Relational Science

Thus far, we have traced the fundamental dilemma in understanding that unity of body and mind back to Descartes’ separation of subjective experience from objective knowledge. When applied in an empirical context, the reductionism he proposed established a closed universe of matter with no place or role for the experience of thought—for the subjective experience of meaning in thought or for human consciousness. Commenting on his experience as a physicist and theoretical biologist, Erwin Schrödinger writes, “The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is not part of it; obviously, therefore, it can nether act on it nor be acted on by any of its parts.” Mind cannot be placed back into the world after the fact; the reductionist concept of the nature of the world itself forbids it. Nor can a unity of the physical particles of the brain and human consciousness be achieved by constructing a one-way syntactical bridge to an emergent but functionally segregated domain of consciousness and semantic meaning.