Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory (Bradford Books) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)You'll find this one hard to put down. Rockwell writes very well: his self-confidence is invigorating without being excessive, and his use of friendly sarcasm toward many of the big names in philosophy of mind gives the reader a vivid point of entry into the chief problems of the field (I now feel a lot smarter about all the disputes Rockwell covers than I did before reading his book, which took less than 24 hours amidst numerous other activities).
The book makes two major claims, and I find the first a lot more interesting than the second (hence 4 stars rather than 5):
1. Mentality is not linked only with the brain. Numerous events that go on in the nervous system and hormonally have to count as mental. Pushing things still further, Rockwell argues that since mentality involves interactions with the environment, we cannot really restrict the mental realm to an "inner" sphere of the human body. This is all quite fascinating.
2. Rockwell justifies his theory on the basis of the pragmatist metaphysics of Dewey. This initially serves as a refreshing basis for his relational theory of the mind, but it eventually leads him into deeper waters where he merely asserts the more extreme metaphysical consequences of pragmatism... nothing has intrinsic qualities, it's unclear whether the world can exist without humans, etc. Granted, this was not explicitly meant as a work on metaphysics, but the antirealist underpinnings of his relational theory of mind come off as a bit facile.
Nonetheless, the book is a pleasure to read.

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In this highly original work, Teed Rockwell rejects both dualism and themind-brain identity theory. He proposes instead that mental phenomena emerge notmerely from brain activity but from an interacting nexus of brain, body, and world.The mind can be seen not as an organ within the body, but as a "behavioral field"that fluctuates within this brain-body-world nexus. If we reject the dominant formof the mind-brain identity theory -- which Rockwell calls "Cartesian materialism"(distinct from Daniel Dennett's concept of the same name) -- and accept this newalternative, then many philosophical and scientific problems can be solved. Otherphilosophers have flirted with these ideas, including Dewey, Heidegger, Putnam,Millikan, and Dennett. But Rockwell goes further than these tentative speculationsand offers a detailed alternative to the dominant philosophical view, applyingpragmatist insights to contemporary scientific and philosophical problems.Rockwellshows that neuroscience no longer supports the mind-brain identity theory becausethe brain cannot be isolated from the rest of the nervous system; moreover, there isevidence that the mind is hormonal as well as neural. These data, and Rockwell'sreanalysis of the concept of causality, show why the borders of mental embodimentcannot be neatly drawn at the skull, or even at the skin. Rockwell then demonstrateshow his proposed view of the mind can resolve paradoxes engendered by the mind-brainidentity theory in such fields as neuroscience, artificial intelligence,epistemology, and philosophy of language. Finally, he argues that understanding themind as a "behavioral field" supports the new cognitive science paradigm of dynamicsystems theory (DST).