ABSTRACT
In eonc1uding this publieation 1 will take up onee again a diseussion in whieh Sir John and 1 have been engaged for weIl over thirty years. As a eonfumed mindlmatter dualist, Beeles has, with Karl Popper, (popper and Beeles, 1977) pioneered an interactionist stanee whieh holds that psyehologieal processes ean and do influence what is going on in the brain. 1 have aeeepted this view but claim that it is only a part of the total story. My expressed ehallenge (Pribram 1986) is that epistemologieally a dualist position is tenable only at the verbal level of naturallanguages; that at other levels of interaction -- e.g. at the neuralbehavioral systems level-- a multiplicity of eognitive, affective and conative processes ean be discerned (a pluralist stanee); and, furthermore. that ontologieally an identity relation eharacterizes the elementary neural and elementary psyehologieal (eommunicative) relationship at the synapto-dendritic level. This identity position leads to a tension between idealism and realism while resolving (in terms of a neutral monism) that between mind and brain: Reciprocally interacting processes are identified whieh are neither material noe mental and are subject to measurement as quantities of information (in Shannon's and Gabor's terms). A major step forward in resolving some remaining issues is possible on the basis of Sir John's presentation during this conference. Beeles onee again presented bis dualist interactionist views. He placed the causa! action of mental phenomena at the synapse. The process alters chemieal transmission by influencing the probability of opening a ehannel in the presynaptie vesieular grid. In a paper written with Friedrich Beck (1993), a mathematieal physicist, the process is viewed as follows:
"The interaction of mental events with the quantum prob ability amplitudes for exocytosis introduces a coherent coupling of a large number of individual amplitudes of the hundreds of thousands of boutons in a dendron. This then leads to an overwhelming variety of actualities. oe modes, in brain activity. Physicists will realize the elose analogy to laser-action, or more generally to the phenomenon of self-organization."
