From Mystical Experience to Biological Consciousness A Pilgrim’s Progress?
Identifying the Mind January 15, 2004 George Graham, Elizabeth R. Valentine
The author recounts an intellectual journey from childhood religious interests through adolescent fascination with mystical experience to the 1956 publication of a paper arguing that consciousness is a brain process. That paper, which proposed the thesis as a reasonable scientific hypothesis not dismissible on logical grounds alone, is described as a watershed in philosophical discussions of the mind-body problem. Its impact, though limited to professional philosophers in the English-speaking world, is compared in magnitude to Descartes's Meditations.