The New Mentalist Paradigm and Ultimate Concern

THE NEW MENTALIST PARADIGM AND ULTIMATE CONCERN ROGER SPERRY* I With a scientist's faith in empirically verified truth and a long commitment to the brain, behavioral, and life sciences, I spent most of my working years believing in scientific explanations of Man, life, and the universe. The more I learned about the workings of the brain and its methods of processing information, the stronger became my allegiance to the kind of truth that receives objective support in the outside world. Nevertheless, without abandoning or compromising scientific principles , I have come around today to rejecting the materialist doctrine of twentieth-century science and its claim that everything in the universe can be accounted for in strictly physical, mass-energy terms without reference to mental or conscious forces. As a brain scientist, I now believe in the causal reality of conscious mental powers as emergent properties ofbrain activity and consider subjective belief to be a potent cognitive force which, above any other, shapes the course of human affairs and events in the civilized world. This turnabout in my system of belief began with some changed concepts concerning consciousness and the relation of mind to the physical brain. It soon became apparent that if the revised mind-brain concepts were to gain general acceptance, the implications would transform our scientific views of both human and nonhuman nature and of the kinds of forces in control. Among the many human value and worldview spinoffs , I could foresee the foundations emerging for a global ethic for all nations based in the neutral universality of scientific truth and promotThis essay is the outcome of an invitation to write a personal account of the beliefs I live by as a scientist and how I put them into action. Designed for a popular volume of similar essays by prominent contemporaries, it is presented here with some minor revisions and a few references. *Trustee professor emeritus, California Institute of Technology, Pasedena, California 91125.© 1986 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 003 1 -5982/86/2903-0490$0 1 .00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 29, 3, Part 1 ¦ Spring 1986 \ 413 ing values that would tend to preserve and enhance our world instead of destroying it. As these and other ramifications began to unfold, I found myself being drawn more and more away from the world of the laboratory and split-brain research into these more compelling and critically urgent ideologic issues relating science to values and belief. From the standpoint of the brain's cognitive processing, one can hardly overrate the central control power of the belief system as a shaper of both individual and social behavior. What we believe determines what we value, what we choose, and how we act. Current global crises are all man-made and essentially products of human values and beliefs. For these there is no technological fix. Technical advances, despite shortterm benefits, make matters worse in the long run in the absence of population controls by progressively elevating the level of a self-feeding vicious spiral in which we then get trapped deeper and deeper. It follows that any lasting solution will require changes in the sustaining valuebelief systems. I believe human destiny and the fate of our whole biosphere hang directly on the kinds of beliefs future generations (let us hope, to come) elect to live and be governed by. The beliefs that count most are not those about ordinary day-to-day concerns and basic subsistence but, rather, the higher religious, philosophic , and ideologic beliefs; the kind people live and die for, beliefs that concern life's purpose and meaning, beliefs about God, the human psyche, and its role in the cosmic scheme. Such beliefs determine a society's judgment of how things ought to be in the world, the cultural sense of value, of moral right and wrong and socialjustice. The force of belief in thousands of millions of minds, determining how people think, what they value and decide, shapes the course of history and is in no small part responsible for the current precarious state of the human condition. II Trouble comes, as daily headlines and history affirm, when these powerful movers and shapers of...