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complex activities as attending college, flying a Boeing 747, partaking in a
chess tournament, performing the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2,
and perhaps even stealthily designing a nuclear bomb.
- Chalmers DJ. (1996) The Conscious Mind. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford;
Edelman GM, Tononi J. (2000) A Universe of Consciousness. Basic Books,
New York.
- I owe this evolutionary insight to a discussion with Professor Francesco
Orilia. Also, the argument from evolution was presented earlier by Karl
Popper. See: Popper KR, Eccles JC. (1981) The Self and Its Brain, Springer,
Berlin, p. 72.
- It can be contended that, in evolutionary history, mind appeared as a by-
product of other functions essential for life, and that mind subsequently
persisted because it turned out to be useful. This argument is akin to
the biological “spandrel” theory of Stephen Gould, which I refuted in
Chapter 12 : The Expanded Self. My reason is that if a new trait turns out to
be of adaptive value, it will be selected and retained whether or not it arises
by accident. In fact, most mutations arise by accident without biological
“foresight”. It is the adaptive outcome that decides the fate of a trait. For
Gould’s argument, see: Gould SJ, Lewontin RC. (1979) The spandrels of
San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist
programme. Proc R Soc Lond B 205: 581–598.
- Perhaps the most glaring example of mind affecting the body is when a per-
son commits suicide. In this case mind destroys the body. I owe this insight
to David Noerper.
- Although mind seems to have a dimension of time.
- The idea of a new “state of matter” may sound ridiculous, but it should not
be dismissed as a total nonsense. An example is the state of Bose-Einstein
condensate: When matter is cooled to near absolute zero degree, quan-
tum effects prevail on a macroscopic scale. This example, however, is used
merely to demonstrate that we should be open to unusual possibilities. It is
not meant to endorse a quantum theory of mind.
- Koch C. (2009) Free will, physics, biology, and the brain. In Murphy N,
Ellis G, O’Connor T. eds. Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of
Free Will. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp. 31–52. (Quoted with permission
from Springer Berlin Heidelberg.)
