by Arthur C. Custance, Ph.D.
with a response by Lee Edward Travis
About the Author and Respondent
ARTHUR C. CUSTANCE holds a Ph.D. in anthropology and an M.A. in oriental languages. His Ph.D. work was primarily completed at the University of Toronto. His Ph.D. degree was granted at the University of Ottawa following a move to Ottawa to direct the Human Engineering Laboratories of Canada's Defense Research Board. During his years there, Dr. Custance also completed the university's course in medical physiology. His research centered on the problem of heat regulation in humans under stress. His reports on this research have been published in a number of scientific journals. Now retired to full-time writing, Dr. Custance is the author of a wide range of books including the ten-volume Doorway Papers, which covers a broad spectrum of correlations between science and Christian faith. Dr. Custance is a Member Emeritus of the Canadian Physiological Society and a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
LEE EDWARD TRAVIS is a physiological psychologist. Travis and a pioneer in the field of speech pathology. His B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. are from the University of Iowa, where he became head of the Department of Psychology. Later at the University of Southern California he founded and directed the speech and hearing clinic, established the first laboratory in the United States to record brain waves, was Professor of Psychology and Speech, and later was Clinical Professor. In 1965 he established the Graduate School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California, where he is now Dean Emeritus and Distinguished Professor. Dr. Travis is a Founding Fellow with Honors and past president of the American Speech and Hearing Association. He is a Diplomate in Clinical Psychology of the American Board of Examiners in Professional Psychology. His book Speech Pathology, published in 1930, was the first in its field. He is author or editor of five books and a prolific contributor to professional journals.
Table of Contents
Chapter one
THE MIND/BRAIN PROBLEMCARTESIAN DUALISM: MIND AND BRAIN INTERACTION
LAYING THE EXPERIMENTAL FOUNDATIONS
One's view of the origin and nature of mind is of crucial importance both for an assessment of human worth and in the formation of a truly healthy philosophy of life.
Carefully examining historical outlooks on mind and brain, the author reviews various explanations which have been offered for the ascendancy of the mechanistic approach. He then presents the experimental findings of recent research which have led some of the most renowned scientists in the field to conclude that mind is more than matter and more than a mere by-product of the brain.
Such a conclusion provides a basis for rejecting the view that man is "nothing but" a machine, without in any way minimizing how remarkable this machine is.
We live in an age of specialization. Specialization is usually accompanied by an extension of knowledge; but it also entails a certain hindrance to communication due to the emergence of technical jargons which, while they become binding factors within any community of scholars, at the same time exclude those to whom the jargon is unfamiliar. Words that are commonly used (or misused)--such as mind, will, consciousness, intelligence--are given specialized meanings which then become intelligible only to those who are party to them.
At a scientific symposium, people adopt such jargons and employ them almost like a foreign language to the mystification of the outsider. Communication ceases to be general.
Another consequence of this is that when quotable statements are taken from authorities in different fields in order to contribute light on some common theme, the same words sometimes mean different things when used by different authors. This potential for misunderstanding seems virtually unavoidable when any attempt at synthesis is made.
To seek to obviate this difficulty by an extensive note on the meaning of each key term as it appears can only confuse the average reader by leading him to suppose that every authority whose words are quoted is thereafter using his terms in this sense and only in this sense, which can sometimes be a misleading assumption.
Lord Bertrand Russell wisely observed on one occasion: To be perfectly intelligible one must be inaccurate; to be perfectly accurate one has to be almost unintelligible!" The best one can hope for in a small volume like this, which calls upon the witness of authorities in one discipline to shed light upon the subject matter of another discipline, is at least to communicate some generative ideas. We may by opening up new lines of thought contribute light to minds of greater precision who will thus be enabled to hit upon the exact truth.
I have therefore followed what I consider to be the rather sane advice of two of the authors from whom I have drawn some of the most vital ideas: Sir Karl R. Popper and Sir John C. Eccles. The former is a philosopher of science with an international reputation as a profoundly creative thinker, and the latter has been for many years one of the most renowned neurophysiologists in the English-speaking world and a Nobel Laureate.
In the preface to their joint work of recent date (1977), The Self and Its Brain, they wrote:
We agree on the importance of a presentation that strives for clarity and simplicity. Words should be used well and carefully (we have certainly not everywhere succeeded in this); but their meaning Should never, we think, become a topic of discussion or be permitted to dominate the discussion, as happens so often in contemporary philosophical writing...what we are interested in is not the meaning of terms but the truth of (our) theories; and this truth is largely independent of the terminology used...What is important is not to prejudge the issue by the terminology used. (1)
In the present volume the multidisciplinary sources of information which hopefully will appeal to readers with diverse backgrounds does not allow the giving of precise definitions. Such an attempt would be abortive in the eyes of experts in different areas of research who would inevitably disagree with them.
A few terms have been "explained" in circular fashion (as very brief footnotes)--i.e., merely by suggesting their opposites as used elsewhere. Beyond this, we have to cast the text upon the indulgence of the highly sophisticated reader in the hope that the more general reader will be as excited and as stimulated by the current trends in research in this important field as the writer has been.
First published in book form in 1980. Online edition, January 27, 1997.
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