My thesis is that the explanations based on the present materialist/reductionist views on how experiential qualities developed out of inert matter are unconvincing and that an alternate viewpoint offers a more parsimonious and logically coherent account. This is a quotation taken from Leonard Freris’ article entitled “Mind and Matter.” It appeared in Communicative and Integrative Biology in 2014 (http://dx.doi/org/10.4161/cib.26658). He goes on to state that the truth of dualism would support the possibility of the mind surviving the death of the body. “The fundamental problem of Dualism is that it has no convincing explanation of how the two realms of mind and matter interact.” This last statement by Freris underscores the very objective of my studies over the last 20 years, the findings of which are presented in my two books and now in my blogs.
The author asks how experiential phenomena can be physical. The materialist/reductionist agenda is problematic. It is the mind-body problem. He refers to “eliminative materialism” wherein “mental phenomena are considered to be an ‘aspect’ of brain activity,” being physical phenomena. “Cognitive psychology” on the other hand views the brain as a computer. Mental activity is “information processing with experiential activity reduced to a computational process.”
Freris addresses the “mind-body” problem well. He closes with a postscript by Erwin Schrodinger:
But now let us assume that in a particular case you eventually observe several efferent bundles of pulsating currents, which issue from the brain and through long cellular protrusions (motor nerve fibers), are conducted to certain muscles of the arm, which, as a consequence, tends a hesitating, trembling hand to you to bid you farewell - for a long heart rendering separation; at the same time you may find that some other pulsating bundles produce a certain glandular secretion so as to veil the poor sad eye with a crape of tears. But nowhere along this way from the eye through the central organ to the arm muscles and the tear glands - nowhere, you may find, however far physiology advances, will you ever meet the personality, will you ever meet the dire pain, the bewildered worry within this soul, though their reality is to you so certain as though you suffered them yourself - as in actual fact you do!