Free The Mind and the Brain by Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Sharon Begley

reach of reductionistic neurobiological explanations.” More and more neuroscientists are admitting to doubts about the simplistic materialistic model, allowing, as Steven Rose does, that brain has an “ambiguous relationship to mind.”
    As a result, a whiff of dualism is once again rising, like the smoke from a long-extinguished campfire, within the scientific community. “Many people, including a past self of mine, have thought that they could simultaneously take consciousness seriously and remain a materialist,” writes Dave Chalmers. “This is not possible…. Those who want to come to grips with the phenomenon must embrace a form of dualism. One might say: you can’t have your materialist cake and eat your consciousness too.” Instead, Chalmers argues that it is time, and it is necessary, to sacrifice the simple physicalist worldview that emerged from the scientific revolution and stood science in good stead for the last three centuries. Although philosophers and scientists both have been known to argue that materialism is the only worldview compatible with science—“dualism is inconsistent with evolutionary biology and modern physics and chemistry,” Paul Churchland asserted in 1988—this is simply false. Nor is it justifiable to hew to materialism in the misguided belief that embracing dualism means embracing something supernatural, spiritualistic, nonscientific. To the contrary: scientists questioning reductive materialism believe that consciousness will turn out to be governed by natural law (even if they haven’t a clue, yet, about what such a law might look like). As Chalmers says, “There is no a priori principle that says that all natural laws will be physical laws; to deny materialism is not to deny naturalism.”
    In a welcome irony, centuries of wrestling with the mind-matterproblem that arose from the clash between dualism and materialism might come down to this: dualism, with its assertion that there are two irreconcilable kinds of stuff in the world, and materialism, with its insistence that there is only the material, should both be tossed on the proverbial trash heap of history. Dualism fails to explain the relationship between mind and matter, in particular how the former can be functionally conjoined with the latter; materialism denies the reality of subjective states of sentience. Dualism leads us to a dead end; materialism doesn’t even let us begin the journey.
    At a meeting on consciousness held in Tucson in the spring of 2000, I was delighted when the philosopher John Searle asserted his belief that volition and the will are real, able to influence how the material stuff of the brain expresses itself. After the session, Dave Chalmers needled me for enjoying Searle’s talk so much. Well, I had: it seemed to me that Searle was the first mainstream philosopher to question whether the physical realm could account for all our mental experiences. Chalmers said that’s not what he heard Searle say. In fact, Dave grinned, he would bet me twenty dollars that Searle had not at all denied “causal closure of the microphysical”—that is, the belief that only physical causes can bring about physical effects, which would preclude the nonmaterial mind’s affecting the physical brain. I took the bet. Let’s ask him, Dave said. No no, I objected: he’ll deny it; let’s get a copy of his paper and see for ourselves. During the break I went to the exhibit hall and found the Journal of Consciousness Studies booth, where Searle had dropped off a preliminary version of his paper. I wheedled a photocopy out of them. In it appeared this argument for the causal efficacy of the rational mind:
    [Neuro]physiological determinism [coexisting] with psychological libertarianism is intellectually very unsatisfying because, in a word, it is a modified form of epiphenomenalism. It says that psychological processes of rational decisionmaking do not really matter. The entire system is deterministic at the