ABSTRACT
Twenty years ago, I was in Paris where the Cartesian mentality and the requirements of the French language preclude the paradox called the Mind-Body problem. There I met Russell, Lord Brain, who warned me that when I reached England I should make it clear that I was a neutral monist. He was so right. The first question to me at the Anglo-American meeting on the physical treatment of mental disease was "Are you a monist or a dualist?" Answer—"Monist." "Are you a materialist or a mentalist." Answer—"Neutral." After that, they left me as strictly alone as they did Norbert Wiener, whose soul they could not save. Before I left England I realized that they confused "mentality" with "mind," "spirit," and "soul," as if they all meant some sort of ghost to be given up at death. This makes it the more difficult to understand what they mean by saying that two men may be of one mind, and one comes to sympathize with their great neurophysiologist, Sir Charles Sherrington, who wrote "In this world Mind goes more ghostly than a ghost." His "this world" was not only "this England," but the world of physics, as ontologically inadequate for biology as it is for engineering; for both require values and meanings in the world—not merely in the observer. We must distinguish work from energy, signal from noise, truth from falsehood, and good from bad. The basic relations are always at least triadic; thus, something is good for some one to some end, and often only at some time and under certain circumstances. Unfortunately, we can say it is useful, informative, pure or good, as if it were just adjectival to that it.
