one. But the most mechanistic physiologists—Pavlov, for example—assume a basic difference, and search for different neural mechanisms to explain it. It is mythology, not history, to describe Pavlov as working with 'purely objective methods, without any assumptions about unseen processes,' as Morton Hunt does in his popular survey of recent developments in psychology. Physiologists constantly guess at unseen processes, and devise experiments to prove their existence. Especially if they are seeking neural processes that are assumed to underlie particular mental processes, physiologists must always be examining the distinction between 'neural' and 'mental,' which constantly brings them back to dualism, or at least to an agnostic refusal of monism.
Review, 3750 words
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