Roger W. Sperry’s research while affiliated with California Institute of Technology and other places

AcknowledgementsReferences

Instead of separating religion and science into “mutually incompatible realms,” the new macromental paradigm of behavioral science permits integration of the two within a single consistent worldview. A new form of causal determinism combines conventional “bottom-up” with emergent “top-down” causation. Traditional materialist tenets are overturned, along with the science-values dichotomy, clearing the way for a science-based value/belief system. Intrinsic ethicomoral directives emerge in which a revised sense of the sacred would help protect the evolving quality of the biosphere, and the rights and welfare of future generations. Subsequent versions of today's changing worldview raise questions of which interpretation to believe. An analysis of “New Age” thinking is called for, and a brief attempt at such analysis is included.

The traditional dichotomy that has separated science and value judgment and set corresponding limitations to the domain and role of science is challenged in the context of recent developments in the concept of consciousness and mind-brain relations. A conceptual explanatory model for psychophysical interaction has emerged during the past decade that changes the scientific status of subjective experience and negates many mechanistic, deterministic, and reductionistic features of prior materialist-behaviorist doctrine. Subjective values, conceived in the present terms, transcend their neural components in brain function to become causal determinants per se with objective consequences. The strategic control power of human values functioning as universal cerebral determinants in all social decision making is emphasized, along with logical indications for a more active involvement therein on the part of science. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

The English language takes the cake For blatant inconsistency; And o-u-g-h I now will take As a quite good for-instansy. When it appears in some one's cough, It rhymes with off and doff and trough; But when we find it in the rough, It rhymes with cuff and puff and tough. When it shows up in a bough, We quote the rhyme—How Now, Brown Cow; While if we find it in the dough, It rhymes as though I told you so. Now when you see it in an ought, It rhymes with taut and caught and bought; While when you see it in a through, It rhymes with who or pew or you. At last I give you slough and slough, Which rhymes with either stew or stuff, And now I think yough've had enough. * Lecture prepared for a centennial symposium on "Biological Controls and Human Values," at Ohio State University, May 1970, that was canceled abruptly following the Kent State riots; the lecture was presented subsequently in the 1971 Honors Program on "Earth and Myth" at the University of Houston, under the title "Value and Belief in a Scientific World," and later in graduate seminars in the United States, Canada, and Sweden. The work has been variously supported by the F. P. Hixon Fund of the California Institute of Technology, the David Stone Foundation, and grant MH03372 from the National Institutes of Health.

Centuries-old determinist traditions of scientific materialism are currently challenged in an unprecedented outburst during the past two decades of emerging new paradigms, new worldview "visions," new approaches to consciousness and to reality, and other transformative trends including an all-time high in favor of holism over reductionism. These revisionary developments are traced to sources in the preceding cognitive revolution and its changed concepts of consciousness and causation. Anew reciprocal "two-way" mode of causal determinism, required to shift mental states into an ineliminable causal role, is a common underlying factor. This bidirectional model is upheld to be a more complete and adequate paradigm for all casual explanation and understanding, giving science a new approach to the ultimate nature and meaning of existence with a new set of answers to some of today's thorniest issues.

Traditional scientific views of the conscious self and world we live in are challenged by an unprecedented outburst of emerging new paradigms, theories of consciousness, perceptions of reality, new sciences, new philosophies, epistemologies, and a host of other transformative approaches. This still expanding outburst can be traced, on both logical and chronologic grounds, not to chaos theory, ecology, the new physics, or dozens of other currently ascribed sources, but rather to the cognitive (consciousness) revolution that immediately preceded. These new approaches all share one key feature in common, namely, they all depend, directly or indirectly, upon a refutation and successful overthrow of the long dominant materialist paradigm. This is what was required to shift consciousness from an acausal or "eliminable" status to a functionally indispensable role. Traditional "bottom-up" micro-determinism had to be supplemented by a reciprocal, "top-down" control exerted by mental emergents over lower-level components. This does not dispose of behaviorism or reductionism, as methodology, but simply incorporates these within a more comprehensive explanatory framework. With the long reign of materialist constraints finally broken, other antireductive views have proliferated but with little regard for what the new paradigm allows.

Opening a new era in science, psychology's cognitive revolution contradicts traditional doctrine that science has no use for consciousness to explain brain function. Subjective mental states as emergent interactive properties of brain activity become irreducible and indispensable for explaining conscious behavior and its evolution and get primacy in determining what a person is and does. Dualistic unembodied consciousness is excluded. A modified 2-way model of interlevel causal determinism introduces new principles of downward holistic and subjective causation. Growing adoption in other disciplines suggests the 2-way model may be replacing reductive physicalism as the basic explanatory paradigm of science. The practice, methods, and many proven potentials of science are little changed. However, the scientific worldview becomes radically revised in a new unifying vision of ourselves and the world with wide-ranging humanistic and ideologic as well as scientific implications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

My account of the recent turnabout in the treatment of mental states in science and its basis in a modified concept of causal determinism and my claim that this opens the way for beliefs and values consistent with science are here reaffirmed in response to perceived weaknesses and “inherent incompleteness.” Contested issues are reviewed to better clarify the main thesis. An inherent weakness in respect to deep spiritual needs is recognized and tentative remedial measures explored.

To a beginner in science back in the mid-1980s, it seemed that there could be no more challenging problem at which to aim—as a long-term, ultimate goal kind of thing—than that of consciousness and the mind-brain relation, more acceptably expressed in those days as the problem of the “neural correlates of conscious experience.” A naive beginner, of course, could hardly expect to approach a final solution, but it is always reassuring to feel that one’s efforts are at least aimed in the general direction of something that might be of ultimate importance. Meantime, as a “brain researcher,” one could find plenty of lesser but entirely respectable and more researchable corollary problems along the way, such as perception, learning, and memory.