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

bottom level, and the idea that the top level has an element of freedom is simply a systematic illusion…. If [this] is true, then every muscle movement as well as every conscious thought is entirely fixed in advance, and the only thing we can say about psychological indeterminism at the higher level, is that it gives us a systematic illusion of free will.
    [This] hypothesis seems to me to run against everything we know about evolution. It would have the consequence that the incredibly elaborate, complex, sensitive and—above all—biologically expensive system of conscious rational decision making would actually make no difference whatever to the life and survival of organisms. Epiphenomenalism is a possible thesis, but it is absolutely incredible, and if we seriously accepted it, it would make a change in our world view more radical than any previous change, including the Copernican Revolution, Einsteinian relativity theory and quantum mechanics.
    We found Searle after the session, and Chalmers asked him point blank. “Of course I do not deny causal closure,” Searle shot back. I wasn’t surprised; most scientists seem to have a morbid fear of saying that anything nonphysical can have causal efficacy in the physical realm. The furthest most scientists and philosophers are willing to go is to acknowledge that what we think of as mental events act back on the brain only through the physical states that give rise to those mental events. That is, brain state A may give rise to mental state A? as well as brain state B—but the causal actor in this case was brain state A and not mental state A?.
    Anyway, at an end-of-conference party that evening at Chalmers’s house, I paid Dave the twenty dollars we’d bet. I did note, though, that Searle’s insisting on causal closure of the physical world was logically inconsistent with his argument that volition is real and able to affect the physical matter of the brain. I hope thebeginnings of an answer to this quandary will emerge from the data I will present showing the critical role of willed effort in generating self-directed cerebral change. In any event, as I said to Dave when I handed him the twenty dollars, “This story still has a long way to go.”
    Wrestling with the mystery of mind and matter is no mere academic parlor game. The rise of modern science in the seventeenth century—with the attendant attempt to analyze all observable phenomena in terms of mechanical chains of causation—was a knife in the heart of moral philosophy, for it reduced human beings to automatons. If all of the body and brain can be completely described without invoking anything so empyreal as a mind, let alone a consciousness, then the notion that a person is morally responsible for his actions appears quaint, if not scientifically naïve. A machine cannot be held responsible for its actions. If our minds are impotent to affect our behavior, then surely we are no more responsible for our actions than a robot is. It is an understatement to note that the triumph of materialism, as applied to questions of mind and brain, therefore makes many people squirm. For if the mysteries of the mind are reducible to physics and chemistry, then “mind is but the babbling of a robot, chained ineluctably to crude causality,” as the neurobiologist Robert Doty put it in 1998.
    In succeeding chapters we will explore the emerging evidence that matter alone does not suffice to generate mind, but that, to the contrary, there exists a “mental force” that is not reducible to the material. Mental force, which is closely related to the ancient Buddhist concepts of mindfulness and karma, provides a basis for the effects of mind on matter that clinical neuroscience finds. What is new here is that a question with deep philosophical roots, as well as profound philosophical and moral implications, can finally be addressed (if not yet fully solved) through science. If materialism can be challenged in the context of