The Impact and Promise of the Cognitive Revolution

Opening a new era in science, psychology's cognitive revolution contradicts traditional doctrine that science has no use for consciousness to explain brain function. Subjective mental states as emergent interactive properties of brain activity become irreducible and indispensable for explaining conscious behavior and its evolution and get primacy in determining what a person is and does. Dualistic unembodied consciousness is excluded. A modified two-way model ofinterlevel causal determinism introduces new principles of downward holistic and subjective causation. Growing adoption in other disciplines suggests the two-way model may be replacing reductive physicalism as the basic explanatory paradigm of science. The practice, methods, and many proven potentials of science are little changed. However, the scientific worldview becomes radically revised in a new unifying vision of ourselves and the world with wide-ranging humanistic and ideologic as well as scientific implications.