Physical and chemical processes may act upon the mind; and when we are writing a difficult letter, our mind acts upon our body and, through a chain of physical...

The Human Psyche is an in-depth exploration of dualist-interactionism, a concept Sir John Eccles developed with Sir Karl Popper in the context of a wide...

Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain, tells the story of...

The relation between body and mind is one of the oldest riddles that has puzzled mankind. That material and mental events may interact is accepted even by the law: our mental capacity to concentrate on the task can be seriously reduced by drugs. Physical and chemical processes may act upon the mind; and when we are writing a difficult letter, our mind acts upon our body and, through a chain of physical events, upon the mind of the recipient of the (...) letter. This is what the authors of this book call the 'interaction of mental and physical events'. We know very little about this interaction; and according to recent philosophical fashions this is explained by the alleged fact that we have brains but no thoughts. The authors of this book stress that they cannot solve the body mind problem; but they hope that they have been able to shed new light on it. Eccles especially with his theory that the brain is a detector and amplifier; a theory that has given rise to important new developments, including new and exciting experiments; and Popper with his highly controversial theory of 'World 3'. They show that certain fashionable solutions which have been offered fail to understand the seriousness of the problems of the emergence of life, or consciousness and of the creativity of our minds. In Part I, Popper discusses the philosophical issue between dualist or even pluralist interaction 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. 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 opinions. (shrink)

Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain, tells the story of how we came to be, not only as animals at the end of the hominid evolutionary line, but also as human persons possessed of reflective consciousness.

Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain, tells the story of how we came to be, not only as animals at the end of the hominid evolutionary line, but also as human persons possessed of reflective consciousness.

The aim of this study was to reflect on the origins and meanings of names describing investment practices that integrate a consideration of environmental, social and corporate governance issues in the academic literature. A review of 190 academic papers spanning the period from 1975 to mid-2009 was conducted. This exploratory study evaluated the associations and disassociations of the primary name assigned to this genre of investment with variables grouped into five domains, namely Primary Ethical Position, Investment Strategy, Publication Date, Regions (...) Covered and Periodical Type. The study indicated that papers coded as expressing a deontological ethical position were more frequently associated with the name Ethical Investment , whereas those with an ambiguous ethical position were less frequently associated with Ethical Investment . Three investment strategies (positive screening, best-in-class and cause-based investing) were unusually associated with the primary name Responsible Investment . A strong preference for the name Ethical Investment was noted in the United Kingdom, and contrasted starkly with an apparent aversion for this name in the United States. The name Ethical Investment is significantly more frequently used in journals dealing with ethics, business ethics and philosophy than in finance, economic and investment journals. Finally, the study yielded some weak hints that the name Responsible Investment might perhaps be linked to an egoist ethical position. On the basis of this, and because these have already been substantively linked through the Principles for Responsible Investment in the popular discourse, we follow the heuristic tradition set by Sparkes (Business Ethics Eur Rev 10:194–201, 2001 ), and propose that Responsible Investment be defined as ‘Investment practices that integrate a consideration of ESG issues with the primary purpose of delivering higher-risk-adjusted financial returns’. (shrink)

The planninnjg of this Study Week at the Pontifical Academy of Science from September 28 to October 4, 1964, began just two years before when the President, Professor Lemaitre, asked me if 1 would be responsible for a Study Week relating Psychology to what we may call the Neurosciences. 1 accepted this responsibility on the understanding that 1 could have as sistance from two colleagues in the Academy, Professors Heymans and Chagas. Besides participating in the Study Week they gave me (...) much needed assistance and advice in the arduous and, at times, perplexing task that 1 had undertaken, and 1 gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to them. Though there have been in recent years many symposia concerned with the so-called higher functions of the brain, for example witbh percep tion, learning and conditioning, and with the processing of information in the brain, there has to my knowledge been no symposium specifically with brain functions and consciousness since the memorable treating Laurentian Conference of 1953, which was later published in 1954 as the book, "Brain Mechanisms and Consciousness. (shrink)

The relation between body and mind is one of the oldest riddles that has puzzled mankind. That material and mental events may interact is accepted even by the law: our mental capacity to concentrate on the task can be seriously reduced by drugs. Physical and chemical processes may act upon the mind; and when we are writing a difficult letter, our mind acts upon our body and, through a chain of physical events, upon the mind of the recipient of the (...) letter. This is what the authors of this book call the 'interaction of mental and physical events'. We know very little about this interaction; and according to recent philosophical fashions this is explained by the alleged fact that we have brains but no thoughts. The authors of this book stress that they cannot solve the body mind problem; but they hope that they have been able to shed new light on it. Eccles especially with his theory that the brain is a detector and amplifier; a theory that has given rise to important new developments, including new and exciting experiments; and Popper with his highly controversial theory of 'World 3'. They show that certain fashionable solutions which have been offered fail to understand the seriousness of the problems of the emergence of life, or consciousness and of the creativity of our minds. In Part I, Popper discusses the philosophical issue between dualist or even pluralist interaction 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. 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 opinions. (shrink)

The Mental Capacity Act is an impressive piece of legislation that deserves serious ethical attention, but much of the commentary on the Act has focussed on its legal and practical implications rather than the underlying ethical concepts. This paper examines the approach that the Act takes to best interests. The Act does not provide an account of the underlying concept of best interests. Instead it lists factors that must be considered in determining best interests, and the Code of Practice to (...) the Act states that this list is incomplete. This paper argues that this general approach is correct, contrary to some accounts of best interests. The checklist includes items that are unhelpful. Furthermore, neither the Act nor its Code of Practice provides sufficient guidance to carers faced with difficult decisions concerning best interests. This paper suggests ways in which the checklist can be developed and discusses cases that could be used in an updated Code of Practice. (shrink)

In his 2014 paper entitled “Reason, Rationality and Fiduciary Duty”, Lydenberg ventures into the field of the moral and political philosophy dealing with distributive justice in search of fresh perspectives on fiduciary duty. Simply by doing this, Lydenberg makes the very important contribution of drawing a little more attention to the potential that this huge field of study might have in relation to understanding socially responsible investment. There are however difficulties with Lydenberg’s paper. I describe three in particular that I (...) believe warrant critical attention. The first emerges out of Lydenberg’s treatment of the central concepts of reasonableness and rationality. The second lies in his apparent suggestion that at some earlier time fiduciary duty was somehow more generally other-considering than it is today. And finally, the third is associated with the place that impartiality occupies in Lydenberg’s storyline, and the implications of this in terms of his call for a reconciliation between reasonableness and rationality. This critical scrutiny clarifies theoretical and practical implications of the transition Lydenberg is suggesting. In doing this, it makes the realization that what Lydenberg is attempting is more than likely nothing short of resolving “The fundamental problem of ethics and politics” in the specific context of fiduciary action. (shrink)

The materialist critics argue that insuperable difficulties are encountered by the hypothesis that immaterial mental events such as thinking can act in any way on material structures such as neurons of the cerebral cortex, as is diagrammed in Fig. 8. Such a presumed action is alleged to be incompatible with the conservation laws of physics, in particular of the First Law of Thermodynamics. This objection would certainly be sustained by 19th century physicists and by neuroscientists and philosophers who are still (...) ideologically in the physics of the 19th century, not recognizing the revolution wrought by quantum physicists in the 20th century. Unfortunately it is rare for a quantum physicist to dare an intrusion into the brain-mind problem. But in a recent book the quantum physicist Margenau (1984) makes a fundamental contribution. It is a remarkable transformation from 19th century physics to be told (p. 22): "that some fields, such as the probability field of quantum mechanics carry neither energy nor matter." He goes on (p. 96) to state: "In very complicated physical systems such as the brain, the neurons and sense organs, whose constituents are small enough to be governed by probabilistic quantum laws, the physical organ is always poised for a multitude of possible changes, each with a definite probability; if one change takes place that requires energy, or more or less energy than another, the intricate organism furnishes it automatically. Hence, even if the mind has anything to do with the change, that is if there is a mind-body interaction, the mind would not be called upon to furnish energy." In summary (p. 97) Margenau states that: "The mind may be regarded as a field in the accepted physical sense of the term. But it is a nonmaterial field; its closest analogue is perhaps a probability field. It cannot be compared with the simpler nonmaterial fields that require the presence of matter (e.g. gravity) nor does it necessarily have a definite position in space. And so far as present evidence goes it is not an energy field in any physical sense, nor is it required to contain energy in order to account for all known phenomena in which mind interacts with brain". In formulating more precisely the dualist hypothesis of mind-brain interaction, the initial statement is that the whole world of mental events (World 2) has an existence as autonomous as the world of matter-energy (World I ) (Fig. 1). The present interactionist hypothesis does not relate to these ontological problems, but merely to the mode of action of mental events on neural events, that is of the nature of the downward arrows across the frontier in Fig. 8. Following Margenau (1984) the hypothesis is that mind-brain interaction is analogous to a probability field of quantum mechanics, which has neither mass nor energy, yet can cause effective action at microsites. More specifically it is proposed that the mental concentration involved in intentions (Figs. 7, 8) or attention (Fig. 4) or planned thinking (Figs. 5, 6) can cause neural events by a process analogous to the probability fields of quantum mechanics. -/- We can ask: what neural events could be appropriate recipients for mental fields that are analogous to quantal probability fields? Already we may have the answer in recent discoveries on the nature of the synaptic mechanism whereby one nerve cell communicates with another. (shrink)

The placenta invades the adjacent uterus and controls the maternal immune system, like a cancer invades surrounding organs and suppresses the local immune response. Intriguingly, placental and cancer cells are globally hypomethylated and share an epigenetic phenomenon that is not well understood – they fail to silence repetitive DNA sequences that are silenced in healthy somatic cells. In the placenta, hypomethylation of retrotransposons has facilitated the evolution of new genes essential for placental function. In cancer, hypomethylation is thought to contribute (...) to activation of oncogenes, genomic instability, and retrotransposon unsilencing; the latter, we postulate, is possibly the most important consequence. Activation of placental retrotransposon-derived genes in cancer underpins our hypothesis that hypomethylation of these genes drives cancer cell invasion. This alludes to an interesting paradox, that while placental retrotransposon-derived genes are essential for promoting early hominid life, the same genes promote disease-susceptibility and death through cancer. Placental and cancer cells fail to silence retrotransposons that are normally silenced in healthy tissues. This has created new genes that are essential for placental function, yet they are also expressed in cancer. We hypothesize that active retrotransposons are a double-edged sword, contributing both adaptive and deleterious functions to biology. (shrink)

Traces the development of the human consciousness and argues that many scientific theories of human nature denigrate the value of humanity.

In the face of a perceived lack of widespread understanding of the theoretical issues underlying the development, dissemination and implementation of clinical guidelines, the Royal College of General Practitioners Guidelines Group developed a 2-day course aimed at teaching the theory in these areas. The course was targeted at potential opinion formers and ran on six occasions. Postal questionnaire assessment of the course revealed high levels of satisfaction with all aspects of the course and high levels of reported use of the (...) knowledge gained. Further developments of the course are discussed. (shrink)