I question the assumed truth of materialism, even on purely scientific grounds. And I think that materialistic theories of behaviour are limited in what they tell us about people and about Krishnamurti’s work. The scientific case that the human being can be understood in neurophysiological terms is far weaker than most people realize. I first encountered this issue in research on anxiety. Researchers have measured countless different internal bodily processes to find out how they relate to people’s fears and phobias. The answer is, they don’t. At least not very much. People’s frightened feelings and avoidant behaviours are largely disconnected from their internal bodily states. To illustrate, someone feeling extremely afraid can have a rapid heartbeat or a slow heartbeat, and someone feeling unafraid can have a rapid heartbeat or a slow heartbeat. The rate of people’s heartbeat is too little correlated with how frightened they feel or act to possibly tell us very much about fear and phobia. The link is just too weak.

It turns out that research usually finds at most a weak relationship between the body and the mind, and between the body and behaviour, not just in phobias but in most aspects of life. Nick quoted Damasio as claiming that “a close correspondence exists between the appearance of a mental state or behaviour and the activity of selected brain regions” (p. 33), but this claim is potentially quite misleading. It might apply to a particular narrow research context, but it is not true of people and their behaviour in general. For example, for more than a century researchers have hunted high and low for the assumed internal neurobiological causes of serious behavioural problems. But with few and isolated exceptions, problem behaviours have remained stubbornly resistant to being traced back to their sufferers’ bodies, even using the most advanced brain measurement techniques. Time and again research finds that a particular internal bodily state correlates a little bit with a particular subjective thought, feeling or outward behaviour, but the correlation is not reliably strong enough to conclude that the bodily state could be the main source, much less the only source, of the thought, the feeling or the behaviour.

The lack of real successes has led neuroscience into fragmentation, with the various researchers pursuing their individual ideas about which body processes might link the body to the mind and behaviour. The resulting profusion of diverse weak findings should disquiet those who find materialism convincing. Torey and Damasio, for example, differ from one another in where they look for the body’s ties to mind and action. And neither of their preferred neural processes seems to boost our ability to predict or explain human behaviour. In short, it is far from self-evident or well-established scientifically that human beings are purely physical.

Our minds, on the other hand, tend to be rather strongly linked to our lives and our behaviours. By “mind” I mean consciousness and its contents:

“Mind. Mental or psychical being or faculty. The seat of a person’s consciousness, thoughts, volitions, and feelings; the system of cognitive and emotional phenomena and powers that constitutes the subjective being of a person; also, the incorporeal subject of the psychical faculties, the spiritual part of a human being; the soul as distinguished from the body” (Oxford English Dictionary, Compact Edition, 1973, p. 1800).

All of us use each others’ conscious minds to predict behaviour. When I want to know what friends will be doing next Saturday, I ask them what they expect to do Saturday. This measure of their consciousness will not be a foolproof guide to what they end up doing on Saturday, but it will allow me to predict correctly far more often than if I relied on charts of their brain activation patterns, hormone levels, electrocardiograms, genetic profiles, or any other measure of the body. Their thoughts about their Saturday plans simply override all the bodily responses and render them irrelevant. Carol is right that some influences on behaviour lie outside people’s awareness, but the really strong influences on behaviour tend to be the ones within awareness.

Social scientists have spent a lot of time measuring people’s subjective mental qualities like perceptions, beliefs, emotions, interpretations, images, expectations, and many others. This research confirms the wisdom of tapping each other’s minds rather than brains to predict our future actions and reactions. For example, the best way to predict how afraid people will feel in a future situation is to ask them how afraid they think they would feel in such a situation. To predict adolescents’ future livelihoods, ask them what work interests them. To predict how people will vote in a coming board meeting, ask them what they think about the issues and choices. Rarely does a measure of the physical body enable us to predict future emotions, mental states, and behaviours as accurately as do these simple questions directed at people’s consciousness.

The mind accurately predicts behaviours far in advance because the mind will guide those behaviours when they eventually occur. As Nick points out, there is a self in some form, and this has measurable psychological and behavioural continuity. Non-materialism accepts that self and ¬continuity could be due partly to physical brain information storage mechanisms. But the hard scientific data steadfastly support the theory that consciousness also exists in its own right as a separate cause of behaviour and of psychological continuity. The slow pace of neuroscientific insights into human behaviour, the rather better scientific insights afforded by consciousness, and the difficulty of making sense of things like compassion, sorrow, and spirituality in purely neuro¬biological terms, leave me skeptical that one day the body alone will explain everything.

I also have doubts that materialistic neuroscience will ever shed much light on Krishnamurti’s work. Krishnamurti said his teaching was mainly religious in character. He spoke openly about the sacred in human life, and about an “otherness” beyond thought. Although he did not use words like spirit or soul as explanatory ideas, he saw a spiritual side to humanity, and his work pervasively reflects that. He discussed consciousness on its own terms, mental terms like fear, thought, belief, desire, awareness, and understanding, and not in terms of physical neurological states. He spoke of abstract things like love and beauty, the implications of time and the significance of death, also on their own terms. Directly pertinent to the brain-mind issue, Krishnamurti spoke of a consciousness that takes place when the brain is completely still, without any activation, as if consciousness could originate outside the brain. The otherness too came and went uninvited, as if from outside. Krishnamurti saw people as responsible for themselves and the world, not as neurobiological machines programmed for survival and reproduction. He acknowledged the body’s role, including that revolution in consciousness through meditation implies far-reaching changes in the brain. But his message focused on the meditation, not the brain.

I agree with Carol’s observation that the neurological approaches appear incompatible with Krishnamurti’s teaching because they suggest that consciousness should be difficult to change. But I think it was Krishnamurti who got it right. Revolution in consciousness might be hard to come by, but big change in consciousness is not. For example, people often master longstanding severe phobias in a few hours of guided learning experiences. They dramatically improve both their outer lives and their inner minds, which are no longer tortured by obsessive scary thoughts, panicky feelings, nightmares, and the like. Various kinds of problems in consciousness and behaviour can be helped greatly in many cases by brief psychological ¬methods. These methods tend to be as effective as, or more effective than, neurobiological methods like drug therapies for problems. So although I agree with Carol that Krish¬namurti could make big mistakes, his emphasis on the mind rather than the body and his optimism about change in consciousness put him on solid scientific ground.