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The soul of the gaps.

Article Excerpt
Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century, by Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Alan Gauld, Michael Grosso, and Bruce Greyson. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. 832 pp., $99.95. ISBN 0-7425-4792-2

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DISCUSSING PSYCHOANALYSTS, Ludwig Wittgenstein once quipped that "they have given up one way of thinking and adopted another." This diagnosis certainly applies to the authors of Irreducible Mind (henceforth IM), although reading through this 800-page volume makes it clear that they would take it as a compliment. The book is an ambitious work, as it explicitly purports to "justify and to some extent foreshadow what we anticipate will become a major and vitally necessary reworking of central parts of scientific psychology" (xiii). It is written by a group of researchers mostly associated by their belief in the paranormal and their involvement in a New-Age Californian think-tank called the Esalen Center for Theory and Research. Although each chapter was written by different authors, they insist that the book is really a common effort, hence I will refer to them as Kelly, et al.

According to the authors, there seem to be two major problems with current views of what the mind is and how it works. First of all--and this is the implicit reproach addressed to "mainstream" cognitive psychologists, philosophers of mind and neuroscientists (all treated as an undifferentiated package sharing a similar worldview, namely materialism)--we just do not have a full and satisfactory physicalist explanation of how the brain generates the mind. The second problem, constituting the raison d'etre of this lengthy volume, is that what the authors portray as establishment science has along the years consistently and purposefully blinded itself to a body of evidence that flatly contradicts its most cherished tenets, and as a consequence, it has narrowed its scope to the least significant aspects of human experience.

Some background. People trying to study the biological basis of consciousness are currently involved...