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Two Fellows of the Royal Society, a religious brain scientist, Sir John Eccles, and an agnostic philosopher, Sir Karl Popper, joined to write this book partly because they feel
that the debunking of man has gone far enough. Popper has already achieved a special kind of recognition from British psychiatry: alone of all philosophers—indeed alone of all non-psychiatrists—he has a paper (‘Science: conjectures and refutations’) included in the compilation of important reading made for psychiatric trainees by the Clinical Tutors of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He also received an accolade from Jung, who told Vincent Brome in 1938 that he thought H. G. Wells would have a better idea of what science is really about if only he could read Popper's The logic of scientific discovery.
In this book the authors argue against reductionist (‘debunking’) answers to the body-mind problem. They put forward an interactionist view: that there is a ghost in the machine, and that this ghost, the mind, owns the machine and is its pilot, not the other way about. In the first part of the book Popper works through the philosophical argument, using especially the concept of emergence derived from the fact of evolution, and his own concept of the Three Worlds. In the second part Eccles gives an account of brain structure and function leading to suggestions as to what happens in what he calls the liaison areas, in the speech centre in the dominant hemisphere and in the prefrontal areas, where he locates the interface between mind and body. The third part of the book is twelve dialogues between the authors working through disagreements, difficulties, and new ideas arising. This third part begins with an agreement on an epistemological principle that well accords with Jung's views; Popper contradicts the idea that knowledge originates with observations, saying that on the contrary ‘knowledge is always a modification of earlier knowledge’.
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