Why Pioneer Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield Said the Mind Is More Than the Brain

I had not come across exactly this argument for mind-brain dualism before, though it resembles some going back to antiquity in its basic assumptions. It’s an interesting idea, proposed by Wilder Penfield, a neurosurgeon working in the first half of the 20th Century. The three foundations for his arguments were:

1. despite hundreds of thousands of stimulations of patients’ brains under neurosurgery, not one ever stimulated the intellect: no one ever did calculus as a result of brain stimulation.
2. when people have seizures caused by problems in the brain, all sorts of body movements occur, but there are no intellectual seizures. No one ever had a calculus seizure.
3. though he could stimulate people to move arms etc, the patients always knew it was him doing it. He was never able to stimulate the will. He could not make them believe they were the cause of the movement.

His belief was, therefore, that the mind (the will and the intellect – logic, abstract reasoning, etc) cannot arise from the brain because, if it did, there would be at least some way to stimulate it by prodding the brain. Apparently there are others who still share his belief.

I’ve not investigated how the arguments have developed since then, nor whether anyone has succeeded where Penfield failed, but it seems to me to be a poor line of reductive deductive reasoning. It is fairly reasonable to assume, without recourse to magic and based on what we know of complex adaptive systems, that the mind is an emergent phenomenon that does not exist in one place in the brain, but that occurs through the interaction of billions of simpler elements, and clusters of elements, all recursively affecting one another, most likely at many hierarchical levels and boundaries. There are many things that behave differently as a whole than in their parts: an atom of a cell is not a cell, the cells of hearts are not hearts, a heart is not a body, a body is not society, and so on. The fact that small parts of the brain can be stimulated to produce measurable psychological and physical effects does not mean that all brain-based phenomena have to work that way. Stimulating an area of the brain as an attempt to evoke the mind is no more sensible than buying a can of beans as an attempt to evoke the economy.