From Mystical Experience to Biological Consciousness A Pilgrim’s Progress?

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract The story I shall tell is a piece of autobiography. But it is not, as you might sup­ pose, a record of my own mystical experiences. For I do not claim to have had any. It is rather a record of a thought process that led from a childhood interest in religion, through an adolescent interest in mystical experience as a psycho­ logical phenomenon, to the publication forty years ago in the British Journal of Psychology for 1956 of a paper titled “Is consciousness a brain process?” In that paper, as I say in the abstract, “The thesis that consciousness is a process in the brain is put forward as a reasonable scientific hypothesis, not to be dis­ missed on logical grounds alone” (Place, 1956, p. 44). It is widely accepted that that paper marks a watershed in philosophical discussion of the mind-body problem, one whose impact, though confined to discussions of that particular issue by professional philosophers in the English-speaking world, ranks in the magnitude of its effect with that of Descartes’s Meditations more than three hundred years earlier.