would not have, and would not be able to pursue, the normal kinds of purposes that we do pursue.
The various phenomena that characterize electrode stimulation of the brain are similarly misconstrued by Penfield. The case of interference with the ‘speech cortex’ does not show that there is any such thing as a ‘concept mechanism’ in the brain that stores non-verbal concepts that can be selected by the mind and then presented to the speech mechanism to be matched to the word that represents the concept. That is picturesque mythology, not an empirical theory. Words are not names of concepts, and do not stand for concepts, but rather express them. Concepts are abstractions from the use of words. The concept of a cat is what is common to the use of ‘cat’, ‘chat’, ‘Katze’, etc. The common features of the use of these words is not something that can be stored in the brain or anywhere else independently of a word (or symbol) that expresses the concept. The patient whom Penfield describes could not think of the word ‘butterfly’ with which to identify the object in the picture presented to him. He knew that the object belonged to a class which resembles a different class of insects (viz. moths), and tried, equally unsuccessfully, to think of the word for members of the second class. This temporary inability is incorrectly described as knowing the concept but being unable to remember the word for it. The supposition that the mind might be presented with non-verbal concepts from which to choose presupposes that there is some way of identifying non-verbal concepts and distinguishing one from the other independently of any words or symbols that express them. But that makes no sense (see §§15.1–15.2).
It is certainly interesting that Penfield found that electrode stimulation could not induce either belief or decision. But this does not show that believing and deciding are actions of the mind, any more than it shows that they are not actions of the brain. It is true that they are not actions of the brain – but that is not an empirical fact that might be shown to be the case by an experiment. Rather, there is no such thing as the brain’s believing or deciding (any more than there is such a thing as checkmate in draughts). But it is also true that they are not actions of the mind either. My mind does not believe or disbelieve anything – I do (although, to be sure, that is no action). Nor does it decide – it is human beings that decide and act on their decisions, not minds.
That the exercise of mental powers is a function of the brain does not show that behaviour and experience are explicable neurally
Penfield objected vehemently to the suggestion that the mind is a function of the brain, and supposed that if it were, then the mind would cease to exist during sleep or epileptic automatism. The suggestion is unclear, but one may surely say that the distinctive powers of intellect and will of a creature that has a mind are a function of the creature’s brain (and of other factors too). It does not follow (as Penfield evidently feared it would) that the behaviour and experience of such a creature in the circumstances of life is explicable in neural terms. But nor does it follow that the mind ceases to exist during sleep or epileptic seizure – any more than one’s knowledge and beliefs, intentions and projects, cease to exist when one is asleep. Penfield was rightly impressed by the fact that ‘the mind develops and matures independently throughout an individual’s life as though it were a continuing element’ (MM 80). But he was misled by his unquestioned assumption that the mind is a kind of agent. Had he thought of the mind in more Aristotelian terms as a set of powers and capacities (second-order powers), he would have been closer to the truth, and less prone to conceptual illusion. For the continuous possession of powers and capacities is not interrupted by sleep or even by epileptic automatism, even though the agent cannot exercise some of his normal powers during the seizure. And the developing unity of a person’s mind is not the development of a substance distinct from the human being himself, but rather the emergence of a determinate character and personality, an intellect with certain distinctive characteristics and a will with a coherent array of preferences, all of which are traits of the person – of the living human subject who has rights, duties and obligations, and who is responsible for his acts, actions and activities.
What Penfield thought the less plausible alternative to dualism is the view currently favoured
Penfield thought that a form of Cartesian dualism is more probably correct than what he conceived to be the alternative: namely, ascribing understanding, reasoning, volition and voluntary action, as well as deciding, to the brain itself. It is very striking and important that the strategy that Penfield conceived to be altogether improbable is precisely the route that is currently adopted by the third generation of neuroscientists, who ascribe psychological functions to the brain. This is the subject of the next chapter.
Notes
1 1 We shall be critical of Sherrington’s ideas, but it must be remembered that his Gifford Lectures were influential and much admired in their day by great scientists. Erwin Schrödinger observed that ‘The book is pervaded by the honest search for objective evidence of the interaction between matter and mind. I cannot convey the grandeur of Sherrington’s immortal book by quoting sentences: one has to read it oneself’ (quoted by J. C. Eccles in his Gifford Lectures, The Human Mystery ( Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1984), pp. 4f.).
2 2 C. S. Sherrington, Man on his Nature, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1953), p. 189. Subsequent references in the text to this work will be flagged ‘MN’.
3 3 ‘So our two concepts, space-time energy sensible [perceptible] and insensible [imperceptible] unextended mind, stand as in some way coupled together, but theory has nothing to submit as to how they can be so’, quoted by J. C. Eccles and W. C. Gibson in Sherrington – His Life and Thought (Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1979), p. 143, without a reference.
4 4 Quoted ibid., p. 142.
5 5 ‘I have seen the question asked “why should the mind have a body?” The answer may well run, “to mediate between it and other minds”’ (MN 206).
6 6 The phrase ‘to have a body’ is indeed curious and misleading. We do not say of insentient things that they have a body (trees, for example, do not have bodies). We ascribe bodies only to ourselves and sometimes to higher animals. Only what leaves a corpse or remains behind when it dies can be said to have a body (we do not say of a dead fish, for example, that it is the corpse or the remains of a fish – the remains of a fish would be a half-eaten fish). The use of the phrase earmarks not an empirical truth of some kind, but an attitude towards certain kinds of sentient creatures – paradigmatically towards human beings.
7 7 C. S. Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1947), p. xxiii.
8 8 Descartes, letter to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, dated 21 May 1643.
9 9 E. D. Adrian, ‘Consciousness’, in J. C. Eccles (ed.), Brain and Conscious Experience (Springer Verlag, Berlin and New York, 1966), p. 240.
10 10Ibid., p. 241.
11 11Ibid., p. 246.
12 12J.
