Times Higher Education Supplement, November
2004
This is the original version
submitted. It was edited before publication.
The title Approaches to Consciousness has two
meanings; one, the intellectual approach of experiment and theory,
and the other the more personal endeavour found in spiritual and
mystical traditions. Lancaster, who is Principal Lecturer in
Psychology at Liverpool John Moores University, weaves the two
together in various ways, but mainly by juxtaposing the findings of
neuroscience and psychology with teachings from Judaism, Hinduism,
Buddhism and Taoism.
His summaries of the competing scientific
theories are well organised and clear. The main problem, however,
lies in the way that Lancaster has chosen the mystical texts. He
does not give his reasons, and one might suspect it is mainly a
matter of personal preference. He argues that the mystical teachings
have a common core, and his explorations into the notions of
emptiness, contentless consciousness, and the self are very useful.
Yet there remains a great danger here. There are so many ancient
teachings, and so many of them are inscrutable or ambiguous to the
untrained eye, that it is quite possible to take any current
scientific theory and find mystical teachings to fit. If this is the
case then such teachings cannot provide evidence for or against the
theories. This problem is exacerbated by the inclusion of much
psychodynamic theory which is notoriously open to multiple
interpretations.
Lancaster himself ends up with a supernatural
or dualist theory, proposing that a “transcendent reality” is needed
to account for subjective experience. He gives two reasons. One is
some weak evidence for the possibility of consciousness without a
functioning brain, including examples of near-death experiences that
have been adequately explained in other ways; the other is his
contention that the famous explanatory gap between brain and
consciousness “cannot be incorporated within the remit of cognitive
science” (p 149). This highlights a serious omission in that he
seems not to take seriously the major materialist positions in
neuroscience held by such thinkers as Crick, Dennett and the
Churchlands. They argue that when we understand enough about the
brain and experience then the explanatory gap will simply disappear,
just as the “problem of life” disappeared long ago.
Even so, this book provides a far better
summary of current thinking than most of the many books about
consciousness around today, and I can recommend it for that purpose,
though it is by no means a conventional textbook.
