Deactivation of the Mind

Abstract

In chapter 21 we noticed that the great twentieth-century embryologist, Hans Spemann, believed that the phenomena which most closely resembled the phenomena of morphopoiesis were ‘those vital processes of which we have the most intimate knowledge, viz. the psychical ones’. That this is no new idea the reader of this book will realise. He will recall that we have many times pointed out that this was the great analogy upon which Aristotelian science was founded. In subsequent chapters we have seen how the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific revolution ridiculed this analogy in physics and astronomy. We have also noticed how the Aristotelian paradigm was slowly driven from the realm of biological science, even from the realm of embryology, its original power base. Now in the last chapter of this book we come finally to the concept of mind. Can the Galilean paradigm, the correlation of ‘accidents’, replace the Aristotelian in its own country? Or is there a symmetry in the history of ideas, and will it be the case that just as Aristotelianism was broken by the existence of projectiles, so Galilean science will be broken by the existence of consciousness? Part of the motive for writing this book has lain in the hope of gaining sufficient perspective, of gaining perhaps an Archimedean fulcrum, to suggest some answers to these questions. First, however, let us briefly review and develop some of the material covered in earlier chapters.