Today, no educated unprejudiced person is prepared to dispute that science has established the emergence of our human world, via a long process of biological evolution, ultimately out of the world of inorganic matter. In a rational universe - and let us at least accept this rationality as a working hypothesis - evolution must be a rational process, every step logically growing out of what has gone before, and, in its turn, implying what is to follow. But the more searchingly one reflects upon human experience in all its range, depth, and complexity, the more the conviction grows that it could not possibly have evolved from the physical world as this is at present understood - if that is the right word - by its officially accredited authorities. For an evolutionary theory to be convincing, we must, as I say, be able to demonstrate continuity; that is, we need to be able to point to a continuous range of function right up from inanimate molecules through levels of increasing complexity to the human. So that what exists nascently at a lower level can be seen to have fulfilled its potential further up the ladder; in particular, we would like to be able to show how mind emerges from matter. But in this, we are sadly disappointed. Present day orthodoxy - identity theory - is totally unable to account for the most distinctive features of our mental experience.

Geoffrey Read (left) and Peter Hewitt (right)

Identity theorists are scientists and philosophers for whom the mind and the brain are identically one: brain is mind viewed from the outside; mind is brain experienced from the inside. Centre state identity theory - to give it its full title - is only really upgraded mechanism. For the old mechanists, we were physico chemical machines over whose workings mind played as a kind of irrelevant phosphorescence - an epiphenomenon. For the identity theorist, mental qualities are built into the machine. But we are no less machines for that. Identity theorists are inclined to talk as if their theory were substantiated by such an overwhelming host of observational and experimental facts - to say nothing of being flawlessly rational and without a single serious rival - as to be virtually established fact. But the truth is very different: both reason and experience reject it.

Biological orthodoxy assures us that centre state identity theory - latter-day Spinozism, in effect - holds all the answers: that what, viewed from the outside, is greater organismic complexity, is, from the inside, richer, more complex experience. However, while this theory is impeccably rational in principle, unfortunately, in brute fact, the two sides just do not match up and the less so the higher we rise in the scale of complexity. Nor is there the smallest indication that the gulf between inner and outer, between experience as directly introspected or inferred from behaviour on the one hand, and our knowledge of anatomy, morphology, physiology etc. on the other, is narrowing as science proceeds. On the contrary, all the signs are of an ever deepening impasse, inescapable in terms of current notions.

The Origins of Identity Theory

To understand how identity theory arose, a brief review of certain long debated scientific issues is called for.

At the outset of our era, the French philosopher, René Descartes, advanced a two substance theory of the world: that the world of inanimate nature operated on purely mechanical principles, that infra-human organisms were also machines, but that, although the human body was an elaborate machine, we had the unique distinction of also possessing a mind, a substance of a totally different order - the notorious ghost in the machine. This, in some unknown manner, was affected, as witnessed by our feelings and perceptions, by the operations of the physiological machine, and, equally mysteriously, through thought and volition, could affect in its turn the workings of the machinery.

For some two centuries after Descartes, the scientific community was sharply divided into mechanists and vitalists. The vitalists adhered to the two substance theory, and being perhaps less Christian than Descartes, they also conceded embryonic minds to the lower animals; but no more than he were they able to produce the smallest intelligible theory of how mind and brain interacted.

The mechanists, on the other hand, believed that Descartes, as a loyal Catholic, had awarded man a mind only out of deference to the Church, and that just as animals were only machines, so too was man, if somewhat more elaborately. They could not, however, deny that human beings, and perhaps even animals, possessed mental qualities, but conceived them as a kind of wholly unaccountable glow or phosphorescence passively playing over the machine whose workings were altogether unaffected by them.

These two centuries saw the vitalists fighting a steadily losing battle. Living substances increasingly turned out to be just more elaborate arrangements of precisely the same material ingredients as composed the far simpler substances of the inorganic world. Likewise, the movements of the body seemed to be governed by precisely the same physico-chemical laws as the motions of the inorganic world. Moreover, with the rise of the theory of biological evolution during the nineteenth century, the more complex organisms, right up to the human, could be seen as having evolved step by gentle step from the simpler, all the way back to the molecules and atoms of the inanimate world. Why, then, postulate the entry, at some arbitrary point in this gradual process, of some radically different substance? But while this seemed to put paid to vitalism, it still left mechanists with the absurdity of epiphenomenalism.

Spinoza's Dual Aspect Theory

A brilliant solution was proposed by certain German biologists, perhaps most definitively by Ernst Haekel (1834-1919) in The Riddle of the Universe. This solution had already been provided by Spinoza's double aspect theory as long ago as the mid seventeenth century, but then scientists are not exactly quick on the uptake where philosophy is concerned. The structural core of Spinoza's theory is that what is matter as conceived from without by the discursive intellect, is mind as actually experienced from within. In this theory, being is, at bottom, form or structure, so that the more form - the more organisation - a body possesses, the more being it possesses - that is, the more it is alive. The difference, therefore, between inanimate and animate is not one of kind but only of degree: as we climb the tree of organismic complexity we become progressively more alive.

This theory was lent further support by two great scientific developments of the twentieth century. With the billiard ball atoms of Newton, so quintessentially inert, as the ultimate parts of the organism, it was hard to see why this organism, no matter how elaborately its atoms might be arranged, should ever become endowed with life. But orthodox modern physical theory has replaced the billiard balls with some hazy kind of oscillatory activity in some unimaginable space time, itself affected in its essence by this activity. In addition, this activity is thought to incorporate a statistically governed indeterminacy which is actually affected by the observing mind. All this made matter seem much more mindlike.

The other discipline which has seemed to lend support to this theory is neurophysiology. Biological systems in general, and the human brain in particular, have revealed a hitherto undreamed of complexity of organisation, thereby rendering the notion of mind as elaborately organised matter even more plausible. Higher order (macro) structures, which arise from lower order (micro) structures, evince new, emergent modes of structural organisation; and from the inside, that is, as experienced, precisely these modes are the higher mental qualities.

All of which sounds very reasonable. And, indeed, there is only one substance; being is form; the more elaborate organisation is, by that very fact, more alive; and there is an unbroken evolutionary development from molecules to man. All this is perfectly true but it still adds up only to a half truth, and, as Tennyson wrote: "... a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies" .

The orthodox theory, despite its truthful features, gives a radically false account of the world. Where, then, does the falsity enter the theory? Essentially, through its false physics. Physics has basically misunderstood the nature of the physical world; so that although the conception of biological organisms as elaborate organisations of physical elements is essentially correct, it still incorporates a monstrous error.

That there is something radically false in the theory is evidenced - to go no further - by the following: first, by its total inability to account for occult and parapsychological phenomena; second, by the self evident introspective fact that we do not function as machines and do we really believe that, say, Byron, Shelley, and Keats were nothing more than elaborate machines?; third, as almost all the top neuroscientists are agreed, with over a century's massive and intensive research into the anatomy and physiology of the brain behind us, we still cannot even begin to account for memory, intelligence, and will in physical terms; fourth, many biological processes, for example those central to morphogenesis, seem completely to defy orthodox explanation.

But that is still greatly to understate the case. As Professor Robert Rosen of Dalhousie University wrote in 1987:

"At present, even in these days of 'molecular biology' there is still not one single inferential chain which leads from anything important in physics to anything important in biology; despite decades of concerted effort by some very clever people biology forces physics to transform itself, perhaps, ultimately out of all recognition."

...

The Emergence of Mind

The relationship between brain and mind is one o the major traditional problems of philosophy. As we have seen (in Chapters 1 & 2) three theoretical approaches to it have been commonplace. The first is some form of mind brain identity theory; this consists in the claim that mind and brain are essentially the same. The belief is that all mental experience has an exact correlate in the material workings of the brain. This position - materialistic monism - is the underlying philosophy of the sciences, and more particularly of all orthodox neurophysiology and psychology.

In philosophy, an alternative position which might be termed monistic idealism has frequently been held, asserting in effect that the prime reality is the mental. This inevitably involves derogating matter (including that of the brain itself) to some lesser order of reality, or denying its concrete existence altogether, as in Berkeley's immaterialism.

The third alternative, dualism, involves the claim that there are two fundamental substances in the world matter and mind. But insuperable difficulties always arise in attempting to show how these two quite different substances can be related. Dualism tends naturally to drift towards monism, as one tries to fit' one substance into the other.

Geoffrey Read's account is not dualistic. Matter and mind, as we commonly conceive them, are fundamentally different. As Descartes saw it, the one is inert and extended in space, while the other is not, thought having no physical properties whatsoever. But in Read's theory this fundamental distinction is eroded; there is no inert, insentient matter: at the most basic level, everything is experience. Everything that exists has a basic level of consciousness and experience. It is the richness and complexity of this experience that differentiates between higher and lower organisms, and ultimately between matter and mind. And these distinctions in turn depend critically on the entry of a wholely different dimension - that of the past. The persistence of the past is crucial to Read's account of the brain/mind relationship. It is the degree of access to the past that is the key factor determining the level and quality of mental experience.

Geoffrey Read

In lower organisms, the level of mental experience is rudimentary, reflecting their domination by the present moment. The past exerts a force that is largely automatic and unconscious - giving rise to what are known as innate or instinctive behaviour patterns. However, with increasing complexity of the nervous system, the experience of the psyche is greatly enriched by increasingly active access to the past.

It is in the mind, in the experience of memory, imagination, will, and intelligence, that this development reaches its culmination. We feel the presence of the past as a constant factor; memory comes under more or less conscious control and enters into everything we do. This marks the emergence of mind - and is ultimately a consequence of highly specific forms of organisation in the human brain.

Memory

The significance of memory in mental life is greatly underestimated. The reality is that memory is fundamental to mental operations. Without it, there could be no intelligence, language, imagination, or will. However the physical basis of memory has always been problematic. For over a century, researchers have been attempting to validate the materialist assumption that memories are located in the brain. Yet efforts to find a precise chemical or electrical basis for memory have consistently failed.
As the American researcher Karl Lashley (1898 1958) wrote in 1950:

"It is not possible to demonstrate the isolated localization of a memory trace anywhere within the nervous system ... The so called associative areas are not storehouses for specific memories. They seem to be concerned with modes of organization and with general facilitation or maintenance of the level of vigilance."

In one well known series of experiments by Lashley in the 1920s, rats were taught to run a maze. Successively greater and greater parts of the brain were then surgically excised. The rats however continued to be able to negotiate the maze, even when their brains were so damaged that they were unable to walk, and were reduced to rolling along the ground.

In Geoffrey Read's account of memory the brain does not store recorded traces of past experience; rather it mediates contact with the past. According to this theory, memories are not 'contained' in the brain at all; instead, memory is a matter of directly accessing past experience which still exists in its completeness. The role of the brain in this respect is to provide access to the accumulated body of past experience, and integrate it with the present.

This understanding of memory undermines most current thinking about the mind. It is universally assumed by neurobiologists that brain and mind are identical. But if memories are not stored in the brain, the materialist approach to psychology is undermined.

The idea that memories exist independently of the brain is not novel. It was proposed by the philosopher Bergson in the early years of the 20th century. More recently, Rupert Sheldrake has accounted for memory in terms of morphic fields and morphic resonance. What is novel about Read's approach is that it builds on a physics in which the preservation of the past is fundamental.

Intelligence

All organisms are purposive, or goal seeking, entities. And intelligence is, at bottom, nothing but the harnessing of the imagination in the service of achieving goals. In a repetitive world, hindsight is effectively foresight. To be informed by ideation of what followed in a similar situation in the past is to possess information as to what is likely to happen in the future. So that in discussing memory, we have also in effect been discussing learning and intelligence.

Lower organisms are dominated by the present moment, their responses being reflexive or instinctive. These instinctive activities, or fixed action patterns as they are sometimes called, are the most elaborate, precisely articulated behavioural manifestations of mnemic causation acting directly on the organism. It is similarities in the experiences of past and present members of the same species that are being exploited, via sympathic association.

In higher organisms, life experience, and therefore behaviour, shows more variation, as brain development grants increasingly active access to the past. The primates, with their use of tools, and relatively sophisticated social life, are a good example of the emergence of distinct individuals, with differing patterns of behaviour.

It is in the human that this process reaches its peak - brain development by this point allowing the creative assimilation of the past on the widest scale. The present moment takes on more 'depth' and several images can be held in this 'extended present' simultaneously, greatly increasing that ability to manipulate them which is the hallmark of intelligence.

This is not to say that all reflex or instinctive behaviour vanishes. Indeed it may be that human language has its roots in the instinctual. The philologist Noam Chomsky in the 1960s found evidence that the 'deep structure" of language was common to all human languages, and concluded that this knowledge was instinctive to the human brain. This discovery strongly suggests that sympathic association at this level underlies all human psyches, having all the appearance of instinctive knowledge.

The Role of the Neocortex

It is the neocortex - the specifically human area of the brain - that is chiefly involved in memory and ideation. The neocortex is shielded from the lower brain and sensory and motor regions by inhibitory nerves, leaving it free from distraction to attend to the stream of incoming images from the past.

For Read, it is the regularity and stability of neocortical activity that equips it for thought. Mnemic causation, to exert an effect on the physical structures of the brain, requires to act on an area of the brain where physical forces are in sensitive balance. It is the neocortex which provides this calm and stable arena for mnemic force to act.

When the electrical rhythms of the brain were first discovered, the celebrated biologist Lord Adrian complained that they were "disappointingly constant". The imagery varies from moment to moment far more than the basically steady electrical activity that underpins it.

The universe could be pictured as a vast, ever rising sea, whose turbulent surface is the ever changing physical present. The neocortex, as it were, establishes an area of relatively calm water via which the depths of the sea can be viewed.

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This is an extract from the book:
The Coherent Universe - An Introduction to Geoffrey Read's New Fundamental Theory of Matter Life and Mind
by Peter Hewitt

The book is available to buy at amazon.co.uk: Coherent Universe, The: An Introduction...   (this link should lead you directly to this book)

More about Geoffrey Read's theory and philosophy on his own website: www.geoffreyread.com