CHANGED CONCEPTS OF BRAIN AND CONSCIOUSNESS: SOME VALUE IMPLICATIONS

Abstract. Prospects for uniting religion and science are brightened by recently changed views of consciousness and mind-brain interaction. Mental, vital, and spiritual forces, long excluded and denounced by materialist philosophy, are reinstated in nonmystical form. A revised scientific cosmology emerges in which reductive materialist interpretations emphasizing causal control from below upward are replaced by revised concepts that emphasize the reciprocal control exerted by higher emergent forces from above downward. Scientific views of ourselves and the world and the kinds of values upheld by scientific belief undergo basic transformations, making them more compatible with religious motivation and moral responsibility.