Book Review: The Mind Matters: Consciousness and Choice in a Quantum World

The Mind Matters: Consciousness and Choice in a Quantum World by David Hodgson, Oxford University Press (1991).

In this impressive volume David Hodgson, an Australian High Court Judge, takes on some of the thorniest problems of contemporary philosophy of mind and re-interprets them in light of quantum physics. There exist a number of books which attempt to relate quantum theory (and other aspects of 'the new science') to philosophical psychological problems. Many of these contributions seem, to me anyway, to be thinly rationalised attempts to gratify the authors' mystical cravings rather than serious attempts to grapple with serious problems. Hodgson's book is no vulgar exercise in pop-science and pop psychology. Hodgson is after big game: he aims to bring down what he calls 'consensus position' in contemporary philosophy of mind. The consensus position is actually a family of philosophical positions including type-type or token-token mind/brain identity theory, Turing machine functionalism (and a general reliance on the computer model of the mind, including both classical and connectionist architectures), the naturalisation of mental content, the rejection of folk-psychology and so on. If the items on this short list have little or no meaning for you, don't read this book without preliminary study of some introductory texts. At a minimum the reader should have a good grasp of modern Anglo-American philosophy of mind, more than a passing acquaintance with twentieth century physics and some basic understanding of philosophical problems thrown up by quantum theory in order to get much from Hodgson's book. It is a detailed and sophisticated philosophical treatise. It's not a book for beginners.

Hodgson argues for a non-mechanistic physicalism based on quantum theory. In a nutshell, he argues that we can never discover laws correlating neural events and mental events because, contrary to conventional physicalism, mental events are not identical with physical events on the neuroscientific level of description. Hodgson advances the thesis that both neural and mental events are manifestations of quantum events. He uses the quantum characteristics of non-locality and indeterminism to draw prima facie plausible parallels with the phenomena of consciousness. Hodgson has a great time poking holes in the arguments of his opponents, but in the end I do not think that he does them full

justice and I am not sure if his own alternative is as intellectually compelling as the alternatives which he attacks. On a personal note, I was a little disappointed that he devoted no space to criticism of the new Darwinian philosophers of mind, such as Ruth Garrett Millikan, whose attack on 'meaning rationalism' coheres with many aspects of Hodgson's attack on the consensus.

David L. Smith