Physicalism has a problem: experience must derive from wholly physical things, but how can physical matter produce experience? An answer to this question may require a drastic change in the physicalist paradigm. Some propose Panpsychism as the best available response. Panpsychism contends that all physical matter has mental properties. To many such a notion is a sheer absurdity. Two mainstream ...

This article, which seeks to sketch a coherent conceptual and philosophical framework for psychiatry, confronts two major questions: how do mind and brain interrelate, and how can we integrate the multiple explanatory perspectives of psychiatric illness? Eight propositions are proposed and defended: 1) psychiatry is irrevocably grounded in mental, first-person experiences; 2) Cartesian substanc...

Deterministic chaos, and even maximum computational complexity, have been discovered within Newtonian dynamics. Encouraged by comparisons of the economy with the weather, a Newtonian system, economists assume that prices and price changes can also obey abstract mathematical laws of motion. Meanwhile, sociologists and other postmodernists advertise that physics and chemistry have outgrown their ...

Even Descartes acknowledged that: ‘I am not only lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel .my mind and body compose a certain unity’ [1]. Today, our understanding of this ‘certain unity’ remains insufficient. The ambition to ‘naturalize the mind’ is constantly renewed but, as Gallagher says in his new book, ‘implicitly, the idea that the body has little to do with cognition continues to haunt a...

Despite decades of clinical, sociopolitical, and research efforts, progress in understanding treating mental health problems remains disappointing. I discuss two barriers that have contributed to a problematic oversimplification illness. The first is diagnostic literalism, mistaking (complex within-person processes) for the diagnoses by which they are classified (clinically useful idealizations...

Essay The sum of the parts Graeme Mitchison Thirty years ago, Francis Crick, in his brilliant and combative little book Of Molecules and Men (Seattle: University of Washington; 1966), expounded what could be regarded as the biological reductionist's credo. The ultimate aim of a modern biologist, he said, should be to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry; in particular, it shoul...