Eccles' Theory of Consciousness

The late Sir John Eccles, a neuroscientist who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1963 for his work on brain cell connections (synapses) and was considered by many to be one of the greatest neuroscientists in the world, was perhaps the most distinguished scientist who argued in favour of such a separation between mind, consciousness and the brain. He argued that the unity of conscious experience was provided by the mind and not by the neural machinery of the brain. His view was that the mind itself played an active role in selecting and integrating brain cell activity and moulded it into a unified whole. He considered it a mistake to think that the brain did everything and that conscious experiences were simply a reflection of brain activities, which he described as a common philosophical view:

'If that were so, our conscious selves would be no more than passive spectators of the performances carried out by the neuronal machinery of the brain. Our beliefs that we can really make decisions and that we have some control over our actions would be nothing but illusions.'

He further argued that there was 'a combination of two things or entities: our brains on the one hand and our conscious selves on the other'. He thought of the brain as an 'instrument that provides the conscious self or person with the lines of communication from and to the external world, and it does this by receiving information through the immense sensory system of the millions of nerve fibres that fire impulses to the brain, where it is processed into coded patterns of information that we read out from moment to moment in deriving all our experiences-our perceptions, thoughts ideas and memories'.

According to Eccles,

'We as experiencing persons do not slavishly accept all that is provided for us by our instrument, the neuronal machine of our sensory system and the brain, we select from all that is given according to interest and attention and we modify the actions of the brain, through "the self" for example, by initiating some willed movement.'

Eccles' theory was well described in his book The Self and Its Brain. However, he acknowledged that he was still unable to explain how the mind carried out these activities and how it interacted with a separate brain. This is a point on which he was criticized by others.