Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century

by Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Adam Crabtree

Current mainstream opinion in psychology, neuroscience & philosophy of mind holds that all aspects of mind & consciousness are generated by physical processes occurring in brains. Views of this sort have dominated recent scholarly publication. The present volume, however, demonstrates empirically that this reductive materialism isn't only incomplete but false. The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, & in some cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms. Topics addressed include phenomena of extreme psychophysical influence, memory, psychological automatisms & 2ndary personality, near-death experiences & allied phenomena, genius-level creativity, & mystical states of consciousness both spontaneous & drug-induced. The authors further show that these rogue phenomena are more readily accommodated by an alternative 'transmission' or 'filter' theory of mind/brain relations advanced over a century ago by a largely forgotten genius, F.W.H. Myers, & developed further by his friend & colleague Wm James. This theory, moreover, ratifies the commonsense conception of humans as causally effective conscious agents, & is fully compatible with leading-edge physics & neuroscience. The book should command the attention of all open-minded persons concerned with the still-unsolved mysteries of the mind.

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Science, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Health, Neuroscience

832 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not entirely an easy read, but it was worth the hours of effort I put into it as it intelligently and forcefully challenged some of my prejudices.

What the Kellys and their colleagues have done is to challenge, with documented evidence, the prevailing materialist orientation of neuroscience, the view which, in its extreme forms, sees the conscious mind as but an epiphenomenon of the brain, a passive witness incapable of freely initiating action. What they propose as models more adequate to the phenomena are several which allow that while the brain may be a necessary basis for mind, it is not a sufficient one. In this regard they go back to the work of F.W.H. Myers and William James, work concluded a century ago, to suggest avenues for future research.

I read a lot of books which deal with the kinds of unusual phenomena (what the authors term 'rogue') that the authors adduce as evidence for their call for a new paradigm of the mind, but I have never been so impressed by a single work dealing with what I'll call (the authors don't) 'parapsychology' for want of a better catchall encompassing everything from stigmatists to mystics, geniuses to idiot savants, clairvoyance to PK, NDEs to OBEs, mediumship to mesmerism and hypnotism.

[Shashank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book of its kind I've read.

A sustained critique of scientific approaches that try to reduce mind/Psyche to only brain/body functions.

Having been someone who in a recent past life was a graduate student in psychology [luckily I came to my senses and got the hell out of there] I was familiar with much of the mainstream ideas and disputes. They tackled them both from within and without which made this book unique. Within they looked at the internal critiques of this reductive approach from people like Searle, Nagel, and Dryfus. They looked at mainstream debates on memory, placebos, hypnosis, creativity and many other areas.

From without they brought in parapsychology and transpersonal psychology findings to critique the reductive point of view. If this was the extent of the book it would have been very good but not great. What makes it great is they offer more fruitful perspectives.

Taking their inspiration mainly from Fredrick Myers neglected masterpiece Human Personality and its survival of bodily death, they take the idea that the brain filters consciousness [or limits its expression] as a guiding viewpoint at looking at modern cognitive psychology, parapsychology and transpersonal fields. They purport to show how this view [or some version of it] better fits the data and is more fruitful in generating hypotheses and interpretations.

I recommend the book to anyone with an interest in mainstream cognitive psychology/neuroscience, parapsychology, or transpersonal psychology. It’s a must read for those like myself with an interest in all three.

There are books which present the paranormal view in-depth [Future of the body by Michael Murphy, Science and Psychic Phenomena by Chris Carter, The End of Materialism by Charles Tart, The Conscious Universe by Dean Radin], or the transpersonal view in-depth [Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by Ken Wilber, Inner journey Home by AH Almaas, Farther Reaches of Human Nature by Abraham Maslow], or an internal critique of reductive cognitive science [Rediscovery of the Mind by John Searle, The Conscious mind by David Chalmers, View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel, What computers still can't do by Hubert Dreyfus] and many books/writers that offer alternative avenues of inquiry [Ervin Laszlo, Ken Wilber, William James, Fredrick Myers, Alan Wallace, Lawrence Leshan and many many more], but I'm not aware of another book that does all three of these things at such a high level [now that is a ruuuun on sentence!].


For me this book was great because it brought these three often non conversant voices together into a rich dialogue.

[Dennis Merimsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book Irreducible Mind sets out to show that biological naturalism, which contends that the mind and consciousness are an emergent property of the physical brain, is totally inadequate in explaining so many aspects of the human mind, that we must conclude that mind itself is a causal agent in the universe and cannot be reduced to the human brain. The battle between these two opposing viewpoints has been going on since the late 19th century and still continues today with the spurious hope of the physicalists that artificial neural networks might become conscious in some way, despite the overwhelming evidence that mind is not just a concomitant of the brain and has major influences on our body (e.g through the immune system) and even on other bodies and minds (hypnosis and distant healing). Biologic naturalism is unable to explain what exactly happens when I decide to raise my hand, let alone volition, belief, judgement, dreaming, hypnosis, creativity, genius, multiple personalities, telepathy, psychokinesis,, terminal lucidity, Near Death Experiences or remote viewing.
For this reason it is so remarkable that in the late 19th century, Frederic Myers, a relatively unknown psychologist who specialized in investigating psychic phenomena, produced the most comprehensive model of human personality and psychology ever known. This model included abnormal psychology, normal psychology and even supernormal psychology and Myers fervently believed that science would develop in the future to find new laws to explain everything without violating the continuity or uniformity of nature. Myer's model was based on ideas that both William James (the renowned psychologist) and Henri Bergson (the philosopher) were subsequently to adopt ,that the brain is simply a filtering mechanism to channel the incredible powers of our mind into a form that is reduced enough to make our ordinary waking consciousness possible so we can adapt to our physical environment. Myers called our normal waking consciousness the supraliminal conscious and wrote "the elements of our personality," and those few "elements selected for us in the struggle for existence" are bound together in a more or less stable chain of memory, our ordinary waking self and said it was separated by a dynamic membrane from the subliminal consciousness with a two-way flow of information between them. For example habits and mastered techniques became automatons which are passed on to the subliminal consciousness, whereas creative ideas ware transmitted from the subliminal mind to the supraliminal mind when the membrane between them was more permeable in sleep and in dreams. It is remarkable how many scientific discoveries have come in dreams e.g Kekule's dream of the structure of the benzene molecule. There ןis a process of evolution, where geniuses 9like Einstein or Mozart) pioneer the way of greater and greater integration of subliminal creative ideas into the supraliminal mind. Myer's model was both modular and centralized because it allowed for the development of a multiplicity of subliminal minds or sub-personalities while control was maintained by a greater Self which was part of the "mind at large" in the universe. Great artists like Robert Loius Stevenson or Charles Dickens were known to converse with the characters they created (or emerged out of their subliminal mind) when they were in a state of reverie; as if they were sub-personalities of the artist.. Unlike Freud or even Jung, Myers model has stood the test of time and can explain "rogue phenomena" which orthodox science is still trying to dismiss despite all the evidence e.g Sack's accounts of idiot savants who can calculate prime numbers up to 20 digits, or the exceptional mental functioning found in persons suffering from hydrocephalus, who have only 3-5% of the normal volume of brain tissue. Meanwhile, quantum theory has brought back the human conscious observer as an agent of quantum collapse of the wave function, and there are a number of theories regarding the interaction of mind and matter in the brain which are quite compatible with Myer's ideas like those of Henry Stapp or even more so the Orch theory of Penrose and Hameroff. They propose that the conscious moment and the quantum wave-function self-collapse are one and the same—a ripple in the fundamental level of the universe. Penrose suggests that the choices of definite states—the conscious choices we make, or perceptions we experience—are not chosen randomly from among possibilities, but are influenced, or guided, by Platonic information embedded in spacetime geometry. The un-collapsed, still-superpositioned precursors of consciousness are somewhat like dreams. When OR occurs, the universe—at least a tiny portion of it—wakes up. Gamma synchrony is the best marker we have for consciousness in the brain. This suggests that conscious moments, or Whitehead “occasions,” occur roughly forty times per second. So gamma synchrony correlates with OR quantum-state self-collapses happening roughly forty times per second among coherent, organized networks of the brain’s microtubule
This fits in well with modern theories of global workplace operating synchronizing the brain through gamma waves. But the most interesting aspect of their theory is the rate of gamma synchrony can change according to the needs of our minds. People often report that time seems to slow down in a car accident and this could be because of a change in the rate of gamma synchrony from forty to eighty hertz. Buddhist texts describe the flickering in pure awareness to be six and a half million per day, which comes down to the gamma synchrony range of 75 hertz. When measured in Wisconsin, the Dalai Lama' monkswho have been meditating for years, showed the highest gamma synchrony ever recorded – 80 to 100 hertz. They seem to have learned how to slow down time and merge with the grater self which is also part of the universes
Myer would be fascinated by recent progress in quantum models of consciousness..
At the end of the day, Myers is the towering giant of the 19thcentury who dared to venture into the unknown territory of the mind and brought a treasure trove we are still exploring today.
Be prepared to spend some time with this book. It is not an easy read. But it is one of the most rewarding and profound explorations I have come across into the nature of the human mind.

[Carole Brooks Platt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just wanted to recommend this book to someone who had read another book by Alan Gauld and didn't like it. Irreducible Mind is an incredible resource for unusual mind matters verging on the mystical, or, at least paranormal and, not surprisingly, my fellow goodreader has already read itand loved it!

Chapters 7 and 8 on Genius and Mystical Experiences are incredibly close to the research and writing that I have done and am planning to do. My first book was In Their Right Minds: The Lives and Shared Practices of Poetic Genius. My next will be on Female Mystics and Mediums. I have high respect for these forerunners in the field.

[Louis · Rating 4 out of 5]

In many ways a remarkable book.

Its breadth is impressive covering such a lot of ground, including the roots of modern psychology, memory, automatic writing, NDEs, genius, placebo and more.

It roots all of this in an assessment of the work of F.W.H Myers. In some ways, this helps to add shape and structure to a sprawling book. In other ways, at times it feels like the prior work is almost a straitjacket, as the authors seemed unwilling or unable to pick and choose which areas they aligned with.

I would caution that if you are unfamiliar with the background to the topic, it can be extremely hard going. For example I found the chapter on memory almost impenetrable.Additionally, at times the authors refer to a wealth of evidence for a given phenomenon, but it's not expanded upon; the expectation is that you are, or you become, familiar with additional texts.  In other places however, it was fascinating and insightful, for example the work on genius, stigmata and placebo.

You may not agree with everything (or perhaps anything) you read in this enormous book, but I found it to be worth the considerable challenge that reading it presented.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great book! It functions as a modern summary of the work of FWH Myers (along with others, particularly William James) and their argument that the mind is not generated by the brain, but that the mind supersedes the brain and physical death. The 'transmission' theory of the brain is reviewed, with evidence and arguments for the theory that the brain acts as a filter for consciousness rather than it's generator. He also argues that quantum physics undermines the basic-science foundations of present day materialist-monist psychology and neuroscience, opening a path towards alternative mind-brain theories. Some chapters were more approachable than others, with the chapters on Genius and Psychophysiological Influence being both fascinating and jam-packed, covering so much territory. I was very inspired by this book, though be warned it's quite dense and skimming in sections is a must. The book is a call to action for the fields of philosophy and psychology to stop ignoring that which it cannot explain, and to examine extraordinary and psi phenomenon with seriousness to come up with a more comprehensive theory of mind that includes these very common and real experiences we have as humans.

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Читал значимыми (для меня сейчас) отрывками. Это вполне солидный труд по мотивам творческого наследия Фредерика Уильяма Хенри Майерза, и он призван вышибать из-под психологии и когнитивистики костыли материализма на стыке "строгой науки" и... ну, научного спиритизма. Видимо, я буду поэтому обращаться к нему и потом. Но вообще действительные взаимоотношения мозга, ума и сознания далеки от тех, какими их описывают нынешние школьные учебники, конечно. Авторы объективно стараются впихнуть в узкие научные рамки невпихуемое, хоть и, по всему видно, упорно пребывают в тисках позитивизма, отчего их резюме отдельных случаев порой выглядят довольно потешно. Например, когда они честно говорят: у нас нет удовлетворительного объяснения тому-то и тому-то. Но - честно, и на том спасибо. Ну и, понятно, основной пафос труда в том, что на основе гипотез и теорий Майерза можно и нужно строить надставленную психологию 21 века, только так, чтобы "строгая наука" теперь учитывала и "невпихуемые" явления. Что ж, посмотрим.

[Aleta]

This book is going to take me a long time to read. It is a dense history of psychology as well as science of the mind (not the brain). I am quite sure if one wants to do a thorough exploration of consciousness this is an essential textbook to begin study. The authors are not afraid to forge into realms that conventional scientists fear, such as paranormal phenomenon. I have found myself, by virtue of my experiences, ready to explore it all with an open mind. I begin the academic aspect of my exploration with this book.

[Leslie Lea Nord · Rating 4 out of 5]

highly professional book for psychology and neurology. interesting up date on current thoughts on the science including studies on how meditation and religion affects the body in positive ways.

[Matthew C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subject matter of this book is outside my wheelhouse, so I had to plod through this tome bit by bit over the past few months. That said, it was one of the most rewarding reads I have experienced in my life. The authors have tied together a compendium of empirical evidence that points not only to the idea of consciousness as independent from "matter" as we know it, but that also carries huge implications for life after bodily death and a broader conception of Self. The exposition of F.W.H. Myers' model of the Subliminal Self was fascinating, and I suspect that there is much "functional" truth to it. Coming from a Christian background, the topics in this book are ripe for incorporation into a broader theological worldview.

[Totochelamouche · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pioneer of quantum mechanics Max Planck (1950) was perhaps only slightly exaggerating when he said: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it" [...].

Mental causation, volition, and the "self" do not really exist; they are mere illusions, by-products of the grinding of our neural machinery. And of course because one's mind and personality are entirely products of the bodily machinery, they will necessarily be extinguished, totally and finally, by the demise and dissolution of that body.
Views of this sort unquestionably hold sway over the vast majority of contemporary scientists, and by now they have also percolated widely through the public at large.

Furthermore, our intimate familiarity with the basic facts of mental life - including, for example, our ability to direct our thoughts to states of affairs in the external world, and indeed the fundamental fact of consciousness itself - should not be confused with understanding, or blind us to the deeply puzzling and mysterious character of these phenomena.

James Clerk Maxwell commented in 1871 that "the opinion seems to have got abroad, that in a few years all the great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will then be left to men of science will be to carry on these measurements to another place of decimals" (p. 50). In 1894 his American counterpart A. A. Michelson declared that "it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice" (p. 52).

Ironically, AI seemed to have adopted the conceptual framework of Wittgenstein's Tractatus shortly after the realities of language use had driven Wittgenstein himself to abandon it.

The most significant by far of these rumblings from within, however, occurred a decade later when a consummate insider, Terry Winograd himself, publicly defected from the program of classical AI. Winograd and Flores (1986) explicitly embraced most of the points already raised above, emphasizing in particular that large parts of human mental life cannot be reduced to explicit rules and therefore cannot be formalized for production by a computer program.

Physiologists routinely presume that the role of the brain is productive, the brain generating the mind in something like the way the tea kettle generates steam, or the electric current flowing in a lamp generates light. But other forms of functional dependence exist which merit closer consideration. The true function of the brain might for example be permissive, like the trigger of a crossbow, or more importantly, transmissive, like an optical lens or a prism, or like the keys of a pipe organ (or perhaps, in more contemporary terms, like the receivers in our radios and televisions).

The cognitive losses that often accompany savant skills could perhaps be a reflection of such substitution, but we must remember that savant-type skills sometimes also occur in geniuses such as the mathematicians Gauss and Ampère [...].

A similar evolution is underway in regard to perceptual theory. Most of the work to date has taken a strongly "bottom-up" approach, along lines formulated in the seminal book of Marr (1982). This school views perceptual synthesis as a kind of exhaustive calculation from the totality of input currently present at our sensory surfaces. Machine vision and robotics, for example, necessarily took this approach, and even in neuroscience it seemed to make sense to start with the most accessible parts of the perceptual systems - the end organs and their peripheral connections - and work our way inward. The great sensory systems themselves - vision, audition, somato-sensation, and so on - were also presumed to operate more or less independently, and were in fact typically studied in isolation.
A separate tradition dating back at least to Kant and the early Gestalt theorists, and carried forward into the modern era by psychologists such as Neisser [...], has been sensitive to the presence of "top-down" influences, both within and between sensory modalities. [...] On this view perceptual synthesis is achieved not from the input, but with its aid. This is necessarily the case for example in regard to ambiguous figures, where the stimulus information itself is not sufficient to determine a uniquely "correct" interpretation.

Sometimes, however, the homunculus is more brazenly evident. One example is Marr's account of vision, which applies computations to the two-dimensional array of retinal input in order to generate a "description" of the three-dimensional world that provided that visual input, but then needs someone to interpret that description [...].

Meister Eckhart's short treatise On Detachment [...] is also exemplary: "I find no other virtue better than a pure detachment from all things; because all other virtues have some regard for created things, but detachment is free from all created things." Perfect detachment leads to the "annihilation of self." This language of "annihilation" and "nothingness" is of course parallel to the Sufi fana or fading and the early Buddhist sunyata or void, emptiness.

Specifically, mystical experience may sometimes transform an individual's perceptual, cognitive, and expressive capacities themselves. Bucke [...], for example, regards such sudden increases in mental powers as one aspect of an objective "transfiguration" produced by genuine experiences of cosmic consciousness. His primary example is Walt Whitman, whose published works he studied diligently and whom he knew personally as well. Bucke asserts that "in the case of Whitman (as in that of Balzac) writings of absolutely no value were immediately followed (and, at least in Whitman's case without practice or study) by pages...covered not only by a masterpiece but by such vital sentences as have not been written ten times in the history of the race" [...].

Yet even a casual acquaintance with the broader literature of mysticism would have made him aware that such events, as for example the various visions of St. Teresa, can crop up anywhere around the subject in spherical space. Even when relevant and potentially helpful, in short, his neurologizing is too dependent both on idiosyncrasies of the Zen tradition and on his own quite limited personal experience of unusual states.

The sacred Soma plant glorified in the ancient Hindu Rig Veda was tentatively identified by Wasson (1968) as the red bulbous mushroom amanita muscaria or fly-agaric, rich in the psychedelic agent psilocybin, and thus some of the foundational mystical scriptures of India may at least in part reflect experiences engendered by this psychedelic mushroom [...].

Unlike Masters and Houston (1966), who suggest that many aspects of LSD experience "may constitute subliminal triumphs of Time, Life, Newsweek" (p. 306), Grof also shows little or no awareness of the potential for cryptomnesia to explain much of his data [...].

We already have some questionnaire-type instruments with respectable psychometric properties (reliability and validity) that sample these overlapping domains. These include Hood's mysticism scale [...], which is based directly on Stace's analysis [...] and Pekala's PCI and DAQ (Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory, Dimensions of Attention Questionnaire [...]), which are more general-purpose tools for quantitative characterization of altered states of consciousness.

Leading educational and membership organizations involved in the promotion and study of meditation and other transformative practices, such as Esalen, the Institute for Noetic Sciences, the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology, and the California Institute for Integral Studies, might also participate.

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Phew. It's taken me a long time to read because there is so much in it. I had to skip a lot but I think I've got quite a lot from this book. I knew that there is more to mankind than materialists would allow. I think this book goes some way to demonstrating that.

[Fitzroy Ford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Challenging but well worth it. Some mindbending stuff. On p513 my brain turned inside out and dribbled out of my ear. Then of course in the final chapter the mention of the work of Stapp put the cherry on top of my new conception of what it means to be conscious.

[L]

I had to skim this massive, deep, difficult tome. There is a lot here about brain science and the biology of consciousness. It was difficult for me to understand! How ironic!

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A SUMMARY OF VARIOUS ASPECTS OF PARANORMAL PHENOMENA

The authors/editors wrote in the Preface to this 2007 book, “This book originated from a seminar directed to theoretical foundations of scientific psychology, initiated in 1998 by Michael Murphy under the auspices of the … Esalen Institute. By the year 2000 our discussions had advanced to the point where we believed we could demonstrate, empirically, that the materialistic consensus which undergirds practically all of current mainstream psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind is fundamentally flawed. We therefore committed ourselves to developing a book-length presentation which would systematically articulate and defend this point of view. Our general strategy was to assess the overall state of psychology, as it exists here at the beginning of the 21st century, from a perspective that deliberately but selectively takes into account its first hundred-plus years of organized scientific effort…

“The basic plan of the book was to be threefold. First, we would provide an exposition of [F.W.H.] Myer’s theoretical and empirical contributions. Second, we would systematically and critically examine subsequent research on a variety of empirical contributions that were central to the theoretical position he developed. Finally, we would attempt to assess, in light of this review, where things now stand in psychology and where we need to go. The goal throughout would be not simply to celebrate Myer’s project as he himself left it, but to carry it forward in the context of relevant substantive and methodological achievements of the intervening century… we have deliberately crafted our book for a primary audience consisting of advanced undergraduate and early-stage graduate students, particularly students in disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy.” (Pg. xiii-xiv)

Edward Kelly explains, “My co-authors and I wish … to state immediately and equivocally our own attitude toward [psychical research]. The irrational incredulity that remains characteristic of mainstream scientific opinion in this area seems to us a remarkable anomaly that will provide abundant and challenging grist for the mills of future historians and sociologists of science. Sufficient high-quality evidence has long since been available, we believe, to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt the existence of the basic ‘paranormal’ phenomena, at least for those willing to study that evidence with an open mind.” (Pg. xxvi)

He states, “the fantastic complexities of the brain can obviously be studied at many different levels from the cellular or even sub-cellular on up. At what level shall we seek scientific explanations of human mental activity? Many scientists, particularly those working at lower levels of the hierarchy of approaches, assume that events at the higher levels are in principle reducible to events at lower levels, and that reductive explanations employing the concepts of the lower levels are necessarily superior or more fundamental. Like many other psychologists, I strongly disagree with this view.” (Pg. 9)

He outlines, “At this point we make the empirical turn that is the central and distinctive contribution of this book. I will begin by outlining the conceptual framework that underlies our presentation. Imagine if you will two complex streams of activity flowing through time in parallel, one consisting of your conscious mental experience, the other of the myriad physiological processes going on in your brain. Imagine further, even though it is scarcely feasible in practice, that we could divide both streams individually into a sequence of states, and in such a way that the mental states correspond to the brain states. Suppose still further, and again counterfactually, that perfect 1:1 correspondence between the two sequences has been established empirically. We have discovered the Holy Grail of neuroscience and psychology, the neural correlates of consciousness.” (Pg. 27)

He notes, “I will briefly address two interrelated problems. The first and narrower is the so-called ‘binding’ problem. This problem emerged as a consequence of the success of contemporary neuroscientists in analyzing sensory mechanisms, particularly in the visual system. It turns out that different properties of a visual object such as its form, color, and motion in depth are handled individually by largely separate regions or mechanisms within the visual system. But once the stimulus has been thus dismembered, so to speak, how does it get back together again as a unit or visual experience? Only one thing is certain: The unification of experience is not achieved anatomically. There are no privileged places or structures in the brain where everything comes together, either for the visual system by itself or for the sensory systems altogether.” (Pg. 37)

He says of mystical experiences, “Experiences of this type lie at the core of the world’s major religious traditions and have continued to occur throughout history and across cultures. Their existence as a distinctive and important class of psychological phenomena can scarcely be denied. Yet they have largely been ignored by mainstream psychology and neuroscience, and generations of reductionist clinical psychologists and psychiatrists have consistently sought to devalue and pathologize them. Even when acknowledging that such experiences are often life-transforming and self-validating for those who have them, the historically standard epistemological approached in psychology and philosophy … treat them as a purely subjective events having authority only for those who experience them, and thus deny their objective significance and the testability of the associated truth-claims… Mystical-type states of consciousness are also now known to be at least partially reproducible by pharmacological means (psychedelics), and they can also be induced by transformative practices such as… meditation.” (Pg. 41-42)

Emily Williams Kelly observes, “This widespread presumption of equivalence between mind and brain is based on the observations, both scientific and everyday, that the evolution of mind is correlated with the evolution of the nervous system and that changes in or injuries to the brain result in changes in or even abolition of consciousness. It is easy to forget, however, that correlation is not causation… observations of the mind-brain relationship have been limited primarily to situations in which a change on the side of the brain is the independent variable and changes on the side of behavior or consciousness the dependent.” (Pg. 117-118)

She points out, “prayer studies broadly understood are NOT about the existence of either God or miracles… Prayer studies are, in fact, a subset of the much larger body of research intended to examine the question of whether consciousness can directly affect, not just the healing of another person, but more generally material objects… and biological systems. Given this larger context… it would be surprising if intercessory prayer---understood as the intentional direction of one’s thoughts toward another person---were NOT effective under appropriate circumstances.” (Pg. 229)

Alan Gauld states, “The principal form of evidence for the post-mortem persistence of an identifiable individual has to be the survival of his or her distinctive memories, from which questions about the post-mortem survival of his or her characteristic desires, purposes, and skills can only partially be separated… Any attempt … to systematize and interpret the ostensible evidence for human survival of bodily death has to take on board the empirical facts, so far as they are known, of the relationship between memory and the brain. Most modern neuroscientists regard memory as totally a function of the brain, a view which if justified… is fatal to the possibility that memory and related feature of personality might survive death as Myers hoped, believed, and argued.” (Pg. 281/295)

They note, “The challenge of NDEs in particular… goes beyond situating them properly within a broader framework or cognate phenomenon. The challenge lies also in recognizing and accounting for one central feature that ... makes this phenomenon uniquely important in any contemporary discussion of the mind-brain problem---specifically the occurrence of vivid and complex mentation, sensation, and memory under conditions in which current neuroscientific models of the mind deem conscious experience of any significant sort impossible. The stark incompatibility of NDEs with current models of mind-brain relations is particularly evident in connection with experiences that occur under two conditions—general anesthesia and cardiac arrest.” (Pg. 415)

They say, “it should be … clear that identification of some biological condition or conditions under which mystical experience occurs would not by itself DISPROVE its objective significance. Reductionist scientists have always been inclined to overlook this rather elementary logical point, and the recent spate of facile and triumphant neurologizing about ‘God Sports’ and the like is only the latest installment in a long and dismal history… All ordinary perceptual and cognitive experience goes forward in conjunction with biological processes in our bodies and brains, but nobody denies for that reason that such experience can teach us important things about the reality in which we find ourselves situated.” (Pg. 518)

They suggest, “Mysticism assigns to consciousness a central and even supreme reality. Its fundamental lesson is that there are experiences, forms of consciousness, and modes of being with characteristics NOT mechanical, physical, or computable. The introvertive mystical experience appears to transcend time and space, the sensory, the imaginal, and the rational; yet it also involves more than mere subjective illusion, for the associations of mysticism with genius and with supernatural phenomena show that it makes contact with some reality or aspect of reality beyond the normal limits of the mind-body system as conventionally understood. Indeed, it appears to reveal the underlying source of our ordinary, everyday experience of intentionality and self-hood. Mysticism, in short, is a topic of vital importance to psychology.” (Pg. 574)

This book will be of great interest to those studying transpersonal psychology, and psychic phenomena.

[John Hein · Rating 5 out of 5]

While not the easiest or most pleasant book to read (it's scholarly), "Irreducible Mind" is full of mind-blowing information. The authors from the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine seek to loosen the stranglehold Physicalism has on Psychology, and succeed in presenting a well-documented case supported by an extensive chronicling of phenomena that Physicalism fails to explain.
There has been some pushback because there are plenty of people so attached to Physicalism that they are very much like Evangelical Christians whose attachment to biblical inerrancy keeps them trapped in a very limiting worldview. The authors of “Irreducible Mind” address objections to their positions extensively in this book.
There’s much more going on in the world than meets the eye. Want to have your mind stretched?
Checkout this book.

[Joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book was recommended to me after inquiries I’d made to Goodreads friends. I was interested in where parapsychology had arrived by the 2020s. My previous personal reading, mainly in older works, had included such interesting books as British physicist Raynor Johnson's The Imprisoned Splendor (1953), D. Scott Rogo’s compact survey (as of 1971) Parapsychology: A Century of Inquiry, astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell’s Psychic Exploration (1974), and John Curtis Gowan’s survey (& theoretical speculation) Operations of Increasing Order (1980).

Although related, and discussing a lot of more up-to-date scientific effort & findings of relevance, this book sets out to do a rather different job. (This explains my giving a rating of just four stars — forgive me, I was simply expecting something more completely focused on psi matters.) This is an inquiry into the scope of the human mind, an inquiry that the five authors believe should be of interest to professional psychiatrists & psychologists, not just to parapsychologists and “psi enthusiasts.” Normal, familiar material of psychology is given its due. Still, the authors seek toward a less dismissive & contracted view of the human mind, a view commensurate with what is suggested by substantive studies from recent decades as well as those stretching back well over a century. The difficulty with what has, up to now, often been relegated to doubtful “fringe science” seems to be a problem of finding a place for authenticated exceptions within the picture drawn by conventional assumptions. But the authors take an evidence-based point of view.

Looking to the future, the authors begin with the question of whether “biological naturalism” (such as assumed by Freud, Skinner & others) can explain the full range of human mental life & capabilities, or whether other factors sometimes including but going beyond biology must be accepted as being at play. The authors are certain there are too many “exceptions” (i.e., well documented occurrences and experiences) for which the accepted insular-brain, biological-naturalism premise cannot offer explanations. The authors aver that “major theoretical advances in psychology will come primarily from examining, not normal psychological processes and behavior, but unusual, often rare phenomena associated with subliminal functioning…”

Given the innumerable, varied, and far-ranging functions & capacities of the mind, the authors are impelled into philosophy. They find inspiration and useful hints especially in the work of the classic explorers & psychologists F.W.H Myers, William James, and William McDougall, who were working in the latter nineteenth century and early twentieth. But the supports of the authors’ thesis are arrived at by the result of their having trawled through masses of professional reports (and other writings) of many authorities publishing after that period, up into recent decades — people whose researches encompass literally thousands of scientific observations, experiments, and electronically assisted neurological investigations.

It’s impossible to adequately encapsulate the subject matter of a book of this scope & length, but a representative listing of a few topic areas can be helpful: physiology's influence on mental states; psychsomatic disease and mortality; distant mental influence on living systems; somnambulism; automatisms & psi abilities; hysteria; phenomena of stigmata; telepathy; challenging aspects of near-death experiences; mediumship; occurrence of genius in relation to psi and mystical experience; and, meditation and health (also, meditation’s neurophysiology).

I was happy to find some focus on the work of psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, MD, director of the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies. Dr. Stevenson’s intensive, cautious studies of cases of apparent reincarnation — carried out in various parts of the world — are afforded a six-page introduction and many references scattered elsewhere through the book.

The field being psychology per se, the authors do not presume judgment on other-worldly descriptions or theories (as exemplified by Swedenborg & others), nor on theological conceptions, though obviously they don't reject an interest in unusual mental states that, at times, may suggest access to lofty, supra-human dimensions. But the authors' caution is noticed, for instance, when they steer away from pondering on spiritual healing of physical ailments, one key reason being that healers’ beliefs usually entail a ‘higher power’.

In Chapter 9, lead author Edward Kelly provides a summation and suggests a paradigm to bring the subject matter together. He accepts, extends & refines W.H. Myers’s century-old theory of the “subliminal” (vast territory customarily veiled from everyday consciousness) which lies beyond the “supraliminal” (everyday consciousness itself). Agreeing with Myers, he views the subliminal as not rigidly structured (i.e., without any strict analogy to “geological” layers) but, rather, conceived as more fluid in nature.

Though the inquiring, intelligent general reader can readily appreciate the expanded horizon rendered in the book, academically sedulous readers will be pleased to learn that passages are carefully footnoted. The book is well indexed, and to say its bibliography of cited references is prodigious is surely an understatement.

Though seriously worthwhile, since reading this book I've realized that what I was originally desiring to read was a book more like Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence (2013 edition).

But to put the purport of Irreducible Mind into concise & simple terms, the authors beckon psychologists to be less closed-minded and a little more adventurous.

[Collin Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very long and difficult book. There are many pages that, without a serious interest in and knowledge of psychology, you will find yourself skimming quickly. The sheer amount of strange phenomena included in this book that cut against naturalism is astounding. There’s usually one or two good examples given of each, but to really get a grasp of the quality of the evidence one would have to spend quite a bit more time digging through the many references to other works. On another note, as a Christian, some of the phenomena and especially the explanations for them can be unsettling. The authors seem to be more of the Panentheist persuasion. The phenomena do overall fit with a Christian worldview, however. Overall, I would look for something shorter and less scholarly on the psychology, although the filter theory of consciousness was worth learning more about.

[Laura Clementz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book packs an intellectual punch! Coming from a philosophy perspective, it examines the broadest of concepts such as consciousness all the way to specific applications. It also challenges which questions the model of current western psychology addresses and which it simply doesn't address. It's a bit of commitment because it's a long, dense, intellectual read but well worth the effort.

[Vaida Macerenkaitė · Rating 5 out of 5]

systematically argues that:
• Consciousness is not produced by the brain
• The brain functions as a filter / receiver
• Many empirical phenomena (NDEs, psi, memory anomalies) cannot be explained by materialism

[Marcas]

A mind incurving history!

[Brendan]

Just read parts of , it's huge

[Inna Uchkunova · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of a small number of books which could be called "mind-expanding", a real treasure trove!

[Madeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

a difficult read, and I needed to skim large theoretical sections to finish it in time to get it back to the library, but I still got a lot out of it. Opened my mind to possibilities. fascinating.

[Jane Rocks · Rating 4 out of 5]

By no means an easy book to read but the content was so fascinating I waded through to the end. Very thought provoking

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A satisfying, dense, and methodical book that met all of my expectations.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and researched, but not engaging enough for me

[Velvetink]

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