Cerebral Activity and Consciousness

By consciousness I mean conscious experience, which each of us has privately for himself. It is the primary reality for each of us, as I have argued in my book (Eccles, 1970). I try to avoid the words ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ because they have been so indiscriminately misused that they now are devoid of precise meaning. For example, mental attributes have been postulated for matter in some ordered state. It has been stated: ‘We arrive at another concept of order in matter in which events analogous to mental events in man, maintain the order, respond to previous events and anticipate immediate future events, for that is what we mean by mental events’ (Birch, 1974); and Polten (1973) states that ‘a rock is subject to mind in that it is ruled by law…. I maintain that a rock is held together by substantial binding energies that are mental in nature’. As I have stated earlier (Eccles, 1970): On the contrary, Dobzhansky (1967) has stated that there are two exceptions to this continuity in the evolutionary process—the origin of life and the origin of man. In order to preserve a continuity in the evolutionary process and to avoid a special and unique emergence or discontinuity, many eminent thinkers [Sherrington, 1940; Teilhard de Chardin, 1959; Huxley, 1962] have taken refuge in the vague generalisation that there is a mental attribute in all matter. As the organisation of matter gradually became perfected in the evolutionary process, there was a parallel development of the mental attribute from its extremely primordial state in inorganic matter, or in the simplest living forms, through successive stages until it reached full fruition in the human brain.