Minds are not immaterial

I’ve criticised Ed Bullmore, Regius Professor of Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London (see previous post) before for wanting to replace dualism with reductionism (see another previous post). Psychiatry actually needs a non-reductionistic understanding of the relationship between mind and brain by seeing them as integrated in the embodied person (see eg. yet another previous post). Bullmore seems to think the only critique of dualism is reducing mind to brain.

Descartes was the first to apply a natural scientific mechanistic approach to life. Animate and inanimate matter were understood by the same mechanistic principles. Animals were, therefore, seen as machines; and human physiology also understood as mechanistic. Descartes stopped short, though, of including the human mind in this mechanistic framework. The soul was denied any influence in physiology. Descartes, thereby, avoided the materialistic implication that man himself is a machine. The split he created between mind and brain is what is referred to as Cartesianism. 

Living beings, including humans, actually have a purposiveness which cannot be derived from mere physical-chemical processes. This creates a split between organic life and the inorganic, not, as Descartes said, a separation of the mind from the body. An organismic perspective in the life and human sciences forms the basis for an emphasis on psychosomatic medicine, and a focus on clinical medicine rather than the physical sciences. Bullmore doesn’t seem to have a role for psychosomatic medicine. Minds are not immaterial, as he states. He needs to develop his understanding of people as embodied beings.

In his recent book The divided mind: A new way of thinking about mental health, Bullmore builds on his philosophical misunderstandings by describing the development of his psychiatric career to 'shoot down' the concept of functional psychosis. Instead, he still believes schizophrenia is an "organic psychosis, rooted in atypical brain network development". He remains “deeply thrilled by the current pace of change in our scientific understanding of schizophrenia ... [and] highly confident that this force and volume of scientific advances will eventually drive changes in the real world”. This is despite his admission that those real world changes have not yet happened. 

Bullmore believes “we are now well informed about what schizophrenia looks like in the brain” in terms of “changes in connectivity at the micro scale of the synaptic connections between nerve cells and at the macro scale of the hubs of the brain’s myelinated wiring diagram”. He sees some children at increased risk from “interactions between genetic and environmental protagonists” creating a  “trajectory of brain and mind development [which] is atypical from an early age”. This is despite not being able to point to any specific physical causes for schizophrenia. I think he just needs to admit that his attempt to overturn the concept of functional psychosis has failed. Functional does not mean non-organic, in the sense that mental illness is not mediated by the brain. It’s mere tautology, not a major scientific advance, to say that schizophrenia is mediated by the brain.