Bergson and the mind-brain parallelism

Abstract

In The brain and the thought: a philosophical illusion, Bergson proposes a scrutiny on the thesis of psychological and physiological parallelism. Such thesis, present in modern philosophy history, would ensure a kind of equivalence between psychic state, thought, and its physiological counterpart formed by the brain state. Bergson translates this equivalence as follows: consciousness does not tell us anything more than what happens in the brain, it would just express it in another language. Thus, brain state and psychological state enter two series of phenomena that correspond point by point, or even that the consciousness would emerge from brain states, constituting then a kind of emerging force. As a result, Bergson declares that this thesis presupposes a fallacy. The illusion in question, concerns points of view, both idealistic and realistic about the nature of the world and how it is possible, yet in an illegitimate way, to pass from an idealistic metaphysics to a realistic one, and vice versa, without realizing it.