Neurons And Psyches

(Good close-ups of Aycharaych and Flandry.)

Erannath, who has spoken with Aycharaych, tells Ivar:

"'Their [telepathic] abilities naturally led Chereinonite scientists to concentrate on psychology and neurology.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Day Of Their Return IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp, 74-238 AT 20, p. 227.

That is the mystery. How do objectively detected neurons generate subjectively experiencing psyches? In Minds And Brains, I suggest that a person's empirically observable body and brain are how he appears to others whereas his consciousness is how everything else appears to him, therefore that mind and brain are not only not identical but also have irreducible qualitative differences. However, philosophers should try to understand the causal relationship between neurology and psychology and therefore should oppose any obscurantism or mystification.

Anderson's universally telepathic Chereionites are his equivalents of Asimov's mentally powerful Second Fondationers on which I comment here, e.g.:

Asimov adds that individual psychology is based on a mathematical understanding of nervous systems and of neural physiology which, in turn, “…had to be traced down to nuclear forces.”²³ Such reductionism negates emergent properties of life and mind and also contradicts Asimov’s apparent assumption of a qualitative difference between the physical science of the First Foundation and the mental science of the Second Foundation.²⁴

Aycharaych would be better employed not fomenting strife but working with human philosophers of mind.