In his closing remarks to the Mind & Reality Symposium on Consciousness, this past February at Columbia University, professor of biology Robert Pollack drew attention to the surrounding inscriptions atop the columns that support the rotunda in Low Memorial Library. “Law, Medicine, Theology, and Philosophy,” he explained, “these are the components of the medieval university curriculum; a reflection, by the builders of this building, of the continuity with that Western Christian medieval tradition.”
Ironically, the symposium was itself a multidisciplinary event that may reflect the recent acceptance of consciousness as bonafide topic of inquiry within the contemporary western tradition.
This newfound approval was brought home by the announcement that Columbia has just received a donation of more than $200 million, from the Dawn M. Green & Jerome L. Green Foundation, for the establishment of a Science Center to house the University’s new Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative.
According to President Bollinger, the center will “explore the causal relationship between gene function, brain wiring, and behavior. . . This will involve creating opportunities to find linkages among virtually all [academic] disciplines, since, at a profound level, we all study how the mind works.”
The center’s multidisciplinary approach is laid out clearly in diagram on their website that depicts Mind & Brain at the center with four distinct areas of research surrounding. Sound familiar?
Strangely enough, this diagram also happens to resemble the one used by B. Alan Wallace in his keynote address at Mind & Reality. Entitled “Knowledge Without Idols,” Wallace’s paradigm offers a non-hierarchical map for the Mind Sciences. Philosophy, Religion, Mathematics, & Science all surround Consciousness and are in reciprocal relationships to it.
Wallace argues that we’ve not treated mental phenomena with the “respect and seriousness” that we have given to the physical and biological sciences. He argues this is why we’ve not had any “revolutions” and asserts that what we need to do is synthesize first and third person methodologies into a single rigorous and scientific inquiry of mind.
Since the publication of his book, The Science of the Mind in 1984, philosopher and fellow keynote Owen Flanagan has also articulated the importance of both first and third person approaches to mind.
The question right now for Columbians such as myself is whether this new center will really take seriously the work we’re doing in the Humanities.ༀ
Web
• The NY Times,“Columbia to Recieve $200 Million”
• President Bollinger’s letter & video converage
• Columbia Spectator,“Columbia Receives $200 Million”
• Columbia Spectator,“Neuroscience Research Proposed for M’Ville”
• CU Center for Neurscience Initiatives
• Mind & Reality Website
• Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies
