ABSTRACT
In concluding this publication I will take up once again a discussion in which Sir John and I have been engaged for well over thirty years. As a confirmed mind/matter dualist, Eccles has, with Karl Popper, (Popper and Eccles, 1977) pioneered an interactionist stance which holds that psychological processes can and do influence what is going on in the brain. I have accepted this view but claim that it is only a part of the total story. My expressed challenge (Pribram 1986) is that epistemologically a dualist position is tenable only at the verbal level of natural languages; that at other levels of interaction — e.g. at the neural-behavioral systems level — a multiplicity of cognitive, affective and conative processes can be discerned (a pluralist stance); and, furthermore, that ontologically an identity relation characterizes the elementary neural and elementary psychological (communicative) 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 which are neither material nor mental and are subject to measurement as quantities of information (in Shannon's and Gabor's terms).
