ABSTRACT

The transition to nonreductive models that I hope to accomplish in this chapter is virtually total, and I hope to maintain it consistently throughout the rest of this book. Nevertheless, this does not mean that I have also abandoned my emphasis

on process as opposed to phenomena. It remains my intent to concentrate on the common explanatory processes underlying the plethora of phenomena that have been observed by perceptual scientists. The explanatory processes used to explain perceptual phenomena associated with Levels 3 and 4, however, are not couched in the logic or language of neurons, synapses, and networks. Rather, the vocabulary to which I now tum denotes functions that, in general, have no specific neurological constructs associated with them. The main rationale behind this transition from neural to molar process is the very practical one to which I have alluded several times in previous chapters-the conceptual, instrumentational, and mathematical tools necessary to model the extremely complex neural networks that must underlie these higher-level perceptual processes are not yet, and may not ever be, developed to a level sufficient to accomplish the task we ask of them. Hopefully, at this point, it is redundant for me to reassert that this failure of analysis in a practical sense is in no way a renunciation of the principle implicit in the primary monistic premise of psychobiology. No matter how refractory the practical aspects of the problem, the implicit commitment of modem perceptual science to psychobiological monism remains intact; most of us in the field act as if we still believe that all mental processes are, in the final analysis, nothing more or less than another set of functions of the neural substrate. That we cannot yet understand the nature of the links between the neural and the mental should in no way subvert the principle of psychoneural monism that is the central metaphysical premise of this science.