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The ‘Hard Problem’ and the Cartesian Strand in British Neurophysiology: Huxley, Foster, Sherrington, Eccles

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Brain, Mind and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience

Part of the book series: History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences ((HPTL,volume 6))

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Abstract

Charles Scott Sherrington’s thoughts on the so-called “hard problem”, the substance dualism of qualia and brain, are discussed in detail. Having inherited Thomas Henry Huxley’s and Michael Foster’s Cartesian approach to pre-modern neurophysiology, Sherrington was adamant that no investigation of the physiology of the brain, no matter how subtle it may be, will ever discover the ‘whisper of a thought or a feeling.’ Pre-figuring Chalmers’ ‘hard problem’, Sherrington said that the mental is not a form of energy; no analysis of the various forms of energy can take us across the gap that separates psychiatry from physiology.

‘But strictly, we have to regard the relation of brain to mind as still not merely unsolved but still devoid of a basis for its very beginning.’

Charles Sherrington 1933, The Rede Lecture, p. 32

Author was deceased at the time of publication.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Gaukroger 1995.

  2. 2.

    Galilei 1638, Day 3, Cor. 3.

  3. 3.

    Gaukroger 1995.

  4. 4.

    Stensen 1669; English translation may be found in Gotfredsen 1950.

  5. 5.

    Huxley 1874, p. 201.

  6. 6.

    See account in Desmond 1997. And not only teachers: H.G. Wells was one of Huxley’s last students at South Kensington and remarks that it ‘was beyond all question, the most educational year of my life’ (Desmond 1997, p. 158).

  7. 7.

    Foster 1901/1970.

  8. 8.

    Foster 1901/1970, p. 1.

  9. 9.

    Foster, ibid., p. 298.

  10. 10.

    The major activity of the Brown Institute was veterinary medicine. It was established in 1871 and directed by a number of distinguished figures including Sir John Burdon-Sanderson, Victor Horsley and Charles Sherrington.

  11. 11.

    Further detail is given in Nobelprize.org

  12. 12.

    Sherrington 1906; 2nd edition 1947.

  13. 13.

    Sherrington, Nobel Prize.

  14. 14.

    Denny-Brown 1939.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., p. ix.

  16. 16.

    Sherrington 1925.

  17. 17.

    Fuller 2007.

  18. 18.

    In a poem written in 1916, ‘Now in the cloister few feet that roam,’ he writes of the Oxford bells hearing ‘from far the filial bugles blow’. But by the war’s end in 1917 and 1918, his poems ‘Dawn’s Red’ and ‘I met a man by yonder mill’, the language, although still sub-Tennysonian, tells of a much darker mood.

  19. 19.

    Sherrington 1951.

  20. 20.

    This historical approach to the abiding issues of philosophy would have pleased Thomas Huxley who averred in one of his essays that ‘that there is assuredly no more effective way of clearing one’s own mind on a subject than by talking it over, so to speak, with men of power and grasp, who have considered it from a totally different point of view … the parallax of time helps us to the true position of a conception as the parallax of space helps us to that of a star.’ (Huxley 1874, p. 202).

  21. 21.

    Sherrington 1946.

  22. 22.

    Kermode 1971, p. 64.

  23. 23.

    Sherrington 1951, p. 240.

  24. 24.

    Sherrington 1951, chapter 5.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., chapter 5. It might be said that a more fundamental principle is encapsulated in thermodynamics second law: entropy inexorably increases.

  26. 26.

    Sherrington hesitates to use the more Nietszchean expression ‘will-to-live’ because it may be mistaken for implying some ‘conscious’ intention.

  27. 27.

    Modern medicine and environmental control has reduced this atrocious sum of human death and suffering somewhat since Sherrington wrote in the first half of the twentieth century. A recent summary in Nature shows that about a million malaria-induced deaths still occur each year (Shetty 2012).

  28. 28.

    Sherrington 1933.

  29. 29.

    Sherrington 1951, p. 238.

  30. 30.

    Sherrington 1951, p. 238.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., p. 239.

  32. 32.

    Sherrington 1933, p. 28.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., p. 25.

  34. 34.

    Sherrington, 151, pp. 253–4.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., p. 255.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., p. 255.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., p. 258.

  38. 38.

    Some have suggested that a way out of Sherrington’s impasse is to use metaphors derived from the physicists’ familiar recourse to higher dimensions than our commonsensical four. The physicist, of course, is merely generalising from the Cartesian method of locating a dimensionless point in four-dimensional space-time.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., p. 261.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., p. 302.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., p. 288.

  42. 42.

    See Barrow and Tipler 1988.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., p. 305.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., p. 294.

  45. 45.

    Further biographical detail may be found Nobel Foundation http://nobel.sdsc.edu/, in Anderson and Lundberg 1997; Borck 1999.

  46. 46.

    Further details of Eccles’ life and personality may be found in Fillenz 2012.

  47. 47.

    Eccles 1977.

  48. 48.

    Eccles 1951.

  49. 49.

    Eccles 1953, p. vi.

  50. 50.

    Eccles and Gibson 1979, p. 183.

  51. 51.

    Eccles scientific papers.

  52. 52.

    Honderich 1988, p. 91 etc.

  53. 53.

    See also Chap. 15, Sect. 4.4, this volume.

  54. 54.

    Margenau 1984.

  55. 55.

    Beck 2000.

  56. 56.

    See Chap. 18.

  57. 57.

    Heisenberg uncertainty is not due to the imprecision of our observational instruments; it is the way things are in the world.

  58. 58.

    Eccles 1986.

  59. 59.

    Eccles 1994, p. 146.

  60. 60.

    See Jack et al. 1981. A quantum of neurotransmitter consists of from 5 000 to 10 000 transmitter molecules and is contained in a single synaptic vesicle. It is released as a unit into the synaptic gap.

  61. 61.

    Eccles 1989.

  62. 62.

    Beck and Eccles 1992, p. 11358.

  63. 63.

    Beck 1996, discusses these quantum possibilities in some detail. A review may also be found in Smith 2009.

  64. 64.

    Eccles 1994, p. 73.

  65. 65.

    Fleischhauer 1978; Feldman 1984.

  66. 66.

    Eccles 1990, 1994, p. 87.

  67. 67.

    The term ‘psychon’ had, in fact, been coined, unbeknownst to Eccles, by Mario Bunge in his 1980 book on the mind-brain problem (Bunge 1980).

  68. 68.

    See Smith 1982.

  69. 69.

    Maudsley 1870. William James and Gustav Fechner also argued for something rather similar at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. See Chap. 13 this volume.

  70. 70.

    See Smith et al. 2012.

  71. 71.

    Eccles 1994, p. 118.

  72. 72.

    Eccles 1986.

  73. 73.

    Stys 2011.

  74. 74.

    Eccles 1994, p. 182.

  75. 75.

    Tennyson, Ulysses. In Tennyson 1911, p. 165.

  76. 76.

    Libet 2002.

  77. 77.

    Foucault 2002, p. xi.

  78. 78.

    See Chap. 18.

  79. 79.

    Nietzsche 1882, §125.

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  1. Emeritus, Department of Vision Sciences, Aston University, Aston Triangle, B4 7ET, Birmingham, UK

    C. U. M. Smith

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  1. Department of Vision Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom

    C.U.M. Smith

  2. Department of Psychology, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, Michigan, USA

    Harry Whitaker

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Smith, C.U.M. (2014). The ‘Hard Problem’ and the Cartesian Strand in British Neurophysiology: Huxley, Foster, Sherrington, Eccles. In: Smith, C., Whitaker, H. (eds) Brain, Mind and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8774-1_14

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