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the highest brain mechanism switches off the power that energizes the mind whenever one goes to sleep, and switches it on again when one awakens.

      Is the explanation improbable?, Penfield queried.

      It is not so improbable, to my mind, as is the alternative expectation [explanation] – that the highest brain mechanism should itself understand, and reason, and direct voluntary action, and decide where attention should be turned and what the computer must learn and record, and reveal on demand. (MM 82)

      Penfield’s neo-Cartesianism

      Penfield’s neo-Cartesianism is no advance over that of Sherrington and Eccles. But if we are to learn anything from his errors, we must not simply dismiss them as misguided and move on to other matters. That will merely ensure that we learn nothing from his endeavours. We must ask what went wrong, what drove one of the greatest neurosurgeons and neurologists of all times to embrace such a misconceived view of the mind and brain?

       Shared presuppositions

      (1) The Cartesian conception of the mind

      (2) The assumption that the question of whether brain mechanisms can account for the mind is an empirical one

      Criticisms of Penfield’s presuppositions:

      (1) Misconceptions about the nature of the mind

      Both presuppositions are misconceived. The mind, as we have already intimated, is not a substance of any kind. Talk of the mind is merely the form in which we represent to ourselves human powers and their exercise and talk about human powers and their exercise. We say of a creature (primarily of a human being) that it has a mind if it has a certain range of active and passive powers of intellect and will – in particular, conceptual powers of a language-user that make self-awareness and self-reflection possible. The idioms that involve the noun ‘mind’ have as their focal points thought, memory and will. And they are all readily paraphrasable into psychological expressions in which the word does not occur (we shall discuss this matter in some detail in §4.8).

      A person is not identical with his mind. A mind is something ( but not some thing) a person is said to have, not to be. In having a mind, an animal (that is thereby also a person, and a bearer of rights and duties) has a distinctive range of capacities. And it is obvious both that an animal cannot be identical with an array of capacities, and that if a human being loses enough of those distinctive capacities, he can cease to be a full-blooded person (and exist only in a ‘vegetal state’). It is not the mind that is the subject of psychological attributes, any more than it is the brain. It is the living human being – the animal as a whole, not one of its parts or a subset of its powers. It is not my mind that makes up its mind or decides; it is not my mind that calls something to mind and recollects; and it is not my mind that turns its mind to something or other and thinks – it is I, this human being. Hence, too, the mind is not a causal agent that brings about changes in the body and its limbs by its actions. On the contrary, it is human beings that deliberate, decide and act, not their minds.

       (2) Whether the brain can ‘account for’ the mind is not an empirical question

      Consequently, Penfield’s second presupposition is misguided. Whether we can ‘account for the mind’ in terms of the brain alone, or must account for the (supposed) activities of the mind (e.g. thought, reasoning, wants and purposes, intentions and decisions, voluntary and intentional actions) by reference to the mind itself, conceived of as an independent substance and therefore causal agent, is not a matter of choice between two empirical hypotheses. If these were empirical hypotheses, then either could in principle be true; that is, both would present intelligible possibilities, and it would be a matter of empirical investigation to discover which is actually the case. But that is not how it is at all.

      It is neither the brain nor the mind that is the subject of psychological attributes

      Neither the causal agency of the brain nor the causal agency of the mind explains intentional action

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