IV. The Apparent Capacity of the Mind for Nonsensory Perception

1. In mathematical and logical experience, the mind seems to be in touch with entities that are not only nonphysical but even nonactual, which the brain's sensory organs are not suited to perceive. Of course, under the pressure of a materialistic worldview—for example, McGinn says that to affirm a causal relation between abstract entities and human minds would be to affirm a nonnatural, even "funny," kind of causation (PC, 53)—mathematics and logic can be interpreted as invention rather than discovery. But this interpretation is problematic and certainly does not seem the natural interpretation to many mathematicians and logicians.

2. Moral and aesthetic experience is also suggestive of apprehension of nonactual entities, whether they be called values, norms,^[*] principles, forms,

[*] Kim makes our awareness of norms (logical as well as moral and aesthetic) central to his rejection of eliminative materialism's program to replace vernacular ("folk") psychology with a purely mechanistic cognitive science: "As long as we think of ourselves as reflective agents capable of deliberation and evaluation—that is, as long as we regard ourselves as agents capable of acting in accordance with a norm—we shall not be able to dispense with the intentional framework of beliefs, wants, and volitions" (SM, 215).

or something else (Nagel discusses the apparent objectivity of values at VN, 143–45).

3. The experience of choosing among possibilities seems to involve the apprehension of nonactual entities (the counter-factual possibilities).

4. Memory can arguably best be understood as direct apprehension by the present experience of the mind's prior experiences. Within a materialistic framework, of course, memory has been understood as based entirely in the brain. But if this were the total truth, it would be hard to understand how we would have the very notion of "pastness": Why would a vivid memory of a scene be qualitatively different from a present sensory perception of that scene, differing precisely in the fact that in the former case we say that we are "remembering" something that happened in the "the past"? Particularly with events that happened a second or two ago, it seems prima facie more likely that the present moment of experience directly perceives a previous moment of experience than that it somehow activates a "memory trace laid down in the brain." Of course, even dualists have usually not thought of memory as a form of (nonsensory) perception, because they have generally thought of the mind as a numerically self-identical "substance" enduring through time. Making a distinction between the mind and the brain, however, does not entail thinking of the mind as a substance in this sense.

5. Religious experience is, at least in some cases, prima facie suggestive of perceptual contact with a reality beyond oneself. Much energy in modern times, of course, has gone into giving alternative explanations of such experiences. But such explanations have generally been a priori, based on a materialistic worldview and a sensationist epistemology,^[4] no more convincing to those with vivid religious experiences than reductionistic interpretations of mathematical or moral experience are to those with vivid experiences of those types. Religions experience at the least provides one more desideratum against the assumption that we have no contact with realities distinct from our minds except through our physical senses.

6. There is considerable evidence, some of it of quite high quality and some of it vouchsafed by people of otherwise undoubted intelligence and honesty, for telepathy and clairvoyance .^[5] Current writers about the mind-body relation typically reject the possibility of extrasensory perception in this sense. But their rejections are usually a priori; few of them show signs of serious grappling with the evidence. Some philosophers and scientists who have seriously studied the evidence, such as Sir William Barrett, Henri Bergson, David Bohm, C. D. Broad, Alexis Carrel, Sir William Crookes,

Hans Driesch, C.J. Ducasse, Camille Flammarion, Sigmund Freud, William James, Pierre Janet, Gabriel Marcel, Gardner Murphy, H. H. Price, Lord Rayleigh, Charles Richet, and Henry Sidgwick,^[6] became convinced (some of them, such as Freud, much against their wills) that these experiences sometimes really do involve nonsensory perception. Of all of the kinds of prima facie nonsensory perception listed above, this is the one form that is subject to empirical testing. It has, according to most of the small minority of intellectuals who have seriously examined the evidence, passed that test. To the extent that this evidence is accepted, it provides a scientific basis, by generalization, for also accepting the other forms of prima facie nonsensory perception for what they seem to be.

In any case, unless a treatment of the mind-body relation has dealt with all of these prima facie counterinstances, it is premature to say that we know that all mental states are dependent for all of their content on brain states. The task may be to develop a theory that accounts both for a high degree of dependence in some respects and for partial independence in other respects. Given Nagel's point about the relative immaturity of both our philosophy and our science, it should not be unthinkable that fully adequate theories may need to be far more complex and nuanced than those of current orthodoxy.