Parapsychology
Another possible source of evidence for the soul is parapsychology, the study of such unusual
phenomena as extrasensory perception (mind reading, remote viewing, or precognition) and
telekinesis (mind over matter). Such phenomena would be very difficult to explain from the
perspective of mind-brain identity, because they seem to violate basic principles of physics. For
example, telekinesis would require that brains somehow have the ability to influence external objects
through means other than the forces currently recognized by physics. Precognition would require some
way in which events in the future could cause changes in present brains. If parapsychological
phenomena are real, they would indeed provide empirical support for the hypothesis that there is
more to mind than brain.
Historically, efforts to validate parapsychology have not been even moderately successful.
Informal studies of extrasensory perception and telekinesis, such as performers who seem to bend
spoons just by looking at them, are worthless because of their lack of controls that rule out fraud and
selfdeception. When attempts have been made to conduct carefully controlled experimental tests of
extrasensory perception, the results have been at best very weak and open to many methodological
criticisms, such as sloppy design or statistical errors. Hence parapsychology provides no more
support for the existence of the soul than do séances and near-death experiences.
Consciousness
The real psychological phenomena that most seriously might support dualism concern conscious
experience. Your consciousness includes perceptual experiences such as colors, shapes, sounds,
tastes, smells, and touches. You are also often aware of emotional states (e.g., being happy or sad),
bodily feelings (pain, fullness after a meal), and thoughts (I am now reading this chapter). One of the
biggest remaining challenges for neuropsychology is to come up with a plausible explanation of how
such experiences arise from brain processes. Some materialist philosophers and behaviorist
scientists have attempted to stave off the challenge of consciousness by denying its existence, but for
most people the conscious aspect of perceiving, feeling, and thinking is undeniable. To ignore
consciousness would amount to admitting that it provides insurmountable evidence supporting the
soul hypothesis over mind-brain identity.
My strategy for dealing with the problem of explaining consciousness is first to refute arguments
that it cannot possibly be dealt with scientifically, a task pursued in the next section. The more
positive task of sketching what a neuropsychological explanation of consciousness might look like is
pursued in Chapter 5, on how brains feel. There I offer not a general theory of consciousness but
rather a neural model of one important kind of experience, emotional feeling. This model is still
highly provisional but at least suggests one plausible route that neuroscience can take to bring
conscious experience within the scope of causal explanation. The difficulty of accounting for
consciousness is the major obstacle to my more general claim that mind-brain identity is part of the
best explanation of all the available evidence about mental phenomena, but I will try to show how
progress in overcoming it can be made. Other mental phenomena that are sometimes taken to show the
limitations of neural explanations will also be discussed in later chapters, including intuition
(Chapters 5 and 9) and free will (Chapter 6).
If consciousness can be explained by psychology and neuroscience, then the case for mind-brain
identity is overwhelming. I argued that we already have excellent starts on neural explanations for
perception, learning, memory, and other mental processes, such as reading. The main phenomena that
might support the alternative hypothesis that minds are souls, including reports of communication with
the dead, near-death experiences, and parapsychology, can be explained away as incidents of fraud
and error. Consciousness cannot be explained away, but Chapter 5 will point to paths that take it
seriously but suggest how scientific advances might occur.