( 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
First, it is not the mind that thinks and reasons, wants things and has purposes, forms intentions and makes decisions, acts voluntarily or intentionally. It is the human being. We do indeed characterize someone as having a clear, rigorous or decisive mind. But these are merely ways of characterizing his dispositions in respect of thought and will. If we want to understand why a normal human being reasoned the way he did, thought what he did, has the goals and purposes that he has, and why he decided as he did, formed such-and-such intentions and plans, and acted intentionally, no neurological account will clarify for us what we wish to be clarified. To this extent Penfield was right. Where he was wrong was in the supposition that what we need is an explanation in terms of the activities of the man’s mind – where the mind is conceived of as an agent with causal powers. Rather, what we want is an explanation in terms of his reasoning, hence too by reference to what he knew or believed, and, in the case of practical reasoning, by reference to his goals and purposes. And if our explanation renders his reasoning intelligible, no further information about neural events in his brain can add anything. All a neural explanation could do would be to explain how it was possible for him to reason cogently at all (i.e. what neural formations must be in place to endow a human being with such-and-such intellectual and volitional capacities), but it cannot rehearse the reasoning, let alone explain its cogency.
Neither the causal agency of the brain nor the causal agency of the mind explains intentional action
Similarly, if we are puzzled by someone’s actions, if we wish to know why A signed a cheque for £200, no answer in terms of brain functions is likely to satisfy us. We want to know whether A was discharging a debt, making a purchase, donating money to charity or betting on a horse – and once we know which of these is the case, we may also want to know what A’s reasons were. A description of neural events in A’s brain could not possibly explain to us what we want to have explained. If we wish to know why A caught the 8.15 a.m. to Paris, a description of neural events cannot in principle satisfy our need for an explanation. But the answer that he had a committee meeting there at 2.00 p.m. that was to decide upon such-and-such a project for which A is responsible may give quietus to our curiosity. If A has murdered B, we may wish to know why. We may be given a reason, and still remain dissatisfied, wishing to understand more – but the ‘more’ we wish to understand is most probably A’s motive, not what neural events occurred at the time of the killing. We want to know whether he killed B out of revenge or out of jealousy, for example, and that requires a quite different narrative from anything that neuroscientific investigation could produce. Explanation of action by redescription, by citing agential reasons, or by specifying the agent’s motives (and there are many other forms of explanation of related kinds) are not replaceable, even in principle, by explanations in terms of neural events in the brain. This is not an empirical matter at all, but a logical or conceptual one. The type of explanation is categorially different, and explanations in terms of agential reasons and motives, goals and purposes, are not reducible to explanations of muscular contractions produced as a consequence of neural events (see chapter 16). But equally, such explanations are not couched in terms of the activities of the mind, conceived as an independent substance with causal powers of its own. In this sense, Penfield’s dilemma is a bogus one. He was perfectly right to think that one cannot account for human behaviour and experience in terms of the brain alone, but wrong to suppose that the idea that one might be able to do so is an intelligible empirical hypothesis as opposed to a conceptual confusion. He was also wrong to suppose that the alternative is accounting for human behaviour and experience in terms of the causal agency of the mind, and wrong again in thinking that that too is an empirical hypothesis. There is no need whatsoever to impale oneself on either of the horns of Penfield’s dilemma.
The hypothesis that mind–brain interaction can explain human behaviour is logically incoherent
Once these presuppositions are jettisoned, it becomes easier to see why the explanation of human behaviour in terms of the interaction of the mind (conceived as an independent substance) and the brain is misconceived. It is not a false empirical hypothesis, but a conceptual confusion. For inasmuch as the mind is not a substance, indeed not an entity of any kind, it is not logically possible for the mind to function as a causal agent that brings about changes by acting on the brain. This is not an empirical discovery, but a conceptual clarification. ( But it is equally mistaken to suppose that substituting the brain for the Cartesian mind is any less confused. That too is not an empirical hypothesis, but a conceptual muddle, which likewise stands in need of conceptual clarification.)
Neither epileptic automatism nor electrode stimulation of the brain support dualism
Consequently, Penfield was mistaken to think that what so impressed him – namely, the phenomena of epileptic automatism and the various facts that characterize electrode stimulation of the brain – constitute empirical support for a dualist hypothesis. Epileptic automatism does not show that the mind has become disconnected from the ‘highest brain mechanism’ to which it is normally connected, and by which it is supplied with energy of an as yet unknown form.26 What it shows is that during an epileptic seizure, as a consequence of the abnormal excitation of parts of the cortex, the person is temporarily deprived of some of his normal powers (including memory, the ability to make decisions, emotional sensitivity and a sense of humour), while other powers, in particular those for routine actions, are retained. The phenomena are indeed striking, but they amount to a dissociation of powers that are normally associated, not to a disconnection of substances that are normally connected. They do not show that the brain is a computer or that the mind is its programmer. The brain is no more a computer than it is a central telephone exchange (the previously favoured analogy), and the mind is no more a computer programmer than it is a telephonist. It is perfectly true that the ability to continue routine tasks unreflectively is useful (and the expression ‘short-term programming’ is an apt metaphor here). It is also true that the purposes pursued by someone are not the purposes of his brain. But it does not follow from this that they are the purposes of his mind. They are the purposes of the human being – and they are to be understood in terms of facts about human life, social forms of life, antecedent events, current circumstances, agential beliefs and values and so forth, not in terms of neural events
